HL Deb 11 March 1954 vol 186 cc287-97

4.6 p.m.

Order of the Day for the Second Reading read.

THE MINISTER OF STATE, SCOTTISH OFFICE (THE EARL OF HOME)

My Lords, this Hill Farming Bill brings the legislation which affects farm cottages which might be built or improved under the Hill Farming Act, 1946, and the Livestock Rearing Act, 1951, in regard to cottages, into line with present housing legislation. There is no new principle involved in the Bill; it is designed to remove an anomaly. Under the Housing Acts, as your Lordships are aware, grants may be given towards the cost of improving or providing "service cottages." as they are called. Under the Hill Farming Act, 1946, and the Livestock Rearing Act, 1951, there cannot even be such a thing as a service cottage. This situation arises in this way. Under Section 10 of the Hill Farming Act, 1946, it is provided that a regulation may be made which has this effect: that a grant can he paid for the improvement or the building of a cottage which is occupied only by an owner or by a tenant. In other words, under the Hill Farming Act there cannot be a tied cottage. It is clearly unjust that a tied cottage should be allowed under the Housing Acts on one kind of farm, whereas on another type of farm, just because it happens to be a few hundred feet higher, a tied cottage is prohibited. It is this prohibition which the Bill whose Second Reading I am now moving is intended to remove.

There are some other provisions, of course, in the Bill. For instance, it protects the occupier of a cottage from eviction at short notice. He can stay in the cottage for four weeks after the date of the termination of his service. Then Clause 1 (3) provides that where there has been a breach of the conditions which have been attached for the rebuilding or the building of a cottage and the grant could be recovered because of that breach, the owner or other person is to be given the opportunity to remedy that breach. In subsection (4) it is provided that in the event of a breach being made and the grant being recovered, the grant may be recovered from the person who had actually received it and not necessarily from the owner. That covers the case of a tenant who has done repairs and reconditioning to the house.

Subsection (5) of Clause 1 enables us to bring within the scope of the Bill cottages already erected or improved by a grant. I should like to bring this fact particularly to the attention of the noble Lord, Lord Mathers, opposite, who may be interested in this point: that the position of occupiers of grant-aided cottages sitting under tenancy agreements will not be affected by the new regulations; and in order to allay any anxiety which such tenants may feel we will arrange that each of them shall, when this Bill takes effect, receive a letter explaining the effect of the Bill and, in particular, that the tenants and their dependants shall have the same protection under the Rent Restrictions Acts as they had before the passage of this Bill. I think that that is a necessary safeguard to existing tenants; but, of course, when existing tenancies expire it will not be necessary for fresh tenancy agreements to be made. Clause 2 provides for the registration of the conditions attached to properties in respect of which grants have been given under the Acts. Clause 3 provides that the Bill shall come into operation two months after the date on which it is passed. This period will allow time for new regulations to be made and publicised.

The question of the tied cottage is, of course, old history. It has long been a matter of political controversy and I hope that common sense is at last beginning to prevail. I am encouraged in that by the recollection that Lord Mathers was a railwayman, and he knows well that the tenancy of such houses is carefully regulated in the railway service, in order to secure efficient working. So it is with the farm: the farmer must have his stockman or his shepherd on the spot, ready for any emergency, and he must, therefore, have control of the house in which such essential workers on the farm live. It is that which this Bill seeks to secure by repealing the section of the Hill Farming Acts which is now causing an anomaly that the Housing Acts have removed in respect of the great majority of the farms in the country. I beg to move.

Moved, That the Bill be now read 2.—(The Earl of Home.)

4.11 p.m.

LORD MATHERS

My Lords, this seems to me to be a notable occasion—a Scottish Minister introducing a United Kingdom Bill; and I am glad of that from the Scottish point of view. The Second Reading of the Bill has been moved by the noble Earl in his usual fine way. I have nothing to complain about in the way he has represented the purposes of the Bill—although I find myself in the position of having to object to the purposes which the Bill is intended to serve. I am inclined to demur to the statement made by the noble Earl that there cannot be a tied cottage in a hill farm. That is true only if advantage is taken of the grant of public money to build a new cottage or to renovate an existing cottage. Where no grant is made, the cottages will still remain under the old conditions. I was glad to have the assurance that this Bill will not be made retrospective, in the sense that it will not deprive those who come under the 1946 Act of the protection afforded by that Act.

