Lords Sitting of 21 December 1964

Preamble
The House met at two of the clock, The Lord Chancellor on the Woolsack.
Prayers—Read by the Lord Bishop of Oxford

LORD BROCKWAY
Archibald Fenner Brockway, Esquire, having been created Baron Brockway, of Eton and of Slough in the County of Buckingham, for life—Was introduced, making the solemn Affirmation.
LORD BESWICK
Frank Beswick, Esquire, having been created Baron Beswick, of Hucknall in the County of Nottingham, for life—Was (in the usual manner) introduced.
LORD SEGAL
Samuel Segal, Esquire, having been created Baron Segal, of Wytham in the Royal County of Berks, for life—Was (in the usual manner) introduced.

ANGLO-FRENCH DEFENCE AND AVIATION PROJECTS
2.34 p.m.
LORD MERRIVALE: My Lords, I beg leave to ask the Question which stands in my name on the Order Paper.
[The Question was as follows:
To ask Her Majesty's Government what joint research, development or production projects are now proceeding, under review or discussion, with France in the realms of defence and civil aviation; and in particular to ask what is the present position regarding the joint development of an air-to-ground missile for our TSR 2 and their Mirage bomber.]
THE MINISTER OF STATE FOR FOREIGN AFFAIRS (LORD CHALFONT): My Lords, a memorandum of understanding for joint Anglo-French development of a tactical air-to-ground
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missile was signed in September, 1964. Since then, developments has been proceeding in both countries. The French are also participating, with the United Kingdom and Germany, in the joint development of the R.B.162 light-weight lift engine. So far as the Concord is concerned, I would refer the noble Lord to the reply which my noble friend the Minister of Defence for the Royal Air Force gave him on December 3. There are standing arrangements with France, as with several other members of the Alliance, for the discussion of possible co-operation in defence research and development. It would not be appropriate to give details of particular projects under discussion.
LORD MERRIVALE: My Lords, I should like to thank the noble Lord for his reply and, as it is my first opportunity, to congratulate him on the excellent speech he made the other day. I should also like to say how pleased I am to see him in your Lordships' House. May I ask the noble Lord whether it is proposed to extend this co-operation and co-ordination on technical projects with France, because I should imagine that these joint ventures would be advantageous to both countries? Also, it seems strange to me that further details could not be given in reply to the Question I put down on the Order Paper.
LORD CHALFONT: My Lords, the noble Lord will know that discussions of this nature in the defence field are confidential to the Governments concerned and a brief announcement is made when a joint project of any importance is agreed. But I would say that Her Majesty's Government welcome co-operation in this field with France and with all the Allies of Her Majesty's Government.
EARL JELLICOE: My Lords, may I ask the noble Lord whether I heard him aright in supposing that he said that the development and production of the air-to-ground missile is, in fact, proceeding, and whether I should be wrong, therefore, in assuming that this particular project, like a great many others, is under review? Am I right in assuming that it is, in fact, proceeding?
LORD CHALFONT: My Lords, I did not, in fact, say "development and production". Development is proceeding,

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although contracts for completion have not yet been laid. But it is true to say that development on this particular project is proceeding.

SCOTTISH ECONOMIC PLANNING BOARD
2.37 p.m.
THE EARL OF DUNDEE: My Lords, I beg leave to ask the first Question which stands in my name on the Order Paper.
[The Question was as follows:
To ask Her Majesty's Government what will be the difference between the Scottish Economic Planning Board which will be appointed by the Secretary of State for Scotland, as announced in the Parliamentary Statement of December 10 on regional planning, and the existing Scottish Development Group, and whether it is intended that the new planning board shall replace the Development Group.]
THE JOINT PARLIAMENTARY UNDER-SECRETARY OF STATE FOR SCOTLAND (LORD HUGHES): My Lords, the Scottish Economic Planning Board will take over the functions and work of the Scottish Development Group, but there will be much greater emphasis in future on economic planning. It will be the Board's task to ensure that Scotland makes its full contribution to the national economic plan and, at the same time, that (hat plan takes full account of Scotland's potential and, in particular, of its under-used resources.
THE EARL OF DUNDEE: My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord for his reply. I put the Question down in the hope of getting clarification of two points. The noble Lord will realise, of course, that official reincarnation sometimes takes a little time and I am sure he will have no difficulty—I hope he will not—in assuring the House that the transmigration of "Development Board" into "Planning Board" will not delay the progress of the plans now being carried out under the White Paper Cmnd. 2188, which has been going on for the last two years.
The other question on which I should like his assurance is a little wider. I am sure that the noble Lord will appreciate that this assimilation of nomen-
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clature between the Scottish Development Group, which already exists, and half a dozen proposed English Planning Boards may give the impression to some people that administrative authority is going to be centralised in Whitehall, and I should like to ask the noble Lord whether he can give a definite assurance that progress on administrative devolution which has been going forward, perhaps too slowly, for many years from London to Edinburgh will not now be reversed.
LORD HUGHES: My Lords, the answer, I think, to the first part of the supplementary question is that if Her Majesty's Government have been under any criticism recently, it has not been on the score that they have been moving too slowly. There is therefore no reason to anticipate any lack of speed at the Scottish Office. In regard to the second part of the supplementary question, anyone who knows my right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Scotland will not have any fear that his sphere of operation will be illegitimately submerged by any other sphere.

