TRANSPORT BILL

HL Deb 23 February 1953 vol 180 cc611-63

4.5 p.m.

Debate resumed.

LORD TEYNHAM

My Lords, I support this Bill because, in spite of what has been said by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas of Chilworth, I feel that it is the first really constructive effort to produce a workable transport system without the evils of centralised control. The noble Lord, Lord Lucas, has said the Bill does not touch the fringe of the subject. On the contrary, I would say that it is a most comprehensive Bill. When the noble Lord says it does not touch the fringe of the subject, surely he is admitting that all is not well with the nationalised transport industry. I would ask the noble Lord whether he really thinks that the nationalisation of road haulage could possibly have been a success with only one-twentieth of the lorries included in it. Of course, it could not be so. On the other hand, trade and industry have suffered enough already through the inefficiency of the nationalised road transport services, and if the "C" licence holders had been included in the 1947 Act the injury to trade would have been far worse than it has been already.

The noble Lord, Lord Lucas, has complained of the many changes that have been made in the Bill since the introduction of the White Paper. Perhaps the noble Lord has forgotten that the original Bill of the 1947 Act included the "C" licence holders and the Government did not have the courage to retain them in the Bill. The fact is that road haulage is quite unsuited to nationalisation, because it is a very personal business. We have had proof of this in the great increase in the number of "C" licence holders. Nobody in industry wishes to buy an expensive lorry and run it for his own account merely because he has Tory instincts. That suggestion just does not make sense at all. The increase in "C" licence holders has been due directly to the failure of the nationalised road haulage organisation to give the service required. From the trumpetings, up and down the country, of a number of Socialist Members of another place, it seems to he the policy of the Opposition to re-nationalise not only long-distance haulage, if they get the chance, but also all the "C" licence holders—in fact, the whole road haulage system. It is just as well that the country should know the real intentions of the Socialist Party.

Again, I would ask the noble Lord opposite whether he thinks the 1947 Act has been effective in the integration of road passenger schemes. Of course, it has not; and it has not been able to accomplish anything of importance. In fact, as noble Lords will be aware, the Commission have had to abandon the integrated passenger service schemes in the North-East and in the South-West of England, largely owing to the opposition from Socialist-controlled councils. On top of all this, the late Minister of Transport decided, very wisely I should say, to abolish the Road Passenger Executive because there was nothing for them to do. I would say that the 1947 Act was a half-baked and muddle-headed production, and the sooner it is amended by the Bill before the House to-day the better.

The 1947 Act has solved nothing, and never could solve anything. No doubt the theory was that a single authority should run the transport services and decide the most suitable way that the public and their goods should travel—in other words, that "the man in Whitehall" should know best. It sounded so nice and tidy in the bureaucratic mind. But, of course, it has not turned out that way at all. Practically no integration has taken place. In fact, the road and rail services of the Transport Commission have been run as separate bodies in competition with one another. Then, again, the set-up of the Road Haulage Executive was quite impractical. As many of your Lordships are aware, it was organised into geographical areas, with little regard to the main trunk routes which run up and down the country, which had existed before nationalisation and which had served the country so well. What has been the result? It has been almost impossible to trace any particular consignment which may have had to pass through several of these areas, and demands for proof of delivery of consignments in transit have increased enormously. Do noble Lords opposite really think the Road Haulage Executive were likely to succeed with such a plan? I suggest that if the Transport Commission had wanted to make a contribution towards the success of integration they should have had one Executive covering railways and road; but even then I think the set-up would have been unwieldy and too cumbersome to provide any practical results.

I am a little disturbed at the provisions in the Bill relating to passenger vehicle road transport. If healthy competition is to be achieved, it is essential that road and rail transport should be divorced. By that I do not mean that all the shares held by the Commission in bus companies should be sold. Provided that the Commission relinquish operational control in the provincial omnibus companies, they should, I suggest, retain substantial shareholdings in them, corresponding to those of the former railway companies in 1947. Your Lordships will remember that the 1947 Act empowered the Commission to acquire bus and coach companies, with a view to the preparation of area schemes for the control of all passenger transport services. But, as I have already mentioned, the initiation and completion of such schemes was a complete failure. I suggest that it is time a definite obligation was placed on the Commission to dispose of their control of provincial bus and coach undertakings, with many of which they have a complete monopoly in some areas of the country. I certainly do not wish to disturb the efficient partnership between the Commission and private enterprise which already exists on a substantial scale. On the contrary, I should like to see it increased. But again I should like to emphasise that when a bus company is under the same ownership as the railways, healthy road and rail competition is unlikely to materialise—in fact, I suggest that there is a real monopoly in its worst form.

I do not know how many of your Lordships are aware that large areas of the country, notably in Scotland, East Anglia and the Midlands, are already under a monopoly of road and rail which is almost complete. I maintain that healthy competition between bus services and the railways should be re-established. My noble friends on this side of the House have no intention of substituting for a State monopoly in bus services a private monopoly. What we should like to see is an extension of the already existing State and private enterprise partnership, which may well be the solution to our transport difficulties. In that direction I was glad to see that, during the passage of the Bill in another place, the Minister of Transport indicated that he would set down an Amendment in this House which would permit the Transport Commission to form companies, in certain circumstances, for the disposal of road haulage units. Surely, that goes on a long way to meet the views propounded by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, to-day. It is quite likely that one or two private interests would welcome partnership with the Transport Commission in road haulage undertakings, and the proposed company formation by the Commission would facilitate this. In fact, we may well see a somewhat similar set-up in road haulage of private enterprise and State partnership as already exists in road passenger services, and I would certainly support such a scheme.

I very much welcome the measure of freedom which is to be given to the railways in relation to charging, which will enable them to become really competitive and to offer the public a better service. I sincerely hope that the name "Region" will disappear and be replaced by the good, old, well-tried names of Great Western Railway, Southern Railway, and so on, which provided so much pride and esteem, amongst employees and passengers. I also hope that Her Majesty's Government will reconsider the proposal in the Bill by which the Commission are charged with the task of preparing a scheme for the reorganisation of the railways. I suggest that the preparation of such a scheme should be entrusted to a composite body, on which, of course, the Commission should be represented, and the present chief regional officers of the railways, with an independent chairman. I believe that this type of organisation would be far more likely to produce a good scheme.

I am sure that all those of your Lordships who are interested in shipping will be glad to know that the Commission will continue to consult coasting owners in the formation of any future charges scheme. I also understand that, by an Amendment in another place, coastal shipping will again have the right of appeal to the Transport Tribunal against railway rates which they consider might place them at an undue or unfair disadvantage. I should, however, like to draw your Lordships' attention to one particular aspect of competition between road haulage and coastal shipping. It cannot be denied that there is considerable uncertainty as to how the road haulage industry will develop under the new Transport Bill, and I would suggest that it might be felt prudent not to alter the grounds for granting or refusing licences until it can be seen how the road haulage industry develops. I suggest that it might be desirable to suspend until January 1, 1956,the application of the provisions of Clause 8. In any case, I think it will be necessary to amend this clause during the Committee stage, although obviously it would be improper for me to go into that matter now. In this great reorganisation of transport which is before us to-day we must be careful not to forget that it is the public, including trade and industry, whom we are trying to benefit, and not the reorganisation of the transport industry for transport's sake. It is true that competition may raise certain difficulties, but I maintain that it is vital and necessary to have competition, not only between road haulage and rail but also between road passenger vehicles and the railways, in order to have an efficient and live transport service.

4.17p.m.

LORD REA

My Lords, it is sometimes said that the quality of debate in your Lordships' House is highest when the matter under discussion is non-controversial or general. This, of course, is based on the well-known fact that when a speech is made which supports one's own views it is, generally speaking, an admirable speech, whereas, when a speech is made in the other sense it is a regrettable speech, and very often should never have been made. To-day we are obviously discussing a controversial matter and one of grave responsibility to each of your Lordships individually. In those circumstances, I do not propose, if I may be excused, to follow in detail the points made in the three previous speeches—which I consider were, perhaps, rather more Committee stage speeches than is usual on a Second Reading—but rather to touch on the responsibility of each of your Lordships in this House.

It is Her Majesty's Government who are in the dock now, and until they are proved guilty we must assume that they are innocent. I have no doubt that the Government and the Opposition are equally convinced of the merits of their respective cases: in fact, the noble Lord who spoke for the Opposition seemed to have so much confidence in his case that one wondered whether he was really angling for acceptance of Amendments, or for throwing the whole thing overboard as a bad job. I should, however, point out to noble Lords sitting on my left that in the rôle of Opposition they are mere tyros and amateurs compared to noble Lords who sit on these Benches and who have been in Opposition for some forty years. We have had the advantage of seeing in a rather special perspective the subtle change of tempo (and sometimes even of policy) of the two larger Parties which takes place as they cross and re-cross the floor of this House from Government to Opposition and from Opposition to Government. Therefore, as the Elder Brethren of Opposition—if I may use that term—we have, I hope, profited in wisdom by our experience.

Your Lordships will agree that the basic quality of opposition is neither admirable nor constructive. It has been said—and I think said rather too often lately—that the duty of an opposition is to oppose. I feel that—if I may again criticise both the larger Parties, but not their members in your Lordships' House—this maxim has been taken rather far in many cases. For my part (and I may be unorthodox and may even be forsworn by some members of my own Party) I would say that the duty of an Opposition in a civilised State is to support—not support continually, but support in general, because when criticism of a Government is likely to put that Government in jeopardy, it is seldom worth while unless the matter is of the greatest Importance. Although Liberals in both Houses are a small Party, we feel that we have a real responsibility to a great proportion of the electorateߞpossibly even a majority—who cannot subscribe to all the "Thirty-nine Articles" of the creed of either the Socialist or Tory Party.

We have been accused of being inconsistent, as indeed we may be in this matter of the Transport Bill, because sometimes we vote with the Government, whatever Government it may be, and on other occasions we vote against it. But we maintain, in all sincerity—and I think it may be granted that we have at present no visible axe to grind—that we represent the average common-sense man and the generality of opinion in this country, because we do believe that to be liberal minded. In this way we have supported on occasions the Government of the day when opposition would appear to be vexatious or doctrinaire, and we have opposed the Government of the day—as in the case of the nationalisation of the steel industry—when we have felt that the Government has not received the mandate of the people. This seems to be the honest job of the honest politician in either House. If a Party measure, such as this measure, is to be put upon the Statute Book, it must clearly and for all time bear the fiat of the electorate of the day. For that reason I speak to-day on behalf of my noble friends in support of the Bill which is now before your Lordship' House. We are convinced that, on the whole, it is a progressive measure, calculated to promote greater efficiency and greater prosperity. We do not hold out that it is a perfect Bill: indeed we are not satisfied with it as it stands, and we reserve the right, if necessary, to go into the Lobby against the Government if certain aspects are not modified in a way in which we should wish to see them modified.