When the noble Earl recalls my connection with the railways, I am afraid that in that particular regard he touches me on rather a sore spot. Since I left the active railway service much has happened in respect of the tenancy of houses by people in responsible positions on the railways, because of the fact that they have been put on a rental basis by the railway companies. If concede at once that that has caused a great deal of trouble. I have a relative, a good railwayman—because I was the third generation of railway workers and he was the fourth—who, due to the change, has been lost to the railway service. He became: the youngest stationmaster in Britain, but he did not get into the station house that he should have had to live in owing to the fact that the previous holder of the house decided to remain on in it. As a result, that young man, who was doing very well indeed, has been lost to the railway service. So I have no illusions at all about the importance of this matter, and about the particular difficulty that can arise in respect of tied cottages when they become untied. I realise how well that point was made by the noble Earl.

I now get down to the fundamentals in connection with this Bill, and I say at the outset that this Government have no mandate to alter the 1946 Act. They had not a majority of the votes at the last Election; a minority of the electorate voted for them; a greater number voted for the Party for which I am speaking. I concede that under our electoral system the Government are in the position, and are using that position, which we have to accept, whether we like it or not, that Her Majesty's Government must govern. Although we usually get some information about the Government's intentions, and about how they are going to conduct their affairs, no mention was made in the gracious Speech from the Throne which opened this Session of Parliament to indicate that this particular change was contemplated. This Bill, however, is no novelty in that respect. The first thing the Government did in this Parliament was to rush to alter the work of the late Government and give their friends in the drink trade the freedom of the new towns for the plying of their dangerous trade by cancelling the provision that this should be controlled in the public interest on the Carlisle model. No information was given in advance about that change, so I do not claim that it is an unprecedented thing for the Government to bring in a Bill without having given any previous information of their intention.

It is true that they did give notice of their intention to take the road passen- ger traffic out of the hands of the State. In this respect they followed what I look upon as the cardinal principle of the Tory Party: that, where there is profit available, it should be exploited for private gain and not for the State. I look at the phenomenon of this great Conservative Party, regarded, even with these flaws, as the patriotic Party, and I reflect upon that. What an asset they have in their great leader! Another great asset is the Press, which backs them so well, so that, generally speaking, throughout the country it is pretty well accepted that the Tory Party is a patriotic Party. I demur from that view because I believe that the Party to which I belong has done many more good things since 1945 to entitle it to that particular description.

It is widely held in the country—I think this will be agreed; I am not being nasty about it—that the chief sources of Tory support are the drink interests and the landed interests, although I gladly concede that that situation is not universal, because many hotel-keepers and public-house keepers have been kind to me, and, indeed, when I have been standing for election to another place, have voted for me. The same applies to the landed interests. While they are, I would say, predominantly Tory in outlook, yet they are not universally so. With that kind of backing, what is more natural than that, when the present Government had given a sop to the brewers at the beginning of this Parliament, they should look round for something with which they might please the owners and farmers of land? That was a difficult task, because since 1945 the Labour Government had been so very helpful to the farming interests—indeed, they had done so much to ensure increased productivity from the land, and to promote harmony in the agricultural community, that there was little, if any, room for further improvement. The Party opposite realised that something must be done, or the growing realisation that prosperity in the countryside was more secure in the hands of the Labour Government would continue to increase. That feeling has been increasing in recent years, and the Government had to find some means of checking that increase in support of the Labour Party. Thus was conceived the idea of this Bill which is before us to-day.

I claim that the 1946 Act, which this Bill seeks to amend, has worked well, and there have been no complaints regarding even Section 10, at which this Bill is aimed. May I give your Lordships one or two figures upon which I base that assertion? These figures relate to Scotland only. From the commencement of the operation of the 1946 Act, and taking into account the Livestock Rearing Act, 1951, to which the noble Earl, Lord Home, made reference and which cannot be separated from the considerations we are making, the expenditure actually approved up to November 30, 1953, was £4,731,868. Of this sum, £846,531, or 17.9 per cent., was for farm cottages. Included here is the erection of 111 cottages and the reconditioning of 456. But here is a significant fact: so far as I can ascertain, there has not been a single case of an owner seeking to withdraw from the conditions of grant in order to preserve his cottages from becoming un-tied in accordance with the terms of the 1946 Act. I shall be glad to hear if any cases of that kind have occurred. In addition to the items that I have mentioned, on November 30, 1953, other schemes had been approved in principle and were under consideration, making in all a total of 1,461 schemes, involving 1,808 farms, with an acreage of 3,790,544 acres, and an estimated cost of £7,437,365. Thus the gloomy Tory prophesies of failure, voiced when the 1946 Act was being placed on the Statute Book, have been falsified by the results achieved.

