Lords Sitting of 20 May 1953

Preamble
The House met at half past two of the clock, The LORD CHANCELLOR on the Woolsack.
Prayers

THE LORD BISHOP OF BATH AND WELLS
Harold William, Lord Bishop of Bath and Wells—Was (in the usual manner) introduced.

SAINT OSWALD ESTATE BILL [H.L.]
Read 2a.
THE CHAIRMAN OF COMMITTEES (THE EARL OF DROGHEDA): My Lords, I beg to move that Standing Order 169 relating to Private Bills be dispensed with in respect of this Bill. I should explain that the effect of Order 169 is that all trustees concerned with personal estate must be personally present when the Committee stage of the Bill is taken. There are twenty trustees involved in this Bill, and it really would not be practicable to get them all together on the same day. Therefore, I beg to move.
Moved, That Standing Order 169 be considered in order to its being dispensed with in respect of the said Bill.—(The Earl of Drogheda.)
On Question, Motion agreed to, and ordered accordingly.

SITUATION IN NIGERIA
THE EARL OF LISTOWEL: My Lords, I beg to ask the Question which stands on the Order Paper in the name of my noble friend Lord Ogmore.
[The Question was as follows:
To ask Her Majesty's Government whether they will make a statement on the constitutional issue which has arisen in Nigeria, involving, among other things, the resignation of certain Nigerian Ministers.]
THE PARLIAMENTARY UNDER-SECRETARY OF STATE FOR THE COLONIES (THE EARL OF MUNSTER): My Lords, at the last Meeting of the
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House of Representatives in March, a Private Member's Motion was tabled urging that the House should accept self-government in 1956 as a primary political objective. Before the debate on this Motion, the Council of Ministers had decided by a majority that members of the Government should abstain from speaking or voting upon it. One Central Minister from the Western Region resigned before the Motion came before the House. During the debate a representative of the Northern Region moved that the discussion be adjourned. This was accepted, whereupon the remaining three Central Ministers from the Western Region resigned from the Council of Ministers and left the House, together with most of the Members from the Western and Eastern Regions. The Ministers who have resigned have not yet been replaced, but action is being taken as provided in the Constitution in an attempt to fill the vacancies.
The Governor of Nigeria has recently visited London to report on the situation and my right honourable friend the Minister of State was able, during his recent visit to the Territory, to hear at first hand, the views of representatives of all three Regions. As noble Lords will observe, the situation is both complicated and delicate, but my right honourable friend—or, indeed, my right honourable friend the Minister of State—hopes to be able to make a statement in another place to-morrow.
THE EARL OF LISTOWEL: I am grateful to the noble Earl for his full reply. May I ask whether he can make any statement about the riots which have taken place in Kano, arising out of the political differences which the noble Earl has mentioned in reply to the Question put to him by my noble friend?
THE EARL OF MUNSTER: Yes: I can make a statement about the rioting which occurred recently in Nigeria and which, as the noble Earl will appreciate, is a separate and distinct problem from the original Question. Serious rioting, the exact origins of which have not yet been clearly established, broke out at Kano on May 16, after the Native Authority had cancelled all permits for political meetings, in view of prevailing tension. The rioting was largely confined to the strangers' quarter outside the city walls and did not spread to other parts of the

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Region. Originally, the main participants in the riots appear to have been lawless hooligans, but the fighting soon took on an inter-tribal character, with Northerners fighting Southerners. Some of the rioters were equipped with firearms.
Following a curfew on May 16 the fighting died down, but broke out anew on the following day. Substantial reinforcements of police and troops were flown to Kano that day, and a state of emergency was proclaimed throughout the whole Region the following day, May 18. My latest information is that the situation is now well in hand, and the opposing factions have been separated by a barbed wire barrier. Casualties among the rioters, according to latest reports, total 43 killed and 204 injured. In addition, three Native Authority police have been injured. No troops have been used in action so far. Information is not available at present to show whether there has been significant damage to property. I feel sure the House will join with me in deploring this savage outbreak and in enjoining restraint on all political parties and groups in Nigeria, in order that an opportunity may be given to repair the damage done to Nigerian unity by this useless violence.
EARL JOWITT: My Lords, I am sure that we all agree with the sentiments which the noble Earl has uttered. I think this is a case in which we might consider whether a debate would not be desirable—indeed, I imagine that Her Majesty's Government may be glad of an opportunity of making quite plain where they stand on this matter. Perhaps it can be discussed through the usual channels and, if it is thought desirable, we might have a debate on this topic.
THE LORD PRESIDENT OF THE COUNCIL (THE MARQUESS OF SALISBURY): My Lords, I shall be very happy to arrange that. Presumably the debate would have to take place after the Whitsuntide Recess.
EARL JOWITT: Yes.

CONVICTED SOLDIERS AND KOREAN SERVICE
2.48 p.m.
THE EARL OF LUCAN: My Lords, on behalf of my noble friend Lord Strabolgi, I beg to ask the Question which stands in his name on the Order Paper.
[The Question was as follows:
To ask Her Majesty's Government if their attention has been drawn to a case at Berkshire Assizes on May 8 in which two soldiers, convicted of robbing another soldier with violence, are reported to have been offered the alternative of prison or of volunteering for active service in Korea; whether they are aware that many citizens regard this as an affront to Her Majesty's Forces in Korea; and whether it is proposed to take any action in this matter.]
THE LORD CHANCELLOR (LORD SIMONDS): My Lords, inquiries have been made into the case to which the noble Lord refers. It is not correct that the two soldiers who were found guilty of robbery with violence at Berkshire Assizes were offered the alternative of imprisonment or volunteering for active service in Korea. Both men are serving on a Regular engagement of three years with the Colours and four years with the Reserve, and, as the noble Lord knows, soldiers so serving may at any time volunteer for service overseas. The learned judge, on being told that one of the prisoners was anxious to go overseas, decided to give the other prisoner an opportunity of volunteering, which he subsequently did. Both men were thereupon bound over conditionally on their volunteering for service overseas, not specifically for Korea, thereby enabling them to start afresh in different surroundings. In the result, the second and third parts of the question do not arise.
THE EARL OF LUCAN: While thanking the noble and learned Lord for his reply, may I add that my noble friend will be glad to have the categorical assurance that the situation was not as stated in the Press reports?
THE LORD CHANCELLOR: Yes.

SUDANESE SELF-GOVERNMENT
2.50 p.m.
LORD VANSITTART: My Lords, I beg to ask the Question which stands in my name on the Order Paper.
[The Question was as follows:
To ask Her Majesty's Government what would be the effect on the recently concluded Anglo-Egyptian Treaty concerning the Sudan of warlike acts by Egypt against the British Government or attacks on its troops and subjects.]
THE PARLIAMENTARY UNDER-SECRETARY OF STATE FOR FOREIGN AFFAIRS (THE MARQUESS OF READING): The Anglo-Egyptian Agreement secured for the Sudanese agreement between the co-domini on the principle that the Sudanese should be able freely to determine their future and on the procedure by which this was to come about. With regard to the extent to which events in Egypt may affect this process, I can only say that it is difficult to answer a hypothetical question of this kind. In any case, Her Majesty's Government do not intend to allow any events which may occur in Egypt to prevent the obtaining of self-government and self-determination by the Sudanese.
VISCOUNT STANSGATE: Has the noble Marquess taken into account the effect which any conflict in Egypt might have on the Sudanese elections and the ultimate Sudan decision as to its future?
THE MARQUESS OF READING: That and many other factors, I agree, have to be taken into account, but on a situation which has at this moment not developed it would be extremely unwise to give any precise reply.
VISCOUNT STANSGATE: Certainly.

SUNDAY ENTERTAINMENTS ACT, 1932
THE JOINT PARLIAMENTARY UNDER-SECRETARY OF STATE FOR THE HOME DEPARTMENT (LORD LLOYD): My Lords, I beg to move that these two Orders be agreed to. The procedure under the 1932 Act has been complied with. I do not think there is anything I need add.
Moved, That the Orders made by the Secretary of State for the Home Department, extending section one of the Act to the Urban District of Bentley-with-Arksey and the Rural District of Wetherby, copies of which were laid before the House yesterday, be approved.—(Lord Lloyd.)
On Question, Motion agreed to.

EARLDOM OF DUNDEE
Order of the Day for the consideration of the Report from the Committee for Privileges read.
The Committee's Report was as follows:
That:

1. the dignities of Earl of Dundee and Lord Inverkeithing were created by Letters Patent under the Great Seal of Scotland, dated September 8, 1660, in favour of John 3rd Viscount of Dudhope with limitation to his heirs male whomsoever;

2. the Claimant Henry James, Viscount of Dudhope, Lord Scrymgeour, is the heir male of the said Patentee and is now entitled of right to the dignities of Earl of Dundee and Lord Inverkeithing.

THE CHAIRMAN OF COMMITTEES: My Lords, I beg to move that this Report be now considered.
Moved, That the Report be now considered.—(The Earl of Drogheda.)
On Question, Motion agreed to.
THE CHAIRMAN OF COMMITTEES: The effect of the Report is that Lord Dudhope is entitled to the dignities of the Earl of Dundee and Lord Inverkeithing. I beg to move that the Report be agreed to.
Moved, That the Report be agreed to.—(The Earl of Drogheda.)
On Question, Motion agreed to: resolved and adjudged accordingly; the said Resolution and Judgment to be laid before Her Majesty by the Lords with White Staves, and to be transmitted to the Lord Clerk Register of Scotland.

WELL-BEING OF THE FAMILY
2.54 p.m.
THE LORD BISHOP OF SHEFFIELD: rose to ask the House to consider the effects of recent social legislation and other influences upon the well-being of the family; and to move for Papers. The right reverend Prelate said: My Lords, in moving this Motion, I have no particular axe to grind, no scandal to uncover, no desire to attack the services now provided by the State and local authorities. The subject, as your Lordships will know, has been discussed recently a good deal outside Parliament and it received much attention in the Report of the Royal Commission on

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Population, which, if my memory serves me, has not yet been debated in Parliament. I will preface what I have to say with a quotation from a lecture given by the present Head of the Department of Social Studies at the London School of Economics a year or two ago. He said that
"the area of contradiction and conflict stretches over much of our social and economic policy, not because we do not care about the family but because we do not think about the family."
I assume that your Lordships care about the family, and require no exhortations from me or anybody else about the sanctity of family life and all that. We believe that the family is part of the established order of things. As birds continue to mate and to nest, in spite of the despoiling attacks of naughty boys, so the family will survive, despite the worst which naughty legislators or industrialists may do; and for precisely the same reason. The family is tough, resilient and adaptable. Human folly cannot destroy it, but it can hurt, corrupt and weaken it. Therefore, I would ask your Lordships to think about the family this afternoon, and I am grateful that speakers more worthy of your hearing than I am, and better informed, will be addressing the House presently.
The family, and the attitude of society towards the family, have been changing in a very fast changing world. A hundred or so years ago it was taken for granted. It was rarely the subject of inquiry, for its privacy was respected. The full-length biographies of the Victorians nearly all become reticent and stylicised when they come to describe the private lives of their heroes. It is roughly true to say that the pre-Victorian family grew, like the seed in the parable, "secretly," and received no proddings from sociological or reformist gardeners. One reason why the family was thus secluded and self-contained was that in those days it was numerous, fairly stationary, and in rural areas was often still an economic unit. Moreover, the mother was occupied for a large span of her life in child-bearing and child-rearing. The members of the family were well occupied in rubbing off one another's corners, and did not need a great deal of attention from outside. And in the process they learnt a good deal about communal life.
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How different is the situation to-day! The family is no longer secluded in unself-conscious privacy. It is studied, legislated for, visited, moved about and taxed. It has become self-conscious. Trained visitors are taught and encouraged to give parents advice on their duties and functions, which may sometimes increase their confidence and efficiency but may sometimes lessen their efficiency by undermining their self-confidence. Even the parson adds his meed of guidance, before the wedding if not afterwards. I am not saying that the change is for better or for worse: I am merely emphasising the fact of the change and its magnitude. As there can be no putting back of the clock, we have to make the best of it. Statistically, the outstanding features of the change, as your Lordships all know, are the reduced size of families and the recent increase in the number of marriages, especially of early marriages. We are all aware, these days, of the rapid disappearance of large families—so much so, that when we do meet a family of Victorian dimensions we are apt to assume, I think a little too readily, that the parents are either "R.C." or "M.D." The figures are very striking. The census of 1911 showed that the average number of children per family from marriages contracted in the 1860's was round about six. The census of 1946 showed that the average number of children from marriages contracted in 1925 was about two. And the figure is still tending to fall. In view of this, it is rather surprising that there should at the same time have been an increase in the number of marriages, especially early marriages. I understand that, as compared with 1911, the proportion of girls marrying at under twenty years of age has risen by no less than 200 per cent.
There is another point to be considered as we ponder these figures—a point which, if I may say so, was well made in a paper by Dr. Bliss at the Conference on the Family which was convened last month by the National Conference on Social Work. The new conception of marriage turns away from the idea of marriage as a social institution, to the constitution of marriage—and here I quote:
"as a freely entered and freely maintained personal relationship worked out by the persons concerned"—