In another place, the small Liberal Party took exactly this line and, in fact, on the Committee and Report stages they voted thirty-three times with the Government and nine times against it. Of course, it is a matter of opinion, but I consider that if there had been no Whips on in another place, most members of both the other Parties would have voted in the same way. I urge, therefore, that in considering this Bill we should try to avoid purely doctrinaire reactions. This country is certainly not wholly opposed to nationalisation, and if our present electoral system means anything at all it is certainly not wholly in favour of it either. I therefore suggest that noble Lords on both sides of the House, including those of us who complete the eternal triangle, should be ready to compromise, not only on detail but sometimes on fairly major issues. If one is convinced that one is right and that therefore everybody who disagrees with one is wrong, that is called, in politics, prejudice; in religion it is called faith, and in the lunatic asylum it is called normality.

This is not an occasion for a detailed examination of the Bill, and I should like to touch on only two points in respect of which I hope to see a change of policy on the part of Her Majesty's Government. In the first place, I would urge Her Majesty's Government to try and recapture the large measure of public confidence which I feel they have lost by failing to set the people free in the way the people expected to be set free. Bureaucracy is very little, if any less, irritating now than it was under the previous Government. A sort of treacle of estoppel has entered the machinery of administration, so that incentive is stifled not only by punitive taxation, but by creating a form of desperation of ever being able to comply with all formalities, and at the end being left with any stimulus whatever with which to pursue the original project.

This country has in the past thrived on the absence of unnecessary restrictions, and my first point which I put to Her Majesty's Government is that they should take the sweeping line of abolishing totally and forthwith all "A" licences, all "B" licences and all "C" licences. To do so, of course, would have the terrible effect of allowing anybody who thought fit to try to earn a living in the road transport industry. But is that such a shocking thought? In another place, this proposal was described as "lunatic laissez-faire"; but was our great shipping industry and all our other great industries built up on "lunatic laissez-faire"? Is our Colonial Empire, voluntarily peopled by fine pioneers and settlers, the result of "lunatic laissez-faire"? In advocating the abolition of these licences, I would naturally safeguard both the industry and the public by regulations as to roadworthiness of vehicles, proper driving hours, terms of employment and so forth. But I would free the people from this generation's apparent reversion to the feudal age, when a man was not allowed to choose his own life or livelihood. I would ask the noble Lord, the Secretary of State, under whose wise, kindly and sometimes strict guidance I have for over thirty years handled many problems of surface transport, to put his hand on his heart and tell your Lordships if this great industry, if completely free of controls and restrictions, would not in fact become prosperous and happy as it was before, and, I suggest, could be again.

Secondly, I ask Her Majesty's Government to yield in what I would call the rather ugly matter of the levy. Having worked under and with the Secretary of State for thirty years, which, added to his fifty, makes eighty, I am rather surprised to see the change of his literary style which was always a model of conciseness and clarity. There are some sections of this Bill which I hope may be changed in time so that they are understandable to the ordinary person. I should like to read the definition of the levy in Clause 10 (2): …the amount charged by way of the levy for any such period shall be the amount by which the excise duty payable upon that licence would be increased if the annual amount of that duty were increased by the amount arrived at by multiplying the unit charge, as defined in subsection (3) of this section, by the appropriate multiplier, as defined in subsection (4) thereof. That does not seem to me at all like the style of the noble Lord, Lord Leathers. He goes on to explain what the multiplier is: …'the appropriate multiplier' is the number arrived at under the second column of the Table in Part I, or, as the case may be, the fourth and fifth columns of the Table in Part III, of the Second Schedule to this Act by reference to the weight unladen of the vehicle plus, in the case of a vehicle of the description specified in the first column of the Table in Part I of that Schedule… and so on.

It is evident that a large and regrettable financial loss is bound to be incurred when this Bill becomes law. Noble Lords on my left may say—indeed, the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, has said—that this loss can be perfectly well avoided by rejecting the Bill.

LORD LUCAS OF CHILWORTH

Will the noble Lord forgive my interrupting? I have said nothing or the kind. I said that this loss could be avoided to an amount that could be easily absorbed by the ordinary accounts of the British Transport Commission, by the adoption of the limited company structure, and therefore by an orderly disposal of the assets.

VISCOUNT SWINTON

Take less and convert it into a profit.

LORD REA

I beg the noble Lord's pardon. I had assumed that he considered that if nationalisation continued the loss either would not grow or might be liquidated in the course of time. But I will not press that point. I believe that in this case the Government have their mandate and should proceed with the Bill. In any event, it is surely undisputed that the blame for the loss, if blame is to be attributed, lies with the Government as the Government, irrespective of which political Party it was or is. Surely it is unfair that one selected industry, the road haulage industry, to whom we think that no more than justice is now being done, should be saddled with the whole expense of a costly mistake, simply because it was for a few years put into double harness with a sick relative? That sick relative, the railway system, has not recovered as a result of this association, and means must be found—I hope by considerably more decentralisation than is envisaged in the Bill as it now stands—to put it on its own feet in some other way.

But why should the road haulier be summoned to this Borgian feast in honour of his re-emancipation and be given, as a first course, a cup of cold poison? The Government, be it Conservative or Labour, is responsible as a Government for this state of affairs, and it is the unfortunate taxpayer who must take that poison, diluted as best the Chancellor of the Exchequer can contrive. That is what Chancellors are for. The acceptance by the Government with good grace of the loss of a few taxpayers' votes because a previous Government has involved it in difficulties is surely a more honest course than victimising one innocent industry because it appears to have the chance of regaining prosperity, yet itself has done nothing to merit such penalty. There are many points which I will leave to other noble Lords in the long list of speakers who wish to address your Lordships' House. In the meanwhile may I commend to your Lordships' approval, in general, this Bill, which I hope during the discussion we may find involves some flexibility and is not entirely an iron hand in a Leathers glove?

4.31 p.m.

LORD PETHICK-LAWRENCE

I have listened with great interest, as I am sure have all your Lordships, to the speech from the Liberal Benches. We are always glad to hear our Liberal friends speak in this Chamber, because they do not often speak and we are always anxious to know what the Liberal point of view may be. The noble Lord who has just addressed us said that from his position of forty years with his Party in Opposition, he is able to criticise and point out the faults in the two Parties that sit on the Government and Opposition Benches. And he may be right, because it is always said that the onlooker sees most of the game. Perhaps, however, we who sit on these Benches may sometimes see that a Party that has been in Opposition for forty years has lost a certain amount of reality and, further, that they suffer from the defect of very small things, the activities of which, according to modern science, are indeterminate and cannot be traced to any very definite cause.

This Bill makes me very unhappy. I say that not from a Party point of view, but from a national standpoint. Indeed, if I were thinking solely in terms of Party, I should be glad, for nothing that this Conservative Government have done up to date is more calculated, in my opinion, to bring discredit upon them in the eyes of sensible people than this silly Bill. From the national point of view it is a disaster, for in that sphere of national life where, most of all, there needs to be order and co-ordination, it recreates disorder and chaos. I myself have no doubt that the time will come—it may be sooner or it may be later—when the principle underlying this Bill will be reversed, not because the Labour Party have declared their intention of reversing it when they get into power, but because it is contrary to the natural progress of civilization; the logic of events is bound to force a different attitude upon some future Government than that which is taken by the Government at the present time. When that time comes, as I am sure it will, the years that have been spent in this futile and fatal experiment will be reckoned the years that the locust have eaten, and in which the economic recovery of this country has been wantonly hindered and obstructed. I know that these are strong words, perhaps harsh words, but I should not have used them unless I had been convinced that they were amply justified by the facts.

I have never been one of those who are obsessed with an ideological faith in nationalisation as a panacea for all human ills. To-day, there can be but few people in this country, other than avowed Communists, who hold that view with, in front of them, the object lesson of the gigantic octopus whose tentacles spread out through Eastern Europe and Northern Asia. I have, however, always realised that there are certain public services which can be run efficiently only on a national or at least a regional basis. I should have supposed that there was common agreement in. this country among the vast majority of knowledgeable people, irrespective of Party alignment, in favour of that position, and I should have thought that the noble Lord who has just spoken would have been counted with me in that view. In fact, he said something of the kind.

But when I read the terms of this Bill, I confess that I am puzzled. I am quite at a loss to understand the mentality of those who have sponsored it and who propose to drive it through Parliament. "Can it be," I ask myself, "is it really the fact, that transport, in their view, is not one of those essential national services?" Are they of opinion that road transport is not inevitably interlocked with rail service? Of course, it was not always so. When I was a boy, the only traffic upon the roads was horse-drawn. In those days the railways carried all the long-distance traffic, passenger and freight, while the carriages and carts looked after the little journeys. Even for many years after self-propelled vehicles were allowed to travel along the road unheralded by a man walking in front with a red flag, no one ever contemplated a road service which would go hundreds of miles in a day and would carry thirty or forty passengers, or several tons of freight, in a single vehicle.

Today, that situation is altered. The road has become an interchangeable means of locomotion with rail. Not only so: the public interest requires that road and rail should be interlocked, and that between them they should cater for every part of the country, the tiniest rural hamlet no less than the populous city. Surely the analogy is nearly complete between the transport system and the Post Office, which has to serve the remote crofter in the Highlands of Scotland at the same price per packet as it does the denizens of the vast conurbations. Admittedly, the road is also used for personal, local and regional purposes, and different considerations apply to these. If, therefore, the Government had said, "The Transport Act, 1947, has blemishes of many kinds"—and it would be unique among human institutions if it had not—"The boundary lines between the different forms of road usage are wrongly drawn. Not enough freedom is loft for individual initiative or personal choice. We propose to amend these while preserving the main features of co-ordination of national transport"—if they had said that, and had embodied those principles in a Transport Bill, I might or might not have agreed with them, but I should have admitted that they had a case. Even if they had said, "We think that road transport is so essentially different from rail transport that the two should be organised separately under public, or it might even be under private, ownership, with some machinery to co-ordinate them," I should have differed profoundly from them; but I should have seen some logic in their standpoint.

But this Bill is a destroying and a wrecking Bill. At a time when the machinery set up by the Act is just beginning to pull the separate parts of the transport system together, so as to weld them into a national service for the country as a whole, this Bill throws a spanner into the wheels. The noble Lord, Lord Leathers, stated in his speech moving the Second Reading of this Bill this afternoon that the machinery at present in existence under the Transport Act of 1947 had not co-ordinated, and had shown no signs of co-ordinating, road and rail transport. Surely that is not the case. In the other place a few days ago, the Home Secretary made a very illuminating comment upon a Bill that was being introduced on an entirely different subject, the amendment of the Criminal Justice Act of 1948. He pointed out that it was quite premature to adjudge that Act a failure because it was less than four and a half years old. No one, he said, had had time to assess the effects of the whole scheme.

