SOUTH-EAST ENGLAND

HL Deb 15 April 1964 vol 257 cc448-66

2.39 p.m.

LORD TAYLOR rose to call attention to the White Paper entitled South East England (Cmnd. 2308) and to the South East Study 1961–1981; to the need for urgent action if the welfare of the people of the South-East of England is to be safeguarded; and to move for Papers. The noble Lord said: My Lords, this Motion is concerned with a White Paper and a Study document, both of which are interesting and surprising. If I had produced the Study document and had handed it to Mr. Harold Wilson as a draft policy statement, I am quite sure that he would have had me "on the carpet" and given me a thorough "ticking off", for it is, I am afraid, a painfully amateur production. I am sorry to have to say this about the work of some anonymous civil servants—because it is written by civil servants—but the Government lave published it and it is the Government who must take responsibility for it. They have published it with a great deal of splendour, both typographical and diagrammatical splendour. But when I was young I was told not to judge a book by its cover. I would now add: do not judge a book by its diagrams. They are very good diagrams, but that does not necessarily mean that it is a very good Report.

It is a surprising Report, and the White Paper itself is a surprising document because it represents a death-bed conversion of the Conservative Government to planning. It shows that at least they are capable of learning, even if they are late developers. They are twelve years too late, and even now I am afraid their planning is rather half-baked—or, to be exact, third-baked, because one-third of the expansion of South-East England which is proposed here is to be planned, and two-thirds is to be disordered, subtopian, speculative building.

One almost feels that the Government are suffering from intellectual schizophrenia. It has been said that this year they will accept anything. Certainly they are accepting various Reports which are mutually incompatible. They have accepted the Buchanan Report. I think they were right to accept that Report, though I am sorry they did not accept the Crowther proposals which were a practical possibility. The Buchanan Report makes recommendations very different from those in this South-East Study. The Buchanan Report describes Newbury as an ideal small country town and expounds how Newbury should be developed from a traffic point of view. This Study proposes to make Newbury into a great new city. The Buchanan Report views with alarm the growth of outer traffic. This Report not only accepts commuting but proposes to increase it. It also looks as though the Ministry of Housing must not let the Ministry of Transport know what it is doing, and vice versa. As for Dr. Beeching and his recommendations, I am going to leave them to my noble friend Lord Stonham, who has—I will not say a bee in his bonnet on the subject; he has a hornet in his bonnet, and a very fine hornet, too.

There are only three places proposed for expansion in this Report whose rail services are not either cut or to be cut by Dr. Beeching. They are Stansted, Colchester and Chelmsford—my noble friend Lord Stonham tells me that Colchester's services are cut or to be cut, too. So this is not really quite what we mean by planning. One cannot help contrasting this Study with the classical Barlow, Uthwatt and Scott Reports, and the Abercrombie Report which I have here. Those were scholarly documents. They have some mistakes in them—we all make mistakes when we set out a plan—but I can compare them with the Robbins Report which also was an excellent, scholarly job. But this is nothing of the sort. It seems to have been something rushed out in order to get something on to paper.

To take one single example: when one is dealing with forward planning and population statistics the usual course is to take three hypotheses. Nobody quite knows what is going to happen in the future about population, so one takes a maximum figure, a probable figure and a minimum figure, and that is what the Registrar-General will supply if one asks him. But here we have only a single figure, only a single assumption without alternatives, not the three projections which we ought to have.

We do not know anything, or we know very little, about the real movements of population. This is not the Government's fault, because at the moment they do not have the new Census statistics. We guess that young people, for example, when they get married try to acquire a flat in central London and then, when they start having a family, move out to the suburbs and face commuting be- cause they want a garden. But this is only a guess. What matters when it comes to projecting the housing needs of the population is not the actual population itself, but the rate of family formation, the rate at which people are getting married and setting up homes for themselves. So far as I know, we do not find the words "family formation" mentioned in this document. It is all done in terms of absolute population. If we take the period up to 1981 we should be able to say what the rate of family formation will be, because almost all the children who will be forming the families are already born. It is not the children who are going to be born in this period who will be forming families and creating new homes. But we have nothing of that.