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that is to say, the personal adjustment of one to the other, creating something new. The question we have to ask is, is this change pure gain for the community or is it likely to increase the sum total of human happiness? The greater emotional tension that it involves and the degree of compatibility and identity of interest which it demands, and also of privacy and physical propinquity, make the risks of failure far greater. One might ask, as that speaker asked, what is the long-term reaction of all this on the adventurous spirit of a seafaring nation? As I asked myself that question I was reminded of an experience I had in the war when I suggested to one much-engaged young parson that he might offer himself as an army chaplain. His reply was: Yes, provided I could assure him that the chaplaincy would be in the neighbourhood of so and so.
May I now pass from the general, which could occupy a great deal of time if one cared to occupy it, to the particular, and single out six points from among the many which might be raised, and perhaps will be raised. It is probably desirable for the nation's life and for individual character and well-being that the size of families should be larger than the low average to which they have fallen. If that is true, then it should be our duty to try to influence public opinion that way and, as legislators, to ensure that both legislation and administration conduce to that end. At present I do not think they do, and I should like to reinforce that opinion by quoting from paragraph 406, the careful conclusion of the Royal Commission on Population. It is as follows:
"…that social development over the past seventy or eighty years has tended to accentuate the relative economic arid other handicaps of parenthood and that, despite recent ameliorations, these handicaps at nearly all income levels are still substantial. In the process of social advance, until recently, the family has been overlooked or given only a miner place in social policy. On the economic side the most important effect is that for most families the addition of children involves a substantial reduction of the family's standard of living; on the non-economic side the worst effect is felt by mothers who have shared little, if at all, in the great growth of leisure in modern times; and the over-all effect has been to lower the status of the family in the national life."
Where there is family poverty of a severe kind to-day it is usually where the
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number of children is above the average. The incidence of taxation and the modest scale of family allowances are such that pressure is still in favour of keeping families small. A housing policy which, in many cases, results in houses with only two bedrooms, and few with more than three; and housing authorities which shrink from the very considerable trouble of rent rebates, are equally discouraging to larger families. So, too, is purchase tax on clothing. And I personally wish that the Fighting Services would repent of the evil they did in 1946 when they abolished allowances, and that instead of the Services following industry, industrialists and trade unionists would consider more carefully their responsibility to the community and have a concern for their employees and members as family men. On a long-term view, it is in the interests of the family that the principle of equal pay for equal work should go with family allowances. Whilst I should not care to advocate an increase of family allowances on the French scale, they ought to be more than token payments and should be sensitively related to changes in the cost of living and the family budget.
Then, as we all know, there are industrial pressures, some due to the nature of an industry and some in the interests of efficient production, which bear hardly on the family. Full employment and good wages are, of course, an immense boon and blessing; but the price is high if it means a great increase in shift work and in the demand for mobility of labour. The rootless ness of urban industrial populations is a social evil, and incidentally it is somewhat inimical to the life of the churches. Industry affects social life powerfully. Whilst someone has said that a family may be more corrupted by coddling than by difficulties, we may ask industry in framing its economic policies to have thought for the consequences of those policies upon the life of the family and community, and to be prepared sometimes to sacrifice, for a short length of time, a little economic efficiency in order to maintain the stability of the family unit in society.
That brings me to the subject of married women at work, about which a good deal of nonsense is spoken. All through history, married women have been economic producers, and by no

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means only within the home. The large number of women who were not economic producers in that very affluent period at the turn of the century were an exception to a very general rule; and if in these more impoverished days married women were not to go out to work, the economic loss would be severe. Society would have to pay more for some utilities or else go without. Therefore, the question we have to ask and try to answer is, does the well-being of the family require that price to be paid?
I think it is generally accepted that the relationships which people have or make in later life are much influenced by the relationships made in infancy. Dr. Bowlby, of the Tavistock clinic, at the conference to which I have referred, ventured this assertion:
"To take the cases of parents who beat, injure or kill their children, I would be prepared to say that in every single instance they had a difficult childhood."
And he adds:
"Our social and medical services are not keyed to the notion that the child's relation to his mother is a tremendously important factor."
A happy relationship with parents, especially with the mother, during the first five years is of permanent importance. The value of sheer enjoyment—parent in child, child in parent—is not always appreciated by some moralists and reformers.
Therefore, it may be good that after the child has reached the age of three its mother should go out to work—moderately—and the child should go to nursery school. In a congested house—and a terrible number of the houses in this country are very congested at the present time—they are likely to enjoy one another more; emotions are likely to be less violent when the children are not on top of mother all day long and the mother is not on top of them. Certainly, the nursery used to provide that sort of easement in times gone past in the houses of the well-to-do. And later on the working experience of the mother may help her to keep on closer terms both with her children and with her husband. It has also to be remembered—and this seems to me an important point—that, as Professor Titmuss has pointed out, whereas the Victorian or Edwardian mother may have been occupied with
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child-bearing and child rearing up to the age of fifty and had a short expectancy of life after that, to-day the mother of a smaller family gets it over sooner, preserves her health better, and expects to live much longer. She needs, therefore, to be able to fill in her time, and not just to kill time and perhaps bore her children in the process. So, I would suggest that, here, again, society has a right to press industrial management to use the labour of married women, whole or part-time, with a careful regard for their responsibilities as mothers. And in industrial areas where women can and do go out to work and overcrowding is deplorable, it would be an ill-chosen economy to close nursery schools and classes or to curtail the service of school dinners.
May I pass on to say a word about the family as a unit. Here we get near the heart of the trouble. There is a growing awareness, one is glad to note, of the danger of dealing with the problems of families piecemeal, and of trying to care for children individually instead of treating the family as a whole. The most radical criticism of the operation of recent legislation is along this line. The sick child is taken off to hospital, where the parent is regarded as an intruder. The education authority, except in the case of the fairly well-to-do, decide how and how long the child shall be educated. The problem of the problem family is still too often solved by putting the children in an expensive institution and the mother in an expensive prison, the family being evicted and its goods and chattels sold up. As we all know, to move any child from its home is not only a very expensive act; it is also a very serious one. Then again, visits by an unco-ordinated army of specialists may, as I have hinted, undermine the little self-confidence of many parents, and disrupt the family in the very effort to help them. What is needed in social work today, is the equivalent of a wise general practitioner—a sort of social family doctor.
Some of the most constructive pastoral work will always be done by voluntary bodies working in good liaison with statutory authority, because they usually can do it with a little more elasticity. I should like to express my immense admiration and praise for the work of the

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Family Service Units, a really heroic venture of love and care and the kind of remedial work which is best done on a voluntary basis. So I would ask this question: Is enough thought being given to the selection and training of suitable persons for this sort of work? Not every person who can get a diploma in social studies and who likes the idea of getting busy on the lives of other people can safely be let loose on defenceless families. Important and necessary as factual and technical knowledge are, they are not all that is needed. One notices that short-term, rather ruthless, solutions always tend to attract the sort of person who never sees beyond or round regulations, for lack of a coherent philosophy of life and of a deep respect of persons.
Discriminating work in the sphere of human relationships will usually be done well by men and women "of true Christian love and charity"; that is to say, who have convictions about the purpose of life and the nature of the good life. About this, Christianity has a word to say and the Church has work to do. My own Church, through training centres like the Josephine Butler House and the William Temple College is doing a little, but a great deal needs to be done. I would leave it at that, only adding that when good housing, good planning, wise advice and comprehensive social and medical services have done all that they can do, there remains deepset in human nature stupidity, inertia, selfishness and sheer lack of self-discipline; and with ordinary folk only a dynamic religious faith can get to grips and deal radically with all those.
In conclusion, I should like to say a brief word about the old people. As things are going, the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, it seems to me, may soon have to consider revising its charter and becoming the National Society for the Protection of, and the Prevention of Cruelty to, Old People. In a span of seventy years or so, we are told, the average expectancy of life has risen from forty-plus to sixty-five plus, and is still rising, while the size of families has declined. There are fewer young folk to care for more old folk. Institutions are not the best answer—although more large homes and hospital provision there must be. It is in part a housing problem and in part a social
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amenities, a pensions and a health problem; but there are no administrative alternatives to the exercise of love and Christian decency. The way in which a family or a society cares for its old folk is a very good test of its moral and spiritual temper and morale. In spite of what I said in this connection I should like to call attention to the unsatisfactory accommodation provided in a good many places (I could not say how many) under Part III of the National Assistance Act. We are told that old folk are often mixed up with others in a very unsatisfactory way, while husbands and wives who have been evicted by the Lousing authorities are separated. The squalor and misery of some of these places is quite unbelievably bad.
I have already exceeded my ration of time and I would only say this: there are always two ways of using the benefits provided by the social services—one can either use them intelligently or lie back on them indulgently. Parents and others have to be encouraged and very patiently educated to use them so that they can do their duties in life better. In my observation, this is rarely achieved by exhortation, moralising, or even by threats. Those who operate the social services, like some organisations, have to aim all the time at making themselves dispensable and the family a self-sufficient responsible unit in the community. True charity slips quietly away when its work is done. I beg to move for Papers.
3.23 p.m.
LORD PAKENHAM: My Lords, I believe that I am expressing the sentiments of the whole House when I describe the speech of the right reverend Prelate as far-reaching, elevated and impressive in every way. He has spoken for what seems only a few minutes—indeed, I think we could all have listened to him very happily for twice as long—but he has said a great deal in that time. His speech, clearly, was based on long years of social work and searching, disinterested reflection, and it flowed from a profound humanity. We speak from a number of different angles this afternoon. I hope that in what I venture to say I shall adequately express the outlook of noble Lords around and behind me, but on one or two points, easily detected, I shall seek leave to speak only for myself. The right reverend Prelate said that if one

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sees a large family, one usually assumes that the parents are either R.C. or M.D. Well, I am R.C., and I may be regarded as the other thing as well—but perhaps that will be for the House to judge when I have finished.
Before coming to my main argument, I should like to make one preliminary observation. This thought struck me with special force last autumn at Oxford, after I had played a part in a conference organised by the British Committee of the International Union of Family Organisations, a Committee that is doing valuable work, as I think the right reverend Prelate would agree. That conference, widely publicised at the time, was attended by representatives of twenty-eight countries. Its theme was the stability of the family. I came away convinced that there was no other subject in the world which forms such a bond of possible sympathy between the nations as the human family does. Indeed, in the world to-day I should regard the family as the strongest possible force for universal peace, if we knew how to use it aright.
We come to this matter from various angles both in the House and in the general discussion that is raging up and down the country on the subject of the family. I do not know whether that is altogether a matter for rejoicing, or one for regret; but certainly there is widespread anxiety about the family at the present time, as was voiced in the right reverend Prelate's speech. This may not necessarily be a bad thing. It may not be a retrogression, but a prelude—and I hope and pray that it is—to a greater regeneration of the family. Compared with other noble Lords, I have not been a member of your Lordships' House for long—about seven or eight years—and I cannot recall a debate here of quite this kind, although I may be wrong. But the fact that we are having one this afternoon seems in itself a pretty encouraging sign.
Few of us would find it easy to agree, perhaps, on the precise indices by which to judge the health or sickness of family life, because things of that kind do not admit of statistical definition. To focus our thoughts early in the debate, I should like to give the House one or two quotations. The first is from a searching
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article in The Times at the end of last year, on December 1, 1952, in which we were reminded that, compared with the years before the war, the number of indictable offences known to the police had nearly doubled—that is, all offences, not only juvenile offences. Though there have been ups and downs, there is no sign yet of any halt to the general increase of crime which has continued since 1930. That alone is a somewhat sobering thought. Turning to the juvenile side, I would remind the House of a passage in the last Home Office Report on the work of the Children's Department, which was published in May, 1951. We are told there that
"The continued high rate of juvenile delinquency is a cause of concern. It was not surprising that a major war, with its disturbing effect on family life should, as in 1914–18, bring about an increase in the number of juvenile offenders. The serious aspect is that the number is still far above the pre-war level."
Paragraph 147 of the same Report assures us that emphasis has come to be placed on the broken home as a prime predisposing factor, an argument heard more than once in recent years in your Lordships' House.
It is now generally accepted that a failure to meet the child's need of security and affection is responsible for a great deal of juvenile delinquency. Incidentally, yesterday afternoon in the precincts of the House I was discussing the causes of juvenile delinquency with half a dozen young men from a famous boys' club, in my prejudiced eyes the finest of all boys' clubs. I asked these young gentlemen what they thought were the outstanding causes of the prevalence of juvenile crime. Various answers, which were quite illuminating, were given. One young man was inclined to suggest that the adolescent of to-day had more money than he knew what to do with; but this was not a popular or prevalent view among them. There was a general disposition to blame the fact that so many mothers go out to work—and I agree that it may be an important factor when the children are younger. Emphasis was also laid on the harm done in mixed clubs which are not properly supervised, and, generally, by unregulated dancing. This may be a local problem, but I do not think it is. I record those as first-hand opinions from young men who are now growing up. But all

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agree with the Home Office Report that broken homes are a supremely deleterious factor.
We have not time this afternoon to pursue statistics very Far, but if we turn to Table XI of the Civil Judicial Statistics for the year 1951, as a whole, we find there the figures for divorce. There we notice that 6,000 divorces were granted in 1938—a far greater figure than for twenty or thirty years further back; that 58,000 were granted in 1947 (that, of course, was the immediate post-war peak), and that 28,000 were granted in 1951, which is still more than four times the pre-war figure. The House will not be surprised to hear that I am strongly opposed to all divorce. But, whether one believes in easy divorce or vigorously rejects it, and even making some allowance, as one should, for the new divorce facilities of recent years, we must surely all agree, as a matter of fact, that there are many more broken homes in England to-day than there were in times past. That must be treated as a contemporary feature of our society, however it is explained, and in consequence, I submit that our children are paying a terrible price.
The first remedy, therefore, which lies within the power of the community is surely the provision of the best marriage guidance, or other advice, which will enable husbands and wives to make a greater success of their marriages. We discussed this topic quite recently in this House in relation to Marriage Advisory Councils. I would only add to that discussion—and here I am sure the right reverend Prelate will be with me—that a lot more than is at present being dime could be done by community effort, in parishes and elsewhere, by way of mutual encouragement and self-education. Today, however, though I hope to be reasonably brief, I feel bound to go a good deal wider in discussing the whole impact of recent social trends and social legislation, and their effect on family life—indeed, when I use the word "recent," I cast my mind back over a good many years. Taking the last century, as a whole, and more particularly the last fifty years, and waxing, if you like, absurdly dogmatic, I would say that certain trends have, on the whole, been unfavourable to the family, and that certain legislation has, on the whole, been favourable. I would submit, realising that broad
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generalisations of this kind are subject to a hundred qualifications, that legislation has done something to correct the trends, and that the trends would have been a good deal more damaging if legislation had not intervened. I throw that out as my personal conviction, for what it is worth, though I realise that it is difficult to distinguish trends arid legislation in this way.
Let us take, first, social legislation, the establishment of what is called the Welfare State. Put quite simply, the wider and more equal distribution of wealth involved, the creation of minimum standards of housing, health, education and social security, seem to me, and to all of us on this side of the House—in fact, I think throughout the House generally; at least, I hope so—not only to be in line with Christian ideas of justice but also, surely, to render it much easier, in the material sense, to raise a family. Surely, they render it much easier to provide a material basis on which to construct a spiritual ideal. That certainly seems to me to be the passionate preoccupation of the noble Lord, Lord Beveridge, who I am glad to see is to follow me in this debate, although naturally it is rather a nervous work for the old pupil to be followed by the master. Certainly it was the noble Lord's preoccupation when he was doing his most famous work. For that reason, although the noble Lord, if I may say so, has always been reluctant to describe himself as a Christian—some years have passed since he showed that reluctance, and perhaps he has overcome it by now—he has always seemed to me to be a much better Christian, in practice, than he would ever admit to being, and, indeed, a much better Christian than many of us who make more noise about our beliefs. I hope that I do not do the noble Lord an injustice in those respectful observations.
No honest champion of the Welfare State can deny that there are possible dangers involved when you remove or lessen the material sacrifices involved in parenthood. In an ideal community, in a community that was infinitely rich and far removed from our present one, we should all have enough to provide an adequate upbringing for our children, and to pass a little on to them at our death, without the intervention of the