To my mind, precisely similar considerations apply to the Transport Act, passed in the previous Session. It was admittedly an immense undertaking, and it has been necessary to sort out and bring under control a vast number of separate units. But this was proceeding not in a desperate rush but in careful, well-thought-out stages. It was pointed out in the other place that 3,700 businesses had been acquired in the three years. I think noble Lords must surely realise that, to do that effectively and carefully, it would be a great mistake to carry that through in a much shorter time: 3,700 separate businesses, with no fewer than some 41,000 vehicles. I think that was a remarkable progress of acquisition, but it was at first an essential preliminary step to the integration of the industry, the integration and knitting together of the road and rail services. We were within sight, for the first time, of a national agreement on rates and charges for the whole of the road and rail transport. But the physical acquisition was not complete until about October, 1951—the very month that this Government took office and proceeded to break the whole of this machinery, so carefully put together, into pieces.

This wonderful co-ordination that was going forward would have brought great benefits to the traders of this country, and now it is to be scrapped—and scrapped for what? For a step backward, for a system that prevailed, broadly, prewar. Let me quote from a comment that was made in July, 1946, on that system. This comment spoke of—and I now quote— …the disastrous defects of our transport system as it existed before the war. At that time the road haulier was at full liberty to accept only traffic 'plums,' to charge whatever rate he liked and to discriminate at will between one user and another. The result was a cut-throat competition which…militated against the efficiency alike of the road hauliers and of the railways and gravely threatened the solvency of the latter.

THE EARL OF SELKIRK

Would the noble Lord please tell us what he is quoting from?

LORE PETHICK-LAWRENICE

I was about to do so. I was rather hoping that I should be asked that question. That is not an extract from a pro-Labour organisation. It is an extract from the Daily Telegraph which, as my noble friend beside me has already pointed out, can hardly be charged with having a Labour bias. Now, my Lords, it is, in effect, that pre-war system, so rightly condemned, to which (with, possibly, some amendments, about which we are to be told more on the Committee stage) this country is to be committed by Her Majesty's Government if they insist on our passing this misguided Bill.

4.49 p.m.

VISCOUNT GOSCHEN

My Lords, I should like to say a few words in support of this Bill, from rather a different aspect. On studying the Bill, which I must admit I found extremely difficult—possibly because it was the first one that I have ever tried to study—I came to the conclusion that this word "competition" can mean three different things. It can mean competition between road and rail transport it can mean competition within the railways and within road transport; and, thirdly, it can competition within both road and rail with no apparent financial aspect. The terms "British Railways" and "road transport" do not really urge on ally form of competition I agree very much with the noble Lord, Lord Teynham, that the names of the old railways should come back. As I say, it do not think the present names have anything to do with competition; they do not produce competition. I believe that one of the few spheres of competition left on the railways is the stationmasters' gardens. But so far as competition between groups is concerned, when the railways get back to their original names, obviously they will do much to bring back the service to what it was, in such ways as running trains more punctually in competition with each other. There are many places in England where it is possible to take either one line or the other. Therefore, obviously each group will try to do their best in that direction. Much can be done in keeping carriages and all rolling stock very much cleaner. This applies equally to the tracks, although they are not quite so much affected. I fully understand that the construction of locomotives and rolling stock has to be standardised to a certain degree, but I very much hope that in the design of locomotives each railway will go on wilt what it has been doing and will possibly produce a new design, just as aircraft manufacturers have produced new designs. From these designs the best can be chosen.

Turning to road transport, of course the position is slightly different, in that the transport companies do not make their own vehicles—they buy the chassis and then, if they wish, they improve the bodies and the gadgets, which are increasing in number. Possibly we shall soon see television within the ordinary bus. I hope that there will be more competition. There is another form of competition which does not exist at the moment because the hotels do not belong to the railways. I feel that the Hotels Executive should go, and that the hotels and the catering should be handed back to the railways concerned. They have always been part of the railway business. There have been cases recently of railway hotels being converted into offices. One rather hopes that when the railways are decentralised it will not be necessary for them to have so many offices. The catering problem on the railways has always been difficult. Since the war much has been done towards solving the problem, and I feel that the railways must be allowed to do their own catering. Each railway has a different catering problem. Business men going up to the Midlands need a quick meal before they get to their job; but the long-distance traveller wants a good meal, act not only to do him good but also to pass away the time. The first point that I have brought up—namely, competition between road and rail—has already been touched upon, and I am certain that many other noble Lords will deal with it.

My next point deals with competition without any gain. This really comes down to a much more human aspect of this Bill. I am sure that it will not be argued in any way that we are all very proud of being British—we are equally proud of being English, Scots, Irish or Welsh. But I am absolutely convinced that we need divisions lower down than that in order to help us in any form of industry or work in which we may be taking part. With your Lordships' permission, I will take the example of the Services. For centuries, men have taken great pride in their regiments, their corps and their ships—in fact in any unit to which they have belonged. In the war it was difficult for a time to put people into their county regiments. County regiments mean a great deal to a great many people. Later on we were able to do it, and to issue such things as shoulder titles showing the unit to which a man belonged. Then there came brigade flashes and divisional signs. To my mind those are most important. They give a man a great feeling that he is going to do his utmost to work for and never to let down his particular unit. I am quite convinced that if one went round to the homes of ex-Servicemen one would find these various regimental, brigade and divisional signs well to the fore among the relics of the last war.

As I say, in the Army there are the county and national regiments, and also such regiments as the Royal Artillery, the Royal Engineers, the Royal Corps of Signals and the Royal Army Medical Corps. They have not a county to hang themselves on to, but they have great traditions, and there they have something. They know that if they do well for the regiment they will always be backed up by the regiment. In the Navy there is competition between various ships. There will always be rivalry between ships; furthermore, you have the rivalry which exists between a Chatham ship and a West-Country ship. To my mind that is most important. Indeed, when the parachute units were first formed, invariably a parachutist would, like the traffic, use the left side of the street, so that everybody might see the parachutist' wings which he wore on his right sleeve.

Somebody may be asking, "What on earth has this got to do with railway and road transport?" I think it has a great deal to do with it, because the men who are now or have been in the Services are the men who are now engaged in or will be entering the industries which we are discussing to-day. To my mind, the National Serviceman, who gets a thrill from belonging to a regiment, will get just as great a thrill if he goes into industry and finds that he belongs to a famous railway or transport company—of that I am confident. Obviously, if that is so (and I am convinced it is) the esprit de corps and morale which he has learnt in the Army, the Navy or the Royal Air Force and which invariably raises the efficiency of that unit, he will carry into the industry of his choosing.

And I do not believe that that feeling is confined only to people who are in the industry: I believe that it is felt very strongly by those who use the industry. Until recently one heard of people who worked in the City of London trying to find a house in a certain area because they wanted to remain on their old railway. I think that the person who travels the country always has the feeling that he is getting nearer home when he sees the buses of his own county, or a vehicle bearing the name of a haulage contractor well known to him, or something of that description. I am certain that that is so. A very good example of that sort of thing occurred in Italy in 1944. A certain Division had landed in the South of Italy, and were to be passed through by the Eighth Army. When they had been passed through they were to wait for orders. I was in charge of administration there, and I was told by the local authorities that it was going to rain. In view of that, instructions were given for cover to be found for this Division. In such cases, inevitably, use is commonly made of schools, village halls and so on. I rang up one battalion commander and asked if he had found any cover. He replied, "Yes, I have found a railway train." And that was true. It was a London and North Eastern Railway train, complete except for the engine. One soldier, when he saw the train, was heard to remark: "There! I always told you the London and North Eastern Railway were the best: they've fixed it again."

5.2 p.m.

LORD BURDEN

My Lords, it is now my very pleasant responsibility and pleasure to offer the congratulations of the House to the noble Viscount, Lord Goschen, for so successfully surmounting the ordeal of making a maiden speech in this House. It is, of course, courteous not in any way to criticise a maiden speech, but perhaps I may be allowed to say this. I seem to recollect that Lord Randolph Churchill, on one occasion, offered to resign from the Government of the great Lord Salisbury; and, to his amazement, his resignation was accepted. Then he said he had "forgotten Goschen." I hope the noble Viscount who has just resumed his seat will not forget the House of Lords, because we shall be very happy to hear him again on many occasions in the future. Perhaps I might continue that line of reminiscence by saying that the great Lord Salisbury was asked whether he would like to have Lord Randolph Churchill back again, and his reply was, "Does a man who has got rid of a boil on his neck want another one?" I am not making any particular application of that story to those who bear the name of Churchill to-day.

I suppose that at the outset of my speech on this Bill I ought to declare an interest, because I have spent my working life as an employee of a railway. Obviously, I am not a railwayman to-day, though to some extent I will agree with the noble Viscount that "once a railwayman always a railwayman." It is something which, so to speak, enters into the blood; the feeling for his own particular railway remains always with a man. But to come to this Bill. On the morrow of the General Election, which was won by the Conservative Party, Mr. Fowler, the chairman of the Road Haulage Association, announced that for two years the Association had been working on a plan for the denationalisation of the road haulage industry, and he said that this would be submitted to the Government as soon as a Minister of Transport was appointed. Mr. Fowler said: It is suggested that the operators should be allowed to buy additional vehicles, premises and equipment from the Executive. Then he somewhat venomously suggested that those operators who had voluntarily surrendered their vehicles to the Executive should tail off at the end of the queue. On the same day a Mr. John M. Burch, chairman of the National Council of Passenger Vehicle Operators' Association, said in London: What we want are the fruits of victory. The spoils to the victors! In this context, as my noble friend Lord Lucas of Chilworth has pointed out, the "fruits" are national assets. And the great Conservative Party came to heel. The first sentence in the Explanatory Memorandum accompanying the first Bill said: The main purposes of the Bill are to provide for the disposal of the British Transport Commission's road haulage property. Rare and refreshing fruit for the operators! Job lots for the boys!

I know that it will be contended by the Government—in fact, the noble Lord, Lord Leathers, has repeatedly emphasised it—that this Bill is actuated, and the Government are actuated, by the highest possible motive of concern for the public interest. Let us consider that claim for one moment. A short time ago, when the affairs of the Conservative Party were at a very low ebb, the newspapers carried an announcement that the noble Viscount, Lord Swinton, had been appointed as a super Public Relations Officer, and that he was being assisted by Mr. David Gammans, a Member of another place. May I give your Lordships just one pearl of wisdom from this assistant to the super Public Relations Officer, as showing how the approach is in the public interest? Nationalisation—that cretin conceived by long-haired Bloomsbury out of envy and greed with timid capitalism as its midwife—is standing in the market place with its foolish tongue hanging out and wagging its monstrous head for all to jeer at. It has not only letdown the consumer, but it has failed where it cannot afford to fail, and that is in its labour relations. Most of the strikes to-day are in the nationalised or Government-controlled industries. Now is the time for industry to pluck up its courage and knock out this alien monster. What a wonderful pearl of wisdom! If that had been a post-prandial utterance, one might have understood and excused it. But it appeared in an article in the sober columns of the Financial Times for July 17, 1950. Is it surprising that Mr. Gammans, holding those views, should have been appointed, along with the noble Earl, Lord De La Warr, to run the oldest nationalised industry in this country, the Post Office?