Equally, it looks as though the people who wrote the White Paper had not really considered the Study. The White Paper describes the influx into London as still continuing. As a matter of fact, the influx into London ceased, so far as central London is concerned, back in 1901—and, indeed, the Study makes this clear—and so far as Greater London is concerned it ceased ten years ago. So it is, literally, a first study and it is quite correct in saying in the preface that they are "tentative proposals". I wonder whether it was wise to publish tentative proposals. It certainly gives us an opportunity to debate them at an early stage, and that may be a good thing. But it can be contrasted with the two publications on Central Scotland and the North-Eastern area, both of which were published as White Papers, instead of as a tentative study like this.

One thing that does emerge from both publications is very important. It is that whichever Party wins the next Election, it is certain that we are going to have a planned environment, because by accepting these proposals the Government have committed themselves as much to planning as are we committed. They have been forced into this by the logic of events. It is our duty in Parliament to see that the plans are good. I have spent about 25 years of my life, first planning health services, and then helping to plan a New Town, and I have learnt two simple lessons. The first is that planning is a means to an end. It is not an end in itself; it is just a means of achieving something, and I think the aim and objective of this sort of planning is a good life for all the people. The second lesson I have learnt is that in planning there must be endless attention to detail. When planning fails, it is almost always because not enough care and imagination and thought have been given to the problems in advance.

The first piece of imagination that was needed was the capacity to see Britain as a whole. Britain is a tiny country. It has only moderate climatic variations compared with the United States or any of the countries of the world which are great in physical area. Yet we have crowded down into the South-East to what can only be described as a ridiculous extent There are 16,300 square miles in the South-East, in the area covered by this Study, which is 28 per cent. of the area of England and Wales. Why on earth not include Scotland and Northern Ireland when one thinks of Britain?—because any sort of physical planning ought to cover the lot. If you do that, the South-East is 17 per cent. of Britain and into that 17 per cent. we have got 18 million people, which is 35 per cent. of the population. So double the share of the population is concentrated in the South-East of England.

The first fault in the plan is the assumption that the South-East is an artificial entity. You may say, "We must deal with England in bits, and Britain in bits, in order to work out our plans". But we must look at the country as a whole as well. The second assumption on which this plan is built is that there will be 3½ million more people living in the South-East in 20 years' time and that the drift to the South is going to continue. Is this assumption true or false? I think we can take it as probable that there will be a 2½ million increase in the population, owing to excess of births over deaths, in the next 20 years. What we ought to be asking ourselves very carefully about is: is it necessary to accept a one million gain by migration from the North to the South during this period? I do not think we ought to accept this as inevitable. I think it is an absolute confession of failure to make the rest of Britain attractive. It is perfectly possible, and I think it is desirable, to have a slight net loss by migration. The South-East has not always been a magnet pulling people down here. There was a time, that of the Industrial Revolution, when migration was up to the industrial Midlands and the North, and it could happen again if we wanted it to happen again.

If your Lordships look at the changes in London itself—and you will find them shown graphically and, so far as I know, quite correctly, on page 31 of this document, in Figure 15—you will see that in the last ten years the population of the L.C.C. area has declined by something between 5 and 15 per cent. This is a very large figure indeed, and it is only in four areas—namely, Roehampton, Wandsworth, Tooting and Balham—that there has been a small increase. The reason for that small increase is the massive physical reconstruction in those areas by the L.C.C. of sites where there were very large dilapidated Victorian houses, a number of which were destroyed in the bombing. Then, if we look at most of the Outer London boroughs, we see that they also have shown a decline of up to 5 per cent.—places like Tottenham, Walthamstow, Greenwich, Willesden, and so on; and we have had a reduction in the population, not only of Inner London but of middle London as well.