The 1946 Act has still nearly three years to run. Why, then, interfere with it? It is true that it was brought in as a compromise which recognised the difficulty of completely abolishing tied cottages. The needs of those who might be adversely affected were cared for, but Her Majesty's Government scorn to have any consideration for the hardship that may be caused to the tied cottage holder. No consultation has taken place about this with the workers' side of the industry; and they are not unreasonable people. They are as keen to see the industry prospering as anyone can be, but they feel that the way in which their small measure of protection is being taken away from them is callous and unreasonable. The difference between the treatment of the tenant farmer, who has security of tenure, and the tied cottager, who is being deprived of the protection afforded by the 1946 Act, shows how the Tory Party still remains a class Party. It is deplorable that a measure of this kind, which is working well, and in the absence of any evidence that it has had any harmful effect, should grave its purpose of securing harmony and concord destroyed and should be deprived of its power in order to suit doctrinaire ideas and political expediency. If I thought there was any possibility of gaining anything by the attempt I would urge the Government to think again before they proceed further with this Bill, and I would plead with them for reconsideration. But I think that such an appeal would be hopeless, and as we are powerless here to stop the Government by our votes I can only leave them to meet the fate which their conduct merits when they face the wrath of the electorate at the next national ballot. This is not a good Bill. as its authors will find to their cost.

4.23 p.m.

LORD SALTOUN

My Lords, if I have rightly understood the noble Lord's argument, he objects to this Bill on three grounds. One is that the existing Hill Farming Act is working well enough. The second is that he objects to spending public money on tied cottages. The third is an objection on political grounds, because this is a small political sprat intended to catch the enormous political whale, the agricultural vote. Of course, the old Hill Farming Act does work for those people who are in a position to take advantage of it, but it is of no use at all to people who are not in a position to take advantage of it. If you have a hill farm and keep a flock of sheep it is essential that you have a shepherd. The probability is that in the position where the shepherd's house must be you have enough water for only one house. If, for any reason, the farmer and his shepherd do not get on, and the shepherd terminates his service with the farmer, the farmer must get a new shepherd or give up the flock of sheep. I would point out to your Lordships that it is not particularly to the interest of the country to discover whether the shepherd is in the wrong or the farmer is in the wrong: but it is very much to the interest of the country that the sheep shall be kept; and therefore any man who is responsible for the keeping of a flock of sheep must have a tied cottage.

I fail to see why shepherds—and of all the men I know shepherds are almost the most deserving of consideration amongst the agricultural population—should not have decent, up-to-date houses to live in, when every other agricultural worker can get one. These other agricultural workers get houses by the assistance of a Government grant, but shepherds are deprived of them. I think that is quite wrong, and, for myself, I think the Bill as it goes is a very temperate Bill, as temperate as any we could have asked for in the circumstances. I am glad to see the noble Earl, Lord Huntingdon, in his place, because I remember the debate on the old Hill Farming Bill. This will serve for what I have to say on the political argument. I remember that when we were discussing this very point on the old Hill Farming Bill he won my heart completely because he heard all our objections, realised their force and admitted it, but said, quite frankly, "You know the political feeling in this matter. In this Bill we are meeting the situation as well as we can, but we cannot help the political feeling which prevents our doing what otherwise the necessities of the situation might demand." I have put only roughly what he said, but f have never forgotten it as one of the frankest statements that I have ever heard from the Front Bench. I shall always remember that and esteem the noble Earl for that frankness. I think that sufficiently disposes of the political argument, and I hope that the House will support the Bill.

4.29 p.m.