If there is anything at all in the doctrine of a mandate, I think we on these Benches can claim that the Labour Government had a mandate for carrying out their policy with regard to road transport. Clearly, in their manifesto, they said this: Co-ordination of the transport services by rail, road, air and canal cannot be achieved without unification, and unification without public ownership means a steady struggle with sectional interests or the enthronement of a private monopoly which would be a menace to the rest of the community. I am grateful that my noble friend Lord Rea is here, because I heard him support this Bill. He seems to have forgotten the manifesto, or shall I say the statement, of the Liberal Party, prior to the 1945 Election. Just before that Election the Liberal Party issued, under the chairmanship of Sir Seebohm Rowntree, a pamphlet, entitled The Future of British Transport, which concluded with this statement: We…recommend that the control and ownership of railways and the long-distance road haulage and passenger transport industry should be transferred to a public utility corporation.

LORD HAWKE

Is one not allowed to learn wisdom in eight years?

LORD BURDEN

I think their wisdom is "like a crab"— goes backward and not forward.

LORD REA

Or sideways?

LORD BURDEN

Or sideways. That is typical of the Liberal Partyߞalways side-stepping. Despite what the noble Lord, Lord Leathers has said, I suggest to your Lordships that the railways have not been given a fair chance to recover from the ravages of war. It is sometimes forgotten by the public that the railways were badly run down, in a physical sense, during the six years of war. May I give your Lordships a few facts to support that submission? I take this reference from a valuable study of postwar Britain by an American professor, Mr. Robert A. Brady. In his lecture, "Crisis in Britain," this is what he said: At the beginning of the winter 1946–47, no less than 3,700 locomotives 'out of a total book stock of 20,242 were out of service for repairs.' The locomotives on the London and North Eastern were 'on the average…over thirty-two years old.' Much the same picture held for passenger carriages and freight wagons. Of the latter 'over 20 per cent.' said Barnes,"— the former Minister of Transport in another place— 'are obsolete and should be scrapped and 50 per cent. are over 35 years old.' In November, 1947, more than a month before taking over under the Act, it was estimated that 'nearly 200,000 wagons were under or awaiting repair' out of a total of about 1,250,000 and that there 'were over 54,000 fewer wagons in operation than a year ago, and over 80,000 fewer than in 1945.'As for roadbed, 'maintenance work on the permanent way was in arrears to the extent of 10,000,000 sleepers and some 328,000 tons of new steel rails, and much road ballast was in bad shape.' The same sort of facts can be found in a lecture delivered to that very respectable body, the Institute of Bankers, by Mr. M. R. Bonavia, who was then assistant to the Chief General Manager of the L.N.E.R. At this late hour I will not go into these facts. But I am sure the noble Lord knows the facts as well as I do.

LORD HAWKE

Will the noble Lord tell us the point he is trying to make from these facts. That is what we cannot understand. We admit the facts.

LORD BURDEN

Do not be so impatient. I am trying to lead up to the point in my own way. I am very grateful to the noble Lord for helping me to make my speech, but while I appreciate his help, I really do not want it.

LORD HAWKE

The noble Lord was going to disclose something.

LORD BURDEN

My Lords, I have here a document issued in 1941 by the Minister of War Transport—the noble Lord, Lord Leathers, may recognise the document. It is the agreement on the financial arrangements between the four railway companies and the London Passenger Transport Board. This is what I am working up to, and I am going to describe the point I want to make in terms of an article in the Economic Journal, the journal of the Royal Economic Society, which is by no means a Socialist or Labour organisation. While the noble Lord may not take it from me, he may take it from somebody else. This is what the article said: Since 1939 the Railways have been working under Government orders and control. Moreover the second 'Agreement' of 1940 was not an agreement, in the usual sense of the word; it was dictated to the four Companies and the London Passenger Transport Board by the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Minister of Transport,— that was the noble Lord, Lord Leathers— with a threat of immediate 'nationalisation' if the five Boards refused the proposed terms. So they were compelled to accept the new 'Rental' of£43½ million. This rental was substituted for the sliding scale arranged with Sir john Simon"— now, of course, Viscount Simon— as Chancellor at the outbreak of war in 1939, which divided the net receipts above a minimum and below a maximum between the Railways and the Exchequer.'

LORD LEATHERS

My Lords, may I say a word? Having been the one who made this arrangement with the chairmen of the railway companies, I want it on record that no such pressure was used upon them. The agreement took a little time to negotiate. I do not want to indicate that they rushed to accept it, but, at a later stage, they came to acceptance quite cheerfully and willingly.

LORD BURDEN

When the noble Lord had exercised that influence which he can always exercise and which he wishes and is endeavouring to exercise to get this Bill through the House. I cannot speak for the railway managers, and I am now going to refer only to the effect of this agreement. The article continued: Evidently a profit-sharing plan of this kind was a good one"— that was the first arrangement— as it encouraged the companies to be efficient and economical. Apparently Sir Kingsley Wood and Lord Leathers saw that traffic was growing as the nation got into its right stride in the war effort and feared that the sliding scale would give the Companies their standard revenues as fixed by the Railways Act, 1921. Perhaps the five Boards were a little weak"— and this proves my point — to submit so easily, but they may have thought it unpatriotic to resist the Government at a critical stage of the war"— and one can see that patriotic strain being played by the noble Lord, Lord Leathers. During the five years 1941 to 1945 the railways and the London Passenger Transport Board actually earned£412 million, of which the stockholders took£217 million, less income tax, and the Treasury took the rest. According to the Economic Journal—I accept what the noble Lord, Lord Leathers, has said—this agreement was forced on the railways, or they were persuaded to accept the agreement, and it clawed£195 million into the Treasury. If the railways had had, say, one-half of that sum for reconstruction, or to help them over these difficult times, perhaps the tale which is being told in the Conservative Press and other places, of the alleged inefficiency of the railways, would not be told in the way it is.

It might be said: Why then did not the Labour Government do as was done by the Coalition Government with the Railways Act, 1921, in settling their indebtedness by£60 million, which, less income tax, amounted to£51 million? The Minister of Transport, of course, was not in the Cabinet. I have no access to Cabinet secrets, but I can in my mind's eye see the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mr. Hugh Dalton, backed by all the majesty of Treasury officials, gently tapping the table, and in his sweet dulcet tones saying, "Nothing doing." That, of course, is the explanation of why nothing was done. But the noble Lord, Lord Leathers, having delivered that deadly telling blow on the railways while he was Minister of War Transport, now, as Overlord of Transport (if he will allow that abbreviation of his title), to continue the language of the boxing ring, comes in for the kill; because, despite what he says, speaking as a railwayman with some experience, I say that unless there are drastic alterations in this Bill, it is a knock-out blow for the railways.

To say that this Bill removes some of the time-honoured shackles, or all the time-honoured shackles, of the railways—shackles which practically strangled them in their competition with road transport before the war—is not a complete and accurate statement of fact. Some of the shackles are removed, but others are put on. The noble Lord shakes his head. I am afraid that I shall have to be somewhat technical to prove my case, but am sure the noble Lord will allow me to. I have here an authoritative description of what was happening to the railways, in relation to road transport, before the war. I know it to be true, because I took part in it. Here are the words used: Beginning slowly during the 'twenties but with growing rapidity during the 'thirties, bus and road haulier systems had been siphoning off increasing percentages of profitable railroad traffic. A single illustration will show how drastic this threat to the railroads appeared to be. British railway freight in general merchandise classes 7 to 21"— if I may again be technical, there are twenty-one classes, as one knows, and classes 7 to 21 are the general merchandise classes, below which are the basic commodities— which include practically the whole range of manufactured goods…although mounting (until 1938 at least, the latest date for which pre-war statistics are available) to one-sixth of the total railway tonnage—yielded almost half of the gross revenue from freight; and during the twenty years before the war (1939) at a time when the estimated potential (railway) traffic was rising one-third, the actual tonnage of general merchandise originating fell by one-quarter.

LORD TEYNHAM

From what is the noble Lord quoting?

LORD BURDEN

This is the same document to which I referred earlier, a study by an American professor, and therefore unbiased, entitled "Crisis in Britain," which I think may be seen in the Library of your Lordships' House. The document goes on: Contrariwise, the railroads lost practically none of their tonnage of classes 1 to 6, consisting primarily of coal, minerals, heavy merchandise, and in general, heavy, bulky and low value traffic. Speaking from my experience as a practical railwayman, I can say that that is an accurate picture of what was happening up to the outbreak of war. With road transport back again on pre-war competitive terms, the same position is bound to arise. They will attack—and quite rightly, from their point of view—this traffic under classes 7 to 21, which is easy to load, easy to handle and easy to transport, and will leave the other merchandise to the rail. As the noble Lord knows, 77 per cent. of the deep-mined coal in this country is carried by rail, and perforce has to be carried by rail. But examine the Bill, despite the gloss which the noble Lord puts on it. What would happen if the railways, losing their classes 7 to 21 remunerative traffic, endeavoured to raise the cost of transport of the classes 1 to 6—namely, coal? The Bill immediately provides for an appeal to be made against that sort of thing. Deadly blow No. 1 at the post-war competitive position of the railways. As my noble friend Lord Lucas said, if you are going to free the railways, then free them; but do not tie one hand behind their back.

I can give another instance. The noble Lord, Lord Leathers, referred to coastwise shipping. But what do we find? Under the Road and Rail Traffic Act, 1933, coastwise shipping had the right to appeal to the Transport Commission in regard to arrangements for agreed charges—and I need not explain to your Lordships what agreed charges are. Now under the clause and the Schedule mentioned by the noble Lord, the right of appeal of coastwise shipping is extended to all rates which they think may hurt them. Is that removing shackles? Is it not putting further shackles on the railways?

LORD TEYNHAM

The noble Lord referred only to unfair charges. The noble Lord, Lord Burden, is referring to all charges.

LORD BURDEN

Where is the criterion for fair or unfair? Let me give your Lordships two instances of fair or unfair from my own experience when I was goods agent for a not unimportant station just outside London. I gave a certain firm a rate for goods somewhere over 20s. per ton, for conveyance from London to Liverpool of 250 tons of traffic. I was young in the job and enthusiastic, and the firm insisted that I should give them a quotation in writing. What happened? They took that quotation from one road transport firm to another in a kind of Dutch auction until they got the goods carried from London to Liverpool at a figure which could not be remunerative to the road haulage firm unless it broke every regulation of the Road Traffic Acts. Is that fair or unfair? I was a little peeved about it, but when I mentioned it to my colleagues at the office they told me that it was not an unusual practice for the firm concerned. I called to see them again and they asked me to quote for another lot of traffic. Well, on the principle that "the customer is always right," I am very glad indeed, looking back on past experience, that the firm concerned did not report to headquarters what I told them they could do with their traffic. I could give the noble Lord the name of the firm, the quantity of traffic and the road transport firm that carried the goods. The next instance is this. A representative of a road transport concern went to a firm with whom I was doing about£70 worth of traffic a month, and made this offer. He said: "Give me all your traffic and I will charge you railway rates less a rebate of 12½per cent." Is that fair or unfair? That is not something fished out of a bag; it is from my practical experience as a railway man, and I could go on giving your Lordships more and more instances of that kind.

