Lords Sitting of 1 February 1961

Preamble
The House met at half past two of the clock, The LORD MERTHYR on the Woolsack.
Prayers—Read by the Lord Bishop of St. Edmundsbury and Ipswich
The Marquess of Reading—Sat first in Parliament after the death of his father.

BUSINESS OF THE HOUSE
LORD NEWTON: My Lords, I beg to inform your Lordships that at some time after half past three o'clock a statement will be made on the National Health Service.

THE POST OFFICE TELEPHONE SERVICE
LORD CROOK LORD CROOK rose to call attention to the White Paper (Cmnd. 973) on Post Office Capital Expenditure, 1960–61, with particular reference to the telephone service; and to move for Papers. The noble Lord said: My Lords, every year when I go to New York on the United Nations assignment I know that I shall have one experience that repeats itself: I shall be reminded of the efficiency of the British Postal service. One recent Monday evening when I was in New York I talked on the telephone to a friend, and he promised that he would post that evening to me at my hotel in Manhattan, three miles away, documents which I wanted on Wednesday morning. I was not a bit surprised when I did not get them on Wednesday morning, though he posted them on Monday; nor would any American have been surprised, because they know how bad their Post Office service is. One knows why they have sent so many people over here to find out why we do things so much better. Incidentally, I did receive at the breakfast table that Wednesday morning a letter posted by one of your Lordships here in Westminster at 7.15 on Monday night. And that is a common experience, except when the weather is very bad.
But Americans, who know that their postal service is bad, never hesitate to rub into Englishmen, when they have been across here, how much our telephone service lags behind theirs. They believe that, however bad their postal service may be, theirs is the best telephone service in the world. They compare their telephone service with ours, to the detriment, they think, of a nationalised service as against private enterprise. But the truth, known to any Britisher, is that that has nothing to do with it at all. It is for that reason that I have put this Motion on the Order Paper to-day. The average Englishman who knows anything of our telephone service knows very well that it is making great profits; profits which in fact pay for the losses incurred in other spheres of the Post Office service, profits which could be greater and greater every year if it were not for the deadly hand of Treasury control, which over the years has limited the ability to expand.
I put this Motion on the Order Paper many months ago. I refer to that period of time deliberately, to make clear to your Lordships that the Motion was on the Order Paper prior to any Memorandum about the organisation of the Post Office services, so far as their general financing is concerned, and to any legislation which has resulted. I do not desire to get the lines crossed. I do not propose, merely because time has passed, to seek to introduce into the more limited field on which this debate was originally intended should take place anything that would take the place of the debate which ought properly to be held when the Bill comes from another place for consideration by your Lordships' House. But the existence of the Bill and its implications perhaps make it the more important that some of the things I wanted to say should be said before the Bill reaches your Lordships' House.
It will be useless for the Post Office to be given a new status in this country if the big profit-making telephone service is to continue to be one of those things affected by the constantly changing minds of successive Chancellors of the Exchequer. Because we have in the British telephone service a magnificent staff capable of doing not only the many fine things they have done but also very

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much more in the interests of this country, always provided they are given the opportunity. Moreover, in some of the great productive organisations we have firms who are capable of producing everything that is wanted for the British telephone service, and of exporting many instruments to other countries, to the great benefit of our balance of payments, provided that they receive from the Government of this country enough encouragement to stable production.
I am satisfied that in men, materials and methods this country has nothing to fear from competition anywhere in the world. The only trouble that the British telephone service has is in the top control flowing from the Treasury. I cannot understand why some Americans try to compare a system of control which comes from private enterprise and one which comes from the heavy hand of the Treasury. Had this great profit-making, valuable and efficient telephone service been in the possession of private capital, private capital would have seen itself making £22 million profit a year. Let us ask ourselves what they would have done with it. They would have gone out for more and more business: they would have invested more and more money; and if they felt at any time that they should have more money immediately available in order to expand, they would have gone out and obtained on the open market, on the evidence of their efficiency, existing profits and their great and obvious potentialities, all the capital they wanted.
What is more, they would have used their public relations staff to go out and explain to the public the benefits of the telephone service, to encourage those who had telephones to use them more and those who had no telephones to come in and have this new service available to them. But, of course, the only use which the Post Office telephone service has been able to find for their effective public relations staff is to send them out to members of the public to explain why they cannot have a telephone, why they must put up with joint telephone use, why this efficiency does not exist and how that inefficiency can be explained by something beyond their control. They have to go and express regret to people like
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that, at any given period of time in the future, the dials they have promised will in fact appear on my telephone, after all these years. They are always apologising, not for their inability to do something, but for the inability imposed upon them by the nature of the control to which the Post Office has had to become accustomed over recent years.
You may say that that is merely making general statements, and what in fact am I able to say has really happened? Let me take the provision of new telephones. Let us look at the year 1947, a year only 18 months removed from the end of hostilities. In 1947 it was necessary to get back into civilian employment people capable of doing important jobs that were needed in bringing the telephone service up to date; it was a period of time in which industry, which had tooled itself and planned all its production in respect of war, had to turn round and change its tooling and often to change the place in which it was producing, because strategically they had to move trained people coming out of the Forces to try to get back into the way of doing their civilian job. In 1947 my noble friends who sit in front of me on these Benches were able to secure that no fewer than 381,821 new telephones were installed in this country. By 1953 the annual figure was down to 210,745, and by 1958 it had reached the new all-time low of 135,272. These figures are not mine, but are taken from Post Office publications. So they were down in 1958 to one-third of the figure for 1947.
Meanwhile, what have the Post Office done to explain this state of affairs. I invite your Lordships again to look at the documents that they have issued up to quite recent months. What they have done is to try to issue statements which do not disclose the facts. I could hardly believe my eyes when I opened the Annual Report of the Postmaster General in November last, when it was in the Printed Paper Office. I quote from Cmnd. 1206, paragraph 31, where, referring to the figure of telephones put in during the preceding months, it says:
"This is more than 50 per cent, higher than in the preceding year."
It was, my Lords, because, 324,000 in the year of course, is 50 per cent, more than 206,000. But perhaps the Postmaster General was being rather mild

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and modest in his phrasing, for he could have written it another way and claimed that the figure was more than twice that of 1958. He would still have been right, because the 1958 figure was only 135,000. Or he could have phrased it yet another way: he could have expressed the regret of the Government that the figure of 324,000 last year was still so much less than the immediate post-war 1947 figure of 381,821. There is no need for a speaker to comment on a set of figures like that; the deplorable facts speak for themselves. If you like to take them and turn them into averages, you can say that in the past three years the average number of new telephones has been running at 220,961. Yet in the first three difficult years immediately following the end of hostilities the figure could be so high as 327,402.
I do not want to confine myself to a reliance upon one set of facts or statistics. I have referred to new telephones given to members of the public. Let us look at them the other way round, at the number of exchange connections—and again these are official figures of the Postmaster General. In 1947 it was found possible to provide 304,552. Never in the years that have passed since has it been possible to equal that figure. In 1958 it was as low as 25,884—that is a drop from 304,000 to 25,000. Again, if you go on averages for three years the same deplorable position is shown. Why do I suggest a three-year period? Because the Postmaster General, speaking in the other place, said that a three-year average is the essential one on which to base consideration, and the White Paper of 1955 says that a three-year averaging is indispensable for the economic development of the telephone service. In the last three years the telephone service has, on the average, put in 103,417 new exchange connections, which is very much below the 304,000 achieved in the first twelve months completed after the war.
The truth is that the economic development referred to in the White Paper, planned over the three-year period, has been made impossible by the actions of the Treasury. There must have been, one would think, some heartburning and troubles and discussions
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between Postmasters General and other members of the Cabinet, because the Postmaster General has never hesitated to let the other place know that he never knows himself what he is getting for the current year (much less three years ahead) until that year is either on top of him or some months of it have passed. The final allocation of capital investment for 1960–61 was not settled until October, 1960, one month before the Postmaster General was due to present his Annual Report to Parliament. That is no way to run any service, and certainly not a great telephone service that should be expanded.
I want to say that my criticism is mild compared with anything that can be culled from authoritative statements from people whose views count. I will quote one, in particular:
" I am quite certain…that one cannot run a business like the Post Office, or any big business, on a year to year basis. It is physically impossible to do so. There must be a set programme, and one cannot turn that programme on and off as though it were a tap. The business will not be efficient if one does."
That statement was made by the present Minister of Transport, Mr. Marples, when he was the Postmaster General of this country on May 15, 1959, when he complained to the House that, even at that date, he did not firmly know the amount either for his current year or for the next. A steady figure, and if possible an increasing figure each year, is highly essential in the interests of the telephone service.
I would say that there are visible to me at least six main grounds for that. There is, first of all, the necessity of giving a guarantee to the electrical telephonic and electronic production firms as to the production that they can plan in the three years ahead. That, in turn, leads to the second point; that is to say, the knowledge of what employment or unemployment there will be in the country in that industry. It also enables them to know what their staple home market is, which gives them the opportunity of planning their production for the important export market in the knowledge of how much of their overheads they can rely upon from the home programme. I would call the fourth a steady research programme. The fifth is a planned

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staffing policy for the Post Office, and I would call the sixth steady and increasing progress with mechanisation (the first stage of which, at least, is dialling).
I should like to dwell for a minute or two on those points and ask your Lordships' kindly attention to them. As to the first three points, the firms within the Telecommunications Engineering and Manufacturing Association must be able to have this steady planned production. At its best the home market is a small basis for the exporter. The firms manage to send 40 per cent. of their production abroad, and exports are now running at £25 million per annum. The telecommunications industry, in other words, has an excellent contribution to make to the balance of payments and to the employment position in this country.
The research programme is closely related to that and to the growth of electronics in the world of the telephone. Electronics are beginning to be the threat or promise of most industries. They are the coming thing in telephones. Unless we speed up, we are going to lose this great market for Britain. The Dollis Hill Experimental Establishment of the Post Office—which I know some of your Lordships and some Members of another place have visited and admired from time to time, with its excellent staff doing a fine job of work—have been working on this problem. But have they been allowed to get ahead fast enough, and have they been given enough opportunity and money to get on with the research? I understand they are disappointed that the new electronic exchange at Highgate Wood, as to which work has been in hand, I believe, since as long ago as 1956, is still in a working model stage at Dollis Hill.
I was shocked to see in what I am told is the leading journal, British Communications and Electronics, an article describing the exchange as it now is as merely a "hotch-potch of ideas" with something being done by each of the big five manufacturers making equipment for the Post Office, and by the Post Office itself. This article, which was written long before Christmas', said that
"it was likely to be uneconomical in its present form, and is unlikely even to become a standard system."
I refer to the fact that the article was written long before Christmas, because I imagine that those who wrote it, and the engineers at Dollis Hill, must have been as surprised as I believe the rest of the world was when, early this year, the Bell Telephone Company announced, not that they had completed electronic telephones as an experiment but that they had put into exchange customer service, at Morris, Illinois, the first electronic exchange in the world. They claim that they will be able to offer the world a production model by the middle of 1964; and unless we can do the same, our hopes of getting into the expanding telephone market and the creation of new telephones in the world will be absolutely nil, because the electronic telephone has advantages completely beyond anything of those we know at the moment. New services can be added; frequently used numbers can be obtained by dialling two digits only on this new installation; incoming calls can be automatically transferred to other people's numbers elsewhere; talks between three parties become ordinary, and the machines will even automatically correct their own faults.
This situation would not matter a bit if we had not in this country people capable of doing these things: but in the engineers in the postal telephone service at Dollis Hill, and throughout the country, and in the production experts of the five great firms in T.E.M.A., we have people who can compete, and in my view do better than anyone else in the world, on these matters. That is one of the reasons why I want to press that we must get on with some of the improvements that other people have and we have not. In large American and Canadian installations, for instance, in firms or hotels, it is not necessary to wait for the internal switchboard operator to get you a number. You can dial an additional figure and obtain outside calls, with automatic notation. I wonder how many offices have that system in this country.
More important still, perhaps, is the new development, just introduced (I believe at the moment in only one organisation in New York), by which a distant caller can dial right through to a person or department on the extension inside any big organisation. To any of your Lordships who has been interested

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in the new system of charging by time, which is to become general in this country, with the difficulty that it must cause to great business organisations, the importance of the ability to dial the number of a firm and, by following that number with one letter and one figure, to obtain the exact extension that we want, cutting out that time lag for which one would otherwise be charged, must be seen to be very important. I hope that the Minister will be able to tell us that the research which is going on covers this field, so that when we get on to timed-unit basis of charging we may at least have this method to help us appreciate the new system.
My fifth point concerns the need for planned staffing. I do not want to occupy your Lordships' time going over every one of these matters in detail. I hope that other noble Lords who follow may have something to say about the difficulty the Post Office must have in planned staffing, because it does not know for three years ahead what its own commitments are. The only thing I would say, in passing, is to pay a tribute to the Post Office for its excellent relationships with its telephone engineering service, the way it carries out its obligations to industrial relations, and the way it has operated the Whitley system efficiently inside Her Majesty's Civil Service.
My sixth point is the need for a speedup in the installation of items like dial telephones. Here the admission in the Annual Report of the Postmaster General, published in November last, is quite astonishing in its candour. I cannot resist reading to your Lordships from it. Referring to mechanisation he says:
" Although it has proceeded steadily since the end of the First World War "—
the First World War, mark you!—it
" has barely kept pace with the growth of the telephone system. Indeed the number of telephonists now in post is almost as great as it has ever been."
That is a marvellous admission for a Postmaster General in charge of a telephone service, who has been busy telling gatherings of businessmen and another place that it is fast becoming the best.
Here, I suppose, I ought to declare my own interest, because I have had a telephone on the Wallington Exchange in Surrey for no less than 33 years. It has been getting progressively worse over
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the years. It became so grossly overloaded that everybody in the district went to the very charming young Member of Parliament who, until recently, held a post in the present Government, and made representations which were successful—so successful that they came down to Wallington and pushed the exchange over a bit and put in another new manual exchange called "Franklyn". They told us that was "our lot", and that they would see whether, in five or six years time, we might be mechanised. Wallington is exactly 12½ miles from this House; I have lived there all that time, and if that is the best service I can get what are they getting in the Highlands of Scotland?
The truth is, of course, that we are behind nearly every country in the world in this matter and on telephone development. We have 14·5 telephones per 100 of the population in this country, compared to 38 in the U.S.A. and 34 in Sweden. We have never ranked better than ninth in this international table, and we have been kept from being tenth only because the Argentine was there. In this country, as The Times pointed out in one of its principal articles recently, the percentage growth is "lower than in fifteen of the world's most highly industrial countries". The world average to expansion is at the rate of 8 per cent. The Times pointed out that our growth, taken at its best, on a two-year average was never more than 2·3 per cent., whereas it exceeded 10 per cent. even in Italy, Spain, Japan and Germany.
All those other countries lead, too in Subscriber Trunk Dialling. We did not inaugurate it in this country until we had it at Bristol, in December, 1958. And what an instant success it was! I believe the calls that took place, calls that could be dialled on "Trunks", rose by no less than 45 per cent. in the first nine months. I should be glad to know from the Minister, if possible, when he replies whether that is true and whether that kind of improvement has been kept up in respect of the others opened. I do not know how many other S.T.D. exchanges have been opened. We were promised by the Minister that 45 would be opened by last December and that another 45 were in hand ready to be opened this year. I have seen a limited list of about eleven towns that