This is not some supernatural, or even natural, change; it has occurred because we have had a planned outward migration from London, and it was planned by my noble friend Lord Silkin. He did the trick because he saw this had to be done if we were to rebuild London at decent levels for the population. From 1951 to 1961, greater London's population fell by 583,000 people, even though the number of homes in London went up. Londoners are living better because fewer of them are having to share homes; and, of those who are leaving London, a quarter of a million have gone with their work to the new and expanded towns around London. So it is not just a natural process that happens by the force of economics or something of that sort. London could have packed up its slums, just as the slums of New York have packed up, if we had not had a planned outward migration policy. The simple truth is that people go where there is work and money and homes: it is as easy as that.

My Lords, we have had this problem with the health service. We have had areas where we could not get enough doctors. So what did we do? We paid the doctors more to go to the under-doctored areas, and it has worked; and we stopped them from going to the over-doctored areas. Exactly the same can be done with industry and with homes and people, so long as both work and homes are provided. If we move jobs 20, 40, 80 or 120 miles out of London and build the homes, the people will go.

If a factory goes to a New Town, what happens? Eighty per cent. of the people from London will move out with that factory; and the 20 per cent. who stay behind are the old people, the people who have very tight links with their old community and do not want to leave. They are not the people who are going to have a lot of children; they are the people who are, as it were, biologically past their reproduction span, so that they are not going to add to the population of London. It is the folk who are going out who are going to have the big families. In the long run, these people who go out with their families to these New Towns are delighted with the change. Our plan ought to be to reduce the population of Greater London—and by that I mean London inside the Green Belt—to a point where every family can have a separate home, and by a separate home I mean their own front door and their own bathroom and lavatory. Those, I would say, are the ordinary human minima that we all ought to have. At the same time, our plan ought to be to reduce, not to increase, the commuting to London by car or rail until those who want or have to commute can do so in comfort.

The third mistake of the Study is, I think, that it has greatly underestimated the dwellings needed to relieve the existing shortage inside London. Your Lordships will find, in paragraph 35, that it estimates that 150,000 dwellings are all that are needed to relieve the existing shortage inside London. There is a gentleman called Westergaard, who works at the Centre for Urban Studies, and in this book, London, he makes the estimate of 300,000—not 150,000; and he thinks that the real figure may be considerably higher. Now where have they gone wrong? I think they have gone wrong—and I stand open to correction here, since I am guessing—because they have taken the Census figure for multiple occupancy, and I think I am right in saying that the Census figure omits people who are "doubling up" with their in-laws. It gives the figures only where two families are living together, and not where people are still living with their in-laws. It is these concealed families that account for their underestimate.

I should like next to say a word or two about London—that wonderful city of my noble friend Lord Morrison of Lambeth—and the sort of London which I, and I think many of us, would like to see. It is a unique city. Historically, culturally, economically and politically it is a wonderful place; but physically a lot of it is still a mess. The fact that much of it has been cleaned up and cleared up, and given a face-lift, is largely due to the work of the L.C.C. I think that anybody who knows working-class London well will be amazed at what the L.C.C. has achieved in the last fifteen or twenty years. The London I want to see is a London with green wedges, green fingers, extending pretty nearly to the centre. This idea is not new; it is in the Abercrombie Plan for London. We have one of those fingers very nearly in existence now. It starts at Regent's Park; then there is a gap; then Parliament Hill Fields, Hampstead Heath, Ken Wood and Highgate Golf Course.

Why should there not be five or six of these great green wedges reaching into central London, so that every boy and girl, every human being, can get into the country within half a mile or so of his or her home? It ought not to be beyond our powers to say, "We will do this, even if it takes us 40 years to do it". In our little New Town at Harlow, we have done just that. We have started from scratch, and we have got the green fingers right to the centre. What is the effect of this? Every main road to the town centre runs in a green finger, with no houses on it. Every secondary school is located on a green finger, so it has playing fields at its door—really lovely playing fields, just like Highgate or Dulwich College. I cannot think of a single secondary school in Inner London which has playing fields tacked on to it like this. Almost all of us who went to public schools went to schools where the fields were adjacent to the school; and what a difference it made! I should like to see this in London, for all London children. If they can do it in Harlow, we can do it here.