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State. The State would come in only to see that adequate safeguards were maintained, and to provide those services which could be more cheaply organised on a collective basis. But that picture is fantastically far removed from the prewar world, although in this one respect, the world in which we are now living is not so different from the pre-war world as is sometimes supposed. I have not the most recent figures—I do not think they are available—but before the war it was calculated that one man in a hundred possessed as much property as the other ninety-nine put together; and, according to a well-known calculation, only one man in three—some say one in four—left as much as £100 when he died. If that is the situation, the State has got to step in to rectify these glaring inequalities. Yet I agree that the Welfare State brings its own dangers, and these we must tackle as they arise. But those dangers are small indeed in comparison with the sufferings and degradations which the Welfare State has already done so much to eliminate. I leave out from to-day's discussion the question with which we have so often dealt, or tried to deal, in this House, of how far the nation can afford, in an economic sense, the global amount of social service actually provided. The view of noble Lords on this side of the House in regard to that question is well known; and it is not, I hope and believe, confined to this side of the House. As the noble Lord, Lord Beveridge, used to say so often when he was challenged about his Report, "We cannot afford not to abolish want." I hope that in these later days that is the language the noble Lord is still talking.
I must pause for a moment on the question which was dealt with authoritatively by the right reverend Prelate, whether within the total of social service the family has had its share: whether sufficient attention has been paid to the family, as such. On this point the locus classicus is perhaps the passage of the 1949 Report of the Royal Commission on Population, from which the right reverend Prelate quoted. I will not quote the same passages again, but I do not think he quoted paragraph 402—it is to the same effect as paragraph 406—in which we find these words:
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"…in the process of social advance the family has tended to be overlooked or given only a minor place in social policy."
Various illustrations of that comment are given, some of which were used and quoted by the right reverend Prelate. The Royal Commission's Report mentions a number of important ways in which the family has benefited, along with the other members of the so-called lower income groups. It refers to maternity and child welfare services, the school medical service, the school milk and meals scheme, nursery schools, rent rebates and other things: and it mentions war-time developments, such as rationing and price fixing, food priorities for mothers and children; and it goes on to add to the list.
As the right reverend Prelate said, when all is said and done, weighing up the benefits to the families against certain disadvantages that have accrued, the conclusion is the one he quoted: that social development over the past seventy or eighty years has tended to accentuate the relative economic and other handicaps of parenthood. That is the conclusion of the Royal Commission, and it is surely a conclusion that we cannot dream of glossing over. The Royal Commission put forward a number of remedies which have hitherto received surprisingly little attention. Personally, I am glad that one of their suggestions is not likely to be strongly supported this afternoon—at least I hope not. I refer to the suggestion for easier birth control. I restrain myself from discussing that further, except to say that I regard it as utterly deplorable.
There are a number of very important proposals in the Report of the Royal Commission which have been mentioned to your Lordships: more and better housing; home helps; nursery schools; day nurseries; holiday or rest homes for mothers; more children's playgrounds; more free allowances under the Family Allowances Act; improved income tax allowances, and other things. Those are very important suggestions, and I am sorry that as a whole they do not seem to have received the considered attention of the nation or of Parliament that one might have had reason to expect. Along with the Report of the Royal Commission, I would call the attention of the House to certain considered recommendations of the British Committee of the

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International Union of Family Organisations, a Committee I mentioned earlier. They stressed the desirability of granting family allowances in respect of first children as a top priority in social advance; a more generous provision for the widow or deserted wife, and the need for treating the preparation for family life as an integral part of the educational system. I must pass over a number of other very carefully thought out conclusions—for example, the interesting suggestion that the new cost of living index should pay much more attention to family needs such as children's clothing and shoes, and less to beer and. tobacco. I would end the list by referring only to what appears to be the most important of all their contentions—the view that there is a close connection between family life and religious teaching in schools.
Those are the practical topics this afternoon. I have not had time to do more than place them seriatim before your Lordships. Obviously each one of them could receive the full measure of a day's debate, arid I must draw towards my own conclusion. I join wholeheartedly—we all do on this side of the House—with any who decline to see what might be called "holy poverty" in the conditions under which the great majority of our people have been forced to live in the past through no fault of their own. We glory in the great reduction in want, malnutrition and disease that has been effected of recent years, partly through the advance of science, but in our century still more by the organised protest of the disinherited masses and by the development of an ever more sensitive conscience among men and women of all types, classes and views.
I agree that, in any future extension of the social services, we must be much more zealous than in the past in avoiding the reproach of neglecting the family as a unit which the Royal Commission on Population has levelled at the British nation, with a justice which it seems to me impossible to deny. I would suggest that these material easements and compensations will neither be forthcoming—the nation will never throw them off—nor even, if they are forthcoming, do more than provide a starting point for spiritual improvement unless our whole national attitude is inspired in the future by a far deeper appreciation of the significance
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of the family than it has been in past years. It is agreeable for all who are interested in the family to find a recovery of interest in the family under the impact of such painful phenomena as growing juvenile delinquency or a declining birthrate. Such dawning awareness, white it is better than nothing, is only, surely, the beginning of wisdom. Surely, the supreme responsibility of all of us who play any part in public life and assume, however timidly or unworthily, the name of Christian, is to believe ourselves, and help others to believe, that marriage is not just a practical convenient arrangement but a divinely appointed sacrament; that in marriage we literally co-operate with God to bring into the world anew life and an immortal soul.
Against that background, as was finally said in a recent broadcast by Professor Colin Clarke:
"No political leader, however powerful, no economist, however learned, has the slightest right to interfere with the birth of children. No—it is the other way round; it is parents who have the right to demand of Prime Ministers and economists that they should so organise the world that children should have enough to eat."
But if parents have rights of that kind, their duties are no less imperative—duties of hard work inside and outside the home; of solicitude and self-sacrifice, and tenderness and absorption in the family. Given a better lead—and there are some signs of a better lead than in the past—I believe that the parents of Britain to-day are as anxious as they have ever been to perform a task which, when properly understood, is as natural as it is sacred. Our influence in this House is not unlimited, but it is very considerable. I hope and pray that we send out this afternoon a powerful message, not only of material but of spiritual support for the Christian idea of the family.
3.47 p.m.
LORD BEVERIDGE: My Lords, after the thoughtful and deeply moving speeches to which we have listened, I hope you will not expect me to traverse again the same ground that has been so admirably covered by both the previous speakers. I want to concentrate mainly upon one particular piece of social legislation and one particular point in which it is falling far short of what it should accomplish. The piece of legislation with which I am concerned is the National Insurance Act, 1946.

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I should like to call special attention to two sections in that Act which are of a rather dry as dust character—Sections 39 and 40. Section 39 requires the Government actuary to make a full report to the Government and the Treasury after five years on how the insurance scheme is working, and whether the contributions are adequate to maintain benefits. But when he has made that report, Section 40 places upon the Government who receive it an obligation of a quite different character. The Government are then asked to review the rates and the amounts of benefit in relation to the circumstances of the insured population, including, in particular, the expenditure which is necessary for the preservation of health and working capacity. Now both those Reports which the actuary and the Government must make and lay before Parliament, are due to be given, I hope, in the first part of next year. If they are to be really good and satisfactory reports, they need taking much thought upon from now onwards. That is my excuse for emphasising these two sections and drawing from them the conclusion that in one respect the National Insurance Act, 1946, in the circumstances in which it has to work, is not satisfactory and is not, in fact, fulfilling the aims with which it was introduced.
I hope I need not ask to be excused from concentrating mainly on National Insurance in this debate. The subject is one in which, ten or eleven years ago, I was a considerable authority. Just ten and a half years ago I made a Report on the subject which, by the wish of the Government of the day, was signed by me alone and therefore came to be called the Beveridge Report. The Report was not in any sense made by me alone. Nevertheless I became an authority on National Insurance, because I was able to consult and get help from all the best experts in the Government Service and, indeed, all the best experts outside it. Between us we produced a Report which astonished the world because all that expert advice was received with almost universal acclamation. That is not a common experience for experts.
Now, my Lords, the central principle of that Report was unified, universal contributory insurance to ensure at all times to all men a subsistence income for themselves and their families as of right;
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that is to say, without any form of means test or inquiry about what other means they had—a minimum income on which by their own efforts they could build freely and add to freely for themselves and their families. That subsistence principle as of right, which was laid down in the Beveridge Report and obtained almost universal acceptance, is also embodied in Section 40 of the Act of 1946, which ordains that the Government shall consider not merely whether the contributions are sufficient to support the benefits—that is the Government actuary's job—but whether the benefits are sufficient to support the family without anything else at all. That is the underlying, principle of the National Insurance Act of 1946.
But what has happened since 1946? What is happening to-day? I have in my hand a pamphlet prepared by the organisation know as "Political and Economic Planning" which is headed Poverty Ten Years after Beveridge. It compares the actual benefits which have been paid year by year since 1948 with what would be required on the very stringent subsistence minimum laid down by my Report to maintain a family if they had nothing, else. The broad conclusion—and I think it is an undeniable conclusion—of that investigation is that with every year since 1948 the benefits have been becoming less and less adequate, because as the benefits remain fixed the cost of living has gone up and up and is still rising. The other side of it is that national assistance, which the experts and I thought would have to continue on a small scale but would gradually diminish, so far from diminishing is increasing year by year. There are today at least twice as many people—nearly 2,000,000—in receipt of national assistance, subject to a means test, as there were three or four years ago. That is what is actually happening. Social security is not being provided as a right in virtue of contributions of insurance, but by a National Assistance Board which, before it helps a person, satisfies itself that he is poor: that he is in need of poor relief.
I do not know whether other noble Lords feel as I do about this matter, but I feel strongly that any kind of means test is a thing to be abolished, so far as it can be abolished, because it is saying to people, in effect: "You cannot think for yourselves; if you make provision

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for yourselves and your children by saving, then we will not help you. "It is penalising independence, and I believe that it is because the means test in any form penalises independence that the underlying principle of the Beveridge Report—subsistence as of right, in virtue of contributions—was so widely accepted. But to-day we are going further and further from that subsistence principle. Next year the Government, whatever Government it may be, will be required by Statute to compare the benefits it is giving with a fair estimate of what ought to be given for subsistence. Therefore the Government will be faced with this alternative: either they will have to raise the benefit rates to adequacy for subsistence, or to say (and this will be in 1954) that they formally abandon security against want without a means test, and declare that they drop the Beveridge Report and the policy of 1946.
That is the issue which any Government will have to face, and face soon—within a year, within months—and my main plea to-day is that the Government should take timely thought in order to give a right answer to that question. I hope, of course, that the answer they will give will be that there shall be adequate benefit rates as of right, without a means test. But that will mean a very substantial increase of the money that must come into the Insurance Fund in order to meet the money that is paid out. I ought perhaps to warn the Government—and they can pass the warning on to the Chancellor of the Exchequer—that when the Chancellor comes to look into the matter he will find that there is a very strong argument indeed against getting more of that money by contributions; in other words, a very strong argument for getting more by taxation.
If one studies the Report of the National Food Survey, it will be found that there is a strong argument—and here I am glad to recall the argument of the right reverend Prelate and of the noble Lord who has just spoken—for improving the provision for the family. This National Food Survey was made by impartial people who were not concerned with any political Parties. One will find from reading the Report that throughout the country malnutrition is apt to be concentrated in the larger
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families. That is because, to my regret, the Government which introduced the National Insurance Act, 1946, insisted on inadequate family allowances—5s, against 8s. which my experts and I advised. Although it has gone up to 8s. now, we all know that the increase was given in connection with the reduction in food subsidies and, therefore, has not really put the matter right. In so far as we are treating people inadequately under insurance, we are treating most inadequately those with large families. Here, I am delighted to associate myself with both previous speakers in their emphasis on the need for providing properly for the family.
I want now to come to a rather different side of this question. The insurance benefit problem, as I have tried to put it and as it will face the Government next year—it ought to be facing them now; I imagine they are thinking about it now—is only part of a much larger social and economic problem that is facing all the people of this country: the problem of how to preserve the value of money. Ever since fighting in the Second World War ended, we have had full employment, more jobs than job seekers. I do not question the necessity of full employment. I remain, as I always have been, a convinced believer in the harmfulness and destructiveness of the fear of unemployment; and I have always wanted full employment, with more jobs than men seeking jobs. But I do not think we have yet realised in this country that full employment is a new climate, and therefore, needs a change from old methods. In a Report which I made on that subject in 1944, I wrote some words which I hope your Lordships will allow me to repeat, because I think they are important:
"There is no inherent mechanism in our present economic and political system which can with certainty prevent competitive sectional bargaining for wages from setting up a vicious spiral of wages and prices under full employment."
That is the danger to which I and many others called attention then. Can anyone doubt that we have that danger imminently before us to-day, when the pound is now worth approximately two-thirds of what it was even so late as 1945, and when insurance benefits, inadequate today, are getting every day less adequate? The insurance problem is only part of