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have gone on to Subscriber Trunk Dialling, but I have not seen any more.
So far as the White Paper which I am bringing to your Lordships' attention is concerned, it appears to suggest that Subscriber Trunk Dialling will be held by 25 per cent. of subscribers by March, 1962, and probably 50 per cent. by March, 1964. The Minister may be able to tell us that. I have no doubt, of course, that ours will be the best system in the world, I have that trust and faith in all that I have seen and known in the telephone service. But I want to know when the whole of this country's phones will be on dial and when they will be on Subscriber Trunk Dialling.
So far as I know from what the Minister has said, I should theoretically be capable of dialling any one of my friends anywhere in Europe by the end of this year. The only thing wrong is that I shall not have a dial. The White Paper, Cmnd. 463, says that the progress on Subscriber Trunk Dialling
" will depend on the amount of capital investment that can be released."
It is on that question of the amount of release that I hope some other noble Lords will have something to say. I would only comment that the telephone service has suffered more than any other organisation from restriction. That that is so is clear, not from any wild statement of any one person or myself, but from the 1960 Economic Survey, which any of your Lordships can see in the Library.
May I begin to sum up what I have been trying to say? We must get out of the complex of thinking that the telephone service is a spender and understand that it is an earner. It earns money in industry internally in the country, and earns money in respect of exports. It provides stability of employment for people, and expands employment in the way the present Government have told us they intend. But the huge service which the telephone service already gives could be expanded, and if the public were enabled to use the telephone more that could bring about a better life for them and a life that would give more opportunities of employment. The telephone service in this country has not been given its chance. And in my submission to your Lordships, it must
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be given its chance. The million people who are now on shared lines must be given an opportunity of going on to individual lines if they wish. Steps must be taken to see that there is an increase in the number of calls per instrument. In that connection, too, we are the lowest country. Sales push can only follow, however, on a clearer position on the release of capital investment.
We are capable of creating the greatest telephone service in the world, both on the manufacturing side and in the Post Office engineering field. With others of your Lordships, I have seen and experienced something of the great jobs of work that have been done. Some of us saw the Atlantic cables, the first telephonic cable to be laid in the Atlantic, made here by a great engineering firm, Dollis Hill Engineers, put across the Atlantic and staggering the whole of the telephonic world over there. I have talked over it, and I only wish that the calls I receive locally were as clear as I can get over that cable.
I have talked in Canada to my friends in Parliament in Ottawa about the forthcoming great link across the world, the imaginative link on which the Commonwealth Conference decided. I understand from my friends in Montreal—and the Minister knows better than I, and can tell us—that in the past week British firms have been successful in getting an £18 million contract for the Pacific cable to run from Canada to Australia and New Zealand. I think we should congratulate everybody concerned. I should like to know what is the date for completion. Is it 1963? I understand that the transatlantic aeronautic control cable is under way and the first link of 24 channels to Iceland is likely to be completed this year. The Minister may be able to tell us something about that. I gave the Minister, knowing his preoccupation with things like the size of bottles of milk and bottles of beer, some long notice to enable him to inform the House on this and other points.
Perhaps he could say something of the experiments on using motor car radiotelephone exchanges for communication with trains, which was of some small academic interest originally to people like myself. I think it gets a new interest this week from the statement once again

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that America is going to beat us on aircraft. I understand that the first aircraft carrying telephonic communication with the ground will be available to people in America in July this year. If it is true that we are going to be beaten in that field, it may be a very serious reflection on B.O.A.C. and B.E.A. and others. The same is true of ships, although I believe that the Post Office is going to some trouble to improve the position. Then there is the new V.H.F. radio-telephone apparatus at Land's End, and I understand that it was to be installed at North Foreland and Anglesey radio stations. I do not know whether the Minister can tell us anything about that.
I may have drawn too many facts to your Lordships' attention in too short a period of time. I know that your Lordships do not like anyone's voice to continue unduly, and I share that general view when I am sitting down instead of standing. I have said some of these things because over a long period of time many of my friends connected with the telephonic communications industry, and my friends in the Post Office engineering service, have felt that it was time something was done to make it clear that this is not just a question of people occasionally grumbling that they could not get a right number, or that they were waiting for a telephone, but that there was a very real story to be told. I conclude therefore, in moving this Motion, by saying to your Lordships that if everything I have said appears to be critical, you will see, I hope, that it has been criticism, not of fine people doing a good job of work but only of the pace at which they have been allowed to progress. Because I am conscious that we have the people to do the job; we have the means to hand, and if only we will produce the money and the policy for progress, that progress we can have. My Lords, I beg to move for Papers.
3.10 p.m.
THE EARL OF GAINSBOROUGH: My Lords, the House will be indebted to the noble Lord, Lord Crook, for giving us this opportunity of discussing the telephone service, which I suppose most of us, despite the noble Lord's depressing statistics, use almost daily. Sometimes we feel somewhat frustrated when we get the wrong number twice running, as hap-
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pened to me recently, and are told afterwards in an accusing voice that we have twice wrongly asked for the number that we have given. But, by and large, the operators are always courteous and polite. With very few exceptions that has been my experience. The noble Lord has told us some most depressing facts, and I hope that the noble Lord who is to reply will be able to reassure us that some of his gloomy forecasts are, perhaps, over-pessimistic.
I intervene in this debate purely as a subscriber and user of the telephone, and not as one who knows much about the technical side of it. I do know, however, that great achievements have been made in the technical development of telephone equipment. I have seen some of the new exchanges. I am sure they are extremely intricate. They illustrate that, as has been pointed out by the noble Lord, the equipment can be made in this country. I think, however, that the private trunk dialling and all these other dialling systems can be over-complicated, and I hope that there will always be available an operator to assist elderly people and those who have not very good eyesight and who may make mistakes when they have to dial about eight or nine different numbers, as I understand it may be necessary to do when the S.T.D. is generally in operation. I hope that these operators will be of a high calibre, because they will usually have to function only when some difficulty has been experienced by the user of the telephone.
Those of us who live further into the country than the noble Lord—he is really, if I may say so, almost a suburbanite, although he still has no dial—often find that it takes a long time to get the operator; we dial "O" or "100", as the case may be, and sometimes have to wait four or five minutes before the operator answers. 'This is most frustrating, especially if there is an emergency or any other difficulty of that kind. I know that this is not the fault of anybody in particular; it is just that the exchanges are overloaded. I suppose this is because people are being connected to exchanges which have not the positions for the requisite number of operators; thus more people are trying to get the operator than there are operators to handle the incoming calls.

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The only other question I should like to mention is that of rural telephone call boxes, which have increased in numbers in recent years, but unfortunately only rather slowly. In fact, in the last twelve months or so there has, I would suggest, been a step backwards in this field, in that the Post Office have abandoned the scheme they had in conjunction with the local authority associations for the allocation of telephone boxes in sparsely populated rural areas, and it is now most difficult to get a telephone box installed in some of the smaller villages. I understand that part of the reason for this is that these boxes are uneconomic—they do not pay. That may be so. But the people who live in these remote areas need to use the telephone sometimes just as urgently as those of us who live in less remote areas and who are fortunate enough to have a telephone. I hope that Her Majesty's Government will be able to help in the installation of telephone boxes in areas where their use is likely to be uneconomic for the simple reason that the number of people using them will possibly not be great at any one period.
I have wondered whether there is not some possibility of putting in call boxes of a less expensive type than we seem to have in this country and which seem quite often to get broken, being damaged by people who, I suppose, may have had a little too much conviviality during the evening or, on occasion, through hooliganism. I wonder if the noble Lord could say whether there is any possibility of introducing boxes of the type now being installed by the motoring organisations, smaller boxes with a less intricate mechanism, so that they may be installed more cheaply on the sides of buildings and such places and used by the public where larger and more expensive installations are not needed. My Lords, I think I have covered the points I wanted to make. I am grateful for the opportunity of bringing to your Lordships' notice the subscribers' complaints.
3.18 p.m.
EARL DE LA WARR: My Lords, I do not want to detain your Lordships long, but I think that anybody who has ever been involved in the Post Office never quite feels that he has completely
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left it. I know that the noble Earls, Lord Listowel and Lord Attlee, will agree with me there. Certainly I was pleased to hear the noble Lord, Lord Crook, at least have a good word for our postal system. It is a system of which we ought to be extremely proud, and the more we hear about it the prouder we must be of the men who work throughout the country, day by day, every day of the year, no matter what the weather. We take far too little notice of them, and pay to them far too little of the thanks that is their due.
I only wish that, instead of giving half a minute to something of which this country should be proud, the noble Lord had not spent the other thirty-five minutes of his speech in digging into every possible deficiency in our telephone system. It is extremely easy to criticise. But to my mind the story of the telephone service over the last ten years or so is one of steady, sound development. I stress the word "steady" because, as the noble Lord, Lord Crook, said, it is no use trying with a great organisation like this to go ahead in leaps and bounds and then to stop. There must be a steady planning of the labour system and of the factories.
The noble Lord complained that our system is not so good as is the system in America. I think all of us must agree that there is a great deal of truth in that. But let us consider the circumstances. Most of us who have been to America on the whole tend to telephone from one large city to another. We do not often test the system by telephoning from a small village community where it does not pay to have a telephone system, but where the system is run as a social service, to another community of the same character. When the comparison is made on that basis I do not think the American system will be found to be startlingly better than ours.
Then again, there is no doubt that if our exchanges were staffed more generously than they are, the service would be better. There would be less of this waiting while one dials "O"—I believe now it is "100". I wonder whether in making these comparisons we compare other factors. There is a great difference in the cost of our service as compared with that in America. I have not the figures in my head, although I kept

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in close touch some years ago when I was connected with the Post Office; but there is a fantastic difference between the rental charges paid in this country and what is paid in America. In fact, in this country the highest charge that can be made for a telephone call from Penzance to John o'Groats or the Shetlands is 3s. 9d., whereas across the Atlantic the cost can go up to 25s., 30s., and even more, per three minutes.
We have also to face the fact that we in this country are not as telephone-minded as are the Americans. It may be said that we should send salesmen round to encourage people to use the telephone, and a great deal of that is being done now. But there may be a dear old lady who wants, and rightly wants, a telephone in her house, either to make one or two calls a week for shopping or possibly for emergency use, to get hold of a doctor. She just does not make great use of the telephone. We have a great number of such subscribers, and that is a very important factor in the economics of our telephone system, because no telephone installation will itself pay for the capital charges it represents. That happens only when a telephone is widely used.
The noble Lord complained of the rate at which telephones have lately been installed. He took interesting dates, starting from 1947 and coming up to date; and he complained of the fact that during the first two or three years—say between 1947 and 1950—installations where made much more quickly than from 1950 onwards. But there is a very easy and obvious explanation for that. Putting a telephone into a house is not only a question of putting the instrument there and connecting it up to something already existing. There is the question of the exchange equipment and the underground cable from the subscriber to the exchange. After the war, when hundreds of thousands of military and defence lines were being abandoned, there was an immense reserve of both exchange equipment and cable for use, and connecting up was perfectly easy.
The time came, however, when all that was used up. It was a decision with which I myself was very often faced. I was told I could get an extra 100,000 or 200,000 lines connected if I would refrain from attending to the basic equip-
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ment of the telephone system—the laying of new cables, possibly taking a year or two, or building new exchanges, possibly taking three or four years. Any responsible Postmaster General had to take the decision that he must keep the basic equipment going, because once an exchange is full up it is a matter of years before it can properly be replaced. I wanted to mention these points only because I think the noble Lord has been a little unfair to the system that is worked with immense devotion by a magnificent body of men—magnificent from top to bottom.
I am particularly pleased to read in this White Paper that we have before us of the progress of mechanisation, doing away with manual exchanges. One would wish that those could all go rather more quickly than within ten years, although I myself must confess I rather regretted having the manual exchange removed in our village. It was so convenient that it did not matter if one did not know the numbers of one's neighbours; and if you rang when a friend was out to dinner the exchange would tell you where he was dining. One has really personal service. But we all realise that those exchanges must go. I do not, however, think they are entitled to first priority, because it is in the towns that we are suffering from shortage of staff, and manual exchanges are, on the whole, in rural areas where there is not so much of a staff problem.
Trunk dialling is coming in at a rapid pace now. We were right to say at the beginning that we should go for operator trunk dialling, which meant that the subscriber asked his operator for his number, and the operator dialled straight into the house at the other end, but clearly the next stage is for the subscriber to do the dialling. I was glad that the noble Lord mentioned the question of electronic exchanges—a matter which was of great interest to me at one time. Quite a bit of research work was started a few years ago, and I rather gather it has now reached the point where there is an electronic exchange working, I think at Skyport, London Airport, in addition to the Highgate Wood exchange. I gather that the Highgate Wood experimental exchange was made of a size suitable for from 500 to 600 subscribers, which is almost precisely the size of the

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electronic exchange that the Americans are themselves operating in the United States. So if I am right in what I am saying, the noble Lord will be glad to hear that we are not behind them in our development of the electronic exchanges.
Finally, perhaps I could ask the noble Lord who is to reply for Her Majesty's Government whether he could tell us a little more of the story of what Transatlantic developments are taking place. I know we have the one cable going, and I believe another is in process of being laid, but I think there are quite a number of new developments there, and I am sure it would interest us all if the noble Lord could tell us about them. But, in the main, if I may, I would very humbly give a word of congratulation to Her Majesty's Government for the steady progress that they are making. I do not in the least deny some of the deficiencies of which the noble Lord, Lord Crook, spoke, but I believe the Post Office have gone far further to correct those deficiencies and to make progress on the development of the telephone service than perhaps the noble Lord thinks.
3.28 p.m.
EARL ATTLEE: My Lords, I believe we are indebted to my noble friend Lord Crook for the full statement he has made. I was, at first, a little hesitant at taking part in this debate because I was Postmaster General 30 years ago and I felt I might be rather out of date. However, I took up the Hansard Report of the debate of last Wednesday in another place and I found that every single point that came up I could parallel in my own experience. Nothing seemed in the least changed. The complaints and everything else were just the same, and so I felt emboldened to make a few remarks.
I recall very well the time when I was at the Post Office. It was a time of very serious unemployment, and one of the problems was to develop the telephone service. I was given that job and I got an outside business expert to look into the whole subject. He made an extremely valuable report which came to my desk the day I left office. That report was faithfully implemented by the late Sir Kingsley Wood, but the com-
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plaints which we had then were just the same as we have had today. The Treasury always regarded the Post Office as a milch cow and milked it with very great regularity; and they did not feed the cow very much. The cow could have produced much more had it been properly fed.
There, we had always the old controversy about whether the Post Office was a business or a service. It is part of both. But some people said it was a business and we ought to have treated it as a business. I remember very well a friend of mine, then Sir Archibald Sinclair, who complained to me that we did not run it as a business. I said. "My dear Archie, if we ran telephones as a business I would cut off all the telephones north of the Highlands line because none of them pays". That brought him up with rather a start. The fact is, of course, that the service in all the remoter areas of the country is really paid for by great conurbations: the London area, the Midlands area, Manchester and so forth. From that point of view we cannot treat it just as a business. On the other hand, the Treasury always have a curious attitude—one probably inherited from Mr. Gladstone—that all expenditure is ipso facto bad, and while a private company can rejoice in having a capital of £10 million, which means that it owes £10 million to individuals, in the case of the Post Office it is not capital; it is a debt, a deadly burden. Therefore you could never get the Treasury to realise that it was worth while putting capital expenditure into the Post Office. I notice that there is to be some rebuilding and I hope that with that rebuilding some of the Gladstonian ghosts will be exorcised—got rid of, anyway. But I do think that that attitude hangs on, and I must say that I rather regret it.
Some figures I saw in connection with this debate referred to telephone progress. I recall that at that time, 30 years ago, we actually started advertising, which was regarded as a very dangerous and wrong thing to do. It was one of my few achievements that I managed to extract a sum for advertising from Mr. Philip Snowden in the summer of 1931. It had a most admirable result. As was pointed out by a Press magnate, there is a dose link between advertising and editorial colleagues, and whereas he had

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heard of faults, we had wonderful stories of how someone was on a voyage at sea and was actually caught by the diligence of the Post Office. That is all to the good. We should advertise. I found when I first went into the Post Office that there was a great reluctance to "push" the telephone, perhaps due to the over-conscientiousness of the head of that Department. When I told him that he was selling a certain commodity, distant speech, and that he was in competition with a man who sold a Hoover, he said, "Perhaps it is better for a man to have a Hoover than distant speech". I said, "That is an admirable social sentiment but it is not exactly business". I added, "Your job is to 'push' the telephone".
It is quite clear, when one looks at these figures, that there has been a failure to catch up with the numbers of people who are waiting for a telephone, and that there has not been enough capital put into the business. I entirely agree with my noble friend Lord Crook and the noble Earl, Lord De La Warr, that it is a splendid service, extremely efficient; but it cannot make bricks without straw, and it has not had enough straw. I hope there is a sign now of change. I am bound to say that I thought as long as 30 years ago that we had released the Post Office from the bondage of the Treasury. Certainly something of the sort was put; forward by the Bridgeman Committee which followed shortly after I left the Post Office, and I thought we had freed it. I am afraid that I have not followed it as closely as I might have during recent years. Although it was my first business as head of an administrative Department, the years that have passed between have taken away the "first fine careless rapture," owing to my being beset with many other troubles of one kind and another.
I think now that we ought to be able to find capital. If we had put some of the money that has gone into television into our telephones we should beat the Americans hands down. But there is a lack of discrimination in the allocation of our technical resources, and year by year the Minister has never known where he stood. I have seen that with successive Postmasters General. How can they plan, how can they deal with the future business of the telephone, when they
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do not know how much they are going to get from year to year? I do not entirely agree with the noble Earl, Lord De La Warr, that there has been steady progress. As I look at the figures I think that the progress has been very unsteady. With steady progress one would have seen certainly, if not a rising expenditure, at least a level one. You find that over the years it is up and down, up and down, and it is quite clear that there has not been long-term planning.
I should like to say one word with regard to the comparison with the United States of America. It is fair to say that it is the goodness of our mail services that prevents us from imitating the Americans. That is more polite than referring to the extreme badness of the American mail service. It is also true to say that while the services in all the great cities of America are good, I was always told—and I believe it is true today—that there is an uneconomic fringe. In our services we have the Post Office system, which does not depend solely on whether some part of the service is profit making but on giving an adequate service to all the people; and the method by which we pay the same for a letter to go to the next street as for one to go to Caithness is a very good example of that Post Office principle as against the principle of profit-making. I am sure it is time that these facts were ventilated, and I hope that they will be read, marked and learned by the Chancellor of the Exchequer.