THE HIGHLAND DEVELOPMENT BOARD
2.40 p.m.
THE EARL OF DUNDEE: My Lords, I beg leave to ask the second Question which stands in my name on the Order Paper.
[The Question was as follows:
To ask Her Majesty's Government whether the Highland Development Board promised in the gracious Speech will be an official body like the Planning Boards described in the Parliamentary Statement on regional planning of December 10, or whether it will be a non-official advisory body like the planning councils described in the same Statement, and in either case, what will be its relationship to the Scottish Planning Board and the Scottish Planning Council respectively.]
LORD HUGHES: My Lords, the Highland Development Board will be an executive body with statutory powers able to effect measures for the development of its area. It will be responsible

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to my right honourable friend the Secretary of State, and through him the necessary links with the Scottish Planning Board will be secured. The means by which the Highlands will be represented in the deliberations of the Scottish Planning Council have not yet been finalised.
THE EARL OF DUNDEE: My Lords, will the Highland Board be subordinate to or parallel with the Scottish Planning Board? I am asking for information only. I am sure the noble Lord will agree that it is difficult enough to get sufficient people who are both public-spirited and competent to serve on all these bodies, and if we have too many Boards with overlapping functions we are sometimes obliged to appoint people who are not any use; and I do want to make sure that the relationship between them has been properly worked out.
LORD HUGHES: My Lords, I think it would be wrong to say that the Development Board will be parallel or subordinate. It is a completely different body. It is a body with a job to do not merely with the planning of things, which may be carried out by local authorities or other Government Departments. It will itself be an executive body. While I think it would be wrong to try to find an exact parallel, its powers would not be dissimilar from the powers that are possessed by a New Town Development Corporation. It will be charged with that kind of executive task.
LORD CRAIGTON: My Lords, is the noble Lord aware that we welcome the setting up of this Highland Development Board? Does he envisage that it will have finance it can spend on purposes in the Highlands in spite of the fact that those purposes might also be grant aided from other Departments of State?
LORD HUGHES: It is not the intention that the Highland Development Board should be a means by which bodies already having power to do things and spend money may be able to transfer their responsibilities somewhere else. The Highland Development Board will be provided with the necessary funds in order to do jobs in the Highlands which
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cannot at the present time be carried out adequately by existing bodies.
LORD CRAIGTON: As a supplementary to that, I should be grateful if the noble Lord would give an example of the sort of job they could do in the Highlands if they cannot match or help work already grant aided. The other point is this. As the justification for the Highland Development Board can be based only on the findings of the Committee now looking at the development plan for the Highlands, can the noble Lord help us on the timing? I feel that this House, and indeed Parliament itself, would not like to look at this Highland Development Board except in the perspective of the plan we have been promised fairly soon for the development of the Highlands. Is he going to bring in legislation for the Board or, in a White Paper, proposals for the Board, in addition to the plan for the Highlands? It would be very helpful if he could tell me.
LORD HUGHES: I have no doubt it would be, but nevertheless I cannot be so helpful. To go into much detail in reply to what the noble Lord has said must inevitably be to anticipate the contents of the Bill for setting up the Highland Development Board, which my right honourable friend has stated will be brought before the other place early in the New Year. I think your Lordships must wait for publication of that Bill.
LORD CRAIGTON: I will be pressing the noble Lord that we should see this plan for Highland development at the same time as we see the Bill. I notice he did not give an example of something which was not already grant aided on which the Board could spend money.
LORD HUGHES: I did not do so for the reason I gave, that I might be tempted to anticipate something in the Bill. I have not the slightest doubt that when the noble Lord sees the Bill he will not criticise it on the score that the body lacks power.
LORD DRUMALBYN: My Lords, perhaps the noble Lord can clear up one point. In spite of the intention to set up the Highland Development Board; will he confirm that the Scottish Planning Board is to be responsible for the whole of Scotland, including the Highlands?
LORD HUGHES: Yes, I can confirm that.
LORD BALFOUR OF INCHRYE: My Lords, would the Government publish a White Paper on this rather complicated set-up which the noble Lord has been explaining so that we may all know what the respective executive and advisory responsibilities of these various bodies are?
LORD HUGHES: My Lords, I think that if the House is a little more patient in this matter the pattern will quite clearly emerge. I do not think it will prove necessary to publish a White Paper in order to make the proposals clear. At the moment your Lordships are seeing only the general picture. The details will be etched in a little more clearly. I think your Lordships, from your own knowledge, will know just as much about it as anyone else will do.