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the much larger problem, of how to preserve the value of money for all the citizens of this country.
Welfare does not depend really upon the State; welfare depends upon the individual even more than upon the State. All those who, by saving, are making provision for their old age and for their children, to-day find that what they have provided is being cut to pieces by the continual rise of prices; and the value of their money, the value of their savings, is disappearing. I suppose most people of my age are being forced to wonder whether they can afford to live as long as their fathers, and probably to conclude that they cannot do so. Every time that a trade union and an employers' association together agree that more money shall be paid in wages for doing exactly the same work as before, they are impoverishing, without redress, the older people who have retired on their savings and who have made provision for their children in their savings—older people who probably worked as hard as the people work to-day and certainly worked longer hours. They are left now without redress because the value of money is destroyed by agreement between the working population and their employers. That trouble is not dealt with, and will not be dealt with, by raising security pensions from the State. Therefore that makes it necessary for the State to ease the position, with the result that these people become dependent upon the State. Their possibility of being independent in their own right, of adding to what the State is providing for them, is destroyed.
A reasonably stable level of prices is in fact the basis of individual freedom and responsibility. We know that is going to be very difficult to get. In this country, as I suppose in most countries, we are in the sad position that we have full employment because, although fighting has ended, war and war preparation have not ended. In war, when you have full employment, you have also, because of the danger of war, a great and admirable restraint on the part of the work-people, and an admirable restraint on the part of their employers, in their not wishing to demand more and more while the country is in danger. But now, when the country is not in danger, there is this competitive, sectional wage rise which is destroying the value of money, and thus,
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I suggest, destroying one of the conditions of individual freedom and responsibility in this country. I hope that the Government, facing this problem most seriously, will make a ruthless, serious, unflinching inquiry into the conditions under which and the means by which, even under full employment, with a cold war and without a real war, the value of money can be maintained so that individual responsibility and freedom may be continued.
4.8 p.m.
LORD SALTOUN LORD SALTOUN had given Notice of a Motion to call the attention of Her Majesty's Government to the difficulties which arise from the ambiguity of the term "ordinarily resident" in Section 24 of the National Assistance Act, 1948, and to move to resolve that in the opinion of the House the import of the term should be clarified and the procedure in cases of doubt laid down, if necessary by legislation. The noble Lord said: My Lords, with your Lordships' permission, I do not propose to move the Motion which stands on the Order Paper in my name. I will make some observations on the right reverend Prelate's Motion, and I will include in them my question to Her Majesty's Government on the National Health Services, because it is from the angle of the National Health Services that I wish to comment on the right reverend Prelate's Motion.
The right reverend Prelate might have made one point in support of the family which, I think, would meet with your Lordships' approval on all sides of the House—and that is the observation, which is quite historical and definite, that as soon as an authoritarian Government gets into the saddle and wishes to establish its power, it starts immediately by attacking the family and the sanctity of the family. Your Lordships must have been aware of the many extremely dramatic and drastic examples of that when Hitler established his power in Germany. I say that a strong family feeling as a social influence is one of the most democratic things in the world, and we should certainly foster it, if only as a matter of self-protection. I agree entirely with the right reverend Prelate when he wishes to shield the family from interference by the State. I feel that the State's action in fostering the family should be action at a distance, by

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removing the disability from which large families suffer to-day and giving them more advantages in the social system. After all, the family is an organisation for the protection of the home—those who by their youth or by their age are weak; and that is the relation which I wish to talk about this afternoon.
I will start with the old. The old to-day number, I think, about 12 per cent. of the population; and so far as I can gather, for every technically old person—that is, a person over 65—whom we have to support, we have the work of some four people in regular active employment. I exclude mothers who look after their families, but if every one of those old people were in need of assistance the situation would be very grim indeed. As far as I can make out, and as the figures which I shall give your Lordships will show, about half of them require, at any rate, observation and attention. One factor that we have to reckon with to-day, which was net in existence fifty years ago, is that the general feeling of the public at large towards the old people has definitely altered. I have had it said to me, by men of undoubtedly high moral standards, that they do not consider children have any duty to maintain old people, and that they themselves do not consider that they have any duty to maintain their parents.
We have to recognise that there is a quite definite change in public feeling on that matter, and one which has to be reckoned with, because once natural feelings have been destroyed they cannot easily be revived, certainly not without considerable suffering and difficulty. For that reason, we no longer feel ourselves charged with the support of our own parents and for that very reason we are charged with the support of the parents of our neighbours. There is a great danger that the four people to whom I have referred may begin to find the charge a rather heavy one. That is one reason, and a very strong reason, why I regard with great distrust the general feeling that seems to be abroad to-day, that the problem of the maintenance of old people can be met by the provision of public hostels.
If your Lordships will consider, I doubt whether it is possible to build or equip a hospital at less capital charge than £800 or £1,000 per place; and when the
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places have been created I doubt whether it is possible to maintain people in them at a less charge than £200 a year for each old person so maintained. In that case it seems to me a very heavy charge to put upon four people, four wage earners who are in active work, especially when to that sum is added the other contributions which they have to make towards the Welfare State. It is for that reason that I have for some time past pointed out that it would be to the public advantage and economy if families and relatives, or people who are near friends or have a connection, could be given an adequate sum to enable them to maintain these old people in their own homes. It would help the hospitals, because hospitals to-day find, that when old people are admitted their relatives sometimes refuse to have them back when they are cured. But if the maintenance of the old person were adequately covered by the State—say, to the extent of three guineas a week—it would be far cheaper than providing hostels, and it would solve the difficulty of the hospitals.
That is one difficulty. There is another. I wish that the Government would take some trouble to establish legal gradations between complete sanity and mental instability. When people get old sometimes they get senile; but they are not mad, and they should not be put into mental institutions. Yet, with this breakdown in family feeling, one hears of relatives who are only too anxious to have old people certified if, by so doing, they can get them put into a mental institution and so relieve themselves of the burden. In the National Health Services we have a very fine system, a wonderful system, if we can get rid of things in it which are not working well and which go wrong. I am glad that the Government have set up a Committee to inquire into the whole of the National Health Services, to see what improvements can be effected.
Now, my Lords, I come to my own particular Resolution. Very often it happens to-day that a person is old and has retired from work, perhaps with a pension, perhaps with some small means, and is unable to buy a residence or a house of any kind. Section 24 of the National Assistance Act says that
"The local authority liable under this Part of this Act to provide residential accommodation for any person shall…be the

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authority in whose area the person is ordinarily resident."
Then, the next paragraph goes on to say that where a person is temporarily resident in an area that local authority has the duty of providing temporary accommodation. I should have thought that no definitions could be clearer. Yet it happens to-day (I have given one case to the Minister; I could have given several) that when an old person is in need of accommodation the local authorities refuse to supply it. They are not convinced that that old person is ordinarily resident," or is temporarily resident. I have knowledge of one case, that of an old lady who was moved round London and then moved out into the country to relatives who had no accommodation at all for her at their house. One member of their family had to sleep on the floor in order to accommodate her for a few days because they could not get proper accommodation for her from the local authority. When we get a situation like that, it throws us back to the old Poor Law rules. Under the old Poor Law, a person was dealt with straight away, and the question of liability was fought out afterwards. That ought to be the case to-day; but unfortunately it is not. Moreover, I do not think there is any legislation which compels a local authority, in such a case, to do their duty. I believe that that is essential, and I shall be very much interested to hear what the noble Earl tells me on that point, because if there is a solution to that difficulty then the more widely it is known the better it will be for us all.
4.20 p.m.
THE EARL OF SELKIRK: My Lords, I welcome the debate which the right reverend Prelate has initiated, because we in this country are operating an immense social service machine, a great deal of which depends upon compulsory contributions, and it is right and proper that from time to time we should examine it thoroughly to see if it is proceeding in the right direction, whether in respect of the family or in regard to other spheres. It has seemed to me that the debate has been rather pessimistic in tone so far. I do not know why we should let even a veneer of pessimism sneak into our consideration of this matter. After all, Disraeli said:
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"Power has only one duty—to secure the social welfare of the people,"
and we have, in fact, fulfilled it. It has been our proud boast—it is not to-day, but certainly it was in periods previous to 1939—that our social services were the first in the world. That was our proud boast, and that is something about which, far from being pessimistic, we ought to be rather pleased.
The right reverend Prelate has looked back' over a number of years, and I should like to touch on one or two additional points. During that time there have been, of course, enormous changes. We can probably say, as Mr. Seebohm Rowntree has pointed out in his examination of the City of York in the last forty years, that primary poverty has been substantially eliminated. Of course, it all depends on what you mean by primary poverty; but, as a general proposition, I think we could all agree that. Accompanying that elimination have been enormous changes in the spending of the people. For instance, we are now spending nearly twice as much on alcohol, tobacco and entertainment as on clothes. That is a factor which may be good or may be bad. I am told that the researches of U.N.E.S.C.O. show that we are the most determined fans of the cinema of any country in the world. Possibly that is a good thing. At any rate, those are factors of which we are certainly entitled to take cognisance. Moreover—and I think this is a matter of real importance—the status of women has altered materially in the last fifty years. They have entered much more into public life and into the business life of the community, and they have done so to our enormous advantage. Whether this change is associated with the smaller family I do not know. I am sure that it has much to do with the desire for nursery schools. I was glad that the right reverend Prelate did not, so to speak, run down these nursery schools. There is a slight tendency to do that to-day. In my view, we should say clearly that the people who are giving their work in nursery schools are doing an enormous service to the community. I think that ought to be said, because there are undoubtedly some people who criticise that type of thing. I am sure that with the alteration in the status of women has

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come an enormous improvement in the standard of our modern kitchens.
I would mention here another thing—the increased mobility of labour. That has stopped the growth of the community spirit to a very great extent, but we are trying to rectify that aspect. In that respect, the experiments of dormitory towns such as Oxhey and Boreham Wood are generally regarded as extremely unfortunate. We look for development more on the lines of the new towns, in which the aim is to get together a community in which a man lives within a reasonable distance of his work. The Act which was passed last year, the Town Development Act, is far more in line with what we want; it is an endeavour to build up a community into which families may fit themselves. One noble Lord mentioned shift-work. This is an unfortunate necessity. Unless production is on a sound, economic basis, the whole structure of this Welfare State, or whatever you like to call it, will inevitably fall to the ground. Anyone who has had practical experience of industry will agree with this—that no one is put on night shift if it can be possibly helped, for it is the almost universal experience that night shifts are less efficient than day shifts.
Another question touched upon was that of education; and then there was, what is more important, the question of health. As has already been stated, the expectation of life has enormously lengthened in modern times, and infant mortality has fallen. If I may, I will deal with some of the implications of that in a few minutes. The right reverend Prelate and the noble Lord, Lord Pakenham, raised the question of whether the family was receiving adequate consideration in this enormous machine which has been built up. I hope they will pardon me for saying that I thought they were a little vague in their recommendations as to what they would like to see carried out in this connection. The noble Lord, Lord Pakenham, it is true, said he would like to see family allowance paid on the first child. That would mean paying out a cool £130 million, and would be a pretty big step to take. I feel that in these debates we should try to consider whether we can do things better in the direction we are going, rather than
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advance at this time into an extensive new field.
It seemed that the right reverend Prelate had in mind the need for better co-ordination of services and for more of a personal touch in the services. He queried whether the development of a sense of responsibility is being encouraged in the structure of the family. With regard to the lack of co-ordination, I think I can say that the children committees which were set up under the Children Act has endeavoured to bring services together so far as children are concerned. A great many specialist services come into this question, and the point is that they should be developed to the highest qualitative level possible. If you produce a comprehensive service for everyone, does it not become almost indistinguishable from the old Poor Law? The difficulty seems to me to be that if you try to make a comprehensive service you are thrown back upon that fact. I can only say that it is clearly a matter which has to be watched extremely closely.
In regard to the personal touch, I think that here the voluntary bodies can give a lead. I know it is common policy in this House—it was with the late Government just as it is wits this—that in this connection voluntary organisations should receive the fullest possible encouragement. On the matter of a sense of responsibility to the family, the right reverend Prelate did not argue, as he might well have done, that free legal aid was available to dissolve marriage, but was not available to maintain the married state. He might also have argued that the responsibility at law for children to maintain their parents had been abolished in 1948. Whether or not that has had a fundamental effect on the relationship of the family members is another matter. Most certainly we have to watch that we do not drop back into the family means test. If you put responsibility too closely on the family, it is very easy to drop back into that.
I think it is a matter of opinion whether the family is stronger or weaker, and we can all form our own opinions. I should like to quote from the Report of the Conference which the right reverend Prelate mentioned—the British National Conference on Social Work,

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who have examined the family and endorsed the views of some ninety working groups who took part. They say something in their Report which I think is very encouraging. It is as follows:
"Personal responsibility it is thought is increasing but not keeping pace with the increase of community responsibility as shown by its provision of services. The new services probably reveal rather than cause responsibility. The old Poor Law coercion upon relatives masked the attitudes of the times."
What is being said there is that the shiftless people stand out more clearly, but on the whole there is no reason to say that family responsibility has lessened. I should like to quote one more sentence:
"The general evidence of the group suggests that the economic changes of the past 150 years have on the whole made possible a better family allowance, stable and free, and that the greatly increased opportunities for education and creative leisure time make possible a greater enrichment of the content of family life. We are still faced with the problem of why so many families do not realise these potentialities."
These are encouraging words, and words by people who ought to know what they are talking about, whether they can speak with authority or not.
The noble Lord, Lord Beveridge, raised, as he always does, an extremely important point. The picture he draws of a world in which all the reasonable hazards of life are met by benefits from the social services, with the total abolition of a personal means test, is a picture almost of Utopia. The noble Lord says "No." There is one fundamental thing to be settled first—that is, the stable value of money. No actuarial system in the world will or can work unless the value of money remains stable. It is no good saying that benefits must go up, and then have to put up the contributions, because it is the anterior contributions which go to make up the superior benefit. This is a very difficult question. I should point out that even Lord Beveridge's scheme would not have been fully operative for nearly twenty years. This is not a thing to judge quickly: it takes time to develop in the full sense.
Here I should like to emphasise a point made by my noble friend Lord Saltoun. It is expected that the number of old-age pensioners will increase by some 50 per cent. in the next twenty-five years, and that whereas to-day there are six contributors to every pensioner, in twenty-five
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years' time there will be only three contributors to every pensioner. That will mean that the cost of retirement pensions will rise from over £300 million to over £700 million, and that the Insurance Fund will become increasingly out of pocket, until in the end we shall have a deficit of something like £400 million. Obviously, these are matters that will be considered next year when the Actuary makes his quinquennial examination. There are two additional reasons for this very big increase: many people entered late in life into the insurance scheme, and the rates of benefit have been raised. The first thing this Government did was to raise the benefits, to bring them back to the level of 1948, when the scheme came into full operation, and to make allowance for the reduction in food subsidies. It is no answer to say that the Exchequer will find the money, because the community has to find the money for the Exchequer; and unless production justifies the increased allocation of resources to pensions, all we have is inflation, and the pensioner will be no better off than he was before. If we do not get an improvement in the position, this is going, to be a very great problem in years to come.
Turning to the question raised by the noble Lord, Lord Saltoun, I think that in this case he is confusing the obligation on the local authority under Part III of the National Assistance Act to provide care and attention in certain cases and the ordinary general duty of providing houses. Although I admit these things run together, they must be regarded as separate.
LORD SALTOUN: They are in different hands.
THE EARL OF SELKIRK: I agree: that is one of the difficulties that arises. In regard to the case which the noble Lord raised, there is some doubt whether the old lady concerned was in need of care and attention—whether, strictly, she came within the limits. But if she was in need of care and attention, it was extremely difficult to know where she was ordinarily resident. The point the noble Lord wishes to have cleared up is whether the local authority take action before deciding where a person is ordinarily resident. The answer is an unqualified, "Yes." The duty of the local authority on the spot is to provide accommodation for