THE NATIONAL HEALTH SERVICE
3.38 p.m.
THE LORD PRESIDENT OF THE COUNCIL AND MINISTER FOR SCIENCE (VISCOUNT HAILSHAM): My Lords, I hope that I shall be forgiven if I interrupt the debate at this stage, since it may be for the convenience of the House, and I hope it will be, if I read the material portions of a statement made this afternoon by my right honourable friend the Minister of Health. After referring to the net Estimates of the National Health Service and the Health Departments, which he estimated were likely to show a net increase of 11 per cent, during the coming financial year following increases of 8 per cent. in the

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current and 6 per cent. in the past year, my right honourable friend went on as follows:
" The Government are determined to continue their policy of developing the Health Service and in particular to carry through a long-term programme of modernising our hospitals. These objects would be in danger if the cost of the Service to the Exchequer were allowed to go on increasing at so high a rate. The Government have therefore decided that certain steps to reduce the net Estimates are necessary.
" The cost of a number of items for which charges are made has increased substantially since the charges were last fixed, and it is proposed to adjust them.
" The charges for dentures will be increased by amounts ranging from 5s. to 15s. On the other hand, in order to put more emphasis on conservation, the charges for dental treatment will not be raised; and children and expectant and nursing mothers will be relieved in future of the present charges for dentures.
" The charges for spectacles will be increased by 5s. a pair, with a higher charge for bifocal and multifocal lenses. However, it is proposed that children aged 10 or over shall no longer be charged for spectacle lenses in any type of National Health Service frame.
" The maximum charge for amenity beds in hospitals in England and Wales will be doubled from 1st March. The cost of the Pharmaceutical Services this year will be about £92 million gross, £80 million net. Since the charge for prescriptions was fixed at 1s. an item in 1956, the average cost of an item has increased from 5s. 1½d. to 7s. 4d. The Government are proposing to raise the prescription charge to 2s. per item from 1st March. We believe that this measure is necessary, along with others already taken or in hand, to restrain the increase in the cost of the Pharmaceutical Services.
" The Government have decided that from 1st June, orange juice, cod liver oil and vitamin tablets under the Welfare Foods Scheme will be sold at
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prices which cover the cost. The existing arrangements for refund of prescription and other charges will remain in force, and arrangements will be made through the National Assistance Board for the free issue of vitamin supplements.
" The Government also propose to increase the National Health Service contribution with effect from the beginning of July next by 1s. a week for the employed man (10d. from the employee and 2d. from the employer), and by the appropriate amounts for other insurance groups. This will increase the yield from the contribution by about £49 million in a full year."
After a reference to the necessary Resolution in another place, my right honourable friend continued:
" A Bill relating to the dental and optical charges will be presented tomorrow. Regulations altering the charges for prescriptions and amenity beds will be laid on Friday, and a new Welfare Foods Order will be made shortly.
" All these changes apply to Scotland, except that relating to amenity beds, for which in Scotland the charges are adjusted automatically.
" The effect of all the measures which I have announced will be to reduce the net Health Estimates by about £50 million in 1961–62 and about £65 million in a full year."
My Lords, that is the statement.
3.44 p.m.
VISCOUNT ALEXANDER OF HILLSBOROUGH: My Lords, we are obliged to the noble Viscount the Leader of the House for giving us this statement. Obviously, as we are to have two subsequent developments in the other place, by the introduction of a Bill and also some draft Regulations, it would be inappropriate to start a debate upon this statement. Nevertheless, I cannot help but comment that the total of the increases indicated, allowing for some slight adjustments downwards in other respects, seems to be a sort of combined attack upon the general policy of supplying the Welfare State. We shall have to examine this statement very carefully, and also look at the Bill, the financial legislation and the like, when they come in; but I think there is little doubt that

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your Lordships will require to have a fairly early debate upon this quite deliberate changing of the financial basis of the Scheme.
LORD REA: My Lords, it is a very useful and interesting tradition that when a statement of this nature is made in another place we are given it in this House. But, my Lords, it also has its dangers. It might lead to some sort of quick debate, which I think your Lordships will agree would be quite out of place to-day, on such a long and important statement. I do not propose to make any snap judgment about this statement except to say that I am not sure I can agree with the noble Viscount the Leader of the Opposition that this is an attack on the welfare services. Whether it is robbing Peter to pay Paul or borrowing from Paul to lend to Peter I think we must look into later; and I agree with the noble Viscount that the sooner we have an opportunity to go into this matter further, the more pleased we shall be.
VISCOUNT AMORY: My Lords, could I ask my noble friend the Leader of the House whether my memory is correct that, after this increase in the contribution of the stamp is made, the stamp contribution will amount to little more than one-fifth of the total cost of the Service?
VISCOUNT HAILSHAM: My Lords, I first of all thank both the noble Viscount and the noble Lord opposite for emphasising the undesirability of introducing to-day a debate on this subject, which is an important one, and on which arrangements for a debate will have to be made in due course through the usual channels. I would accept what the noble Lord, Lord Rea, has said: that this is certainly not an attack, or a combined attack, upon the Welfare State although, of course, these financial arrangements do effect important changes. I think it will be seen, as my noble friend put to me, that the burden borne by the stamps is probably less, proportionately, than would be supposed—and, indeed, that the actual burden is probably less than in 1948, having regard to the differences in levels of wages and other sources of income since then. But these are all matters we can go into. I realise they are controversial and I should not like, without precise information, to give a
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positive answer to my noble friend—he is much more likely to be right than I am —in the present circumstances.
LORD TAYLOR: My Lords, the noble Viscount the Leader of the House gave certain net figures at the end of his statement, saying the Estimates were reduced by certain sums of money. To what Estimates is he referring—the new Estimates or previous years' Estimates?
VISCOUNT HAILSHAM: The new Estimates, which are not yet presented. That was the intention.

THE POST OFFICE TELEPHONE SERVICE
3.47 pm.
Debate resumed.
LORD AMULREE: My Lords, the comments which I propose to make in this debate (I shall be very brief) will be based entirely on the Paper which I hold in my hand, which is called Post Office Capital Expenditure, 1960–61, Cmnd. 973. One thing which I am pleased to see in this Paper is that there has been some slight increase in the amount of capital expenditure incurred by the Post Office. But when I say that the increase has been slight, I should like to emphasise that that is what I really mean, because it has risen from £94 million in 1956–57 to £97 million in 1960–61, and there has been a good deal of wobbling about in between those two figures. I do not call that a very big increase, and it does not seem to me to bear any kind of relation (as, indeed, other noble Lords have said) to the profits which the service has made during that time.
Then, when I read further down this document, there was one comment that shocked me profoundly. That was where it speaks of the fact that repairs and changes could be done more quickly than they were, and says:
" Orders will be completed more quickly but this may stimulate fresh demands for service."
That is said as if it were a thing to be rather frightened of and rather deplored. Surely, that is a thing to be really pleased about. If your service is so good that you have more demands upon it, so long as you have a paying service you should be delighted. That is what any normal

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business firm wants, but that is not what the Treasury, who still, apparently, control the Post Office, want.
Then one can have no ground for much complacency, because, although orders are being cleared more quickly than they were, there are still some 48,000 people who want telephones. I admit that last year there were 68,000, and that a 20,000 reduction is something to be quite satisfied with: yet it is nothing to be very pleased and gratified about if there are still 48,000 waiting for a telephone. And supposing that the demands go up, I take it that we shall be back again to 68,000. At least, there is nothing, to make me think that that will not be the case.
Further, one wonders sometimes, although one must be extremely pleased with the way that all this modernisation of the service is going on—the extension of the dialling system and the other advances mentioned by both the noble Lord, Lord Crook, and the noble Earl, Lord De La Warr—whether the customer, the person wanting the telephone, is not being left rather behind in all these modernisation achievements to-day. Because, after all, the telephone service is for people who want a telephone. It seems to me no great consolation to the people who have not got a telephone to be told that there is a dialling system to-day where you can dial trunk calls direct. I wonder whether the emphasis is not a little on the wrong thing.
Another point which struck me in the statement was this: that apparently some 40,000 people are waiting for telephones because the lines are not available. I take it that that means there are not enough cables available. I would ask, why is that? Is it because of a lack of staff, or of the engineers making the cables, or a lack of raw materials, or what? It seems to me a serious state of affairs; that we have 40,000 willing customers for a telephone yet cannot get it because there is a lack of cable. That is the situation which one finds to-day.
Perhaps I may be permitted here just to give an illustration of one of my own personal experiences. In the part of London where I live, my telephone goes wrong about a couple of times a year. I would not say any more than that,
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but certainly twice a year it goes out of order. I must say that the Post Office repair it quite quickly: they are very nice about it. But they tell me that the cables are worn out; that they are no longer properly insulated. So these breakdowns occur. There again, if the Post Office is going to get a Trunk Dialling System going, is it not better to have proper and efficient cables instead of cables which go wrong all the time?
There is one case in point which occurred, I think, last summer. One Sunday there was a very heavy thunderstorm about lunchtime which lasted for about a couple of hours. When we "came round" from it, the entire neighbourhood where I live found themselves without telephones. That extended over to the Monday, the Tuesday, and the Wednesday. Then suddenly I remembered—due to some of my experiences as an old-time civil servant—that the only thing to do was to telephone the Minister's private secretary. I did that and I got my telephone back that evening. My next-door neighbour is a busy general practitioner: he did the same thing and got his telephone back in the same way; but the rest of our neighbours waited a day or two longer. I should think that if they can get one or two telephones restored, surely they can get them all restored. Otherwise, something is very wrong with the system generally.
There is another occasion I remember, about some two years ago. I wished to have one of my telephones moved from one end of the room to the other, which meant that a new length of telephone wire—not cable but telephone wire—had to be put in. The Post Office told me that it would take at least four months. I may say that perhaps that was a good thing, because by the time the four months came round I had forgotten why I wanted it moved, and it was not moved. It seems to me absurd that one should have to wait four months to get a telephone moved from one end of a room to the other.
Here is another example of a peculiar practice which I found existing in the Autumn of 1958. I have inherited, in Kent, a house where the telephone was in the name of a deceased relative. I had a considerable amount of correspondence with the Post Office with a

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new contract. I thought that there was nothing to do, and that they would put my name in the telephone book in due course, because I had signed a contract. But not at all. When the new book came out last year, my aunt's name was still in the book. I rang up and told them about it, and they said that they were not told to change the name; that another new book would not be coming out until 1962, so that had no chance of getting my name into the book until then. That makes it quite uncomfortable for me now, when the name of somebody who died five years ago is still in the telephone book, after I have had correspondence with the Post Office and signed contracts for a new telephone. Yet no one seems to trouble about that. It is that kind of thing which I find very trying indeed about the telephone service. I have no complaint to make about the men who carry out the work; they are first-class and work quickly and efficiently. The service is a good service in all sorts of ways, but it could be better, and I trust that this debate which the noble Lord, Lord Crook, has instigated will do something to relieve the position.
3.55 p.m.
THE EARL OF LISTOWEL: My Lords, I think your Lordships will agree that we have had so far a most interesting debate on the telephone service. Indeed, to my recollection it is the most interesting debate I have listened to since the war. We are all grateful to my noble friend Lord Crook for making this debate possible, and for his extremely balanced and well-informed speech on a very complicated and difficult subject, as anyone who has had anything to do with the Post Office would agree.
I think this debate has shown one thing quite clearly. This question of the telephone service, which is of very considerable public importance, is not the sort of matter that catches the headlines of the Press, but it is a subject with which your Lordships' House is peculiarly suited to deal. We have more time and leisure than the other place, and we are exceptionally well placed to deal with a subject of this kind. But I should like to ask the Government one question in this connection. It is the policy of the Government—indeed, legislative effect has been given to this policy—to have more junior Ministers and
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fewer Lords in Waiting. It is no reflection on the noble Lord, Lord St. Oswald: I am certainly looking forward to hearing from him a well-informed and extremely skilful speech. But he will agree with me that he cannot speak with the same authority as a Minister in the Department for which he is gallantly acting as spokesman on the Front Bench opposite. What I hope the Government will consider when they implement this policy, which seems to be finding favour amongst ex-Lords in Waiting, is that consideration may be given to allowing us to have the Assistant Postmaster General in this House when the Postmaster General is a Member of another place. We have had no direct representative of the Post Office—no Minister—in this House since the noble Earl, Lord De La Warr; and that was some time ago, because it was before I went abroad. I hope that that is a matter to which the Government will give consideration, because I am sure that it would give us the opportunity and the stimulus for further debates of this kind.
I am sure that all speakers in this debate were anxious to acknowledge the qualities of the people who work in the telephone service itself—the Post Office engineers, the research scientists, and the very large personnel engaged in its work. Whatever criticisms may have been made of the telephone service, they were not criticisms of the people who operate it. I think, if I may say so, that the noble Earl, Lord De La Warr, rather misunderstood what my noble friend Lord Crook said on this subject. I was so struck by one sentence in his speech that I made a note of it; perhaps I may quote it to your Lordships, in order to show that what I think my noble friend was saying was that the blame for the defects in the telephone service should be laid at the door of the Treasury, not at the door of the Post Office. The sentence in his speech which I noted down was this:
" The only trouble with the telephone service is top control coming from the Treasury."
I hope that I have quoted my noble friend correctly.
Now, my Lords, I think this is a point which is worth emphasising. My noble friend said that the telephone service in this country is backward—and this is a statement of fact with which I think everyone will agree—as compared with