I submit to your Lordships that this Bill, instead of taking all the shackles off, is putting fresh shackles on. As a direct result of this Bill—in fact, it is one of its objects—there will be intensified competition between road hauliers and the railways. The noble Lord, Lord Leathers, and his Minister in another place have emphasised that time after time. Has the noble Lord calculated what that may mean in terms of sacrifice of human lives? As your Lordships know—it has already been referred to—there are certain conditions governing the issue of "A" and "C" licences. Everyone acquainted with the road haulage industry and the railway industry prior to the war knows about private ownership. Working conditions were very bad, and the annual report, 1936–37, of the licensing authority for the Yorkshire traffic area says: There was widespread disregard of the provisions laid down by Parliament with regard to hours of driving and conditions of rest. In that year there were over 8,000 convictions for offences of this kind. Again, for 1936–37 the annual report of the licensing authority for the West Midlands Area stated: There is still far too large a number of operators…who ignore the limits of hours, speeds and weights and disguise their offences by the falsification of records. In that year there were over 10,500 convictions in connection with the keeping of records. Everyone who was in the business knows that hundreds of lorry drivers were compelled to keep two log sheets—one to produce to the police and one for the firm. Those 10,500 convictions are only those of the people who were found out.

But, as Modern Transport says as late as May, 1952: The fact is that this far flung commercial undertaking (British Road Transport Services) has brought new standards of service, vehicle operation, engineering and employment into the road haulage sphere. Prosecutions relating to British Road Services for breaches of the law have practically disappeared. If the railways were destroying life even at one-tenth of the rate on the roads, there would be howls of indignation throughout the length and breadth of the land. It is no use saying that the road users pay a tremendous amount in taxation, and so on. So, as I understand it, do beer and whisky drinkers. I believe that those who drink beer and whisky give the Revenue a good net return for their expenditure. But that does not authorise the beer and whisky drinkers to go out and kill and maim people because they have contributed to the Revenue.

I charge the noble Lord, Lord Leathers, with deliberately tearing up the work of far-sighted railway officers and administrators, from the late Sir Eric Geddes to Sir William Whitelaw, of the old London and North Eastern Railway. I can prove What I am saying by quotation after quotation. In its place, the noble Lord wishes to restore free competition between road and rail. That is the issue which divides the people on this side of the House from those who sit on the other side. We believe that inland transport should be organised as a perfect service in the public interest. The Government are deliberately handing back road haulage and trusting to the incentive of private profit, of greed, of the law of the jungle— I repeat the law of the jungle.

LORD TEYNHAM

How can the noble Lord say "the law of the jungle" when he knows perfectly well that the licensing authority can cover all the points that he has raised?

LORD BURDEN

The law of the jungle is that the fittest shall survive. That is the philosophy of the gentlemen on the other side: We dined off each other, What matter; the toughest survived. But it may be said—the noble Lord has said it repeatedly—that transport would be more efficient and provide a more satisfactory service. Even if that were true, the evidence does not in any way prove it to be true, because we have this curious, anomalous position, that a Minister who is technically responsible for a Department is here attacking the administration of another Department with no one from that Department to defend it. That is a curious position in British political life. But do not forget that under the 1947 Act the Minister is in the position to give general directions to the British Transport Commission. Even if the evidence for increased efficiency were right—and I submit it isnot—we of the Labour Party would still strive for the substitution of fellowship for fighting, of professional ethics for competitive trading, of scientifically audited vital statistics for the test of pecuniary profit, because we believe that the state of mind produced by fellowship and the pursuit of knowledge, the society in which fellowship is the dominant motive and scientific method the recognised way, is, whether or not it is materially better provided, infinitely preferable to that produced by the economic war of man against man and the social rancours which are the outcome of such warfare. We are definitely opposed to this Bill; and the day will come, as my noble friends have said, when the Labour Party will be able to give practical effect to its determined opposition to the wicked Bill now before us.

5.42 p.m.

VISCOUNT BRIDGEMAN

My Lords, I gladly follow the noble Lord who has just sat down in the congratulations he offered to my noble friend Lord Goschen. He made, as I think we all agree, a very clear and practical approach to some of the problems in this Bill. I hope we shall often hear him again in this House and that he will join some of us, his noble friends, in the other activities of the House behind the scenes without which the business of this Chamber would not go on as it should.

I find it a little harder to follow the noble Lord who has just sat down in some of the rest of his speech. I find it hard for two reasons: first, because I thought that his approach was primarily political, and secondly, because I thought he spent a great deal of time discussing what had happened in the jungles of the past. He said one thing which I think needs some comment, and that was that if private enterprise is allowed back in road haulage there will be infringements of the Road Transport Act. 1933. I do not admit that for one moment, but let me say this: that, if so, it is the business of the industry, the employers' associations and the trade unions concerned, to clear that up. It is their business and I am sure they will have the support of all concerned in keeping order and upholding the law.

Let us leave that for a moment, because I have in mind to try to get back to the economic aspect of this Bill. After all, in 1947, when our places were reversed, we spent a good deal of time saying that we opposed the 1947 Bill not so much because it involved nationalisation but much more because we considered that nationalisation to the extent proposed in that Bill was not what was required for the good of the country: that is to say, it would not produce more efficient transport of goods and passengers. After all, nationalisation, certainly with us, is not a creed; it is an expedient to be adopted according to whether or not we think it fits the economic requirements of the case, in the same way as in earlier times (but I must not go back into the past like the noble Lord opposite). Protection was not so much a creed but an expedient to be adopted when the right moment came. As I say, we took the view in 1947 that nationalisation did not fit the case. We take the view now that what we said and thought then has been borne out, and therefore that the time has come to make the alterations which are now before us in the Bill. So what we want to discover is whether the alterations proposed in the Bill, coupled with the ones which we know are to be offered as Government Amendments at a later stage of the Bill, will produce improvements in the system of transport as it is now operating under the 1947 Act.

Various principles have been laid down in the Bill. Some of the talk this afternoon has been on principles and some has been on practices. The principles, as I see them (and I think they are right) are really these. First, there is the principle of restoring proper competition and obtaining the proper incentive which competition gives. Do not let us say that improved efficiency and lower running costs are not worth having. That was suggested by the noble Lord who spoke last. They are worth having. Every improvement in efficiency, every cutting of costs, improves our export position, to give only one reason; and the amount which can be done in that direction, I believe, is very great. For that reason, do not let us say that we should not have competition between the railways and the roads because sometimes the roads may take a job from the railways or perhaps the railways may take a job from the roads. Do not let us say that the lorry drivers are going to kill more people. If they do, I hope they will soon find themselves in court on the proper charge. But let us think of the matter much more in this way: that competition will give incentives to efficiency and reduce costs, and that decentralisation will give efficiency to the men on the spot; because if competition is the first principle enshrined in this Bill, then I think decentralisation is the second.

The noble Lord, Lord Pethick-Lawrence talked about the Bill leading to disorder and chaos. It seems to me that that is a view which can be properly taken only if one assumes that everything that does not lead to centralisation must automatically lead to chaos. However, let us leave that and come back to the question of principles, the question whether or not what we are proposing to do will improve the transport of goods and passengers; because whether or not that is the subject we are discussing in the House this afternoon, it is most certainly the thing that people outside are discussing when they react in the paper that we are dealing with the Second Reading of this Bill. It is not so much that this Bill has generated any very great political heat outside this House—it has caused far less, I think, than the 1947 Bill—but it does seem to me that a good many people are asking themselves whether by this Bill we are going to improve the transport of goods and passengers, or whether we are going to throw that transport into confusion, as indeed was done after the passing of the 1947 Act.

Coming to passenger transport, I feel it would be quite wrong to suppose that there has been any integration at all during the period of nationalisation. The road passenger transport companies seem to have dug themselves in very successfully, and I agree heartily with my noble friend Lord Teynham when he says that it is high time that the operating control was vested in the companies themselves, and that they were independent of the railways and able to make their own arrangements. I am hoping that those arrangements will also include greater integration of passenger services with the services that the railways provide, because certainly in my part of the country, with the closing of the branch lines, that has been conspicuous by its absence.

Then we come to the railways. We are told that everything is being done in opposition to the far-sighted railway chiefs of the past, perhaps of the last generation but one; but I cannot myself recall that the railway chiefs of the 1947 generation were loud in their praise of the provisions of the 1947 Act. My recollection is quite to the contrary. It is clear that some change is required in the present running of the railways. It is not easy for those who are not professional railwaymen to look below the surface and see what is happening. So many of us, when we think of railways, think in terms of the food on the train, the behaviour of the porters at main line stations and the punctuality of the trains by which we happen to be travelling; but those tests are not quite good enough. My own judgment, as a layman, would be that, since nationalisation, the maintenance of the permanent way has caught up very little indeed; that the maintenance of the rolling stock and locomotives has not even kept pace with requirements and, speaking very generally, that the post-war progress of British Railways has been, on the whole, slower than that of some railways on the Continent.

LORD LUCAS OF CHILWORTH

I hesitate to interrupt the noble Viscount and I appreciate his courtesy in giving way. He is, I hope, going to give reasons for saying that. Surely the principal reason is the capital expenditure allowed to the railways.

VISCOUNT BRIDGEMAN

It is one reason; I quite agree with the noble Lord opposite. But I think there are other reasons, and those other reasons are probably connected with excessive centralisation. As I say, I am speaking very generally, and I know there are a great many reasons which made matters difficult for the Railway Executive, but not so difficult as they would have been had the railways not had to contend with the double heading of the Transport Commission and the Railway Executive. On the other hand, it probably would be right to say that, since the Railway Executive took over, there has been a certain amount of economy—perhaps a good deal—in the manufacture of locomotives, rolling stock and things of that sort. I am certain that no one would wish to destroy those improvements. There has been nothing in the Bill or in any speech in another place to suggest that; and I do not think for a moment that any sensible body, when they come to prepare the scheme, will suggest making any arrangements which will do away with the economies which are clearly there.

What I do wonder is whether the Commission are the right people to form the scheme for the railways. After all, the Commission, if the personnel remain the same, may, by this time, not have too open a mind—it would be difficult for any human being to have that. Many of the alterations that have to be made are, I should think, largely technical matters, and can be satisfactorily made not by discussions in this House or by committees of laymen, but only on the advice of those who really understand railway operating and railway maintenance. I hope, therefore, that, when the time comes, the Commission, or whomever they delegate their work to, will arrange matters in such a way that they get really good technical advice, and that that technical advice is submitted to people who are qualified to judge of it.