We in Harlow have been rather criticised for building to low densities, and I would say just a word about density, not apropos of Harlow. Architects are like ladies: they are very prone to change the fashion. It is perfectly all right with ladies, because their fashions last for only two or three years; but with architects fashions last 60 or 70 years, and if they make a mistake that is a little bad for the people, who have to go on living with a fashion for all that time. The latest fashion is for what is called "high density", but not with high buildings. The result of this fashion is that every house, instead of having a garden, has a little backyard, which is called a patio. This is thought to be very good, though I must say that I think it very bad. I believe that we should experiment with it, to see if it can be any good; and that is what we are doing in Harlow. But I have yet to meet the architect or the town planner who has brought up his family in a high-density area, with a patio and no garden. The people who have to live in these houses are being condemned to this for sixty or a hundred years; and that, I think, is wrong.

Now I want to move out of London and pause for a moment at the invention of my noble friend Lord Morrison of Lambeth, the London Green Belt, the London countryside. It is not yet properly planned and used as it ought to be. The possibilities of Epping Forest, Scratch Wood, Burnham Beeches, Thames Side, the rivers Wey, Mole, Roding and Lea, are just beginning to be realised. If you look at the other Abercrombie plan, the Greater London Plan of 1944 (and a jolly good document it is!) you will find on page 171 a picture of the Lea Valley developed as a recreation area for Londoners. It is a splendid potential place, with great areas of water, with the River Lea and plenty of potential parkland. We call it the Lea Valley Green Wedge, and I am pleased to see that the Civic Trust were re-proposing this development about three weeks ago. Yet the Lea Valley has not been made a lovely place for North East Londoners—simply because it is nobody's business to do it. We must tight for our Green Belt, and keep it; or, as The Times has said, it will die the death of a thousand cuts. We must extend the Green Belt and in extending it punch purposeful holes in it where we shall have our expanded or new towns. But we must not let it just be nibbled away, or the while concept will be ruined.

Beyond the Green Belt, we get into the main area of South-East England. It is in this hinterland, and beyond, that most of the new inhabitants of the area will have to live. By 1981 there will be an overspill from London, estimated in this study at at least one million, though, for the reasons I have already given, I think that this is an underestimate of at least a quarter of a million. Even if we halt the drift to the South the natural increase in population of all these towns around London—and remember that it is the younger folk who have gone to these towns—is such that we shall have to find work and homes here for between 21½ million and 3 million people in this time. This will he some job; and it will take a lot to do it.

First, is there room for it? In this so-called region there are altogether some 9¼ million acres, of which just over 1¼ million acres are already built-up. Towns for 3 million people, at 15 people to the acre (that is the net figure, including the roads and the shops and the garages; if these last items are excluded the figure is about 45 people to the acre) would take 200,000 acres of that, leaving 7¾ million acres so far unbuilton. So it will be seen that on that calculation there is plenty of room. If all the people were packed into high flats, at 150 to the acre, it would save just one quarter of this, or 50,000 acres, at the price of masking most of these families less happy for the whole of their lives. But there is room to do the job, though some people will lose their land and are bound to suffer. We can build the towns we want, with tall flats for those who want to live in them, and homes, and gardens, for those who want to live in those, and still leave 7¾ million out of 9¼ million acres of open country in the South-East.

The Government have at long last accepted the principle of more New Towns. I have long been urging that we should have started one New Town a year; and if only we had done that we should have come very near to solving this problem, because it is always the early stages that are so difficult in starting a New Town. Choosing the right site is not just a question of having a look round and putting out a pin: it involves a very careful study of all sorts of factors—the building of the initial services, the water supply, the sewerage and the roads. Until two or three years have passed, you do not begin to make an impression. If only we had started one New Town a year, what a wonderful situation we should be in to-day? But it is twelve years too late.

The New Town machinery designed by my noble friend Lord Silkin has worked wonderfully. It has worked wonderfully for two reasons. First when an area is designated for a New Town the land in that area can pass into public ownership, as it is required, at existing use value. This means that when we are building new roads we are not suddenly faced with enormously inflated prices which are reflected in the rents or the prices that people must pay. Here we have a simple piece of socialisation which worked successfully, and, indeed, has been commended by the Minister of Housing in another place. He has accepted it and said it ought to be extended to the expanded towns; and he is right. The second reason why the New Towns have worked so well is that they function as socialised business enterprises. They are much more like the B.B.C., as it were, than a conventional local authority with its multitude of committees and its tendency to get a play of local forces with, on occasions, I am afraid, a tendency towards delay.