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the telephone service in a number of other industrial countries; or, indeed, as compared with the telephone service in some of the smaller European countries, such as Denmark, Norway, or Switzerland. He said—and again I agree with him, though this is not a question of fact but of opinion—that the main reason for our backwardness is not any technical failure, because we have an admirable telephone equipment, an excellent manufacturing industry, and certainly no lack of demand (because everyone who has no telephone and can afford one is clamouring for one, and everyone who shares a line wants one of his own), but the fact that we have failed to put sufficient capital into the manufacture of telephone equipment.
What is the reason for this? Surely it is that we have been unable to ensure for the Post Office the normal programme of capital development that any big business enterprise would have. And, after all, the Post Office is a business enterprise rather than a Government Department, and should be looked at in that way. When the Government want to damp down capital investment as a matter of public policy, the first victims for cuts are always those who are under Treasury control; and it is really most unfair (I thought that my noble friend Lord Attlee made this point with great force) that capital should be allocated in this way and that the capital development of the telephone service should depend on the vagaries of the national balance of payments. It is impossible to develop any business in this way; but, in fact, this is exactly what happens. And we should not forget, in talking of capital development in the Post Office, that 90 per cent. of this is on the telephone service, so that in speaking of capital development we are really thinking of the telephone service.
As my noble friend Lord Crook pointed out, there has been this extraordinary fluctuation over the past five years in the number of new telephones, reflecting the changes in capital investment, ranging from 135,000 to 396,000 new telephones per annum. What is needed is a plan for sufficient capital expenditure for steady expansion over a definite period of years. My noble friend Lord Crook is thinking of three years and perhaps that is as far as we can aim.
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For myself I should have thought that a longer period would be even more desirable, but it may not be practicable. The Post Office Engineering Union, which of course has a very good knowledge of this problem, has proposed that there should be a five-year plan to increase the number of new telephones from 8 million to 10 million, at a rate of expansion of 5 per cent. per annum, which happens to be about double the present rate, which is only 2½ per cent. I must say that even that, in relation to demand, seems to me a not unworkable and not unattainable target; but whether that is a practicable target is not a matter about which I am able to form an opinion. I give this merely as the view of a responsible body which knows a good deal about this problem.
But what I am quite certain about is that any steady capital development, on which the telephone service of this country depends, is impossible unless the Post Office is given a greater measure of commercial freedom and is not bound tightly, as it is at present, to Treasury policy expressing the economic policy of the Government. Therefore, what I think we may legitimately ask the noble Lord who is to reply for the Government to say is how much more commercial freedom the Post Office will be given. I am glad that it is the policy of the Government to give the Post Office more commercial freedom, and that this policy has already been put into a Bill. But how far will this freedom go? Will it be limited to recurrent expenditure and revenue, or will it apply in some measure to capital investment as well?
The crux of the matter is whether the Post Office will be free to make firm plans for capital development over a period of years. It must be able to plan this capital development without fear of drastic cuts. I know that it is undesirable to cut the telephone service away from other services of the Post Office and hand it over to private enterprise. Private enterprise has done well in certain countries, but I do not think that it would be suitable here. But I would ask the noble Lord how far the Government are prepared to go to give the Post Office at least as much freedom as other nationalised industries, because this is the most important thing from the point of view of business efficiency and of a better and more efficient telephone service.
4.6 p.m.
LORD ST. OSWALD: My Lords, I can say with confidence and sincerity not only that your Lordships' House will be grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Crook, for launching this debate, but also that although this may not be the easiest time for a Government spokesman to answer a debate on the telephone service, the moment is apposite from almost every other point of view and therefore we can welcome it. There is scope at this moment for a progress report on the telephone service; there is material for such a report, and I hope to show your Lordships that most of that material is encouraging. The noble Lord, Lord Crook, was good enough, as he said, to warn me that he would be critical, and even informed me of the lines along which he would advance his criticisms. Other noble Lords have added theirs, including the noble Earl, Lord Attlee. I will attempt to answer or reassure as many critics as possible and will certainly write to noble Lords regarding any other criticisms that I may omit, either from lack of time or of immediate information.
At the same time, I am grateful for the fact that not all has been criticism; and on behalf of the Post Office I would thank particularly my noble friends Lord De La Warr and Lord Amulree and, of course, the noble Lord, Lord Crook, for some of the kindly remarks made. I shall try not to base my answer on only the best examples. Indeed, I hope that my method of selection will meet with the noble Lord's full approval. There is little or no difference between us as to the touchstones of an efficient telephone service. Fourteen months ago in another place, in opening his maiden speech for the Post Office, my right honourable friend said that the customer judges the Post Office not by speeches and statements of policy but by the time it takes to buy a postal order or to get through to the operator. Or one might add, by the time it takes to acquire a telephone with which to get through to the operator and the time it takes to get through to another subscriber. People who require telephones and are ready to pay for them are people who want to communicate with others without delay, and speed is of the essence. Delay is the principal target
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of criticism and the most general. Complete failure and frustration due to breakdowns is a great deal rarer.
Possibly I should announce in opening that what I shall not try to do is to persuade noble Lords that all their criticisms are imagined and that the telephone service to-day (I emphasise to-day) is exactly what we should wish it to be. That would be a great injustice to the directors and to the whole staff of the Post Office, who set themselves a higher standard than anyone else outside when it comes to the service they wish to give to the public. I shall try to persuade your Lordships that grievances come mainly from the aggrieved and that in large parts of the country telephone subscribers are perfectly satisfied with the service that they are getting.
I shall try to convince you that improvements are on their way and that it is better, as the Government believe, to aim at an entirely new and satisfactory service in ten years' time than to put off that day by temporary, costly and already out-of-date adjustments to the old model. I shall also seek to persuade the noble Lord and the House that in many respects, in comparison to other countries, we are not so unfavourably served as the noble Lord supposes and would have us suppose. Finally, and far more daringly, I shall submit that some of the admitted shortcomings of the telephone service to-day are owed partly to the character inherent in, or at least endemic to, the average British telephone subscriber.
First of all, since the Motion for this debate is based on the White Paper on Post Office Capital Expenditure, I should give as a background the general financial considerations which govern the service as it is and our future plans for it. No one is more anxious to develop the telephone service quickly than the Postmaster General and the directors of the Post Office, but the pace of that development is largely a matter of the capital investment which can be made available. Forming, as it does, part of the total investment for the public sector, this has to be, in our view, subject to Government control, together with many other important services, such as roads, hospitals and electricity. It will continue to be subject to this control, and policy on public investment must take into account both the aim of expansion and the balance

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between demand and reserves. For this reason, much as a guaranteed level of investment for, say, three or five years ahead would help the Post Office planning, there are definite difficulties in this for any Government, when so many factors can affect the economic situation over such a term.
We are well aware of the difficulties which uncertainty in investment imposes on the Post Office, and we seek to minimise them. Each summer proposals for Post Office capital investment, as well as those for other parts of the public sector, are considered and a figure proposed for the following year. If the national finances permit, at a later date the approved figure may be increased. This happened in the summer of last year, when the capital investment ceiling for 1960–61 was raised from £92 million to £94 million. Apart from this, the Post Office ploughs back a considerable proportion of its income into the business. Recent performance suggests that in future about two-thirds of the requirements of capital can be provided in this way, leaving only about one-third to be borrowed.
The noble Earl, Lord Attlee, and the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, asked principally about commercial freedom and mentioned the White Paper on the Post Office status. As we are slightly inhibited in a discussion of that subject, as the noble Lord, Lord Crook, agreed, because it is at present passing through another place and will one day reach us. I think the most I can say on this occasion is to quote from the described purpose of the Bill in this respect:
" Treasury responsibility for the Post Office would cease, except in so far as its activities affect the national economy generally, or where Post Office staff as part of the whole Civil Service are concerned. In practice this would mean that Treasury control over the Post Office would be restricted to three things—

(a) Pay, grading and conditions of service of staff;

(b) Investment control, including control of borrowing for the purpose of financing it (as for the public sector generally);

(c) Foreign exchange control.

Some months ago, the Treasury made a study of the extent to which public investment could be varied without serious distortion in the interest of employment policy. The conclusion was
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that it is not sensible to try to vary public sector investment more than marginally in any one year; that is to say, by from 2 to 3 per cent. In the case of the Post Office there is some scope for varying, at fairly short notice, our capital expenditure on the provision of local cables and installing subscribers' telephones. Much of the expenditure arises, however, from long-term projects already in hand as a result of decisions in previous years and cannot be varied appreciably at short notice. I can give noble Lords details of capital investment in recent years and that proposed in 1960–61 and 1961–62, but I would suppose that only the total figures are desired at the moment.
The approved level of total Post Office investment in 1960–61 was fixed in July, 1959, at £90·6 million (at 1958 prices—equivalent to £92·1 million at March, 1960, prices), but in September, 1960, in view of the buoyant demand for telephone service, the ceiling was raised to £94 million (at March, 1960, prices) and expenditure of £96 million for 1961–62 and a minimum expenditure of £100 million for 1962–63 has now been approved. These are, it seems to me, substantial figures, but a massive effort is required.
Already the telephone service is expanding at a record rate, and the noble Lord, Lord Amulree, is, I can assure him, quite mistaken in supposing that we take a sad view of this. I assure him that he misread the tone of that public statement to which he referred. There has been an upsurge of orders for new telephones, and more calls, especially trunk calls, are being made than ever before; and this gives us great delight. This expanding demand must be met at the same time as a huge modernisation programme, and the problems of carrying out both tasks at the same time will be clear to all noble Lords. All the same, achievements in meeting this demand have been rather more impressive than Lord Crook suggested. Lord Crook's figure of 135,272 for telephones connected in 1958 is accurate; but 1958 was, in all fairness, a freak year, the year of the "squeeze", and last year's figure of over 450,000, an increase of 13 per cent. over the previous year, is a notable improvement on the 2·3 per cent. given

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by the noble Lord, and is far more indicative of current aims and, I am confident, of coming achievements and trends.
Every effort is being made to prevent the number of those waiting for new exchanges or more cables (at present about 50,000) from rising, and to limit the waiting period to twelve months. The aim is to complete straightforward cases in a few weeks. Fewer and fewer people are now being obliged to share their telephones. Some 75 per cent. of the telephones supplied to residential subscribers in the past year were exclusive lines. It may be of some interest to your Lordships to know that out of the approximately 1 million telephone sharers in the country 700,000 are perfectly content with their condition, 20 per cent, or 200,000, are actively unhappy, and the remaining 10 per cent. do not mind particularly, but if given the choice would presumably choose an exclusive line.
What is equally important, as noble Lords have pointed out, is that improvement in service should accompany this, and there are many who are dissatisfied with the service as it stands. I should be doing small service to the Post Office if I pretended that all complaints were groundless, but I have proved in my own circle of friends and in my own personal experience that they can be exaggerated. That is almost inevitable. Men who use telephones frequently are busy men to whom minutes and seconds are important. For them, in fact I may say for us, the irritation caused by delay in getting through on a telephone is equalled only, perhaps, by that occasioned by a lackadaisical or indifferent taxi-driver, rara avis, happily, in this city.
Some weeks before this debate, I sat at lunch with three friends, one the head of a leading public relations firm, another the city editor of a national newspaper, and the other the London director of a development corporation in the Commonwealth. With almost embarrassing gusto they were ready to relate their own telephone experiences. All declared with great positiveness, that more than half the local calls they dialled failed to get through, due to a technical fault in the system; that they were rather surprised when they got through at the first attempt. I took note and investi-
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gated the three London telephone exchanges concerned. I discovered that unless the three particular connections complained of were uniquely and catastrophically bad, compared to the recorded behaviour of their respective exchanges, then the Munchhausen who lurks in all of us had joined us at that convivial lunch.
No doubt every noble Lord in the House to-day can relate frustrating incidents of his own and, indeed, one or two have done so. The noble Earl, Lord Gainsborough, mentioned waiting five minutes in order to get through to an operator. But your Lordships, being unselfish by nature and by definition, will be chiefly interested to know what your average compatriot suffers from the present state of affairs. In the year ended September, 1960, the average subscriber had to wait 8·6 seconds for the operator to answer an average call. His failure to connect at all varied, according to the type of exchange he was on; but, taking the worst type—that is, the director exchange—his failures attributable to the Post Office would have been less than three in every hundred calls he made. We aim to cut the waiting time down to five seconds.
The quality of service at present varies about the country, and the bad figures are confined to definite areas. In London, the Home Counties, the Midlands and North East England, we are far from satisfied with the service given at present. This is a passing state of affairs with rational causes—causes which are paradoxically encouraging in themselves. The rate of growth in telephone traffic in these areas over the past two or three years has been generally double the normal rate of growth, and most marked of all in South East England. This has overloaded the system generally, and in many places has produced staff shortages. In London we are about 10 per cent. under strength, and while we have endeavoured to spread the shortfall, some exchanges, mainly those in the centre of London are seriously affected by the inexperience of the staff. An intensive advertising campaign has been in progress for some time, but even so, it is proving extremely difficult to recruit sufficient people to balance wastage, let alone to provide for additional work. Some relief has been

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achieved by borrowing staff from provincial exchanges and by recruiting in some cases as far afield as Yorkshire for work in London. I shall return again to the question of staff raised by the noble Lord, Lord Crook.
By way of securing more intimate statistics, I looked up case histories of three private subscribers' numbers: Wallington 2620, Knightsbridge 7716 and Crofton 394. For my purposes they differed conveniently in their facilities. Wallington has a large and up-to-date manual exchange, Knightsbridge a large automatic exchange, and Crofton a small and old-fashioned automatic exchange. I looked at their experience of local calls, of short-distance trunk calls, and other trunk calls, and of faults requiring engineer's attention. The reports I received were as follows: against the national average time to answer of 8 seconds by day and 10 in the evening, Wallington's report said:
"Service slightly better than in other London exchanges but not entirely satisfactory. Time to answer 9 seconds by day and evening. Last reported fault was on the 25th of February 1960".
The Knightsbridge report said:
"Time to answer 15 to 20 seconds."
The Crofton report said:
"Time to answer has been over 12 seconds, but has improved a little recently. Four to 5 per cent. of calls fail due to plant faults. Equipment is old and of an obsolescent type. Several faults reported in last year. Installation is to be overhauled".
The noble Lord, Lord Crook, will have recognised the first of these numbers as his own, and will no doubt have guessed that the other two are mine. I was somewhat relieved to find that his service compares favourably to mine, and so do his prospects. Wallington exchange is likely to be changed to automatic by 1966 with the introduction of S.T.D.; Knightsbridge will have S.T.D. in 1962; but Crofton 394, although it will benefit by the replacement of plant in Wakefield in 1966, will have to wait until 1970 for S.T.D.
The telephone instrument, with its bell, dial and cord, is made up from some 200 pieces. It has almost the complexity of a radio set, but in most houses is liable to considerably rougher treatment. The open wire, where it is in use, is
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subject to the elements. Poles, pillars and cabinets are liable to be damaged in traffic accidents. Underground cables can suffer from excavations of other contractors, and by entry of water through corroded cable sheaths. The equipment in the exchange is precision equipment. The large exchanges, such as those which I have tramped over during the last few weeks, contains several miles of internal cable and millions of soldered connections. The thousand switches, which are the heart of such an exchange, have about 250 pieces each. Failure of any element in all this can cause a call to fail. None the less, to-day it is extremely rare for an exchange to become completely out of order. During the war we lost some exchanges through bombing, but in peace time only the small automatic exchanges in isolated parts of the country are likely to be affected, and this only exceptionally.
Our telephone service has been compared unfavourably to that of other countries. In certain respects, that is true. In other respects, it is the envy of other countries. My noble friend Lord De La Warr has already made the point of the cheapness of the service. Local call areas are, for instance, larger than in any country, and, of course, with the introduction of S.T.D. the whole country, including Northern Ireland, will become a local call area. I shall have, naturally, a little more to say on Subscriber Trunk Dialling. Also we have a far more generous provision of telephone kiosks than in any other country. The position of the lack of telephone kiosks in particular areas, drawn attention to by the noble Earl, Lord Gainsborough, is something that has not been brought to my attention before. So far as I know, telephone kiosks are being provided at the same rate as formerly, but I will definitely look into any given case.
The two countries most usually cited as being better served than ourselves are Switzerland and Western Germany. It might be fairer to compare London and Switzerland, rather than Britain and Switzerland. There are 1½ million telephones in Switzerland compared to 1¼ million in the City and County of London. The Swiss telephone service is completely automatic, and so is London's, where most of the subscribers were able to dial each other even before the war, a state of affairs which the Swiss