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those who have that need and to argue subsequently whether or not they are ordinarily resident elsewhere.
LORD SALTOUN: What action should be taken by the people looking after the old lady? It would help the country more to know that.
THE EARL OF SELKIRK: I do not want to argue the details of the case. So far as I know, the action taken was correct, for the reason that the lady was not in need of care and attention; and, moreover, there was no assurance that she was ordinarily resident in London. I shall be happy to go into this point in further detail with the noble Lord, but I think he wants to know the general principle in this matter and I wished to explain it shortly.
Turning to the general question of old people, I think, as has been emerging more clearly in recent years, that we are anxious more and more to avoid public provision, or institutional treatment. What we want to do, so far as we can, is to use the ordinary private home for looking after our old people, both because of economic interests and because it is directly in the interests of the old people themselves. I must emphasise that the whole organisation for the care of old people is designed to provide just that kind of help which will enable old people to remain in their homes—health visitors, nurses, domestic helps of one sort or another, the W.V.S. and other organisations.
I should like strongly to underline what the right reverend Prelate the Lord Bishop of Sheffield said about the family service of the Church. I know of no higher Christian service, and I assure him that it is fully recognised by all those who come in touch with it. I thought the right reverend Prelate was a little hard on some of these people who are doing this work, when he said that they were "let loose on defenceless families" I felt that the right reverend Prelate was over-stressing the point. No doubt some workers are less competent than others but, by and large, I should think that roost of those who take part in these services are welcome visitors to that home. One of the requirements of old age is the need to overcome loneliness, and the non-expert can help just as much as the expert in relieving old people's
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loneliness. When the old people are unable to be looked after, or have no one who can look after them, they have to go to homes. The right reverend Prelate seems to have been very unlucky in the homes he has seen: to speak of "squalor" and to say that they are "unbelievably bad" is far from the truth. I admit that many of the homes are unsuited to their purpose, but I think the words which the right reverend Prelate used were more colourful than was necessary. I can only emphasise again that, whilst there are many difficulties in maintaining people with their families, that is the objective we have in mind.
In ending, I should like to say that we approach the family and the social services with the view that the element of quality is essential to get proper value. I disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Pakenham, this far—I do not think that the present structure of the social services is designed primarily as a method of redistribution of the nation's wealth. I do not know whether the noble Lord meant that, but I do not think it is one of the primary objects for which the social services exist. I would say, further, that to a great extent they are not, as they once were, centred round the problem of poverty. There are many evils which afflict mankind, and poverty is only one of them. The present structure of the social services is designed, so fax as possible, to meet as many of those evils as it can, and also to give training and assistance, by education and health. I would add this, too. We can never fulfil the purpose and intention of the social services simply by the cash nexus; that is to say, by payment over the counter. I am not underestimating the importance of an insurance benefit by right; but that is not the end, and can never be the end, of the social services. I would suggest that if we are to create a strong and secure society it must have roots, and the people must feel that they belong somewhere. I suggest that two things which, more than anything else, give them that are, first, that they have a means of exchange which is stable and reliable; and secondly, that they have a home to which they can go. With those two as the central points of our policy, I feel that we are right in the general policy which we are adopting at the present time.
4.42 p.m.
LORD KERSHAW: My Lords, I should like to congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Saltoun, on his continued efforts for the aged people in our community. Turning to the Motion, I have some difficulty in understanding what it is the right reverend Prelate wants to deal with. First of all, I cannot define what he regards as "recent legislation"—I do not know whether "recent" means ten or fifty years. Moreover, there is no indication in the Motion whether the right reverend Prelate was about to argue that the effects on the family life were good, bad or indifferent. However, I rather gather that he would not be wholly enthusiastic about the advances in social services during recent years and there are certain features that he would not readily like to see extended. I think the best he could say in connection with certain aspects of it was, "There it is, and we have got to make the best of it."
It so happens that all my adult life has been spent in the study of, and working in, the social services for the people. If we are to consider to-day the effect of those social services on the family life of the people, I feel that it is necessary to look back and to see what was the normal family life of ten, twenty, thirty, or even fifty years ago. I should be quite wrong if I were to confine myself to what has happened since 1945, the advent of a Labour Government. I should be less than just to all political Parties if I did not recognise the great contribution in the direction of social welfare that has been made by Parties other than my own. If I were to single out any particular piece of legislation which, while not perfect in itself, has led to many other developments of a much more useful kind to the community, I should choose the National Health (Insurance) Act, 1911. If I did that, obviously I should have to pay a tribute—which I do most willingly—to Mr. Lloyd George, of the Liberal Party of those days, and to Sir Winston Churchill, who is our present Prime Minister. Since those days, legislation has been promoted by Governments of all kinds, so that, in saying what I am to-day, I hope your Lordships will believe that I am not speaking at all from a Party political angle; indeed, I may claim that the whole
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of my services in connection with this matter have been given, irrespective of what Government were in power, or likely to be in power.
It so happens that a few years ago I discovered, to my surprise, the notes of the first speech that I ever made in public. That speech was made exactly forty-nine years ago this month, and in that speech I was calling attention to some evils of family life in those days. I lived near Manchester. You could not pass through the streets of Manchester without seeing the hungry, ragged, barefooted children; and the conditions of life in and around Manchester in those days was something which in these days could not be believed. One of the distinguished members of the Church in those days said, "It is not to be wondered at that a workman takes the shortest cut out of Ancoats,"—meaning that it was not to be wondered at that working men got drunk in order to forget the conditions under which they were living. In that speech, made as a young man, I demanded the abolition of the Poor Law. In those days it was quite a common feature of the village in which I lived to see a procession of miners from neighbouring villages, headed by what was called a tin-whistle band. The procession would go along the streets, and the men would go to the cottage doors collecting pence to keep their colleagues out of the workhouse while they were unemployed. I need not continue along that line; everybody knows that there has been a complete revolution in our social conditions during the last forty or fifty years.
Too often, however, when people are considering the social services, the Welfare State as it is called, they look only upon what I would regard as one side of the balance sheet. They see hundreds of millions of pounds paid away in benefits, or in the costs of medical services, and so on, without thinking for a moment of the credit side of that balance sheet—namely, the better health of the community. Who would dare to put in terms of money the increased health of our children to-day? It is one of the common comments of visitors to these shores that our children are happier and healthier than those of any other nation. Some twenty or thirty years ago I was concerned with a Royal Commission on these matters. We have heard

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to-day from the noble Lord, Lord Beveridge, to whom great praise is due for the Report which formed the basis of many of our social schemes of to-clay. But the same idea was promulgated thirty years ago. The figures were different, but the idea of providing for all the contingencies of life with which man was faced was put forward twenty-five years ago in the Minority Report of a Royal Commission. What was regarded as the greatest danger to family life, and the greatest anxiety to the working people in the past years? It was the fear of unemployment, the fear of sickness and the fear of old age; and, if I may put it this way, the fear of death. I remember that some twenty years ago I was a member of a Departmental Committee on industrial insurance, and we were shocked at the number of old age pensioners who in those days were getting, I believe, 10s. a week and who were paying 6d. a week in order to avoid a pauper's funeral. The fact that the 6d. a week did not prevent their having a pauper's funeral is by the way.
There are a number of people to-day who believe, I think without giving the matter proper thought, that these services are undermining what they regard and speak of as the sturdy thrift of the English working man I wonder. Those of us who have come up know quite well that this sturdy independence which was spoken of was purchased at very great cost. We know that the one fear that went through the whole life of the working class family was, as I have said, the fear of unemployment, the fear of sickness and, above all, so far as the parents were concerned, the fear of old age. So out of their scanty wage—a wage not sufficient to give even a decent standard of living—a shilling or two was put away. For fifty years these shillings would be put away in order that, at the end of their working life, the people would be able to avoid the Poor Law. These were the facts of life at that time, and how anyone can for one moment suggest that the social legislation of this country during the last ten, fifteen, twenty or fifty years has not been beneficial to the family life of this country I really cannot understand.
I would refer to two other matters which are closely related to this, and which were touched upon by one of the
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earlier speakers. During the last fifty years the infantile mortality rate in this country has been reduced to one quarter of what it was. If we speak of these things in terms of statistics it sounds a simple matter. But if we transform those statistics into human sorrow and tragedy within the homes, then we realise what immense progress has been made in that direction. The same thing applies to what was regarded as the maternal mortality problem. There again, the mortality rate during the last twenty years has been reduced from about four per thousand to loss than one per thousand. Who can measure the value to the family life of this country of the saving of thousands of mothers at the highest time of their endeavour? I remember quite well the time when Sir George Newman, the Chief Medical Officer of the Ministry of Health, was calling attention to this problem. In season and out of season he said that the problem did not end with the death of so many thousands of mothers who might have been saved. It went much further than that, he said, because, for every woman who died of childbirth, scores were more or less permanently injured. And it does not need any great strength of imagination to realise that that should have had a great effect on the family life of this country.
All we can hope for in this connection is that, when people look at what appears to be a colossal cost, they will remember the other side of the balance sheet—the imponderables, the things that cannot be mentioned in terms of pounds, shillings and pence. Within the last few years, through my daughters-in-law I have been able to seethe meticulous care that is taken of young women when they are about to have children, when they have the children, and after the child is born—a care that twenty years ago, in spite of all the child and maternity welfare services, would not have been at hand. Before I leave that, I should like to pay a tribute to the medical profession for the advances that have been made in that direction. No one would dare to claim that this tremendous saving of human life has been due entirely to our social services. But it is true to say that, however medical science has advanced, unless its discoveries had been made available to every woman in the land we should not have had the same reduction

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in mortality. Therefore, I hope that the right reverend Prelate will be as optimistic as, I was glad to hear, the noble Earl, Lord Selkirk, was when he spoke about these social services. I trust that what will happen in the future is not so much that we shall attempt to cut them down but that we shall economise wherever we can. But wherever we economise we can easily use the money in extending the services in further valuable directions.
4.57 p.m.
THE LORD BISHOP OF COVENTRY: My Lords, in this or any House it is rather a dangerous privilege to speak after the noble Lord, Lord Beveridge. From the point of view of the Church, I would pay tribute to much that he has done for this country. Speaking for the Church of England, I would say that when we talk of responsibility and discipline, what is intolerable is the discipline of socially imposed poverty. I am happy to follow the noble Earl, Lord Selkirk, because I find myself in complete agreement with everything he said regarding our having a note of optimism and facing in good spirit the concrete problems before us. It is dangerous to generalise from a limited experience, when we are dealing with recent legislation and its impact in a few years on the intimate lives of vast numbers of people. I would speak with this authority only: that I have been in touch with a group of people concerned with the welfare services in the district where I live—the headmaster, the probation officer, welfare officers, school psychiatrists and clergy. Our little group has been in discussion.
In anything that I say I do not speak for myself but for this group, and they, as experts on this matter, have brought forward one or two things which I would venture to raise in this House. One is an encouragement. The headmaster in this group—one of the most experienced headmasters in the country—having lived a long term of his life in a slum area in Coventry and seen its development over a number of years, deprecates the attacks in which even Bishops indulge about the irresponsibility of the modern parent. His view is that 95 per cent. of modern parents are immensely interested in their children. He says that they watch the child's career closely, and that whereas
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formerly they never came to see the schoolmaster except to have a row, they now join the parents and schoolmasters' associations, and come in constantly to see the headmaster or a member of the staff to talk about their children—their health, their future and their careers. He says that the whole physical standard of health of the children is 200 per cent. better than it used to be. Their clothes and their cleanliness are of a much higher order than they were. This is obviously due to the standard in the home and to the increasing interest of the parents in the children. Things, therefore, are better and not worse as is so often suggested by the pessimists.
I should like to raise one point which has been discussed by this group. Here, again, I am entirely with the noble Earl, Lord Selkirk on the need for the Government to watch the working of recent legislation. The most recent piece of legislation, of course, followed the Curtis Report. Here, all this group of representative social workers wanted to emphasise one factor in particular—that of the family. They thought that the post-Curtis Report legislation did not go far enough with regard to the integrity of the family. They said that the family, even a bad family, is the best instrument for training the child. Let me quote, for instance, one thing which might be examined. A family with five or six children is turned out because it cannot pay its rent. Under the present system this family becomes disintegrated. The children are dispersed into children's homes, and this will cost the country perhaps £60 a week. What the group ask is that attention shall be given to the possibility of the rehabilitation of the family. They ask that a policy which is being applied, I believe, in Holland, Denmark and Belgium shall be considered. Under this system houses are allotted by the local authorities to such families and the families are put under supervision and control for rehabilitation as a family. Sometimes, perhaps, furniture has to be provided; but at any rate they are put into a house of their own and carefully supervised. The group said that this question of the rehabilitation of the family is one they would wish to see pressed.
Furthermore, one frequently finds that children who have suffered from cruelty