However, there has been one great tragedy about the New Towns, and that is that over the last few years they have had to run down their staffs. They have got in sight of the end, and their excellent staffs have been largely, but not wholly, dispersed. Now a number of them must go into reverse. I have always thought that each existing New Town corporation ought to have a daughter New Town about twenty miles further out, and it ought to start planning that as it begins to complete the building of the first New Town. So here we have a group of people, a highly-skilled staff, with the necessary expertise, who are all keen on the job, and yet seeing the job run down. How splendid if they could have gone on and done the job again, with the new ideas which are coming all the time, in the daughter town a little further out. I certainly strongly commend that conception to the Government of to-day and that of the future as a way to get on quickly with this job of starting the next generation of New Towns.

I now want to say one word about the achievement of the expanded towns and what has been done by the London County Council and those boroughs who have co-operated with them. They have had a very hard job to do because the Town Development Act was not as good as the New Towns Act. Nevertheless, the London County Council has managed to get twenty of these expanded towns going, and at last it has begun to see some fruit for the tremendously hard negotiations, it had to do with all the local authorities concerned. For example, there are Swindon, with about 4,500 houses built; Bletchley, with 1,500 or rather more; Luton rural district, with 1,500. As a result, I believe that about 12,000 or so new houses have been built in, and 153 firms have moved to, these expanded towns, due to an immense amount of work on the part of the L.C.C. All that is a good piece of work, but it is equivalent to only one New Town and I cannot see that we have any hope of solving the problem of this great increase of population in the South-East by the expanded town machinery. We have to use New Town machinery to do it. And I think the Government have at last realised that.

Over the past 15 years, we have had a lot of experience in building New Towns and we ought to have kept a record of our successes and failures, but we have not done so. I want to suggest three or four simple rules which should be considered when it comes to selecting places for the new populations we have to look after. Easily the most important single question is water supply. One can build sewage disposal plants and meet transport problems, roads are not so difficult to build and two-thirds of industry can be located anywhere without detriment because it is what is called "foot-loose"—it is not tied to a particular locality because of local conditions.

If we look at what is proposed here and what we have done already, I think that the mistake we have made and are making is to concentrate too much on the Thames Basin. We have neglected the area of the Great Ouse, which produces so much water in its lower parts that we have had to cut a second channel to get the water away at times of flood. We have neglected the valleys of the Nene, the Welland, the Witham and the Waveney, and we have neglected the Broads. In fact, the neglect of East Anglia is an extraordinary thing, and I am glad that my noble friend Lord Wise is going to say something about this.

The second rule about New Town building is that we ought to take a conscious decision whether we are going to build on what is virtually virgin land or around an existing town. It makes a dickens of a lot of difference. If we build around an existing town, the existing town centre is almost certain to have to be pulled down in due course, because there are few existing town centres of small towns which are anything like big enough to cope with these enormous expansions of population. The only two New Towns which are built on more or less virgin land are Harlow and Stevenage, and if you look at these towns you can see how they have not been circumscribed by existing town centres, as at Crawley and Hemel Hempstead. If there is an existing town, I think it is much better to treat it as a small peripheral neighbourhood and build very much to one side. But in every case a substantial town has been chosen for the proposals in this study.

The third thing is distance between towns. I think we ought to aim at an absolute minimum of ten miles between towns, with green belt in between. Here I want to say something about the existing arrangements. The New Town area is designated, and inside that area the development corporation has the proper powers. But there ought to be a green belt all round—let me call it a delineated area—within which the development corporation should keep an eye on the green belt as such and do something towards upgrading the villages in the area. These villages become extremely important. One of the problems of getting industry to move to New Towns is that the industrialists do not want to live in the towns. They tend to live in the villages round about, and it would be a very great help both to the town and to the villages themselves, if they could be properly developed, rather than left to develop in a straggly, sprawling sort of way around the town.