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have reached only in very recent years. In Switzerland, there are 30 telephones per 100 of the population: in London. there are 39.
Our system is more closely comparable to that of Western Germany, the areas and population served being almost the same. There are 8 million telephones here, compared with 5½ million in Western Germany; 15 per cent. of the population compared with 10 per cent. possessing telephones. In Germany, it is true that 99 per cent. of the telephones are automatic, compared with 82 per cent. here, and the Germans are also better provided with S.T.D. There is a factor here which affects the whole of our industrial comparisons with Western Germany. The Western Germany telephone system was almost completely destroyed by war-time bombing, and when reconstruction was started the most modern equipment was naturally installed. Before the war, our intention was to have 100 per cent. automatic exchanges by 1945, but due to the war many manual exchanges have had to be retained far longer than was intended. There is another respect in which we have a certain advantage. A telephone call from London to Switzerland or Western Germany costs 10s. for three minutes. A similar call from Western Germany to London costs 11s. 5d., and from Switzerland 12s. 7d. The same discrepancy in telephoning between London and Rome is 13s. 7d., and between London and Moscow 12s. 11d.
The Post Office participates, of course, in the work of the International Telecommunication Union and its consultative committees. There are also progress visits of technical and administrative personnel to and from other countries. In recent years, visits of Post Office teams from the United Kingdom have been made to Sweden, Germany, Switzerland, Holland and France to examine the operation of their telephone systems with a view to improving the efficiency of our own and to reducing our costs. A visit was made to America in 1958 to study operating methods, and this has produced valuable results, particularly in regard to training and supervision.
Many forms of development have been mentioned by noble Lords. Perhaps the most interesting and immediate is Subscriber Trunk Dialling, for which there
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is a very important reason for our being somewhat behind other countries. As my noble friend Lord De La Warr has explained, in the first ten years after the war the Post Office had to devote its main efforts to overtaking arrears of basic plant and to catching up with the backlog and meeting the rising new demand for telephones. All Governments since the war have considered that that was the right way to set about it, and I am quite certain of that myself.
None the less, ever since the war the Post Office has been looking to the future, undertaking an ambitious programme of expanding the network of long-distance trunk cables and installing automatic trunk exchanges in the largest towns. All this prepared the way for more extensive mechanisation, and the first Subscriber Trunk Dialling exchange was opened by Her Majesty the Queen at Bristol in September, 1958. The noble Lord, Lord Crook, has referred to the results. I have slightly different but corroborative figures. The immediate result for the people of Bristol was that trunk calls to places they could dial went up by 40 per cent., and have since increased to more than 60 per cent., above the number before the introduction of Subscriber Trunk Dialling.
Since the Royal opening at Bristol, work at other centres has been pushed ahead. All the places mentioned in the 1957 and 1958 White Papers which outlined the new plan now have Subscriber Trunk Dialling, or will have it very soon. Other important centres not mentioned at the time, like Rugby and Bolton, already have the new service. But this is only a start. Subscriber Trunk Dialling equipment is now being installed or manufactured for no fewer than 600 exchanges. By March, 1962, just over a year hence, about 300 of these installations, serving 1¼ million subscribers, or one quarter of the total in the country, should have been brought into service. This also confirms the noble Lord's hopeful figure. In another year the proportion of subscribers with Subscriber Trunk Dialling will have risen to 40 per cent., and by 1966 to 70 per cent.
By 1970 the Post Office confidently expects over 90 per cent. of all lines in the country to have Subscriber Trunk Dialling. The centres that will have

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Subscriber Trunk Dialling this year include many of the principal cities, such as London, Edinburgh, Belfast, Birmingham, Glasgow, Liverpool and Manchester. In London and five of the largest centres a new type of electronic equipment, using magnetic drums, will be installed—the first of its kind in the world. Last Wednesday, Peterborough joined the centres on Subscriber Trunk Dialling and next Tuesday Skipton will be added to the list. It seems clear from these facts, my Lords, that although the Post Office may not have been able to start its plans for mechanising the trunk service as soon as it would have liked, it is now taking great strides.
There is another aspect to this matter. While it is satisfying to be first in the field, I think that most noble Lords would agree that it is most important to have the best system. And from what I know of the British Subscriber Telephone Dialling system it is second to none in the world. For example, in many countries, including America, dialled trunk calls are no cheaper than calls made through the operator, and they are subject to a three-minute minimum charge. In the British system all dialled calls are charged in 2d. units, according to their duration, and short-duration calls can therefore be made very cheaply indeed. Even if you speak for three minutes, most calls are cheaper. The system of dialling codes used for trunk calls is simple and easy for subscribers to remember. In addition, the plans include a new coin box which is designed to give the benefits of a quicker and cheaper trunk-dialling service to the general public, as well as to telephone subscribers, and eventually these will be installed in all public telephone boxes in Subscriber Trunk Dialling areas.
Noble Lords have mentioned a number of specific matters in connection with the service, and I will try to deal with some of them very briefly, in view of the hour. The noble Lord, Lord Crook, mentioned staffing policy. The size of the engineering force—that is to say, workmen engaged on laying and jointing cables, fitting subscribers' telephones, installing equipment in telephone exchanges and on maintenance—required to maintain the telephone service to subscribers, is largely dependent upon the amount of capital investment made
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available. Ideally, many of the Post Office's problems—for example recruiting and training, associated with keeping this force up to strength—would undoubtedly be eased, as the noble Lord suggested, if a guaranteed level of investment several years ahead were possible. A certain amount of flexibility in the deployment of the force can, however, be achieved by switching people from one job to another.
In short, because of the size of the system, and because not all the engineering staff are employed on capital works—many of them are on maintenance duties—the effect of variations can be softened. Recently a thousand additional engineers have been engaged in the London area. One problem is the unusual wastage. Many girls having been trained by the Post Office almost immediately leave for jobs in hotels or large office buildings where the hours are less onerous. A shorter working week and new conditions of service which should help to make the Post Office telephonist's job more attractive are under discussion with the staff associations, and it may be possible to introduce them soon. There has been, as noble Lords remember, a "go-slow" move at the Mayfair exchange last year, but, I think, there has been no repetition of that at any exchange since then.
Direct inward dialling has been referred to, and this facility, which as the noble Lord, Lord Crook, said, enables calls from outside to be dialled to a firm's number and then straight through to the extension telephone without any help from a private switchboard operator, is an attractive one, but it involves complex technical problems. A number of schemes of this kind are in use on Post Office-owned installations, and the experience gained there has helped in planning the first non-Post Office project of this kind, at London Airport, which should be working in two years time. Meanwhile, the Post Office is actively studying the possibilities of its wider application.
Telephone service to trains was referred to. Trials of a telephone service to trains have been carried out in South Lancashire using the car radiophone stations. The results were in general good, at least equal to the quality of service from cars, but certain difficulties were experienced

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when trains were passing through tunnels. The provisions of public radio-telephones in trains is technically feasible, but the establishment of a satisfactory service would be very costly. There is not enough evidence of public demand at present to justify expenditure on such a service.
The ship-to-shore services have been mentioned. The facilities provided in the Post Office ship-to-shore telephone service are being extended. The V.H.F. ship-to-shore radio-telephone service is being introduced in two stages. The first stage, the equipping of Humber, North Foreland, Niton and Land's End radio stations, has already been completed. The provision, timing and scope of the second stage will depend on the demand for service. However, because it is known that many ships sailing from the Mersey are extensively fitted with V.H.F. radio equipment, the Post Office is considering equipping Anglesey in advance of the second stage. Until last year, passengers on deep-sea ships could obtain radio-telephone service only over the long-distance high-frequency circuits. They can now obtain medium-frequency service via coast stations at Anglesey, Land's End, Niton and North Foreland when they are within 250 miles of the United Kingdom. Further expansion will also depend on the demand for this type of service.
The noble Lord, Lord Crook, and others were interested in electronic exchanges, and I am happy to tell them that no limitation has been placed on research for electronic exchanges because of shortage of capital investment. The Post Office and the five principal manufacturers referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Crook—who because of their vast experience in research are able to make a unique contribution to this—have together made substantial progress. High-gate Wood was always regarded as an experimental exchange and was not expected to be economic. The number of possible electronic techniques that can be used to perform various functions required is large, and it was deliberately decided to employ different techniques in different functional sections of the exchange in order that their merits could be compared from all points of view—for example, economy, reliability and ease of maintenance. The ultimate aim
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is an economic standard electronic exchange.
The noble Lord has asked: where do we stand now? From the lessons already learnt from the model, and from the production of equipment, this sort of work is proceeding at high pressure to produce improved designs, so that British industry will retain its position in the forefront of telecommunication development and be able to offer in the world markets electronic exchanges which will be fully competitive with those of any other manufacturers. Your Lordships will not overlook the fact of the leading part that the Post Office has played in the use of electronic techniques to perform some of the more complex operations in association with traditional automatic equipment. For example, electronic "directors" to steer calls through the complex London network have been working at Richmond Exchange since 1952. The equipment for S.T.D. at Bristol, installed in 1958, is controlled exclusively by cold cathode electronic equipment, and more than 40 units of electronic equipment, embodying magnetic drums, for controlling the S.T.D. service from London and the largest provincial cities are now in production.
It is clear that those who have spoken in this debate insist upon such development, not simply for export, and will make the fullest use of it when it is perfected. But one of the problems besetting development generally is the comparative lack of enthusiasm among the normal telephone subscribers in this country for anything new. It may come as something of a surprise to your Lordships to learn that the average residential telephone user makes less than one call a day on his telephone, though the average for business and residential subscribers together is 530 a year. That is still less than one and a half calls a day. The comparative number in Japan is 2,000; in Sweden, Canada and the United States it is between 1,000 and 2,000. We have to stimulate the calling rate. The recent lowering of cheap trunk rate at night time and its extension to all day on Sunday, and the lowering of the cost of local calls from 3d. to 2·d. have all had this objective. Until that objective is achieved, it is rather as if every railway traveller in the country insisted upon having, a permanent seat reserved for him and used it only a few days in the year.

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The Post Office, in conjunction with London University, has recently started a joint research programme into the sociology of telephone usage. But the march of progress is not urged on by all subscribers. At Hemsworth, three miles away from my own home, the manual exchange is about to become automatic, and the newspapers have recorded dismay rather than self-congratulation in the village. Under the headline "Hemsworth will miss its Hullo girls" one paper claims:
" Hemsworth's switchboard is Hemsworth. Few telephone users in the area do not automatically regard the girl at the other end of the line as a sort of institutional friend and helper. People will have to fend for themselves instead of asking the girl to put them through to the butcher. One man in the neighbourhood has already asked whether, since he will have to work the dial himself, he will get a rebate on his rental."
Another paper, under the headline "Goodbye to a jolly Hello", records the opinion of the deputy clerk to the urban district council:
" I have been using the exchange for 26 years and for my money it is the best in the country."
In order to impress your Lordships with the innate conservatism of our countrymen I might mention that Hemsworth has the largest Labour majority in the entire country. It was maintained by my good friend Mr. Horace Holmes for many years, reaching the point of 38,000.
Despite this sentimental and in some ways endearing attachment for the obsolescent. I am sure that automation will be welcomed, as we have proved, when it becomes familiar. Already the telephone service is expanding at a record rate, both in the demand for telephones and in the number of calls, particularly trunk calls. This demand, however, has come before the current programme of mechanisation has hit its stride, and before it has given effective relief to telephone operators. The short-term result has been, inevitably, delay in providing telephones and, in some places, delay in answering calls, this being due to people becoming more telephone-minded. That, to us, is entirely encouraging.
It is a very different situation from that which confronted the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, during his period of office
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at St. Martin's. He has already recorded that he found it necessary at that time to appoint a firm of consultants, Messrs. Whitehead & Staff, to investigate and make recommendations in the matter of popularising the telephone. Most of these recommendations were, as he said, accepted and introduced. It may be the long-term result of the noble Earl's action which is posing us part of our problem to-day—a problem which has to be met by generous and discriminating expenditure.
My Lords, we are setting ourselves to provide a sufficient investment capital for the following achievements: To complete the conversion to automatic working of the remaining manual exchanges by 1970; to extend Subscriber Trunk Dialling to nearly all telephones, also by 1970; to provide for the rapidly increasing level of trunk traffic, and to expand the system to the extent necessary to provide services on demand and to eliminate entirely the waiting list. Your Lordships will appreciate that this is something like waging a war on four simultaneous fronts. There is no doubt that the voice of the country, as heard in your Lordships' House to-day, demands victory on all four fronts. So long as the continuing prosperity of the country can provide the capital equipment, I am confident that all those victories will be won.
THE MARQUESS OF WILLINGDON: My Lords, before the noble Lord sits down, can he tell us how he obtained the figure of 70 per cent. as the proportion of party-line users satisfied? I was never asked, nor, I think, was the district nurse.
4.47 p.m.
LORD CROOK: My Lords, I rise to thank all noble Lords who have taken part in this debate—the noble Earls, Lord De La Warr, Lord Attlee, Lord Gainsborough and Lord Listowel, and the noble Lord, Lord Amulree—for their contributions. I also thank the noble Lord who has just sat down for the nature of his reply and the way in which he has given it. I think he selected the way of replying that I should have done: he failed completely to answer one of the criticisms that I have put forward and he told us all of the wonderful world that we are going to have. It will be for

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me to come back in a year or two when we have not got that world, and to remind him of what he has said; or alternatively, if we have got it, to say how good it is that we have managed to get the things that we have been wanting to get.
Some of the information that he has been given in his brief was a little forgetful. There was a paragraph where we were told to think about cities in a completely different context from the open country. A little later we were told that it was right to compare London and Switzerland. I must take the noble Lord to Switzerland and show him the open country, the mountains and the snow, and the cables, and where they have to be taken. Perhaps he will then know that there is a little difference.
LORD ST. OSWALD: My Lords, I do not know whether the noble Lord has considered the difficulty of taking lines across open country or underneath the London streets.
LORD CROOK: I have. I have absolutely no doubt that I shall have to take the noble Lord to Switzerland, just as I have considered that he ought to come and spend a day with me with a stop watch, because he would need to do this in order to convince me of the accuracy of his figures with regard to the Wallington Exchange. He needs only to dial, where they have the dial— it is "WAL"—to find out how frequently he is unable to get Wallington and, in order to get through, has to bother the Exchange by dialling "100".
I deplore using personal material too much on an occasion like this, but, although I did not say so, I believe that one of the important things about delays is that when one has no dial one has no "999" service. In districts like my own, and those of many other noble Lords, ordinary fire alarms have been completely taken away and we have no alarm to pull. We are told that we have to rely on the telephone. If we were asked to rely on the eight-seconds' service I should be happy; but when a burglar is bashing someone over the head next door and I cannot get a number I am not
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happy about returns such as the noble Lord offers to-day from people using stop-watches with times given somewhere else.
The noble Lord has agreed with me on many other points. Clearly our S.T.D. system will be the best in the world when we get it. But in wanting a dial I am rather like the little boy in the Pears' advertisement—holding out my hand for the soap but never getting it. The noble Lord mentioned that the staff difficulty was closely related to capital investment, as it is in many other fields. As to the conservative nature of people in his own area not taking to new dials, I think they must have been influenced by the noble Earl, Lord De La Warr, in passing on some of his nostalgic reluctance to be rid of the girls.
As to new services, if the Post Office would be a little less conservative and embark on new services, I believe that it would get a return. Where it has done so it has gained. "TIM" was the first: it was a tremendous experiment, and a great success. And the Test Match score service, limited as it has been in the amount of service offered, has been a tremendous financial success. I believe that the Post Office has already picked up 7 million telephone calls on the limited Test Match score service offered. If the example of other countries in such services were followed, I think the Post Office would benefit. I understand the Post Office already has a Committee looking into that aspect. It is surprising what the public will respond to.
In Hull, the only place in the country whose telephone service does not come under Her Majesty's Post Office, I was surprised to find that the municipal service there instituted a "Call Santa Claus" service and last December made a lot of money with it. It is not for me to keep your Lordships further on an occasion such as this. Having thanked those who have subscribed to this debate, may I ask permission to withdraw my Motion.
Motion for Papers, by leave withdrawn.