I feel that the noble Viscount, Lord Goschen, was absolutely right when he talked about going back to the old railway names. The regimental spirit always has mattered a great deal in the railways, and it is surprising how long it has persisted, in spite of nationalisation. There is a great deal to be gained there just as I believe there is a great deal to be gained also by restoring the individual companies of good reputation to road transport. It is in road transport that I think, not that the principles are more difficult, because I think they are exactly the same, but that the lower level problems, if I may put it in that way, are more difficult than they are in passenger transport or in the railways. But although the British Road Services have worked extremely hard, both as a body and as individuals, to try to build up a really good service, and although they have succeeded in the last year or so in improving its operating, I am sure that my noble friend Lord Leathers is absolutely right when he tells us that, with the overhead organisation, they can never really cut their costs and can never have the freedom which is required to give the right charges quickly to the right sort of customer.

It is not going to be easy. When the late Government acquired the road transport vehicles, they did so at the top of the market. Whether or not it was wise to do it they were the judges at the time; but there is no doubt that the time when those vehicles were bought out was the time when prices were highest, and that prices are not so high now. All this makes it clear that whoever undertakes the actual disposal of vehicles must do it cautiously and carefully, and that it will be much better to take longer rather than shorter over this process. In saying that, it is nice to hear the cheers from the opposite side of the House; but I should not like anyone to think that, because I am saying that, I mean it is wrong to dispose of those vehicles. I mean nothing of the sort. But two wrongs do not make a right. At any rate there is going to be a great deal of untying, and all the time that process is going on we have to keep in mind the business of serving the consumer, seeing that the consumer is satisfied all the time and that he does not go through a period of disorganisation and chaos such as occurred after the passing of the 1947 Act.

I think one step has been taken this afternoon to avoid that disorganisation and chaos, and that was the announcement that my noble friend Lord Leathers made when he pointed to those two clauses in the Bill—I think they were Clauses 25 and 26—to safeguard the position of the people who are now in the road haulage industry. From what I have heard outside, I feel that that will go a long way to allay many doubts and fears which have been felt in the industry at large. It was inevitable that those doubts should be felt, because it was quite impossible, and it would have been utterly wrong, to try, in this Bill, to produce a detailed scheme showing exactly what things were offered for sale, how it was to be done, and all the rest of it. Of course, until that is known, the future of the vehicles in the industry, and therefore of the people in the industry, cannot be accurately foretold. And yet the country relies on those people to carry on the industry, because the goods will still have to be carried.

Furthermore, as some noble Lords have said this afternoon, we should remember, that although most of the lorry drivers themselves will get the same job or another job exactly like it, it is the people at the top—the people who have been put in to organise, and control British Road Services—whose positions are most vulnerable at the present time. It is true that nearly all of them came from commercial organisations, and it is probably true that many of them will go back. None the less, the good will and the continued service of those higher and middle piece executives is very necessary indeed if the business of carrying through these changes is to go smoothly and lead to the state of affairs which we on this side of the House intend shall happen. I think that that is the main point regarding British Road Services.

Another point, which is almost as important, concerns the units which are split up. You can split up into units of fifty lorries or so at a time, but you cannot split up overhead services—the depôts, the exempted traffics, the parcels organisation—which have to exist in some form, which indeed did exist in some form before the Transport Act, and which will have to carry on. I feel that this proposal to form companies will go a long way towards meeting what were previously very serious difficulties. There was a good deal of doubt and despondency in business and industry as to what was going to happen in regard to these things. I will take one small example. There are in this country only two or three transporters capable of transporting a locomotive made on a non-British gauge and which is being sent from the factory to the port. Before the Transport Act these services were operated by a small company: they have now become part of the Pick ford organisation. Unless these lorries are kept at work, it will not be possible to transport any locomotive other than one of standard gauge from the place of manufacture to the port of shipment. I give that only as an example of a number of small things which have to be cared for, and which I am certain will be cared for once this Bill is passed and the Minister has time to apply himself to the difficult and delicate job of seeing that the plans work, and of getting out of the works what one might call the "low level spanners."

To say that those difficulties exist is not to say that the principles are wrong. I am sure the principles are right. Equally, the difficulties are there. I feel that, since the principles are right, it will be possible, by taking time and trouble and by doing the thing in the right way, to get over all those difficulties. When they are overcome and the smokescreen which we are bound to have for a year or so has rolled away, we shall find that the Government was right in principle and will turn out to be right in practice.

6.5 p.m.

VISCOUNT ST. DAVIDS

My Lords, delighted as I have been by the thought of a "low level spanner," I am afraid that I cannot follow the noble Viscount who has just spoken. I wish rather to remark on the subject of integration. Several noble Lords, particularly Lord Leathers and Lord Teynham, have said that there had been no, or very little, integration in the new nationalised services. I do not see why that worried them, because of course they are busy taking the whole machinery apart and stopping any integration—possibly, they do not require such a thing. In point of fact, there was very considerable integration. Lord Leathers himself gave an example of it. As he pointed out, after nationalisation there was a considerable drop in the number of lorries on the road. I remember the time well. All the scrap depots were full of old lorries. There was an opportunity for a number of them to be got rid of because there was great integration of service. Whether or not the present Government require it, that is a most important item, because we in this country are really fighting for our lives, and it is important that we should get our transport as cheaply as possible. If we have on the road large numbers of surplus lorries and lorry drivers, it is not a good thing for the economics of this country. This country is already in the position of having too few people making things and too many people pushing them about and selling them to each other. The fewer of the latter we have, of course, the better, provided that the stuff is properly distributed and sold.

In point of fact, it is true, as I think Lord Leathers will agree, that a reduction in lorries occurred either directly after, or within a few years of, nationalisation. However, there has also been a reduced turnover on the part of British Road Services. That is not their fault. As Lord Leathers said, it is in the region of 15 per cent. Strangely enough, that is much the same as the reduction in British manufacturing speed and output at the present time. So the reduction in turnover can hardly be blamed on British Road Services. The fact of the matter is that, under the system arranged by the present Government, the whole of the speed of production of British industry is down by just about that amount, so there is less stuff to carry round. One cannot say that that was a cause of there being fewer lorries, although, in fact, there were fewer lorries directly after nationalisation. I know that the noble Lord is making plans to compensate lorry drivers and others who lose their livelihood. I do not think there will be many who will lose their jobs. I believe that under this proposed new system many more lorry drivers will be needed. What is more, I think it will need many more accountants and people of that kind. I think it will be found to require more executives. After all, the Government are creating a separate Executive for each of these units which are being made. So, kind as it is of the Treasury to "dish it out" to some of these people, I do not think it will be found that very much compensation will have to be paid out.

What is all this for? What is the purpose of it all? Why this splitting up of organisations? I have scratched my head for a long time, and the only thing that I can see it doing is to give a magnificent opportunity to a number of gentlemen to "cream" the traffic. "Creaming" is a well-known economic phrase. You can have regional "creaming": you can have "creaming on a particular route; you can have "creaming" of a particular kind of traffic, as Lord Burden told us a little earlier. There are a dozen sorts of "creaming". The Post Office was originally set up because it would be perfectly possible for a private post office to "cream off" profitable postal deliveries here, in great, densely built-up cities, and send letters for a fraction of a farthing each, whereas, to send letters at an economic rate in the Highlands of Scotland would cost something in the region of half-a-crown—or so I believe. But this is really what the Government are doing. The total effect of the Bill is to allow all the "creamers" in to take fares on the main routes, where they can do it easily, and to leave the uneconomic routes to the national organisations which have to run on those routes.

Let me give some examples. There are a great many highly uneconomic processes which have to be carried out by the British Transport Commission in their various lines and branches. There is the uneconomic railway branch line which has to be run either because it is a public service, directly for individual customers, or else, possibly, because it is a strategic service. These services have to be run, and the Transport Commission do not get any pay for them; the Commission do not get any subsidy for these uneconomic or strategic services, though by law the Commission have got to make the whole service pay. The Commission, therefore, are in a highly uncompetitive position. They must be, for they have to carry these extra burdens, of which I have given examples, whereas private enterprise is to run normally economic services. Take the case of David MacBrayne's buses and steamers in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. MacBrayne's could not hope to make that service pay. It is utterly un paying. But MacBrayne's are paid, for they get a substantial subsidy from the Secretary of State for Scotland. On the other hand, British Railways and other national organisations which have to deal with such areas do not receive a large subsidy for that sort of thing. The Transport Commission have to make both ends meet, so to pay for that sort of service they have to charge higher fares elsewhere. Then the Government propose to let everyone in and call it a "basis of free competition!"

Let me give a few more examples. I know the canal systems of this country very well. I should like to say that I believe the Docks and Inland Waterways Executive have done a wonderful piece of work. They had put on their plate an ancient, cob-webbed, mildewed tangle of canals, a large number of which needed immediate closing down and another large number of which will eventually have to be closed. But all these antiquated waterways were hung around the necks of a few economic waterways and were well on the way to strangling them. So the Docks and Inland Waterways Executive are in the same position. They have a number of economic waterways which they must run, and they have a number of antiquated waterways which, admittedly, they will get rid of at some time, but which at the moment are losing£250,000 a year. That sum, again, comes on to the British Transport Commission's plate, because they have to make ends meet. So that has to be added to the fares of the railway and road services.

Apart from those which, after all, we can probably get rid of in the course of a few years, there are such canals as, for example, the Kennet and Avon Canal. There is no traffic on that—none at all. And there cannot be. It was slowly and systematically reduced to wreckage by the old Great Western Rahway Company, who were its previous owners. They carried it on, making things as difficult as they could, until traffic stopped. Given time they would finally have pleaded with Parliament to be allowed to abandon it, on the ground that there was no traffic. That was the usual thing that was done in the case of such canals under the old system. But the Kennet and Avon Canal has a strategic purpose—for this reason. Supposing, unfortunately, at any time there was another war. It would be very difficult under modern conditions to push convoys up the Channel. Even if the other side of the Channel were in friendly hands, with such a very small area of water to watch it would be possible, under modern conditions, for an enemy to wipe out convoys much more easily than in the last war. It would be a question of how London was to be provided with all the milliard things that London must have.

One of the best ways of getting them here would be to take the stuff in at Avonmouth and across country by the Kennet and Avon Canal. It is a big broad canal, which can take barges of considerable size, provided that the canal is in a decent state of repair. Certainly, it would not solve the whole problem, but it would be of very material assistance in solving it. As things stand, and as things will stand in any conceivable period in peace time, the Transport Commission and the Docks and Inland Waterways Executive will have to carry the Kennet and Avon Canal, with all its locks and organisations, but with no traffic at all, having to do major repairs to it, and still having to make ends meet. If noble Lords think to leave the Commission in that state, bound by law to make ends meet and carrying all its burden without any support from public supplies, and then say, "It is freely and fairly in competition with private enterprise road transport," well, to me it seems mad and wicked. If the noble Lord has an explanation of such a system I should very much like to hear him give it.