One word about the size of the town. Nobody knows what is the optimum size of a town. One would only say that the town should be such as to bring together within a convenient space—and that means convenient for all its citizensh—home, work, shops and social services. The bigger a town becomes, the more the criss-cross journeys develop, and it is really this criss-cross travel inside a town that sets a limit to its desirable size. And just a ward about the homes in the New Town. I have already said that, when young people get married, they are only too happy, for the first part of their married lives, to live in a flat. But when children come along, they want a house with a garden and they want that for 20 or 30 years. Then, when they are getting older, they are ready to go back into something smaller, a flat or a bungalow. It ought to be this human pattern which should determine the kind of houses we should build. I am not against terrace houses or high density, if we can preserve a sufficiency of gardens for all those who need them. I would say that 75 per cent. of the accommodation of a New Town ought to be houses with gardens. The rest may be high flats, if you like.

On the whole, the neighbourhood conception of a town has worked well. Just a word about the shape of towns. All the New Towns built so far are what are called flower-shaped: that is to say, they are circular, with three or four neighbourhoods, a town centre and one or more industrial areas. The latest idea is what is called the linear town. This is another architectural fashion. We are told that the proper thing to do now is to build a town along a main road, stepping it back and having a series of neighbourhoods, so that everyone gets on to the main road, and the shopping centre is along the main road. You can extend such a town as long as you want it.

This is very fashionable at the moment, but it is not a new thing. It was first heard of in 1904, when it was invented by the French architect, Tony Garnier, who called it the cité industrielle. This linear town was his idea, but it was given up. Nobody really thought much of it. Now it has come back into popularity. It is, of course, ribbon development writ large. There may be occasions when it is jusifiable because of the site. For example, I would not say it was wrong at Cumbernauld. I am sure it was good also at Hook. Anyone who knows how Hook has developed may think that linear development was the only thing to do with it. But, as a general rule, it just is not a starter, and I hope that we shall not hear too much more about this particular fashion in New Town planning.

The Study proposes three New Towns at Bletchley, Newbury and at a site adjacent to Southampton and Portsmouth. My main criticism would be of Newbury, because it is in the Thames Valley area, where I should have thought that water supply would be a tremendous problem. We have to bear in mind that, as the citizens of London are re-housed, the consumption of water goes leaping up. Anyone who knows working-class Victorian London will know that one of the rarities is a bath. There are many Victorian houses which are subdivided among three or four families, with one w.c. and no bath. Put each of these families in a flat, each with a bath, and the consumption of water goes leaping up. So you can be certain that there will not be any water to spare in the Thames Valley. There will be very little water to spare in Essex. It is not until we get to the Great Ouse area and East Anglia that there is any water to spare. As a matter of fact, Bletchley is just over the watershed into the Great Ouse area, so I should have said that Bletchley is a "possible". But anybody who knows Bletchley will also know that it is a very dreary sort of place; it is a terrible place. Whoever has the job of redeveloping Bletchley has his work cut out: it is a real "stinker" to do. But that does not make it any less desirable to tackle, and it may even be just the place to tackle.

The next major proposal is for a New Town of 100,000 at Stansted Airport. This is a very strange choice. Those of your Lordships who know Stockholm or Helsinki will know that the airports there are located well away from the cities in the forest. That seems to me to be an excellent place to put an airport. Anybody who works at an airport, or has to go to an airport has to get into a car, bus or train. You cannot walk to your work at an airport; it is not "on." So if you have to get into a car or train, you might as well live five, ten or fifteen miles away. It is quite reasonable to say that you will have a New Town seven or eight miles from Stansted, say, at Dunmow or Thaxted or Stansted Mount Fitchet; I suppose those are starters. But to build a New Town at Stansted because the airport is there seems to me to be a most extraordinary proposal. But let us hope it is not as silly as it sounds.