AVIATION FUELS AND SAFETY
5.3 p.m.
LORD BRABAZON OF TARA LORD BRABAZON OF TARA rose to ask Her Majesty's Government, in view of the change by some Airlines from kerosene to petrol, "what price safety?"; and to move for Papers. The noble Lord said: My Lords, I hope your Lordships will forgive me for raising a question at this late hour (five o'clock is called "this late hour" in your Lordships' House) but we are all air passengers to-day, and safety in the air is something that is dear to my heart, for in my life I have seen too many of my friends killed. Flight was born of the internal combustion engine, and the internal combustion engine runs on petrol—probably the most objectionable fluid one could ever think of. We have been saddled with that fluid ever since. At one time we tried to introduce diesel engines. Some were made. They were too heavy and lacked boost on take-off; but of course it would have been wonderful had we succeeded, because there is a fuel which is almost non-inflammable. History is full of minor crashes of aeroplanes that have turned into bonfires and burnt the occupants. But we must not overstate the case. Over the course of years we have made aeroplanes flying on petrol safe, and were I not to say that I think I should be overstating the case against petrol. And when one remembers the millions and millions of miles flown per year without accident by aeroplanes driven by petrol, it will be seen that everything has been done to ensure safety and that that form of transport is a sound and safe method of travel.
I want first to make my own personal position clear to your Lordships. I am chairman of the Air Registration Board, and I have been fourteen years in that position. I would stress the fact that it is not in any way a political appointment. The Air Registration Board was set up by Statute. It is a curious body which would exist only in our country. The Board is composed of four people elected from and by the aeroplane manufacturing side; four by the operators; four by the insurance people and four by the general public. The Board has earned an international reputation and is highly thought of throughout the world. because it has done wonderful work. If there were any one criticism I could have
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of it it is its choice of Chairman; but that is the fault of the members.
To-day I am allowed to speak as a private person, and anybody who disagrees with me on what I am going to say is entitled to ask me: If you are on the Air Registration Board, and if you consider a turbine-engined aircraft running on petrol to be dangerous, why do you grant such an aircraft a certificate of airworthiness?" I must make that point clear to your Lordships. The business of the Board is to see that an aeroplane is airworthy in the air. We see to the strength of the structure, the choice of metal and materials, that the under-carriage is safe and the general design is sound. We also have the responsibility of proving that the aeroplane handles correctly in the air. Beyond that we do not go. What happens on a crash is really outside our province, and the question of the use of petrol in turbine-engined aircraft has never been raised on the Council itself.
Critics might say that the position we take up of not being concerned with crash-worthiness is not quite true; they could advance the fact that we are responsible, for instance, for the placing of sufficient exits in a new design of aeroplane. But we do not go further than that. In the amazing development of the airliner over the last 60 years, unlike motor car engineers, aeronautical engineers have invented a new prime mover in the form of the gas turbine; and for that we have to thank the great Whittle.
Whittle was always anxious that his engine should run on diesel oil so that the fuel then would be practically non-inflammable. His engine can run on that fuel, but at high altitudes, where the temperature is very low, there are difficulties about "gumming-up", and it has never been a success. Kerosene (or paraffin, as one may call it) has been used now for many years and it is extremely successful. The difference between running an engine on paraffin, as compared with petrol, is such that there is no advantage with one or the other. The efficiency of the two fuels is about the same. Experts will say that one has a little more heat value; on the other hand, it has not quite the range of the other. But in flight they are both satisfactory, and it is for that reason that the

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Air Registration Board is quite right in giving such aeroplanes a certificate of airworthiness. The point I wish to make to-day is a very narrow one, and I hope that your Lordships will appreciate that. It concerns the consequences arising in circumstances of a minor accident on a bad take-off or on a faulty landing when tanks are broken and fuel is spilt. I am not talking about great crashes where aeroplanes go into mountains or fall down from 6,000 ft. and everybody is killed; in such cases it is immaterial what fuel is used. But it is of these minor accidents on the ground that I want to speak to your Lordships to-day.
Your Lordships will appreciate the extra speeds indulged in to-day. When I first flew, my maximum speed was 40 m.p.h., and I landed at 30 m.p.h. To-day aeroplanes take off at 160 knots and touch down at 130 knots. Nothing will persuade me to think that that is really safe, but it works, and there are very few accidents at that speed on touch-down—a very remarkable thing. But what has to be noted is that, as aeroplanes advance in speed and complexity, the business of the pilot becomes even more and more important, because his work requires great precision and nicety of judgment. If your Lordships put yourself in the position of a pilot carrying 150 passengers and coming down at an airport at night, with rain and a side wind, you will appreciate the enormous skill and responsibility which are put upon his shoulders. But the accidents which I refer to are accidents which take place due to a bad take off or due to a swing on landing, when the passengers, by virtue of their belts, are comparatively safe. But when fuel is spilt fire results. It is that type of accident about which I want to speak to your Lordships to-day.
Accidents of that kind should not result in loss of life if there is no fire. But fire, as we know, occurs. It is difficult to say how the first ignition occurs. It may be due to shortage of electric currents, to spark from metal as it grinds along the concrete, or it may be due to the flame from an engine. But the fact remains that aeroplanes in minor crashes usually catch fire. We cannot get away from that fundamental fact. In those circumstances I was very shocked—I repeat, very shocked—to find that some
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operators were switching from kerosene to gasolene, and in the technical Press I issued a challenge. I said, "Let us imitate the conditions in which an aeroplane crashes on take off;I will go on to an aerodrome and I will spill 40 gallons of kerosene, stand in the middle of it and drop a match, if anybody who advocates petrol will do the same with 40 gallons of petrol". Curiously enough, my Lords, there were no takers. I did not get much support, especially from the Press, over this matter. I do not blame the Press in any way. The Press get great revenue from the big operating companies and from the oil companies, and I can quite follow their train of thought when they do not want to get involved in some riot which would occur between those two very great interests.
Anyhow, to my surprise, the great British Broadcasting Corporation rang me up and said, "Will you give a comparative exhibition of this on television?" I got my friend Mr. Rickard, who is a great expert on all questions of fuel, to attend with me—and he has been a tower of strength the whole time—and we repaired to Wembley and did the thing on a minor scale. We spilt eight gallons of kerosene and we attempted to light it. We threw matches into it; we had a blow lamp; nothing would make it burn—to our fury. At last we had to light a rag and put it into it and then it started to burn. But we did the same with petrol, or J.P.4 as it is called in this case. Very wisely, we did not approach too near. We threw a match and there was one "pfff" and a bonfire. That was with eight gallons. As I reminded people on that television service, if an accident occurs to a Boeing 707 on takeoff is not a question of 7 gallons; it is a question of 17,000 gallons. That would be a proper bonfire. Do not let us pretend that kerosene does not burn: of course it burns: the point is that the rate of propagation of the flame is so much slower than that of petrol. It gives one time to get out before the fire really gets going.
Let me give your Lordships examples of three recent accidents. There was a Lockheed-Electra which crashed at La Guardia. Something went wrong with the engine; it has not been decided what it was. Anyhow, it got into trouble and came down on its back. The tanks were

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burst and the fluid caught fire. But it was kerosene; it did not burn very quickly. We can imagine the state inside that aeroplane when it was upside down and people were trying to get out. But although it caught fire, all the 70 passengers and the five of the crew got out, with no casualties at all. We have the case of the Boeing 707 which swung off on coming down at London Airport. It did not catch fire, although the fire service there said that it was a marvel it did not, as kerosene was pouring out of one of the engines. Ninety-five passengers got out, and 12 of the crew.
Recently, again, when a Douglas DC.8 caught fire 102 occupants got out alive. Four of the crew were killed, but that was due to percussion, not to the fire. One hundred and two survived. I had a letter from someone in that aeroplane, Mr. Rushen, and he writes to me and he says:
" Mr. Mitchell and I were two of the British passengers in the Mexican Airlines DC.8 jet which crashed at Idlewild, and we are both utterly convinced that we owe our lives, as do all the other passengers, to the fact that this particular aircraft was powered by Kerosene and not by J.P.4 or any similarly volatile propellant."
These things are, I think, very remarkable and I hope that we shall not have to wait for an accident with an aeroplane using petrol to prove the point of the extra safety of kerosene. The point arises—and I suppose it is a legal point—as to whether if an aeroplane were fuelled unnecessarily with a more dangerous fluid it would constitute negligence; because, if it constituted negligence, claims, of course, would be unlimited and a case for manslaughter would arise. Those are very serious thoughts indeed. I am very proud of the two British Corporations. After all, they do everything they can for safety, and for running their enterprises satisfactorily; and neither of them has ever used, or has thought of using, any other fuel than kerosene—and we thank them very much for that splendid example of considering the safety of the public.
Your Lordships will ask me: what is the incentive to change from kerosene to petrol? The answer is very curious. I have to quote something said by Mr. Hagrup, who is a prominent member of the technical side of an organisation called I.A.T.A., which is a body made
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up of all the operating companies. Talking about the two fuels, he said:
" It is not possible to say which is the safer fuel. Nobody can say that one is safer than the other. They just cannot."
I entirely agree with that; but that applies in the air. From an operating point of view, that is perfectly true. But listen to what Mr. Hagrup says after that:
" The point is that if J.P.4 tends to become cheaper—it is not now, but it may become cheaper—then we must be ready for it."
I consider that remark to be very cynical, with no consideration for passengers, or anything at all; just a matter of whether it is cheaper. At present, it is about a farthing a gallon cheaper, which means, on a trans-atlantic flight, £15. It might well become a penny cheaper, and the difference would then be £60. Spread over 120 passengers, that is not a lot extra to pay for added safety. That is what I put in my Motion —"What price safety?". How much are we prepared to pay for the little extra safety it gives when there is the question of a crash? That is what we have to consider.
Your Lordships may well ask: what are we to do about this? The question is: what can we do about it? The great British companies behave themselves, and are an example to the world. The offenders—I name them, and I am not afraid to name them—are Sabena, T.W.A., Trans-Canada and Pan-American. They are the offenders. The oil companies are inclined to push them towards J.P.4 or petrol—for this reason: that, out of a barrel of oil you get more J.P.4 than you get kerosene. It is true to say that if all the air forces of the world used kerosene there would be a shortage, but it is up to the oil corn-panics to produce more kerosene out of a barrel of oil. So far, they are concentrating, by cracking, only on getting very high-volatile spirits for motor cars and such like. That is one of the urges that are going on to-day.
The Government could not possibly say that it is dangerous to fly any of these machines on petrol. That would be quite ridiculous, because more than half of the airplanes of to-day, of the piston type, fly quite satisfactorily on petrol. They cannot therefore do that. In fact, putting myself in the position of the unfortunate Minister who has to

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reply, I can see nothing that can be done. But what I do say is that it is a good thing to have this question voiced in this House, because passengers may realise that this danger exists. And if, when they buy their tickets, they would ask whether they were to be flown on petrol or kerosene, that would have a very big effect upon the running of the airlines by the operators.
If the, Government were prepared to go so far as to say that, within the very narrow limits of 'what I have been speaking about—that is, the danger of spilt fuel when there has been a ground accident—there is extra danger in using petrol instead of kerosene that would be, to me, quite satisfactory. Because if they said that, then that statement would hang over the head of any operator using J.P.4, and it would indeed be a very unpleasant situation to be faced with at any inquiry into a catastrophe concerning fire. My Lords, I beg to move for Papers.
5.16 p.m.
LORD SHACKLETON: My Lords, the noble Lord, not for the first time in his distinguished life, has followed an individual path; but on this occasion, I hope, this individual path, this rather lonely battle which he has been fighting, will become less lonely. It is a fact that he has fought this particular battle with surprisingly little support and surprisingly little reaction from people who ought, think, to have jumped in on the cause in which he has interested himself. We have an opportunity to-day in this House, and the Government have an opportunity, to make a contribution— not a very spectacular one (the noble Lord was extremely moderate in the presentation of his case), but a contribution to safety which may, sooner than we think, and certainly at some time, be responsible for saving some people's lives.
I think it is clear that the use of this alternative fuel—J.P.4 or petrol, or whatever we may want to call it—is not essential. The noble Lord has dealt with some of the arguments that have been used. I have heard of other arguments. It has been argued, even, that there is a danger of kerosene being less satisfactory at very great heights; and it is true that, under certain conditions, there may be little to choose between them from a safety point of view. But it is not in regard to those conditions that we are
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concerned: it is simply on this narrow point of a minor accident on the ground.
I am sure your Lordships all remember the first Comet crash before the disasters that really overtook the Comet which were essentially design disasters—the crash, I think at Rome Airport, where the Comet either overran or the nose-wheel collapsed and there were thousands of gallons of kerosene spread over the ground. At that time, the newspapers all pointed to the fact that on this occasion the passengers escaped because they had the advantage of flying in an aircraft, a modern jet, which was fuelled by kerosene. It seems extraordinary that we should contemplate for one moment throwing away the advantage that this fuel gives us. It is all the more surprising because the gains to the operators, in financial terms or in operational use, from using other fuel are so very marginal. They are marginal in the way that the noble Lord has said, when one compares the millions of pounds spent annually on maintenance, repairs and depreciation in a modern airline with the few thousand extra pounds, at the outside, which would be spent on using a safe fuel.
My Lords, the days of speed or of unrestricted competition in transport are gone. The public demand safety. They would not even tolerate some of the habits in some of the great railway races of the last century. Let us consider an alternative proposition. Suppose somebody came along and said that it would be cheaper, and aircraft would be faster, if they were to use yet another fuel—something which is, I agree, not practicable—like high-test peroxide or one of the really unstable fuels. We should all laugh at the suggestion. But because these two fuels are so narrowly separated, it seems possible they may use the more dangerous, as the noble Lord has mentioned, whenever they think they can get away with it. We do not think they are mischievous or unconcerned; they have merely decided—a hard, operational decision, they might argue—that they must use what, to them, seems the most efficient fuel. I am sorry that no one has yet taken up the noble Lord's challenge. It would be a pleasant spectacle to see the noble Lord standing in the middle of his 40 gallons of kerosene tossing matches around. We can all think of other people who might be candidates for the other test!