6.17 p.m.

THE EARL OF RADNOR

My Lords, I have had the impression that in the public mind the most important part of this is that which deals with road transport. It is therefore very welcome to me to find, in your Lordships' House, a great deal of attention, starting with Lord Leathers, being paid to that shorter part of the Bill which deals with railway transport. Our railways are a most important part of the transport of this country; indeed they are an essential part of it. I do not know whether people realise to the full the extent to which we use the railways. I read the other day that 1,000 million passenger journeys are made annually on the railways, and that a million tons of freight are lifted every day of the year. That is a very considerable business. I was a railway director for nearly twenty years—I resigned when the 1947 Act came into operation—and as such, I did everything I could to oppose nationalisation of the railways. There were a variety of reasons, but the two fundamental ones were that I believed that the service to the public would suffer under nationalisation, and that a vast organisation such as the nationalised railways could not be economical in its working.

So far as service to the public is concerned, it is my belief that the service has continued at as good a level as, if not better than, could have been maintained by the railway companies had they been in private hands. The noble Viscount, Lord Bridgman, talked a great deal about maintenance, and the noble Lord, Lord Lucas of Chilworth, pointed out that the railways were limited as to capital expenditure. But there was another factor. They had been very limited as to the amount of steel available. Last year, 1952, they had a programme for the building of 2,000 passenger coaches, but they had not enough steel to build one of them. So the faults which may lie with British Railways in the way of service are faults which would have affected the privately owned railway companies just as much. So far as economy in working is concerned, I have been proved entirely wrong. Entirely as a direct result of unification of the railway companies, economies to the extent of£16 million per annum have been effected. Very few of these economies would have been effected by the separate railway companies at a time of rising prices, rising wages and rising costs generally. I think that that is a remarkable achievement of organisation.

We come to deal with the Bill as it affects railways. Clauses 14 and 15 deal with material alterations in the structure of the organisation of the railway companies. The wording of these clauses is somewhat vague and not easy to understand. The first part of Clause 14 is quite simple. It says that we have to provide a scheme and that under subsection (2) (a) the Railway Executive shall be abolished, if it is not already abolished. That is easy to understand. I do not know that anyone is going to object to the abolition of the Railway Executive—not even, I am told, the Executive themselves—provided that the Transport Commission themselves become entirely a policy-making body, instead of interfering to some extent in the management as well, as I understand has been the case. There is a provision for a slight increase in the membership of the Transport Commission and not so many of the members are to be whole-time. I think it is the whole-time members of the Commission who have made the difficulty. They have had to fish around and try to keep themselves out of mischief, because they have got to be there whole-time. They are experts in transport, of course, and it is difficult for experts to keep their fingers out of the pie. However, if that can be done, there is no great objection to getting rid of the Railway Executive.

The clause goes on to suggest that regional authorities should be set up and that to those authorities should be dele- gated unnamed powers. I think it would be interesting to know the extent to which Her Majesty's Government think delegation can go, because subsection (3) (a) provides for setting up other authorities (I hope noble Lords will note the plural) to deal with those things which cannot be delegated to the regional authorities and for setting up co-ordinating authorities for the purpose of co-ordinating the work of these authorities. Once again, note the plural. If we have abolished one Railway Executive, we are setting up an unspecified number of authorities which will do a great many of the things, I imagine, which the Railway Executive now do. It would be interesting to know from the noble Lord what the Government really have in mind in setting up these additional authorities. Apart from that, I wonder how far delegation can go without destroying the proper organisation of the railways as it exists. Capital expenditure cannot be delegated to the regional authorities; that has to be centrally controlled, and since finance generally dictates policy, they will not be able to delegate any policy which involves capital expenditure. Salaries and wages must be centrally controlled, and also fares and rates. We cannot have the different parts of the same organisation cutting each other's throats. I agree that it is competition. I did not mind the Great Western and the Southern Railway competing with each other, but I object to Mr. A of British Railways competing with Mr. B of British Railways and trying to cut his throat.

There are two other things I would mention in that connection which are a large part of the economies made by the British Railways service in the five years they have been in existence. One is locomotive and rolling stock distribution. By eliminating boundaries British Railways have been enabled to put rolling stock where it was most required, regardless of regions or companies. When I mention locomotives and rolling stock, I also include railway steamers. If there is a breakdown in one place, instead of having expensively to charter another steamer from somewhere else, they can move a spare one from some other region where it is not wanted. The same applies to locomotives and rolling stock. The number of locomotives has gone down by about 1,500, and the total amount of rolling stock has decreased very materially. Yet the railways are able to do their job, because of that flexibility which is centrally controlled from day to day and which would not have been achieved if such authority were delegated to local bodies. I should not like to think of the kind of remark the General Manager of the Southern Railway would have made if the General Manager of the L.N.E.R. had come to him and said, "Look here, old chap. I have run short of engines: would you lend me half a dozen?" or the kind of remark that the L.N.E.R. Board of Directors would have made to their General Manager if he had got into that sort of position. That can be done now, and it is being done now, and it is something which it would be a great pity to lose.

Another major economy lies in the standardisation of construction. I do not mean only the fact that the number of types have been reduced from 400 to twelve. I mean also that the actual method of construction has been standardised and—I do not like the word "streamlined," but modernised on modern construction lines. We might find, say, with passenger stock, that the bogies are being made in Derby the frames in Swindon and the bodies in Lancing. All that would be lost with delegation. Although I could name a number of things which I think ought not to be delegated, I do not honestly know what is going to be delegated to the regional authorities. I do not know, and it does not appear in the Bill, what the intentions of the Government are, but if they are going to have boards of directors, as in the old days—and that has been hinted at by more than one speaker today with, perhaps, a nostalgic desire to get back to the "good old Great Western" or "good old Southern Railway" or whatever other railway it may be—I do not see people taking on directorships with no power of control and able to do nothing beyond operating in their own area.

There is one other thing which I think is of considerable importance in this matter. I became a railway director in 1929, and right on until practically the beginning of the war I found that there was still considerable feeling, going a long way down in the ranks of the railway workers, with regard to their old railway before the 1921 amalgamations. I can tell your Lordships that a railway ticket collector whom I knew well came to me one clay and said, "Do you think you could see if I could become a travelling inspector?" I made no comment at the time, but I put in his name. A little later, somebody quite unknown to me was appointed, and I had another word with my friend the ticket collector, who said, "They are putting too many of these South Eastern men on the South Western line." That was in 1938. We have had five years of British Railways, during which time a great many senior officers have been moved from railway to railway, and many of the lower classes have also been moved about. There are the beginnings of the tradition of British Railways. I do not say necessarily that it is a good thing to have that tradition, but there are the beginnings. It will take a considerable time to get any kind of tradition in that way. If they are unsettled now, by starting the regions, this is something which once more will be unsettling to the staffs of the railway companies. That is really all I have to say on those two clauses, except that I have a strong feeling that, unless I have misread the 1947 Act, everything which is proposed in them could be done without the aid of this Bill.

I should like to say a few words with regard to the question of additional freedom, so far as rates are concerned. I must confess that this is something which is most welcome, and which the railways have wanted for a long time. I am rather doubtful whether the proposals go far enough. I do not know whether anybody has fully realised that denationalisation of road transport will expose the railway companies to the full rigour of competition; and the competition which road transport can afford to the railway companies generally lies in taking from them the most profitable forms of traffic. It is an intense competition. Therefore, alleviation to the extent that is proposed in Bill is welcome, although I doubt whether it goes far enough.

I feel that I must tell the noble Lord, Lord Burden that he did not get things quite right in the instance which he gave of his early life, when he quoted a price, because I do not think he fully understands the Bill. All that the railway companies need do after this Bill becomes law will be to give a maximum price. The mistake that the noble Lord made was, I think, in putting his quotation in writing. I am afraid that I have been rather critical of this Bill. When one has been a railway director as long as I have, one has a great feeling for the railways as a service. I have a feeling that the provisions of this Bill may well strike a blow at the railway service and, in an attempt to put the clock back, will disrupt that service to a degree which will react seriously on the transport of this country.

6.35 p.m.

LORD GIFFORD

My Lords, I should like, first of all, to add my tribute to tributes of other noble Lords to the noble Viscount, Lord Goschen, on his excellent maiden speech. I feel that he "had something," if I may use that term, when he gave us the instance of the regimental badge and the divisional sign. The rank and file cannot give loyalty and esprit de corps to too large a unit. I think the noble Earl, Lord Radnor is wrong. I do not believe you will ever get the same esprit de corps in British Railways as a whole which the men felt for the old companies, for the simple reason that there is nothing with which to compare. The average railwayman does not go to France and compare the British Railways with the French Railways. In this esprit de corps there is laughter, and sometimes derision, at the other fellow. "Look at that sloppy ticket collector on the London and North Eastern Railway; and look how late their trains run," says the Great Western railwayman. There is a great deal in that competition between units, and that is why these regions (a term which I hope will go) should have their different colours and their outwardly-seeming competition.

The noble Lord, Lord Lucas, as I understood him, said that the question we should ask ourselves with regard to this Bill, and particularly with regard to the road haulage part of it, is: Is it going to benefit the taxpayer or the buyer? To my mind, that is not the right question to ask. I feel that the questions we should ask ourselves are: Will this Bill give us a better transport system? Will this Bill benefit the transport user? In my view, the answer to those questions is "Yes."

LORD LUCAS OF CHILWORTH

I am sure the noble Lord does not want to misquote me. What I said, in answer to the noble Lord, Lord Leathers, who said that the shape of disposal had got to suit the buyer, was that it had also got to suit the owner—and that happened to be the taxpayer.

LORDGIFFORD

I should not wish to misquote the noble Lord, but I thought he gave us those two alternatives. However, I believe the answer is that this Bill will benefit the transport user. And if it benefits the transport user, then, in the long run, it automatically benefits the taxpayer, because a great percentage of the cost of every article of commerce to-day comes under the heading of transport. The noble Lord, Lord Burden, gave us a tirade, and accused us of dining off each other.

LORD BURDEN

May I interrupt the noble Lord to say that that was only a quotation from Browning. I hope the noble Lord will not accuse Browning of a tirade.

LORD GIFFORD

Anyhow, apparently the noble Lord let us off if we took plenty of beer and whisky with our dinner, because in that case we benefited the Exchequer. I suppose that the most important thing in this Bill—though by no means the whole purpose of the Bill—is the denationalisation of road haulage and once more giving free enterprise a fair opportunity of competing in the carriage of goods on the roads. I did not agree with a great deal that was said by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, but I did agree with him as to one matter. I feel that this Bill rather makes it appear that the only things to be dealt with are vehicles, whereas, in fact, vehicles are only a small part of the capital structure. In addition, there are depôts, offices and many other assets to be considered. In that respect, I feel that the Bill rather ignores these other assets of the industry.