We then have a series of extensions of 50,000 to 100,000—Ashtead, Northampton, Swindon, Ipswich and Peterborough—which I take it would be done by New Town Development Corporations, though it will be a bit of a job working in with these large communities. There are then twelve for expansion up to 30,000; and then we have the expansion of existing New Towns. We had a long debate about Stevenage recently, and I must not talk too much about Harlow; but Harlow could be expanded practically to take all that the Ministry wants it to take. However, the Government have to make some basic decisions about whether they want expanded towns or New Towns; and I think the real answer is that they must have both.

I should like to say a word now about commuting. It is planned to have over this period an increase of 450,00 people commuting into London. I think this is a confession of social failure. Why on earth is it proposed? I think I know why it is proposed, but if I have it wrong, no doubt the noble Viscount, Lord Blakenham, will tell me when he comes to speak. I think the reason is that the Government have allowed for only one-third of the expanded population to go into New Towns and expanded towns. Two-thirds of the expanded population are to go into expansions of existing towns without any particular planning. It is part of this two-thirds that has to commute in and out of London, because it is going to be unplanned private development. This is the most serious criticism of the whole plan: that the Government have accepted planning and the control of land values for the New Towns and expanded towns, but for two-thirds of the increased population there is to be no control over land values. They are to be allowed to grow, and we know that prices will go soaring. There will be no planned exodus of industry to these places; it will be pure chance if they manage to get some offices there; the prices will go up and up for the people who live there, and many of them are bound to commute.

The second reason why I think they have assumed continuation of growth of commuting is to do with the location of offices. The plain fact is, so far as I can discover, that planning permission has already been granted in the London area for more than 170,000 extra jobs in offices. This is a terrible thing, and it would be worth our while to cancel these and compensate the people in order to stop this from happening. It really will be a tragedy if it is allowed to happen. Location of offices is determined largely, in my experience, by the location of the dwellings of the directors of the company. I do not say that this is bad or wrong. You will find that when firms are prepared to move out, it is because they are going to move somewhere near to where the directors and many of the office staff already live. That is fair enough. But I should say that the movement of offices depends not only on building offices, but on providing adjacent homes for the people who are to work in the offices. This has to be a planned operation. There are some offices that you cannot move out. In these cases very often a pied-à-terre in London must remain, but most of the office must go out. A very good idea has been put forward for developing offices along the main railway lines, say, fifteen or twenty minutes journey out from London, for roofing over the London termini and having the pied-à-terre offices there, so as to cut down the amount of travel the office staff have to do between headquarters and the London periphery.

This proposal, we can be sure, will lead to bottlenecks. That is not the Government's fault; it is inevitable in the work. But there is a bottleneck now, and it is due to the shortage of technical staff to do the job; that is to say, a shortage of architects, town planners and civil engineers. In preparing for this debate, I read through the Report of the University Grants Committee on university development, 1957 to 1962, including a section on the universities' and national needs. There is not one word about architecture, town planning or civil engineering, or if there is, I missed it. So far as I know, only two of the universities are interested in this—namely, York and East Anglia. Yet this is one of the most important functions that we must have. We have to produce the architects and planners if we are to do it.

To sum up, this plan is open to severe criticism. In my opinion—I am open to correction and to be "shot down" if the Government can do it—it is open to criticism on grounds of sloppy demography; on the assumption of the failure to check the drift to the South; on the increase in commuting and the increase in offices in London; on the haphazard selection of places for development; and on the failure to deal with the problem of land for two-thirds of the new development outside London which is envisaged. Once planning consent is given a "pot of gold" is released to the owners of that land. I quote from the Financial Times of November 7, 1963, what happened at Bishop's Stortford. Land at £200 an acre went up to between £5,000 and £10,000 an acre as a result of just the grant of planning permission.

At last the Government have recognised the need for more New Towns and cities. That is a good thing. But I am afraid it is too little and too late. I am afraid this plan will have to be entirely redrawn, with better demography, better geography, better hydrography, better economic considerations, better social considerations and better politics. The only answer is better politics, and I am sorry we have to wait until October for that. I beg to move for Papers.

House adjourned during pleasure, and resumed by the Lord Chancellor.