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This seems to me to be an absolutely clear-cut case. When we are spending such prodigious sums to-day on safety, when every day we read in the newspapers of some particular Safety Campaign, it is astounding that the newspapers, who claim, at any rate, that they have the public interest at heart, have not taken this matter up. I think this is an occasion when this House should give a lead, and I hope that the noble Earl who is to reply will give that lead. We appreciate that it may not be possible for him to say everything we want him to say, but we hope that he will at least make it clear that he is going to do something about it and make further representations, because I suspect that this is not the last time we shall hear from the noble Lord on this subject. I must say that the noble Lord will find a growing team of supporters who will accompany him, if necessary, on his special test-piece to prove the case that he is making.
This is an urgent matter. It is not one that we ought to spend a long time over, but it is something about which the Government ought, I believe, to make representations, whether through I.A.T.A. or through publicity of one kind or another. And, above all, they should make a really forthright declaration that they strongly support the policy followed by British airlines in using a safer fuel; that they deplore the presence on British airports of aircraft which do not use the safer fuel; and that they will, if necessary, bring pressure to bear on, or at least have talks with, the oil companies to find out what the true facts are with regard to any drive they may be making to use J.P.4. In particular, we should like to know how far the R.A.F. are using an unsafe fuel. I do not want to pursue that subject to-day, because we realise that we cannot go so far as we should like. But we should like to know, for instance, whether Transport Command are using J.P.4, or whether they are using kerosene.
LORD BRABAZON OF TARA: Kerosene.
LORD SHACKLETON: The noble Lord has answered my question. If Transport Command are using kerosene, this seems to strengthen our case.
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One of the most famous of last words among householders in days when fires would not light was, "Put a little paraffin on the fire". Provided it ignited at once it was not too dangerous. The danger with paraffin on those occasions was that it filled the room with an inflammable gas and ignited later. But it was far more dangerous when people put paraffin on a fire, and then found that it was not paraffin but petrol. I have known this happen with Primuses on expedition, as well as in people's houses. Yet we are prepared to play, not with small quantities of fuel, but with these vast amounts which the noble Lord has mentioned. I am sure your Lordships will expect a very forthright answer from the Government; and I am also sure that your Lordships will agree that the noble Lord, again not for the first time in his remarkable career, has rendered a service to the community.
5.25 p.m.
LORD OGMORE: My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Brabazon of Tara, put his case very mildly indeed. In some ways I think he put it too mildly. He certainly did not exaggerate it and use language which, like petrol, was inflammatory. The position, as I see it, is that it is largely a question of safety against availability. The noble Lord has said that he thinks the reason that there has been no support for him in his campaign is that the Press, having in mind its advertisers, did not like to offend either the oil companies or the aircraft companies. I should think that perhaps this is an unfair attack to make on the Press; at least, I hope it is. I, for one, cannot believe that the Press as a whole would, for those reasons fail to report a matter of this importance. I think the reason is that, as the noble Lord, Lord Shackleton, has said, no one came forward to support the noble Lord, Lord Brabazon of Tara. As I will tell your Lordships in a minute, I had very much the same difficulty, and it is because of that that the Press have probably held back.
So far as I am concerned—and, I have no doubt, so far as other Members of your Lordships' House are concerned — once the Motion was on the Order Paper we waited until it came up, so that we could give what views we have to your Lordships' House instead of expressing

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them outside. I think that is the right course to take. There seems to be no doubt whatsoever that kerosene—the highly-refined kerosene which aircraft use in these turbine engines—is much safer than petrol when an aircraft crashes to the ground. I should have thought that that had been proved beyond any shadow of doubt. Indeed, when I had an official connection with the Department concerned with these matters, and one of the great virtues of jet and turboprop aircraft adduced in those early days was this very fact, that if an aircraft crashed on the ground it would be very much safer if kerosene were used. The noble Lord, Lord Brabazon of Tara, has instanced several recent cases where there have been crashes with aircraft using kerosene, with few resultant fatalities, and in some cases no fatalities occurred. I can give him another instance where the same thing happened, and that was the case of the South African Boeing 707 which crashed in Nairobi and which the noble Lord probably remembers.
My Lords, I gather that the R.A.F. do not any longer use the J.P.4 petrol; they use kerosene. Also, the Fleet Air Arm will not allow any J.P.4 on a carrier; they insist on kerosene being used. So it looks, at all events, as if the Service Departments, the Admiralty and R.A.F., arid the two State Corporations, are quite satisfied about the safety of kerosene. That is, I imagine, a great mark in its favour. But it is not only kerosene and petrol which are at issue. There are other fluids in aircraft. For instance, there is the hydraulic brake fluid. There are non-inflammable brake fluids, but, for some reason, quite a number of operators will not use them but instead insist on using an inflammable brake fluid. These may be quite as dangerous, in some ways, as the fluids of propulsion which the noble Lord, Lord Brabazon of Tara, has mentioned.
I have been trying to find out why companies insist on using J.P.4 petrol. It is so obvious to us, why is it not obvious to them, that kerosene should he used? It is very difficult to find out, but I understand that it is not so much a question of price—indeed, very little a question of price— as of availability. It appears that the oil companies have not organised a world-wide supply of kerosene, as they have organised a world-
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wide supply of petrol, and therefore it is often difficult for operators to obtain kerosene in places where they would like to do so.
Why are the oil companies not organising this world-wide supply? That is the real question that we have arrived at in our process of elimination. Is it more expensive? Is it more difficult? Why are the oil companies taking up this attitude? If it is just a question of saving money on their part, it would be perfectly dreadful to think that they were risking the lives of people in this way for the saving of what, to them, must be a comparatively small sum. If that is so, I think it would 'be worthy of our greatest condemnation. But we have not heard their point of view, and I think they are entitled to tell us why they do not make kerosene available on the world-wide scale that is desired.
I suggest to the noble Earl that he holds an inquiry—if he wishes, a departmental inquiry; I do not mind what sort it is so long as it is held by competent people and so long as its results are published. I have had great difficulty in getting any of the authorities concerned to give me any facts upon this subject. The position in the minds of many of the authorities is not so clear-cut as we have put it to-day. When I asked questions they hedged their answers around with all sorts of qualifications. There was this and that to be considered. And I could not get any of the authorities officially to come out into the open, although they would sometimes do so unofficially.
Here is the view that I got from the aircraft insurance companies. One would think that they were pretty well concerned in this matter. I have cut down what was said because it was rather lengthy, but I do not think I am doing them an injustice. This is what they told me this morning. The insurance companies will support Government regulations, while reserving the right to make their own estimate of risk in fixing rates. So far, they have not noted firm rules as to the difference between fuels in air safety. Secondly, accidents lately suggest that in survivable crashes more people have continued to survive when kerosene is used. Thirdly, it is too early to say whether the situation is due to inherent physical difficulties, as so many complex factors are involved in

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ignition. Fourthly, since fire and survivorship are only two of the factors in overall airline risk rating, so far these factors by themselves have not made any significant changes to premium rates. That is the considered opinion of the insurance people.
In these circumstances, and in view of the fact that I have not been able to get clear-cut opinions from the authorities I have consulted, I suggest to the Minister that he would be doing a great service to airline operators, to the oil companies, to the travelling public and to the crews as well, if he held an inquiry on the lines I have suggested, so that we can clear up the facts, and the public, the authorities and the crews alike will know exactly what the risks are.
5.35 p.m.
LORD MERRIVALE: My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Brabazon of Tara, has rightly asked the question: what price safety? But I do not think that we should single out one particular factor involving the safety of passengers. Whenever one boards an aircraft there is an element of risk, and this risk is made up of a number of considerations. The type of fuel can be one of these considerations, but there are others, such as climatic conditions, possible mechanical failures, certain stresses that may develop, associated with metal fatigue. And these considerations cannot be overlooked. I think that they all form part of the risk in flying nowadays.
All forms of travel carry a certain risk—safety ratio, if I may put it that way. No doubt, due to conditions of taking off and landing, and to the simple fact that in the case of difficulty in midair one cannot just halt an aircraft and remain poised there, flying has a higher risk-safety ratio than earth-bound forms of travel. In matters of safety in modern means of travel, I agree that ail reasonable precautions should be taken; but, as in all things, a proper balance has to be maintained. One body of opinion may stress one aspect of safety precautions, while another body of opinion may consider some other aspect to be a greater risk.
If I may, I would quote some examples which have a certain bearing on the matter in hand. It has been stated that Transport Command use kerosene when
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operating from this country, but it is equally true to say that they are prepared to use kerosene or J.P. fuel, and it may well be that abroad they would use the other fuel. The noble Lord, Lord Ogmore, referred to availability. I am advised that the question of availability has something to do with the siting of refinery plants. Another aspect of safety is rearward-facing seats. Transport Command Britannias are fitted with these, while Comets are fitted with forward-facing seats. In all these matters there are various elements which affect safety, and they can be viewed from different angles. For instance, with regard to airlines, Air France planes will take on J.P. fuel only if kerosene is not available, and at the first possible opportunity will empty the tanks of the aircraft and take on kerosene. On the other hand, Trans-Canada Air Lines use exclusively J.P.4 fuel in their D.C.8 aircraft and in their Viscounts. With regard to the latter aircraft, the Viscount, these have been in service since 1955 with conspicuous success. There are other airlines—for instance, Sabena, as mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Brabazon of Tara, Pan-American Airways and T.W.A.—which use either fuel.
In the last few months the technical Press has rightly been devoting a number of columns to the fuel aspect of safety. There is a body of opinion that believes, with regard to the Mexican D.C.8 airliner which crashed on the night of 19–20th January, when taking off from Idlewild Airport, that had the aircraft been using J.P.4 fuel the number of passengers who would have escaped may not have been so great. But that has not been proved.
LORD SHACKLETON: Would the noble Lord tell the House also whether there is any body of opinion that takes a different view from that?
LORD MERIVALE: What I am trying to stress is that in this case it has not been proved that if the aircraft had burned J.P.4 fuel a similar number of passengers would not have escaped, because, in effect, the aircraft exploded; and I understand from Press reports that it exploded when passengers were within 50 feet of the aircraft. I am only saying that it has not been proved that had the aircraft been fuelled with J.P.4 a

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similar number of passengers would not have escaped. But, unfortunately, some of the aircrew—four I believe—were burned to death. The point I am trying to make is that there is no evidence available that had J.P.4 been used, a similar number of people would not have escaped.
Also on the question of safety, who can assess or deny the effect of taking off under conditions of a blinding snowstorm on the safety of the aircraft? It is not long ago that a B.E.A. Viscount was completely burnt out at London Airport. But in that case it was not the fuel that was responsible; it was the fluid of the hydraulics system which ignited on spurting out after the crash. Therefore, I think there is insufficient evidence available to dictate to the airlines whether they should use one fuel or another. I think it should be left to them to decide which fuel they wish to acquire, but, naturally, in consultation with the research departments of the main petroleum companies.
With regard to one or two of these companies, the official reaction of the one approached first, a British company with Dutch affiliations, was, "No comment." An American supplier was more forthcoming, and thanks to their co-operation I was able to appreciate the extensive research carried out and to note that particular care was taken by their research and engineering section to bring to the attention of the airlines concerned the important variations in the fuel properties that exist between the fairly light J.P.4 and the heavier kerosene.
I do not wish to weary your Lordships with technical details, but this comparison, which was based on a world-wide fuel survey, went into such aspects as energy content, burning quality, inflammability limits, cleanliness, static electricity and flashpoint. Here I should like to quote an extract from one of their journals, which is headed, "Some important characteristics of aviation kerosene and J.P.4." The writer says:
" The differences of particular interest to an airline are in the energy available from the fuel, the combustion quality of the fuel, its inherent cleanliness properties and the safety considerations associated with flammability limits and with unusual ignition sources."
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Therefore, I think it can be said that the petroleum companies have taken this question very seriously, and I should imagine that the advice they can give to the airlines on this matter is of the greatest importance. I believe it is right that the airlines, with that technical information which is available to them from highly qualified persons, should be allowed to decide for themselves what they prefer to do.
The question of the economic aspect has been touched on by other noble Lords, but, as is mentioned in the editorial of Flight on January 13 of this year, a significant economic factor which must be borne in mind, apart from the question of cost, is that operations are more often weight-limited—that is payload—than tank-limited. As has been mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Brabazon of Tara, J.P.4 does give off more heat energy—I believe in the region of 100 B.T.U.s per lb. Another important economic point, I feel, is that a far greater proportion of J.P.4 is extracted from crude oil. For instance, Saharan crude has a surplus of the lighter fractions; that is to say, petrol. That is an economic consideration. Other crudes will have various proportions, and all that has a bearing on the economic position. I assume, therefore, that if there were an exclusive demand for kerosene it might tend to put up the prices of this fuel. So it would seem to me, as I have said, that the airlines should be free to decide, so that a natural balance can establish itself; that is to say, a balance which would be regulated by normal supply and demand.
Finally there is one point on which I heartily agree with the noble Lord, Lord Brabazon of Tara. I do not think that many passengers take into account fuel considerations when they are booking a seat on board a plane, but in view of the noble Lord's Motion, I am wondering whether airlines might consider advising travel agents as to which aircraft, on the one hand, carry rearward-facing seats, which is a safety factor, and, on the other, which aircraft or flights carry the lighter or heavier spirit.
5.50 p.m.
EARL BATHURST: My Lords, it must surely be one of the greatest advantages of your Lordships' House that an expert such as the noble Lord, Lord Brabazon of Tara, can come here and, without fear

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or favour, give his opinion to your Lordships, and, indeed, to the whole of the world. Before I go further, I must say that I regret that at some points my speech has to be a little technical, but I will be as non-technical as possible.
The noble Lord, Lord Brabazon of Tara, who has initiated this debate, fully realises that there will be people throughout the world who will be awaiting the opinion of Her Majesty's Government with regard to the content that my noble friend has brought forward. I want to congratulate the noble Lord upon bringing this matter before your Lordships. We all know that he has devoted a lifetime to the service of aviation and to the aircraft industry, and, as he has told us, he is now Chairman of the Air Registration Board. I want to congratulate him and his comrades on the Board on the great services they have given, in particular, to the interests of safety in the air. We know that the noble Lord is also the holder of the first pilot's certificate issued by the Royal Aero Club, and I have no doubt that, remembering those days, my noble friend specifically brought out the hazards which face the pilot of a great commercial aircraft in these modern times. The noble Lord has a reputation for being forthright and for saying exactly what he believes. No one, if I may say so, navigates the slippery slopes of expert argument with greater precision, gallantry or success than the noble Lord, whether in your Lordships' House or in many places overseas.
For the Record, I must make quite clear the differences between three fuels which have been mentioned in your Lordships' House to-day because, unfortunately, the terms that have been used mean many different things to our friends overseas, and to our competitors in the air transport field. First of all, there is the high-octane fuel which the piston engine uses. The noble Lord called this petrol, and he went on mentioning petrol. For that reason, I must make these differences plain. High octane fuel is really a super high-grade motor car fuel. I am going to call it gasolene. I regret that term but, unfortunately, to our friends, particularly on the other side of the Atlantic, gasolene does mean and does include this particular type of piston-engine fuel. Unfortunately petrol
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does not mean the same thing to them or to many other people. So when I say "gasolene", I mean piston-engine fuel.
The next fuel that we deal with—and this is what we are really concerned with in the noble Lord's Motion—is turbine-engine fuel, either paraffin or kerosene. Those are slightly different, and I am going to use all through my speech the term J.P.1, which your Lordships will have heard the noble Lord use at times. J.P.1 is really aeronautical paraffin. The second type of fuel (and this is the fuel with which the noble Lord is especially concerned) is what our American friends call wide-cut gasolene; which is different from petrol as we know it; different from gasolene as the Americans know it and different also from kerosene—in other words, J.P.1. In English language it would be somewhere between the lowest grade of motor car petrol and what we call paraffin. For aviation purposes it is called J.P.4, and I shall always refer to it as J.P.4 when I mean this wide-cut gasolene.
There are differences in the two fuels. The noble Lord, Lord Brabazon of Tara, and the noble Lord, Lord Merrivale, described some of them. The main points your Lordships will be interested in is that J.P.1—that is, the paraffin-type fuel —has a higher flash-point, as it is called, than J.P.4. That means that J.P.1 needs a higher temperature to make it burn and, because of this, normally burns much more slowly. That is really the difference between the two fuelswith which the noble Lord is concerned, and it was the difference of burning of which he gave such a dramatic demonstration upon television. Nevertheless, as the noble Lord, Lord Merrivale, showed, J.P.4 is claimed to be more reliable—an element of safety in aircraft operation—in certain technical circumstances. One of these circumstances is claimed to be in conditions of cold. It is also claimed that J.P.4 has a higher output of heat per pound weight of fuel carried. That is also claimed to be a very important technical advantage with regard to modern aircraft.
I confirm that the difference in price is really negligible at present. The noble Lord, Lord Ogmore, mentioned this point in his speech, but there is only a negligible difference. Only in certain places is it