As I said before, denationalisation of road haulage is only justified if it gives the trader a better service. If it is going to give the trader better service, it is essential that the people who buy these units or form companies to run road haulage should be efficient people with full knowledge of transport. At the moment I do not think there are sufficient safeguards in this Bill to ensure that those who buy the transport are fully qualified to do so. I think there should be a direction, possibly to the Disposals Board, that they are to satisfy themselves that the buyers, if not themselves fully qualified transport men, are at least employing fully qualified transport men in executive positions.

I intend now to pass to the question of passenger road transport. There I believe we have a much easier problem than with road haulage, because the existing companies and the existing structure has been little interfered with by the 1947 Act. I was rather surprised that the noble Lord, Lord Leathers, devoted so little of his speech to passenger road transport, but rather skated over it and left it to be dealt with by the Thesiger Committee. I feel that it is wrong that the British Transport Commission should continue to manage certain undertakings which they voluntarily acquired, such as S.M.T. in Scotland, and other companies mainly operating in East Anglia. It should be the policy of this Government to direct that these units should be run on a partnership basis, which is very succesfully employed in many large companies to-day. Bus undertakings should be run and managed by busmen and those units wholly owned by the Transport Commission should go back to the control of private enterprise so that they can run in true competition with the railways. The noble Viscount, Lord St. Davids—I think he has left the House—said that the Transport Commission had to run many uneconomic undertakings. It is not only the Transport Commission who have to run uneconomic undertakings. All the bus companies run many uneconomic services. They do that because it is to their advantage to do so in order to prevent other operators from coming into the part of the country which they serve, and because they consider it is right and necessary for them to take the rough with the smooth.

I do not think there would be the slightest difficulty in arranging for the disposal of part of the Commission's holding in these transport undertakings that they now wholly own. Bus shares have always been attractive to the public, probably more so than investment in road haulage, and I think the holdings could be disposed of to the public at a fair and profitable price. I should like to say one word about the London Transport Executive. They are doing an excellent job in providing transport over a difficult area, but there is a growing feeling in this country that it is being somewhat extravagantly run, and public opinion is becoming more vociferous on the subject. There are many ways in which great economies could be made—for instance, if more standing passengers were allowed during the rush hours. I believe that the scale of uniform allowances for conductors and drivers is higher than in many other undertakings. I do not know how many new pairs of trousers your Lordships buy each year, but I believe each driver and conductor gets two new pairs a year.

I would mention the latest proposals for fare increases. The Transport Tribunal has, no doubt rightly, decided that the London Transport Executive can bring in this new scale of fares, even though it is less than a year since their last increases were made. Whatever the legal interpretation of the 1947 Act, it does seem to me that the intention was to protect the public from more than one fare increase annually, and I should like to see something in the Bill to regularise and carry out this intention. It may be necessary from time to time, owing to sudden increases in costs, to make an increase within that time, but this could be done on a temporary basis, such increase, I suggest, being limited to a period of three months until the proper machinery can be put into operation.

This is mainly a Committee point, but I did notice that there was one clause which allowed London Transport to run vehicles almost anywhere in the country outside their own area, for parties of employees of the Transport Commission and their friends. That is a tremendously wide permission and I think that it should be narrowed down considerably, because in the way it is worded it is very much open to abuse, particularly as there are adequate coaches running under private enterprise to take these parties to the coast, or wherever it is, at reasonable prices.

The noble Lord, Lord Rea, in a very amusing speech likened himself and his Liberal friends to the older brethren of Opposition, and he spoke about the eternal triangle. So far as I can see at the moment, only the base of the triangle remains, the other two sides having departed. Perhaps we on the Back Benches here can call ourselves the younger brethren of Opposition, in that we do our best, as Lord Rea suggested, to support the Government in their proposals, at the same time feeling ourselves free to criticise as regards certain details. I will end my speech by repeating that I think that this Bill will greatly benefit the transport user, and therefore I give it my wholehearted support.

6.51 p.m.

LORD WISE

My Lords, in winding up a very interesting day's discussion I promise you that I will be brief. Her Majesty's Government are no doubt of the opinion that this is "the end of a perfect day." I am not so sure that it has been such a perfect day for them, and I hope that they will take particular note of the speeches which have been made by the "younger brethren" behind them. It has been significant that many of the Members on the Benches opposite have made speeches which call for attention. There has, I think, been a determination on both sides of the House to try to improve the Bill. I was particularly struck with the speech which a few moments ago the noble Earl, Lord Radnor, made. I personally have nothing to say against the railways, and I agree entirely with the points he made. I think it is curious to note that the opposition on that score in another place came primarily from an honourable Member who had been in the past a railway director of some note.

I noticed that several noble Lords suggested that when the new system comes into operation the names of our railways should be changed back to their original names. In my part of the country there were one or two lines that we used to know by bad names. The noble Lord, Lord Gifford, referred to the London and North Eastern Railway and to that, in our fashion, we gave the name "Late and Never Early." There was another joint railway, the Midland and Great Northern which was called the "Muddle and Get Nowhere."

LORD GIFFORD

May I interrupt the noble Lord? I could tell him privately a number of the names given to British Railways, but they are not fit for publication in this House.

LORD WISE

We shall be silent on those, I am certain. At any rate, I have a little tale to tell of that old condemned railway, the Great Eastern. I apologise to the noble Lord, the Secretary of State for the Co-ordination of Transport, Fuel and Power, that I did not hear his speech. I did not arrive in time. The fact remains that I arrived at Liverpool Street this afternoon six minutes before time, so that there is nothing very much wrong with the railways at the present time.

Coming back to this afternoon's speeches, I wish to congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, on a very powerful speech. I think we might say to Her Majesty's Government that that speech, and the speech which has been delivered by the noble Lord, Lord Pethick-Lawrence, represent the views of the Opposition. We do not like the Bill, and in Committee we shall try to improve it. We shall wait for the time when we may be able to wipe it out once again and start afresh. I think the Bill is inopportune at the present time for many reasons, but primarily because we are in the midst of what might be termed a trade crisis. Everybody in this country is keyed up for higher production, and none of us wants the Government to take any action whatever which is likely to curb that production or put out of joint our transport systems. I think that is extremely important. I do not think nationalisation of transport should be so wholeheartedly condemned as it already has been in another place and may be from the Benches opposite during the next two days in your Lordships' House. We have had a very short period of trial; in fact we have not yet got into our stride, and I can see a great many improvements which will come along and which we should consider.

I am wondering whether anybody, at heart, really wants this Bill. I know that it was mentioned in the pamphlets which were issued by the Conservative Party at the last Election, but for the life of me I cannot discover in the country anybody who wants the Bill, except possibly one section of the community, with which I will deal in a moment. If you consult the great trade union organisation you will find that the people who work in the industry apparently do not want a return to the old order of things, or a partial return to the old order of things. None of the workers want it. We have had very few complaints from passengers or users, either of the railways or of the road services. In fact in many instances there has been a recognition of the great improvements which have been made. Difficulties have been experienced, as the noble Earl, Lord Radnor, said, when he referred to steel for the construction of new coaches and locomotives and so on. But, by and large, I think, looking around the country, we shall find that the majority of our people cannot possibly see any reason for the tremendous upheaval which is likely to take place in the transport industry within the next two or three months. I notice that in another place an honourable Member referred to certain firms in his own constituency. He said that sixty-seven firms had been taken over after the 1947 Act, and there had not been a word of complaint from any of them. That is significant. If there has been serious complaint I hope that Her Majesty's Government, before this debate finishes, or during the progress of the Bill, will tell us what it is and from whence it comes.

Now I want to refer to one or two remarks which have been made during the course of the afternoon. I want, first of all, to assure the noble Lord, Lord Teynham, that we on these Benches stand by the 1947 Act. It is there, so far as we are concerned, and I hope that if it goes, we shall revive it. In that Act we did not take over the "C" licences, and, so far as I know, there is no intention whatever from this side of the House to deal with the "C" licences in the manner in which the noble Lord has suggested. It is not part of our policy; and, if he will take an assurance from me, that is so. I do not want it to go out from this House that there is any such intention on the part of the Labour Party or of a new Labour Government.

I want, if I may, just to refer for a moment to the levy. In doing so, I apologise to Lord Leathers that I was not here when he was speaking. I did note on the tape machine what he said in one particular. It was that: We hope that the process of disposal will be well advanced by this time next year, for the latest reports of the number of prospective purchasers are encouraging. The noble Lord, Lord Gifford, hoped that the Government would move rather slowly in that direction, but if, indeed, there are a number of purchasers in the market, purchasers ready to try to treat, I wonder whether they have taken notice of the levy. I stand to be corrected in these figures if I am wrong, but it seems to me that the purchase of the vehicles which will be sold is not a thing to be lightly entered into by anybody, because if the present arrangements are carried out the levy is there.

My noble friend Lord Lucas was anxious that some other system might be evolved. If the levy is still there, according to my information it may reach£8 million in two years; there may be a further£12 million in the following three years; and then, if the deficit has not already been made up, there may be a further £12 million in the following three years after those. So, in eight years, the new-born industry, if you like, or the new purchasers of the vehicles, may be faced with a payment in a levy form of no less than£32 million over eight years. That is the figure I have as being correct. We will break it down a little further, because I always believe in breaking these things down. If there are 40,000 vehicles sold, that means, on those figures, that each vehicle has a charge of£80 a year. If those figures are not correct, then the proportionate figures can be given. In any case, the sum will be very high. It will mean that there will be a tax of something like£80 a year on each of the vehicles.

THE EARL OF SELKIRK

Did the noble Lord say a tax of£80 a year on each vehicle?

LORD WISE

Yes.

THE EARL OF SELKIRK

That is quite incorrect. I should not like that to go out as being accurate.

LORD WISE

The Government will be able to give these figures, in course of time, but those are the figures I have, and they come out in that way.

I want to conclude by saying to the Government that I think that, in the interests of the country, this Bill should be withdrawn. As I said in my opening remarks, I am certain that there will be a tremendous upheaval. The Bill is not well thought of, it is not well wished and it is very incomplete. Possibly it is the most incomplete Bill that has ever come to your Lordships' House. It requires a tremendous number of Amendments. The Government admit that it will have to be amended in many particulars. I therefore suggest to noble Lords opposite that they should take their courage in their hands and have the Bill sent back.

THE EARL OF LUCAN

My Lords, on behalf of my noble friend, Lord Mathers, I beg to move that this debate be now adjourned.

Moved, That the debate be now adjourned.—(The Earl of Lucan.)

On Question, Motion agreed to, and debate adjourned accordingly.