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in their own homes still find the home tie very strong and want to go back to it. Therefore, the real re-creation, psychologically and spiritually, of a child can be made only in a re-created family. The exceptions are, of course, where there is open sexual immorality on the part of the father or mother, in which case, of course, the children must be removed. Even there, one finds such cases as one which I can quote from my own experience, where the mother was a prostitute and the elder daughter was on the same path. The second child was taken back from a boarding school to which she had been sent. This seems to have re-created the home. So it seems that a home can be re-created even in those conditions.
There is another point which I think is a constructive one, and I would put it to the Government. It concerns the question of social legislation. Many people criticise State legislation because they say it brings with it hordes of officials. But wherever I see people working on the Government side and people working on the social side, more and more I note with thankfulness how they work together. I see a new corporate sense developing, a new pastoral life, and a new sense of Christian vocation. I see also under these new public services a movement towards equality between voluntary workers and the officials of the public service. I find an increasing liaison between the people in the Government service and those in the voluntary services. I could speak of several groups in Coventry, composed of headmasters, clergy, welfare and probation officers and others, who meet to discuss the problems of their children. They meet once a week or once a month, in the vicarage or elsewhere, and go over the problems of the children in their care. They follow up individual cases themselves.
An interesting point is that the Government workers themselves insist on the invaluable contribution of the voluntary worker. They say that the vicar can go into houses into which they themselves cannot go, and that the voluntary worker can go in where the official worker would not be welcome: he would be looked upon merely as one who was paid to do his job. I see a continually increasing co-operation of this kind between the officials of the Government
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service and the voluntary workers, each benefiting from the experience of the other. That was not always so, and it is a great encouragement that it is so to-day.
A further point which I should like to mention is the extra year at school provided for under the last Education Act. This extra year was the basic contribution which that Act made to these problems. One of our great problems, one which is recognised by the shop stewards and management and all concerned, is the terrible impact of this extraordinarily alien adult world of mass factory life on the child of fourteen. It is such as to destroy all that he has been taught at school and at Sunday School; it is disastrous in its effect. Now, this extra year at school is a most valuable one. All those who are experienced in these matters recognise it as such. That extra year makes all the difference. Moreover, in spite of criticisms to the effect that the teaching is not good, and so forth, a headmaster I know who is in charge of a very important school in a district in Coventry has told me that he gets 100 per cent. attendance in this last year. He pointed out with justice that if people were not interested there would not be likely to be that 100 per cent. attendance.
People talk about irresponsibility. This so-called irresponsibility of young married women who are going into an industry—whether or no it results from the policy or, as is much more likely, the accident of full employment—can be represented as being due to selfish motives. But to-day young people who are starting to build up a home find—the cost of rents and furniture being what it is—that this work helps to give them a start. They want a home which is worth living in to bring up their children. Young people have to build up perhaps £500 before they can make a start, or they have to work for four or five years before they can build up the home that they want. The cost of building a home is a factor which the easy moralist might well consider. One other great danger is the family which cultivates the "pub" and the club. I was referred to one case of acute difficulty, in which the local authorities were concerned, where the children were all astray and the father and mother were

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the two best darts players in the city. They spent the whole time perambulating the clubs and "pubs." winning competitions. It is more likely that that home will go astray than the young family where the mother works in a factory as long as she can in order to build up a home, and the children are in nursery schools. A lot of rash and dangerous talk is heard about that.
The fundamental question is, how far Government legislation can cope with this situation. I was approached not long ago by the chief probation officer of the whole of the Midlands area. He said that he was speaking for all the people concerned with the court work and probation work, and for the approved schools for the whole of the Midlands area—in fact, for all who were concerned with young people in trouble. He asked me: "Will you come and spend a week-end with us in conference?" He told me, "There is only one answer to this problem of young people in trouble—we all know what it is: that the Christian faith should come back into the life of the people. Will you join us in our discussions, and take the service on Sunday?" Again, I spent part of the day at the famous National Police College, a remarkable place, run with 250 very able police sergeants, all with enormous experience, who were having a six months' course. I spent part of the day discussing the question of young people in trouble, after a remarkable woman police-officer had given the picture of the issues. All the police said was, "What are we facing?—more police forces, more policemen, more patrols, more probation, more approved schools. We never catch up in this expanding circle. What is the answer? What does the Church and Christian faith say?" That question was not addressed to me particularly, but it is in the answer that the solution to this trouble, to the problem of these children and homes, lies. That is the question addressed by the police, if you like, to the conscience of a Christian nation. That is where the issue finally lies. I would reiterate my support of the whole tone and approach to the problem of Lord Selkirk's speech. I thought it was a fine statement of encouragement, and I warmly agree with it.
5.15 p.m.
LORD AMULREE: My Lords, I do not want at this hour to compete in the rather wide surveys that have been made on this important and interesting point, but there were two matters which I was intending to raise before your Lordships: one regarding young children, and one relating to old people. The first point, I am pleased to say, has been very well expounded by the right reverend Prelate who has just sat down, and therefore I do not need to go into it in any great detail. I have just seen a pamphlet which has been produced by the Children's Officers Association, entitled Cruelty to Children, in which they emphasise strongly the importance of keeping some kind of family life together. It is a simple matter to take a child away from a mother who is unsatisfactory, or if the father has got into trouble, but it is better if a certain amount of money can be spent on building up that family again. From a purely financial standpoint, it works out much more cheaply; and from a spiritual and moral point of view it is the much more satisfactory thing to do.
One would like to see more use made of the powers of the courts to put families as it were on probation, rather than that the family should be broken up in that kind of way. One of the very pertinent sentences in the Report of this Association states that:
"A tithe of the money spent on maintaining neglected children in Institutions apart from their parents could provide, throughout the Kingdom, a first-class family service that would considerably reduce the incidence of neglect."
I think that is an opinion with which all of us who are engaged in any kind of social work would be in agreement. Although it is difficult to see how it can be done from any legislative or instructional point of view, it is a principle one would like to see spread over the country. One of the troubles that the right reverend Prelate mentioned was that of the appalling expense involved. There is the case of a family of six, where the father had got into trouble and the mother was living with her children in a poorhouse or institution, from which they were quite properly removed by the appropriate Department. Those six children are now being kept in various institutions for children, at a cost of £48 a week to the local authority concerned. I do not know

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whether that is a common case but I believe it is rather more common than one imagines. Certainly, it is the most glaring case that has come my way up to the present time. The great difficulty, of course, arises through the shortage of housing; and although building is progressing, it will be a long time before there is sufficient accommodation for all these families.
The second point I wanted to raise relates to the old people and their accommodation, a matter which is dealt with in Part III of the National Assistance Act. The right reverend Prelate who moved this Motion referred to the poor accommodation that exists now, and most of us who work with old people realise that there is not at present enough accommodation available for them. I do not want it to be said that it is impossible to build any more. I do not wish to build any more. I think there is enough accommodation in the country to go round if it is properly used. It is a point I have made several times before, and I am more and more convinced of the truth of it. At the present time there are, comparatively speaking, many fit and well people who are being taken care of in hospitals by the National Health Service, and there are a large number of sick people who are being taken care of under the Welfare State by various institutions. There seems to (be very little chance, apart from purely friendly exchanges on certain occasions, of getting those people put into the right place. The trouble is that if those sick people are not kept in the institutions, it is not long before they become irremediably sick. With two separate Acts of Parliament, the National Assistance Act and the National Health Services Act, we find that separate Departments are looking after the two types of people.
We have heard a good deal said about the old Poor Law. One of the goad principles of the Poor Law was that the "sick or destitute, "as they were called—it is not a pleasant phrase—were kept in the same building and could be easily transferred from one part to the other. That principle has now almost disappeared. But I am sure that if these beds were properly used a larger amount of accommodation would become available, with no extra building and no extra beds required. It is far cheaper, far better and far more humane to keep old
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people in their homes, with services that are laid on by the local authority and by various voluntary bodies.
I should like to say a word about family life and adopt the encouraging line of the noble Earl, because my experience in the comparatively poor part of London in which I work is that in the majority of cases family feeling and responsibility is still very strong. In that district one finds a certain number of families who are quite well oft and some who are very poor indeed. I have great sympathy with the young and middle-aged families who live in this part of London, in appalling housing conditions, in grim, squalid flats, parts of family houses built in the latter part of the last century. The thing which has encouraged me greatly is that these families are anxious to take back their parents or their elderly relatives when they have been sick. The chief thing they are anxious about is to see that their relatives shall come back to them from the hospital better than when they went away—that they shall really have improved in health. I think that is a perfectly justifiable demand to make.
The second thing these young or middle-aged people would like (and I think it is greatly to be encouraged, when somebody is living with them for a long time) is to have the chance of a break, possibly during the summer, so that there can be some kind of holiday period in which they are relieved of the burden. I know of a case where a comparatively young woman spent nineteen years looking after a semi-invalid mother. She had not had one day off from that situation, and about the time that the mother died the daughter broke down. I do not think it would be too difficult to arrange for these old people to go into some sort of institution during the summer months, when the call on the beds is not so great, and it would do a tremendous amount to encourage people to take care of their families.
There is one other point that I should like to make. It is sometimes difficult to get a home-help to go into a house where the children are at work all day and the parent is left behind. It may be that the parent is fragile and the children do nor like to go away, but if somebody could come along from the local authority to

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assist in keeping the house tidy then the family is often willing to carry on with its duties. Various other attempts to provide assistance could be made in this respect. It is possible to keep some of the more senile members of the community comparatively fit if they are given some kind of employment. During the day they could perhaps be brought up to an institution by car and given some work to do, be given a midday meal, and then be taken back home. I think that is a more economic way than to take them into an institution where their whole social background collapses. I should therefore like to put forward a strong plea to Her Majesty's Government to see whether it is possible to arrange for a better exchange of the sick and infirm and the healthy between the National Health Service and the Welfare Service, because then I think we can carry on in the more optimistic way to which the noble Earl referred, and achieve some success in our work.

WHITE FISH AND HERRING INDUSTRIES BILL
Returned from the Commons, with the Amendments agreed to.
House adjourned during pleasure.
House resumed.

ROYAL COMMISSION
5.30 p.m.
The following Bills received the Royal Assent:
Town and Country Planning,
White Fish and Herring Industries,
Coastal Flooding (Emergency Provisions),
Pharmacy,
Bromley Corporation,
Belper Urban District Council,
Tees Conservancy Superannuation Scheme.
House adjourned during pleasure.
House resumed.

WELL-BEING OF THE FAMILY
Debate resumed.
5.43 p.m.
LORD SHEPHERD: My Lords, I do not propose to make a long speech arising out of the most interesting debate to which we have listened to-day. I have nothing to say about the three speeches last delivered to your Lordships, because I find myself in agreement with them, and I hesitate to trespass upon your attention at this late hour by reiterating what has already been said, to which I have given my approval. Listening to the noble Lord, Lord Amulree, I sometimes wonder why he continues to sit across the gangway, because usually we find him putting before your Lordships policy that is similar to our own.
I would say one or two words about the first speech, that delivered by the right reverend Prelate the Lord Bishop of Sheffield. In the main I agreed with his speech, but there are one or two points on which I should like to be a trifle critical. I agreed with the right reverend Prelate when he suggested that when dealing with the social services we should do nothing to break up family life. I agreed with him even more thoroughly when he said that when we are dealing with a mother and her infant, we should do all we could to keep them together. The right reverend Prelate went on to say, however, that later on, maybe because of circumstances surrounding a particular mother and her child, it might be necessary for this mother to go to work, and then it would be necessary for the community to find a nursery school for the child. Again we may be in some agreement. But then comes a point on which there appears to be some difference between us.
The right reverend Prelate suggested that employers of labour should be especially sympathetic to such cases and, if they found opportunity, should employ mothers of this kind, at suitable wages. But to-day, employers of labour are living under keenly competitive conditions. They have to look most minutely at the costs which they incur, in order that they should not be undersold by their competitors. It may be true that where employers have a friendly attachment to a particular case, or being good-hearted in themselves, they will do something to