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difficult to get one fuel or the other. In most aerodromes both fuels are available.
LORD OGMORE: That is not quite the point. What these companies are afraid of is that there is not a worldwide availability in sufficient quantities—that is to say, if everyone were to use it. That, I gather, is their fear.
EARL BATHURST: That could be so if everybody used it. However, if that should happen, no doubt it would be possible to make more of it. As the noble Lord has made that interruption I will go on to a point I was going to mention later. B.O.A.C., who are probably one of the largest users of such fuel, find no difficulty at all, I am informed, in obtaining it at all the major aerodromes. It is where airlines operate principally from the Service aerodromes that there may be difficulty. I confirm what the noble Lord, Lord Brabazon of Tara, has said; that jet engines run perfectly well with equal operational safety on either of these two fuels, J.P.1 or J.P.4. I think it is an important point to emphasise to ordinary air travellers. In fact, there is no reason at all, in so far as operational safety is concerned, why these two fuels should not be mixed together. Sometimes they may have to be mixed, and it makes no difference to the safety of the operation of those engines, as indeed the noble Lord told us. It is the narrow view of the crash which the noble Lord has described that we are concerned with to-day—the crash where large quantities of fuel are spilled and yet passengers live. The question is, which fuel is going to give them the greater chance of escape before there is burning or before there is an explosion?
The first point which all airlines and air operators have to bear in mind in considering this problem is that all fuels used in aircraft engines are highly inflammable and represent a potential fire hazard. In normal operation the actual risk to the passengers and crew has been almost eliminated by careful attention to the design and construction of the aircraft that is where the noble Lord, Lord Brabazon of Tara, and his Board are especially concerned, as he described. Piston-engined aircraft, which must use gasolene, still exist in very large numbers throughout the world.
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I was asked by the noble Lord, Lord Shackleton, to give a lead. I do not think he will expect me exactly to go the full way that he would like me to do, but I should like him to note the words I am going to say next, because I believe that when they are considered they are as strong a lead as I can possibly give to your Lordships to-night, All British operators use J P.1, together wih the major world airlines. Only a few foreign airlines use J.P.4 for some of their operations with turbine aircraft. There is no difficulty to B.O.A.C. in obtaining the J.P.1 that I have described. If that is the opinion of our two great airlines with the support of my right honourable friend, that goes a fair way, I think your Lordships will agree, in giving the opinion of Her Majesty's Government with regard to this question which the noble Lord has brought up. However, I agree with the noble Lord that there is no appreciable difference in safety as between the two types of fuels while in actual flight; and the noble Lord described the reasons for that.
I have indicated, as the noble Lord, Lord Merrivale, also indicated, that there are various technical arguments for and against the use of J.P.1 and J.P.4. These arguments are derived from the known properties of the two fuels and the empirical evidence of known accident cases, where the use of J.P.1 has appeared to give the better chance of survival. The noble Lord, Lord Brabazon of Tara, described some of those accidents most graphically.
It is clear that this is a subject of great technical complexity, and the noble Lord, Lord Merrivale, mentioned some of those problems about which there is still considerable controversy among aviation experts. This has been shown by the considerable space given to the matter in aviation magazines and in the Press in recent months in articles concerning the respective merits of the two fuels. With your Lordships' approval, I will place in the Library the fully collected cuttings that have appeared in the technical Press and other places with regard to these two fuels. The noble Lord, Lord Ogmore, and the noble Lord, Lord Shackleton, mentioned how difficult it is to get hold of both sides of the argument, and I think probably this is the first time it will have been done,

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to have both sides in one sheaf. I much regret that it was not possible to have these in the Library before, but I am afraid that I removed the only copies available.
LORD OGMORE: My Lords, may I intervene? I did not say that the difficulty was in getting hold of the argument, but in getting anybody to make up his mind and give a definite opinion.
EARL BATHURST: I think I have given a pretty considered opinion about what B.O.A.C. and B.E.A. and other English operators consider. When the noble Lord sees these articles he will see that there are pros and cons; and I have mentioned some of the difficulties with regard to J.P.4.
LORD SHACKLETON: Perhaps I may interrupt the noble Earl. I was not quite sure whether he had finished giving the lead he had promised. Have we now had the lead, in the sense of the Government's opinion on this matter?
EARL BATHURST: The noble Lord has had the lead; I think I made it quite clear that the opinion of B.O.A.C. and B.E.A. and the other operators—backed by my right honourable friend; obviously it must be backed by my right honourable friend—was that they would not be carrying out the policy complained of. The noble Lord will hear a little more in a moment or two.
In view of the technical controversy that we have just been talking about, which has still to be resolved, we must be careful in making premature judgments on the evidence which is at the moment available, and some of that evidence will be seen in those cuttings. An empirical study of accident cases, however, does point to the probability that in certain cases where passengers have survived impact J.P.1. has afforded a better chance of escape, either because it has not ignited —that is, the fuel has not ignited—or because the spread of the fire has been slow; and that is exactly the point the noble Lord, Lord Brabazon of Tara, so dramatically demonstrated. That is the second part, I think, of the lead showing the way my right honourable friend is thinking. In a moment I think the noble Lord will see that there will be another,
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too, in conjunction with the opinion of the noble Lord.
This tentative conclusion must be tempered by the fact that the number of these accident cases is too small to provide convincing statistical evidence in favour of J.P.1. And I certainly hope, my Lords, that we shall never have an accident to a plane using J.P.4. with such results as the noble Lord, Lord Brabazon of Tara and others of your Lordships envisage. That would be tragic. Many cases are known where piston engines using gasolene, which is probably more dangerous in these conditions than either J.P.4. or J.P.1., have crashed heavily and yet have not burst into flames. That is not an inexplicable point. It has happened many times, as your Lordships are aware, that an aeroplane using this gasolene has not burst into flames. But far be it from me to use that as a reason why the noble Lord's experiment should not be of vital interest regarding the two fuels, J.P.1 and J.P.4. Amid this welter of technical argument and counter-argument which has abounded in the present controversy, perhaps the only conclusion which the average air passenger can draw is that the J.P.1 fuel has, as the noble Lord, Lord Brabazon of Tara, has dramatically demonstrated to us on television, a theoretical safety advantage over J.P.4 in the limited type of crash which the noble Lord considered to-day. It is significant that in a statement in the Aeroplane, a technical magazine, on January 6, a spokesman for one of the major airlines using J.P.4 also agreed with this conclusion, but in the following words:
" In the type of accident that results in fuel being spilt on the ground J.P.4 is more likely to ignite if there is a spark above it than kerosene, and this is all that Lord Brabazon is talking about."
That is a point of view. The article then went on to say
"Unfortunately it is far from the whole picture."
Then the writer advances the various technical counter-arguments, some of which the noble Lord, Lord Merrivale, has put forward.
LORD LATHAM: My Lords, is not that the kind of argument which history records was used against the Plimsoll Line?
EARL BATHURST: My Lords, I have not said whether I agree with this argument or not. I am saying only that there is a most technical argument taking place and that there are always two technicians with two different ideas. I should not like it to be thought that the case is simple or clear-cut, as possibly might be thought from the results of the noble Lord's dramatic experiments. It is much more complicated, and that is why I beg to put that piece of evidence on the other side before your Lordships.
LORD AIREDALE: My Lords, may I intervene for just one moment? I think the noble Earl was not doing the noble Lord, Lord Brabazon of Tara, full justice just now in saying that the quotation he read out said that the noble Lord, Lord Brabazon of Tara, was concerned solely with the likelihood of ignition. I do not think the noble Lord was concerned solely with the likelihood of ignition; he was also much concerned with the rate of spread of the fire if there was an ignition. His point was that if there is an ignition kerosene causes a much slower rate of spread of fire.
EARL BATHURST: I thank the noble Lord for what he has said. I hope he appreciates that in what I read out it is not myself speaking; that is an expert opinion from the other side. It is exactly what the noble Lord is saying—that is the opinion of the noble Lord, Lord Brabazon of Tara. For that reason, I think the noble Lord will be pleased with what I have to say in a few moments.
With the high approach and take-off speeds of jet aircraft which the noble Lord mentioned, these types of accidents are likely to occur at take-off and landing with a heavy load of fuel. Due to the public interest and concern, largely due to the words and actions of the noble Lord, Lord Brabazon of Tara, the Government have carefully considered the argument that in these limited circumstances—that is, in the circumstances of an accident such as the noble Lord described, and the circumstances which the noble Lord, Lord Airedale, mentioned just now—J.P.1 fuel may have a safety advantage over J.P.4.
The Government have also consulted the Air Registration Board, whose statutory duty it is to advise the Minister on airworthiness and safety matters, as indeed the Board's Chairman has just told
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us. The Council of the Board have recommended to my right honourable friend in the terms that the noble Lord, Lord Brabazon of Tara, has already mentioned. However, the Board recognise that, in certain limited circumstances only, after an accident has occurred, J.P.1 may offer better prospects of escape. This is the considered advice of the Board. That, with the limited evidence at present available, has therefore led Her Majesty's Government to conclude that there is a prima facie case that in certain limited circumstances after an accident has occurred the use of J.P.1 fuel may offer the better prospect of escape to passengers who have survived the impact, because of its lower volatility and higher flash-point. That is exactly, in technical words, what the noble Lord, Lord Airedale, has just said.
I think there is a third lead which the noble Lord, Lord Shackleton, will be pleased with—at least, I dare to hope so—and, above all, that the noble Lord, Lord Brabazon of Tara, may be pleased with. It must be remembered, however, that considered statements by some of the airlines using J.P.4 have said that in certain conditions J.P.1 is less safe than J.P.4, and that, taking all factors into account, J.P.4 is the safer and the more reliable fuel. That goes against what the noble Lord, Lord Ogmore, said, but it is derived from some of the reasons given by the noble Lord, Lord Merrivale.
LORD OGMORE: My Lords, I do not think I dealt with that point at all. I do not recall dealing with the in-the-air comparison between J.P.I. and J.P.4 at all. I will look at Hansard, but that is not my recollection.
EARL BATHURST: The noble Lord gave me the impression that he did not believe that there were any factors in favour of this J.P.4 fuel.
LORD OGMORE: I said that there were no factors in favour of J.P.4 as compared with J.P.1 when it came to a crash on the ground; that was the point I was making. After all, this is the limit which the noble Lord has to some extent introduced into this debate. We are not discussing the relative factors in the air.
EARL BATHURST: I am afraid that there are many factors. I am only trying to do my best to draw the attention of

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the noble Lord to what experts on the other side of the J.P.1 fence have to say with regard to this other fuel.
LORD OGMORE: I am much obliged. The noble Earl has been most courteous. I just want to say that it is not my argument. I do not say that it is not an argument, but it is not mine. It was for this very reason that I asked for an inquiry. I think that is the only way to settle it.
LORD SHACKLETON: My Lords, we fully conceded that of course there are factors in the air that had been put forward. The noble Lord mentioned that and I mentioned it. I wonder whether we can be told what the arguments are in favour of J.P.4 from a safety point of view in the air?
EARL BATHURST: That would be a most technical thing to have to do. But one of the arguments in favour—I do not by any means say that it is an overwhelming one—is in regard to water in J.P.4. There is much less water, and therefore much less to freeze. Therefore there is less likelihood of a filter blocking. There is also the argument that there are little bits deposited inside the fuel tank in J.P.1, rather than in J.P.4. There is also static electricity, which was mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Merrivale. I mention that only in deference to the noble Lord, Lord Shackleton. But I am quite certain that the noble Lord, Lord Ogmore, was not convinced that there was anything in favour of J.P.4, and it was for that reason that I brought his name in, to do my best to show him that there are, in fact, technical opinions on the other side.
LORD LATHAM: My Lords, the noble Earl would agree, I suppose, that the factors which he has mentioned do not prevent either B.O.A.C. or B.E.A. from using J.P.1?
EARL BATHURST: It is the opinion of B.E.A. and B.O.A.C. and that of other operators. Far be it from me to say that that is the only opinion that exists. I do not think I can go further in regard to what other operators may do. I can only put forward an indication of the factors with regard to the two fuels. After that digression, in view of this prima facie case which I have mentioned
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in favour of J.P.1, and in order to verify the precise significance or size of this possible safety margin, which the noble Lord, Lord Brabazon of Tara, has mentioned, in favour of J.P.1., the Minister of Aviation has decided that further technical studies will be necessary to establish the actual position. These studies are now being put in hand. I think they will go a long way to please the noble Lord. Lord Ogmore, and also the noble Lord, Lord Shackleton, who mentioned an inquiry. I cannot say how long this will take, or how the results can be published; but no doubt the noble Lord, Lord Ogmore, will not be slow in putting down a Question in due course with regard to that.
LORD OGMORE: My Lords, this is a most important statement which the noble Earl is making, as he and we all realise. It is most important to all of us to know, first of all, that there is to be an inquiry—he can, if he likes, call it a study; it is the same thing—by competent people (as I am sure they will be); and secondly, that the results will be published. I think that is equally vital. If the noble Lord would go so far as to say that, it would be most comforting to us.
EARL BATHURST: I will go so far as to say it is going to be a most detailed technical study, and my right honourable friend has himself personally instituted this study which is about to take place at this moment. With regard to publication, I would rather the noble Lord, Lord Ogmore, asked a Question on that at a reasonable time in the future.
Her Majesty's Government also considered whether any immediate action is necessary, either nationally or internationally. As I have already said, no British operator is using J.P.4 except on the very rare occasions when J.P.1 is not available. Therefore, there is no need for my right honourable friend unnecessarily to use his regulatory powers with regard to the issue of a certificate of airworthiness for aircraft registered in this country. The Air Registration Board will continue to recommend for certification to the Minister aircraft fitted with turbine engines using either J.P.1 or J.P.4: and as I have indicated, and as the noble Lord, Lord Brabazon of Tara, mentioned, that is perfectly safe during flying operations.

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A further important consideration in reaching this decision was that refusal to certify British manufactured turbine engines for use with either fuel might adversely affect the export of aircraft and engines to countries where J.P.4 is in use. It had also to be borne in mind that on rare occasions on world routes aircraft may be forced to use J.P.4 because J.P.1 is not available. That point was covered by the noble Lord, Lord Ogmore.
With regard to the international situation, Her Majesty's Government have no powers, except those of persuasion, over the choice of fuels by foreign airlines. The Government have raised this issue informally at recent conferences of the International Civil Aviation Organisation which the noble Lord, Lord Brabazon of Tara, mentioned, and tried to stimulate interest among representatives of other countries, but without finding any positive support. In the present climate of opinion among international aviation authorities and foreign airlines, it is clear that any attempt by this country to secure effective international action will depend principally on whether the detailed technical analysis which my eight honourable friend the Minister of Aviation is to carry out enables us to present to I.C.A.O., the international body, and to world air lines a more convincing case than can be presented at the moment. The Government will, however, pending the Outcome of these technical studies and whenever it is possible, do their best to explore international opinion on the possibilities of international action, on the lines I have indicated.
In finishing, I want to thank the noble Lord and those who have participated in this debate. I thank the noble Lord for bringing this vital subject, a subject of life and death for the future. before your Lordship? House. I assure the noble Lord that his efforts do not go in vain. As I have indicated, it is a subject at present uppermost in the mind of my right honourable friend.
6.24 p.m.
LORD BRABAZON OF TARA: My Lords, I should like to thank very much noble Lords who have rallied round me in this particular debate, and especially the noble Lords, Lord Shackleton and Lord Ogmore. Lord Ogmore brought up a point which I must say slipped my mind: that of availability. which in this particular case is a very good one. But the noble Lord said I attacked the Press. I did not mean to do so in any way. I have never accused them of any unworthy motives in this matter. All I wanted to point out was that they were in great difficulties and consequently did not quite know what to do.
The noble Lord, Lord Merrivale, made a very interesting speech but not actually about the subject; because the subject is the very narrow one of spilled fuel in a ground crash, and we must not go outside that. I am very obliged to my noble friend Lord Bathurst. I must say I kept on thinking of what I should say were I in his shoes; and I could not have bettered what he said, because he slipped over the difficult ice in a most remarkable and accomplished way.
The noble Lord, Lord Shackleton, asked me what were the points in favour of J.P.4. I could make my case, because I know the subject from both sides, but it is a question of the order of magnitude of the points. When we come to the experts they will say, "That point is in favour of this and this point is in favour of that". But what we poor passengers have to consider is: are we going to be burned when we arrive by a bad crash, or not? If paraffin is being used we have a chance of escape, but with J.P.4. there is "not a chance in hell", and no amount of inquiry or anything else will disabuse me of that conviction. I have pleasure in asking leave of the House to withdraw my Motion.
Motion for Papers, by leave, withdrawn.
House adjourned at twenty-seven minutes past six o'clock.