VISCOUNT ALEXANDER OF HILLS-BOROUGH

My Lords, before the noble Earl replies, I must apologise for being a minute or two late and not being able to hear his speech. I am sure I missed a great deal, I am more particularly anxious about the future course of this Bill and what may be said about it. My noble friend has said that the workers' organisations in the industry were not supplied with any information about it in advance and were not consulted in any way. The Government is not, of course, bound to consult anybody in regard to any Bill, but it is increasingly the practice, in introducing Bills of such a possibly controversial nature, to give the largest organisations on either side of the industry concerned the opportunity of at least some consultation and the chance to put their points of view. I hope that when the noble Earl comes to reply he will give some information about that matter. The other point about which I am particularly anxious and as to which I regret that I missed the noble Earl's speech and the figures given by my noble friend is that we should have a case made out on the actual experience in the country of any adverse effect of the working of Section 10 of the existing Act. Are there, in fact, sufficient grounds in that experience to justify the very drastic amendment which is now before your Lordships' House? I apologise for my intrusion but I should like a specific answer on those two points.

4.31 p.m.

THE EARL OF HOME

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Mathers, will excuse me if I turn at once to the two points put by the noble Viscount, Lord Alexander of Hillsborough, because I think he missed what I had to say. This Bill raises no new principle, because it is consequential on the Housing Acts which have been passed in this House since this present Government came in. For instance, as I explained to the noble Lord, if we did not have this Bill we should have 90 per cent. of the farms in the country able to have a tied cottage improved or built under the Housing Acts and only 10 per cent. denied one. That would be a quite haphazard arrangement, because it so happens that these farms, instead of being situated two, three or even one hundred feet above sea level are situated six or seven hundred feet above sea level on marginal hill land. Therefore this Bill is a necessary corollary to the Housing Acts, designed to bring about uniform treatment for all the farms in the country. Therefore it is not a matter of principle but a matter of righting an anomaly.

The noble Viscount asked about protection for the workers and, indeed, for those who at present enjoy the tenancy of a tied house, and did so under the old Act. As I explained, anyone who is the tenant of a tied house at present does not have his occupancy disturbed by this Bill—he still has the protection of the Rent Restrictions Acts. When his occupancy comes to an end, then it need not be renewed. That would have been so under any conditions. As to the conditions protecting the worker, we have taken particular care in this Bill to provide that he shall have four weeks' notice. I think it would be unreasonable to expect a farmer to do without the house for more than four weeks in, for instance, the lambing, season. Therefore, we think that four weeks is a reasonable time for notice to be given. So far as the working of the Bill is concerned (this is a point which was also raised by Lord Mathers), it is true that some progress—and not bad progress—has been made under the Hill Farming Act, but there is plenty of evidence to show that a good deal more reconditioning of cottages would have been done if the grant had been available for a tied cottage. That is one of the reasons why we have introduced this Bill. It is particularly important in hill country, where local authorities are not anxious to build houses, that old houses which are structurally in good condition should he made modern and up to date for shepherds who live in the locality. That is the main reason why we have brought in this Bill; we think that far more progress can be made if a grant is available for a tied cottage.

I have some sympathy with the noble Lord, Lord Mathers. In desperation, it seemed, to find arguments against the Bill, he ranged far and wide. He brought in the brewers and the franchise, about which I cannot find anything in the Bill. He said in fact that the present Government had a minority vote, and that the Conservative Party and the Government were in power by virtue of a minority vote. But I do not remember that this stopped the Government of the noble Lord's Party from passing the Iron and Steel Act. Anyhow, my Lords, here we are in power as a Government, minority vote or not, and we intend to exercise our mandate. Again, the noble Lord said that we had no mandate for this Bill in regard to tied cottages. I suppose he does not read Conservative literature, as perhaps he should—he would be better off if he did. Perhaps I may remind him that on page thirty-four of a document called The Right Road for Britain, there are these words—I apologise for being a little tactless in reading them:

"The Socialist Government … have refused to make them "—

that is, grants for reconditioning rural dwellings— available for service cottages.… A Conservative Government will press forward with reconditioning. We shall extend it to service cottages … in other words, to the tied cottage. If that is not a mandate, I do not know what is. I am bound to say that the noble Lord is a kindly, generous person, who does not want to deprive a shepherd of a good modern house in the uplands. I did not find the voice of Transport House coming very well from him.

My Lords, as I said at the beginning, this is not a Bill which involves any principle, but it is one which really removes an anomaly, enabling all farmers and farms to be treated alike. I hope that we shall not pursue the political difficulties which have divided us in the last few years, but that we may concentrate on giving this Bill a Second Reading, and thus provide all shepherds, all stockmen, arid all people in the uplands of Scotland and England, with decent houses to live in.

On Question, Bill read 2, and committed to a Committee of the Whole House.