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provide employment; but, by and large, employers of labour cannot accept the full responsibility which the right reverend Prelate seemed to wish to impose upon them. I, and the Party for which I speak, think that in cases of this kind the responsibility is less that of the employer of labour than of the community as a whole. That is why we prefer that there should be less division between the woman and her child, by allowing, with the help of the community, the women to remain at home rather than to proceed to employment.
I think it was the right reverend Prelate also who suggested that we are not paying enough attention to the needs of the family industrially, and that from time to time employers of labour should give employment to the man with a large family, rather than to the man with a small family, in order that the man with the large family could he helped. It has even been suggested in some quarters—though not by the right reverend Prelate—that there should be some difference in wages between the man with the large family and the man with the small. I want to emphasise this point. Whereas certain employers of labour, out of the kindness of their hearts, or because of their interest in a particular person, might be persuaded to do that, if large families are to be looked after as a general responsibility, then it seems to me that it is the job of the community, rather than of particular employers. The community will more and more do what is required, with the aid of the services of which we are now so proud.
That is my first criticism on the right reverend Prelate's speech. Now a small one, then I have finished with him. Tie right reverend Prelate seemed to suggest that the hospital services, with the consultants as the principal culprits, are rushing children to hospital, rather than having them attended at their homes. When I heard the right reverend Prelate say that, I began to wonder how recently he had been in touch with those responsible for hospital management. I have had two recent cases that I should like to recite to your Lordships, which indicate care on the part of the hospital authorities, the consultants and the normal medical practitioner—the family doctor. In the first case it was a child one month old. Suddenly the child
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developed violent fits of vomiting. The family doctor was called in, and he at once ordered the child to hospital, because the only way in which that child could he treated was by an operation. The operation took place on that same day. The hospital authorities were most generous and willing, and they acted immediately and with success. The second case was in a neighbouring house to the one I have just mentioned, and concerned a boy of six or seven years of age, very poorly indeed, with heart disease. He was ordered to the hospital by the same family doctor, on these grounds. Although the boy had a good mother and a good home, neither the mother nor the home could guarantee what he needed: interest, but complete rest and complete quiet during a lengthy illness, stretching over months. In fact, the child has now been in that hospital almost twelve months.
I mention those two cases to indicate that at present the health services, so far as doctors are concerned, seem to me to be working fairly well, with the family doctor, in the first place, making the recommendation; the consultants and the hospital doctors accepting the responsibility placed upon them; and all this followed by the care and sympathetic services of the nurses who have charge of the cases. My experience of hospitals is that if a medical practitioner, in order to get rid of difficult cases, pushes them into the hospital when they ought not to go there, then the authorities in charge of the hospital do not delay action and frequently refuse to take them in. I should not like it to be said in these days, even though my Party are no longer in charge of the hospital services, that care in those services is not being properly exercised. I believe that to-day we are improving the services, rather than spoiling them, in that respect.
THE LORD BISHOP OF SHEFFIELD: Perhaps I may interrupt the noble Lord. I hope I did not give the impression that I was making a serious criticism of the hospital services, as such. Being the manager of a hospital, I endeavoured to be particularly careful on that subject. I wished only to point out that there is a danger of a tendency developing—not more than that. One has to watch these things, sympathetically, not critically.
LORD SHEPHERD: I should not dare to place at the door of the right reverend Prelate a statement which he had not made. But if he will read Hansard to-morrow I think he will understand that I was justified in raising the issue, as I have done
Having said that about the speech of the right reverend Prelate, I should like to say a few words about the speech of my noble friend Lord Pakenham. Your Lordships will remember that the noble Lord indicated that on certain points in his remarks he would be speaking for himself, and not for the Party of which he is a most useful and valuable member. We are very glad to give the noble Lord that liberty to state his case on issues where he is at variance with some of his colleagues. But perhaps I may be permitted to state my view on one or two of the points raised by the noble Lord. He indicated to your Lordships, as a fact, that there were more broken homes in this country to-day than ever. I just cannot accept that as a statement of fact.
LORD PAKENHAM: That is not what I said.
LORD SHEPHERD: I know that the noble Lord based what he said, or what I thought he said, upon certain figures, which indicated that there had been a great rise in the number of divorce cases in Great Britain since the war; and that there had recently been a decline, even although the level of divorce cases at this moment is higher than it was before the war. Those figures we accept, although we dislike them intensely; and we think there are grounds for the attempt suggested by my noble friend to bring them down. However, I cannot accept those figures as indicating that there are more broken homes in Britain to-day than there used to be. It may be that, through these divorce cases, more publicity is given to the broken homes. But in my younger days, as I roamed the streets of industrial England, and industrial Scotland as well, I knew of thousands of cases of broken homes which never reached the Press, because the people who lived in them had no money with which to go to the divorce courts. We are with the noble Lord in his anxiety to reduce the number of divorces, if that is a sign of well-being; but I cannot
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accept it in the way it has been put forward. There is one other point about the figures. I do not accept as a fact that, if there is a divorce, there is necessarily a broken home. It may have been a broken home that caused the divorce—a broken home that could not be healed even by the ministration of the Church or any other organisation. I do not believe that, if a marriage tie is broken by legal operation, because of the presence of disloyalty, that home is necessarily a broken home because of that fact.
I should like to say a few words about the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Beveridge—I am sorry to see he is no longer here, because I agree with a good deal of what he said. I have been a great admirer of the noble Lord throughout his life, but there are certain things that I would not accept, even from him. He said that every man and woman should have a right to subsistence gained by insurance. We agree. He said that since 1948 the benefits paid under insurance have become less adequate because of the increase in the cost of living. Again we agree. He said that the means test that may be applied, or is now applied, to public assistance is hateful and penalises independence. Again, we agree. Then he asks the Government what they propose to do, and we associate ourselves with him in that inquiry. Next year something must be done to put the insurance schemes into a healthy state once more; and it would be extremely valuable if the noble Marquess who is to reply, while not necessarily giving many details, could tell us that the matter is receiving the active and sympathetic support of the Government, and that they are not likely to travel the way that the noble Lord, Lord Beveridge, seemed to fear. This however is where I join issue with the noble Lord, Lord Beveridge. He wants an insurance scheme from money obtained by a multiple levy, rather than that the costs should fall upon taxation—insurance rather than taxation. I wish to look at that idea for a moment, because this is how it works out.
The Government levy a tax upon every man and woman employed. The contributions to the insurance schemes are in the nature of a tax. There is public authority behind each levy which is made. The Government then levy a tax upon

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every employer; and that again is a tax and not a voluntary contribution. Then there is a third contribution made to the insurance fund out of which the insurance benefits are paid. The Government, having already separately taxed the workmen and the employers, through the general taxation of the country tax them over again, so that the Government can pay their contribution into those funds. I suggest to the noble Lord, Lord Beveridge, that that is a very clumsy way of doing things. Think of the costs of administering schemes of that kind. Think of the book-keeping to be maintained, in order that the accounts should be accurate and every man covered. My Lords I suggest that if this benefit is to be a community charge; if the responsibility for maintaining our people in health when they are unemployed, or nursing them back to health when they are sick, is to be borne by the community at large, it is far better that it should be borne out of one form, of taxation than out of three. I would suggest to the noble Lord that he should consider more deeply that issue and then see whether he can meet us upon it.
There is one final point that I wish to raise, and that is with regard to the speech of the noble Earl. Lord Selkirk. He rather twitted speakers on this side of the House with being vague and indefinite. To-day's debate was not initiated from this side of the House, and our speakers have been following the general tenor of the debate set by the speeches of noble Lords opposite. But at some future date, to meet the noble Earl, we shall undoubtedly do something to provide him with data into which he can get his teeth, and to enable him to speak with the authority of the Government thereon. But there exists at the present time a series of proposals, some of which are already in operation in a small way but of which others ought to be more generally applied. They are the recommendations made by the Royal Commission on Population, to which reference has already been made. I propose, therefore, with your Lordships' permission, to recall from their Report some of the things they require, so that, between now and the next debate, the noble Earl may have time and thought and substance to prepare his next speech to us. The Royal Commission require
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these things: more and better housing; more home helps; more sitters in, official and otherwise; nursery schools; day nurseries; washing and laundry facilities; holiday or rest homes for mothers; more children's playing grounds; financial help by improving the amount and conditions of free allowances under the Family Allowances Act, and improved income tax allowances in respect of dependent children. I have quoted these points, but it does not follow, of course, that we on this side of the House necessarily give our support to every one of them. But I was anxious that the noble Earl should not be disappointed, and that he should go away from to-day's Sitting with something to think over before our next discussion on this subject.
6.5 p.m.
THE MARQUESS OF SALISBURY: My Lords, I am quite certain that we shall all agree that the House owes a real debt of gratitude to the right reverend Prelate, the Bishop of Sheffield, both for the Motion which he tabled and for the extremely interesting speech with which he introduced it. There is no doubt that this Motion has led to an extremely thought-provoking debate—it certainly has for me, and I think it has for everybody who has listened to it—and, what is more, a debate, even for this House, remarkably free from Party bias. Indeed, if a visitor had come to this House this afternoon and had heard the speeches without having been able to see from which Benches they were being delivered, he would, I think, have had a good deal of difficulty in guessing to which Party the various speakers belonged, so impartial were they. In the course of his remarks, the right reverend Prelate, the Bishop of Sheffield, raised a number of specific points. On these and on others which have been raised by later speakers in this debate I do not propose to follow him, if he will forgive me. My noble friend Lord Selkirk has already dealt with many of them, and it would be wrong for me to weary the House by traversing the whole ground again.
Of course, as so often happens in this House, the debate has ranged a great deal wider than the Motion which gave rise to it. In effect, I think it can be said to have covered the whole impact

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of the Welfare State on the family and, through the family, on the social structure of the country. It is with regard to these wider aspects that I propose to contribute what I may describe as a postscript. In doing so, I shall speak like other noble Lords who have addressed your Lordships, quite frankly. First, I should like to say this. I do not know who invented the phrase "Welfare State" which has come to play so large a part in our vocabulary during recent years. Personally, I do not think it is by any means a perfect phrase and, indeed, if any of us heard it for the first time I think we should find it rather obscure. But if I may be bold enough to attempt a definition of this phrase, I should suggest that, broadly speaking, it means a State where the welfare of each is the concern of all. I think that would be a fair definition.
It may be said that there is nothing very new about that, and that is perfectly true. The idea that the more fortunate should provide for their less fortunate brethren dates back through uncounted centuries, almost since the very dawn of history. I imagine that the impulse behind it was never better described than in that splendid passage in the First Epistle of St. John:
"But whoso hath this world's good, and seeth his brother have need, and shutteth up his bowels of compassion from him, how dwelleth the love of God in him?"
That, in my regard, is the sort of impulse which lies behind the Welfare State. In this country, the community sense, which is another phrase for the impulse lying behind it, has been, as we all know, of comparatively slow growth. For a great part of our history, the part played by the community as a whole was a very small one, and the poor and the sick and the needy had to rely very largely on private relief. But with the evolution of political and social thought in all Parties, the defect of that system, we must all confess, became ever more widely recognised, and especially, as one of the speakers said this afternoon, over the last fifty years.
Do not let us undervalue even now the great contribution which private effort has made and can still make towards the care of the sick and of the needy, and, indeed, as an indispensable adjunct to our
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social machinery. We have been given a great many examples of that fact to-day, and all of us, I am sure, can think of many others. What we have heard this afternoon, indeed, should make it clear that the voluntary services of individual citizens, which were one of our country's greatest glories in the past, are still of immense value in supplementing the work of public organisations and generally cooperating with them. But, of course, that does not mean that to-day the whole burden of social relief could be carried by private organisations; that would be ludicrous, and, as we all know and as I have already said, such an idea has long ago been discarded. Even in our great-grandfather's day there was an increasing realisation of the fact that, however efficient and devoted private effort may have been in these directions, there were inevitably old people, sick people, unemployed people and so on, who slipped through the wide mesh of private relief; and their fate was only too often a tragic one.
With the steady growth in the general population of that community sense to which I have referred earlier, this sad fact became more and more intolerable to the public conscience; and for that reason it was fairly long ago recognised among all Parties that only an extension of the State social services could meet the case. That recognition, my Lords, as I understand it, was the genesis of the Welfare State as we know it to-day. It was, in effect, if I may so put it, designed as a kind of insurance company from which, by paying a premium, the individual citizen could take out a policy against those major catastrophes of life from which he knew perfectly his own capabilities by themselves would be inadequate to protect him and his; and, of course, it has been further elaborated by successive Governments since those times. None of us, in whatever part of this House we sit, can claim the sole paternity of the Welfare State which has come into being over this long period of years through the efforts of all Parties alike.
A good example of that continuity of policy in recent years—I do not wish to be controversial—was, I would say, the Health Scheme, which was adopted in principle by a National Government composed of all Parties and brought into being by the Labour Government who succeeded them. Another example was

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family allowances, which were passed through Parliament by a Conservative Government and implemented and applied by the Labour Government which followed them. Therefore, we can all claim credit for the creation of the Welfare State. But, if we claim credit for it, we must surely also share the responsibilities to which it has given rise. Above all, we must frankly recognise that, if it has made the main contribution to the solution of one of the world's most intractable problems—that is, the problem of want—it has equally created some new problems to which a solution must be found' if it is not to contain within itself the seeds of its own dissolution.
In particular, we must face the fact, as speaker after speaker has indicated today (and here, I am afraid, after a long preamble I come at last to the main subject of the discussion this afternoon) that it has had certain undesirable repercussions on the integrity and well-being of the family. That is my own belief, and I agree entirely with the noble Lord, Lord Pakenham, that the matter is of vital importance to this country; for as I see it, even in these days, the family remains the ultimate basis of Christian society. The maintenance of family life, as I think the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Sheffield pointed out—and by family life I mean the life of families not, perhaps, of Victorian size, but at any rate rather larger than they tend to be to-day—is a matter of the first moment to us all.
As has been pointed out in practically every speech to-day, we have to face problems, raised by the impact of the Welfare State on the family, which are largely economic in origin. We must recognise that, however great the social merits of the Welfare State, the great complexity of this machinery makes it inevitably extremely expensive to run. It had been hoped, I think, in certain quarters—perhaps it still is—that the cost could be defrayed by increased taxation of what I believe is now called the "higher-income brackets" who are better able to bear it—as, indeed, they are—than the other sections of the community. But I think it has now become clear that that will not be sufficient by itself to meet the cost; for the higher-income brackets—or if I may be allowed to use the older expression, the well-to-do—are comparatively few and are getting rapidly
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fewer; there is not much more to be got out of them for a purpose such as this.
The vast bulk of the national income—and I would respectfully point out to the noble Lord, Lord Pakenham, without wishing to be controversial, that in this matter I should have thought that national "income" was more relevant than national "capital"—that is to say, somewhere, I believe, in the neighbourhood of 90 per cent., is to-day in the hands of the lower-income group. I believe it is correct to say that.
LORD SHEPHERD: No; there is a percentage to which it applies but it is by no means 90 per cert.
THE MARQUESS OF SALISBURY: It depends where you draw your dividing line; but if you were to draw your line at the surtax payers, the £2,000 a year people, I think you would find that the other sections of the population would have over 90 per cent. At any rate, these people in the lower income groups as individuals are far less well endowed than the others; but collectively I believe they hold a great proportion of the national income or revenue for each year. It is, therefore, on these lower income groups that successive Governments, including Governments composed of noble Lords opposite or any others, have more and more to call to defray the cost of the Welfare State. Although I would not in any way dispute what was said by the noble Lord, Lord Kershaw, as to the improvement of the conditions of the working classes during the last fifty years—we are all very happy that is the case—I think we would agree that the burden that falls on these people to-day in the form of direct and indirect taxation has become a pretty heavy one.
I recall a remark made to me not long ago by an American about labour-saving devices in his country. He said that labour-saving devices had become so essential to the modern housewife that she and her husband had to work twelve hours a day to earn the money to buy them. And that, I think, is not entirely unlike the position of the British or United Kingdom citizen with regard to the Welfare State. The weekly sum he has to pay in the form of contributions is so considerable that, as we have been told again and again, the housewife in a great many cases now has to go out to work and is not able to look after the

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family, because she must supplement the family budget. I think there is no doubt that that in a great many ways has led to undesirable results. We must face that fact.
The extent to which this change in the life of the British family has expanded and become a serious problem is, I think, even now not generally realised, but I saw some figures which were given the other day in the Manchester Guardian of April 17 of this year and I thought them so significant that perhaps noble Lords will allow me to quote them to the House. This is what the article said:
"There are two to two and a half million married women, between 20 and 49, at work in this country to-day, an unprecedented number in peace time. About one and a quarter million are mothers; over 10 per cent. of these mothers are at work in the first five years of marriage. This means 10 per cent. of all children under five are affected. After five years the proportion of mothers at work increases until it reaches 24 percent. after fifteen years of marriage."
Those are formidable figures, however inevitable they may be from an economic point of view. I cannot help repeating—and I do not know whether other noble Lords feel this way—that to me this appears a very regrettable development from a purely social point of view. It is not a question in the vast majority of cases—and here I would entirely agree with the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Coventry—of any irresponsibility on the part of the parents; that is not the point at all but the bad effect arises from the simple fact that owing to economic conditions the mother cannot be where she would like to be—that is, in her home with her children.
It is perfectly true that the Welfare State does its utmost to counteract the evils arising from these economic problems—free education, nursery schools and in many other ways, all excellent in themselves. The State does its best to minimise the bad effects which are being caused. No doubt these institutions are not only good in themselves, but, in many places like Sheffield, to which the right reverend Prelate referred, where there has been great overcrowding, they have additional advantages too. But, excellent though they are, we must face the fact that in certain things the State cannot take the place of a parent, or, if so, then it must be with not nearly as good results.
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In the old days, for instance, I think I should be right in saying that the basis of education, and especially of religious education, was the teaching which was given by mothers to their children in the homes. No school syllabus, however admirable it may be, can quite take the place of that, and I am quite certain that we must all recognise that the increased godlessness of this country, or lack of knowledge of God which exists and which is such a lamentable fact, is to a great extent because parental education which was the basis of the religious life of our country is not to-day being given, or not nearly to the same extent.
Or take the case of discipline which is imposed upon children in their formative years and which, in a great many cases, leads to self-discipline in their later years. That, too, used to be largely a matter of parental training, mainly done by mothers in the homes. We hear a great deal to-day about juvenile delinquency—and I am afraid it is probably true, though perhaps, as in the case of other things, it is exaggerated, that there has been a tendency for this to increase during recent years. There, again, the State does its best to counteract it, first by the teaching of the schools and, of course, where necessary, by the juvenile courts. Those, we know, are admirably conducted. What is more, they are manned by men and women with special aptitude for their tasks.
I do not want in any way this afternoon to criticise the juvenile courts, but even so I doubt whether these courts can ever entirely take the place of the discipline of the home. For one thing, the punishment is not so immediate and therefore it is not so effective. Then in some ways it is too severe. When a child appears before a juvenile court, to some small extent it is branded as if it were a little criminal, whereas, in the vast majority of cases it has merely been extremely naughty. Again, from another point of view, the punishment is not severe enough. The court is so anxious—at least that is my information from various places—not to overdo the penalty that only too frequently it confines itself to giving the child a good talking to, and the result is that the child rapidly ceases to have any respect for the law. A firm but affectionate mother would, I believe, be far more likely to in stil into the child

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in its earliest years a respect for what is good and an abhorrence for what is bad; and yet if she is always away at work. she just does not have the chance of doing that. Such are some, as I see things, of the unfortunate results of purely economic repercussions of the Welfare State on the institution of the family; and noble Lords, I am sure, will be able to think of many others for themselves.
Moreover, the issues involved, as I see them, are not only economic. There is also a moral side to this problem which might vitally affect the future of a family. Here I realise that I am touching on very delicate ground. It is, I think, vital that the growing generation should be brought up with right ideas as to the Welfare State, as to what are the proper functions of the Welfare State and what are its proper limitations. Suppose, for instance, a young parent began to say: "I am not going any more to be responsible for the education and discipline of my children. That has become a matter for the Welfare State." There is evidence already that there is a certain section of the population—not, I hope, a large one—which is beginning to take that attitude. Or suppose that those voluntary welfare workers and doctors who have hitherto served the poor in the most devoted manner for little or nothing, were to begin to say: "I do not propose to give free voluntary service any more. It is the Welfare State that should now do that work that we have done in the past." And, indeed, there are some people who would not be very sorry if the voluntary workers did take that line; people who dislike voluntary work per se. We all know there are a certain number who exist. Or, finally, suppose the heads of families were to begin to say: "I am not going any longer to put by money for a rainy day. It is for the Welfare State to look after me when the time comes." It would be a terrible disaster, should any of these things happen.
As we all know, it was never the intention of the original founders of these great national insurance schemes of which we are so proud that the State benefits should take the place of private thrift. Their intention was that it should supplement private thrift. If protection against a rainy day were ever to be regarded as the responsibility of the State alone, and not also of the individual,
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quite inevitably a steadily increasing obligation would fall upon the community, and it might well be that that obligation would ultimately become one which the community would no longer be able to afford. And, beyond this, the moral loss of such a situation would be graver still. Frankly, I do not believe that that will happen—I have much too great a respect for the British people to think so—but it is a danger which we ought not to ignore. There has, I believe, been a slight danger of ignoring it in this debate this afternoon. It is the only criticism I have of it. Such are the problems of the future as I see them. I speak as a firm believer in this Welfare State in the sense that it is our Christian duty to look after each other so far as lies within our power.
I am bound to say, however, that if the effect of the measures we take were to destroy, or even seriously impair, the institution of the family, we might, I feel, with the best will in the world, find that we had struck a severe blow at the very foundations of our civilization; and we must at all costs avoid that. What the complete solution of the problems that have been posed to-day is, I frankly do not know, and I should be misleading your Lordships if I said anything different. Ultimately, no doubt, we must hope, with the aid of all the new discoveries for the manufacture and transportation of goods, so to build up our wealth that the burden which now seems so heavy may become more easily bearable; and then family life and the Welfare State may, we hope, continue agreeably side by side.
In the meantime, of course, there are numbers of things that we can do, as temporary measures or palliatives, or what you will. The right reverend Prelate and the noble Lords who spoke after him have put forward a number of suggestions this afternoon. The right reverend Prelate talked of nursery schools for the young and, I think, care in their own homes for the old. The noble Lord, Lord Pakenham, who followed him, talked of rest homes for mothers and playing fields for young people. I think there was another noble Lord who talked of increased taxation relief for large families, and others who spoke of the family service units. In particular, two suggestions were made which I should like to re-emphasise.

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First of all, stress was laid on the importance of the provision of an adequate supply of houses or, as I should prefer to call them in this context, homes—after all, the home is the very essence of family life. You might almost say that without homes family life could not exist at all. It is, of course, inevitable that after six years of total war, during which many thousands of houses were destroyed, and none were built, there must be a severe shortage of houses. That was quite inevitable. But I submit that it must be the object of every Government, whatever their political colour, to replace that deficiency as soon as they possibly can. I do not in any way question the great importance of other forms of building, like schools and factories—all of them of the greatest importance; but for me (and I speak only for myself) homes must always have a special priority, because a situation in which husbands are separated from their wives, and children are parked out where-ever a spare bed can be found for them, could not continue without the destruction of family life and a great increase in the wave of divorce, to which the noble Lord, Lord Pakenham, referred. I do not propose to enter into a controversy between the noble Lord and Lord Shepherd on that point.
The other point was, I think, made by Lord Selkirk, and it is one upon which I am sure there will be general agreement. It is, that every effort must be made to stabilise the cost of living. I understood the noble Lord, Lord Beveridge, in the very important speech he made this afternoon, to point out, from his great experience, that schemes such as he advocated in his famous Report could be really successful only if they were actuarially sound; and he added that the finance of national assistance at the present time was not actuarially sound. That, of course, may be quite inevitable when the cost of living has been steadily rising for a number of years. Indeed, the noble Lord himself, if he was objective, as I am sure he was, must have anticipated something of that kind even at the time when his Report was written. He must have anticipated that benefits which would have been adequate some years ago would quickly become inadequate with any rise in the cost of
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living. But, my Lords, at any rate for the moment, that rise is, as your Lordships know, slowing down. In that respect the situation has improved. But I would entirely agree with the noble Lord, Lord Beveridge, that every effort must be made, not only by the Government but, what is equally important, by individual citizens, to hold the rise in the cost of living within bounds. That is essential, because otherwise there is, I believe, a very real danger that the Welfare State itself (paradoxical though this may appear) may impose too heavy a burden on its own beneficiaries; and that would be a deplorable situation.
The noble Lord, Lord Shepherd, asked what the Government proposed to do about this unsatisfactory situation. At any rate—obviously he thought he was unlikely to receive an answer to that question—he said he would like an assurance that the matter was very much in the Government's mind. He is quite right in thinking that I cannot give him an answer to his first question, but I am happy to give him an assurance that the matter is very much in the Government's mind. I can go further and say that he can be quite certain that there is no complacency at all in the Government about this extremely thorny question.
Now, my Lords, above all, if I may return for just one moment to all these things that we might do—palliatives, temporary reliefs, anything to make the problem less intractable—we must, I suggest (and this applies to all Parties), do our best in everything we say to make sure that the British people understand the realities of our situation, and to raise their outlook to the level of our needs. That is true, I am quite certain, to whatever Party we may belong. Were any of us from unworthy motives to give way to a temptation to hide from our fellow citizens the economic and social dangers, and in particular the dangers to the family, which are inherent in the present position, our responsibility to posterity would. I believe, be very heavy indeed. I can assure your Lordships that the object of the Government, at any rate, and I am sure of noble Lords opposite too, is to strengthen family life in any way they can. It is for that reason that we must all have welcomed so warmly the very lofty tone which has inspired our discussion this afternoon. I hope and think

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that this debate may be regarded as a worthy contribution to a problem on the solution of which the happiness of our children and the whole future of our race may well depend.
6.39 p.m.
VISCOUNT SIMON: My Lords, may I be forgiven for making one observation which presses upon me, more particularly after listening to the very informing speech of the Leader of the House? He said in the course of his speech that he did not feel very sure what was the meaning of the Welfare State. I submit to your Lordships that the term, "the Welfare State," is perhaps in some danger of being misused. The original idea of the Welfare State was that it is the duty of the State to come to the help of those who need help most. I quite agree with what the noble Marquess has said, that the phrase can be illustrated without going back a very long way. But there is a danger of this term, "the Welfare State," being used to cover something different—to use it as though the advocacy of the Welfare State were the same thing as saying that "the State will provide."
I must confess to some concern at this change in attitude. The Government of which I first was a member undoubtedly made important advances in promoting the Welfare State, in the old and proper sense. They took the case of the old man, or the old woman, who was past work and was in danger of destitution; and they provided out of public funds a limited old age pension, which was not intended to be the equivalent of a full day's wage, but an alleviation of hardship. In many cases the old man would become a welcome inmate of the home of his married daughter, and lie took with him, as his contribution, his old age pension. That was the old idea. In the same way, the Insurance Acts of 1911, providing for sickness and unemployment, provided assistance; but they did not profess to put an unfortunate who was suffering in the same position as an able-bodied person who was earning a full wage. It was all on the principle that the State should come to the help of those who most needed help, and that it should do so, as the noble Marquess has said, with due regard the economic situation.
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Now the change which, I think, threatens us, and which it is extremely important to appreciate, is that there is another conception which is also labelled: "The Welfare State." It is the conception that the citizen is entitled to be placed by the community in the same position as though he were earning full wages.
VISCOUNT HALL: No.
VISCOUNT SIMON: I doubt whether that is economically possible. The direct consequence of it is to encourage the view, to which the noble Marquess has referred, which is held by some people who say, in effect, "Let the State do it. There is no call on my own compassion, or my own generosity or my own sense of duty. Let the State do it." The motives which made our ancestors establish almshouses and hospitals were motives of charity, in the broadest sense. I think that if you say, "Well these services are very much better provided by the State out of public monies"—which would be exacted by high taxation from those who are supposed to be able to bear it—there is a certain danger. There is a danger if we transform the notion of what is the Welfare State into the new conception, that the community will carry on its own back all those who are unfortunate, and put them in the same position as though they were fortunate. It may be that that is an idea which will appeal to some, but it appears to me to be a new conception of what the Welfare State really is.
Think what the ordinary Victorian family of small means did to meet the difficulty of the old person, of the sick person, of the unemployed person. The family effort was on these lines. There were some members of the family who were earning full wages, and they felt it a duty, as being members of one family, to help those other members of the family who were in misfortune. That is a history which can be recalled. a thousand fold in this country, and it is because that was the situation that we avoided the risk of taking the simple line which might be expressed by saying, "Well, here is someone who has been overwhelmed by misfortune; the State must put him in the same position financially as though misfortune had not overtaken him." My Lords, I venture, at the risk of being

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blamed for interposing after the Leader of the House has wound up the debate, to make that simple observation, because it seems to me that, in analysing this, we have to be quite sure what our real object is in claiming to maintain the Welfare State. The distinction which I am drawing is one which. I think, is occurring to many thoughtful minds. It is necessary, not only to preserve national economy but also to preserve these motives which tend to build up family life, that we should bear in mind this distinction to which I have ventured to call your Lordships' attention.
6.48 p.m.
VISCOUNT HALL: My Lords, I would impose upon you for a few moments to express my own opinion as to the speech of the noble and learned Viscount who has just spoken. I feel it is rather regrettable that a contribution of such a highly controversial nature should come at the end of what I had regarded as an excellent debate in every sense. In many ways, the remarks of the noble Viscount show an entire misconception of what is the meaning of the Welfare State as understood by any political Party in this country. There are few, if any, who would agree to the conception which the noble and learned Viscount has attempted to define this evening. On some other occasion, when more time can be given to the question of what ought to be the conception of the Welfare State, I am sure that we should welcome a debate on those lines. At the moment, I say merely that we on this side of the House just cannot subscribe to everything which the noble and learned Viscount has said.
6.49 p.m.
THE LORD BISHOP OF SHEFFIELD: My Lords, I can be very brief in replying to this debate. May I say that I count it a privilege to have been allowed to introduce this debate and to provoke such varied and valuable expressions of opinion from all parts of the House—and not least, if I may say so, to have elicited from the noble Marquess the Leader of the House that speech which he modestly described as "a postscript."
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I feel that in times of rapid change, when it is so easy for our thinking, as well as our prejudices, to apply to what is past, rather than to what is present, it is valuable that rather frequently Members of this House should have this kind of discussion on this sort of topic. The fact that we have touched on so many subjects in the course of the afternoon surely is proof not so much of the discursiveness of our minds as of the fact that the well-being of the family is really fundamental to the whole Christian life.
I hope that I did not appear unduly pessimistic in introducing this subject. I had to assume, of course, the immense change for good in the whole social situation in this country. Just because there has been that immense change for good, just because there has been all this most valuable and beneficial legislation, it is important, without being fundamentally critical of it, that periodically we should look at its tendencies and ask ourselves, "Is that quite right?" or, "Can that be improved?" I do not want to say more, and I ask your Lordships' permission to withdraw my Motion.
Motion for Papers, by leave, withdrawn.

OXFORD CORPORATION BILL
Brought from the Commons; read 1a, and referred to the Examiners.
GREAT OUSE RIVER BOARD (REVIVAL OF POWERS. &c.) BILL [H.L.]
Returned from the Commons, agreed to with an Amendment.
DOVER HARBOUR BILL
The CHAIRMAN OF COMMITTEES informed the House that the opposition to the Bill was withdrawn: the Order made on the 5th instant discharged, and Bill committed.