AIR CONDITIONING OF THE HOUSE OF LORDS
2.47 p.m.
LORD BOSSOM: My Lords, I beg leave to ask the Question which stands in my name on the Order Paper.
[The Question was as follows:
To ask Her Majesty's Government whether, as it is comparatively technically simple and has been done in the other place, the Ministry responsible will give serious consideration to improving the present unsatisfactory atmosphere in this Debating Chamber.]
THE JOINT PARLIAMENTARY SECRETARY, MINISTRY OF LAND AND NATURAL RESOURCES (LORD MITCHISON): My Lords, while respecting the noble Lord's opinion, I cannot agree entirely with his view that improving the atmosphere in this Chamber is comparatively technically simple, or that this problem is directly comparable with what has been done in another place. However, as the noble Lord was informed on March 17, 1964, my right honourable friend the Minister of Public Building and Works is considering a scheme for improving the atmosphere in this Chamber and has, meanwhile, been pressing ahead with his examination of proposals. Equipment is now being assembled for tests to be carried out early in the New
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Year. Subject to these tests being successful, measures will be taken to improve the atmosphere of this Chamber as soon as the necessary funds can be made available.
LORD BOSSOM: My Lords, I thank the noble Lord for that Answer; but is the country dependent on waiting for funds in order to make improvements like this, which are essential and have been waiting now for fifty years?
LORD MTTCHISON: My Lords, I hope that we shall not have to wait as long as that again. Experiments are to start soon, and they will require a little time. The noble Lord will remember that when he asked a similar Question in March of this year he was given the caution about funds being available, a caution that I have repeated to-day. I can assure him that during the months between March and to-day not many more funds have become available for this particular purpose; they have been used otherwise.
LORD BOSSOM: My Lords, while thanking the noble Lord for that answer, but not quite agreeing with him, I hope that he will not be slow. Action on this point is not a complicated matter. It is a technical matter, of which I have had a little experience, and I think he could get on with the job fairly quickly if he wanted to do so.
LORD MITCHISON: My Lords, I can assure the noble Lord that we do, indeed, value his views on matters of this sort. I can also assure him that my right honourable friend appreciates that something must be done about this matter as soon as may be. The experiments begin early next year. I made a reference to funds, and I meant it, and I am sure the noble Lord will understand the kind of difficulty that is presented. I will take care that the noble Lord's views and comments on this matter are brought to the attention of my right honourable friend.
LORD BOSSOM: My Lords, I thank the noble Lord for his assurance that this matter will be followed up with a certain amount of urgency.
EARL JELLICOE: My Lords, may I ask the noble Lord whether the experiments will be live experiments; and, if so, who will be the guinea pigs?
LORD MITCHISON: My Lords, I do not think so; but perhaps I might, on behalf of my right honourable friend, make a conciliatory offer to the noble Earl and to the noble Lord, Lord Bossom. I understand that the experimenters would be glad to see any noble Lord who is interested in what they are doing. It does not follow that it will be a live experiment, but it will certainly be watched by those who are concerned—I might have said that before to the noble Lord, Lord Bossom.
BARONESS SUMMERSKILL: My Lords, do I gather from the attitude of my noble friend that he regards these complaints as more attributable to physiological conditions than to mechanical conditions?
LORD MITCHISON: My Lords, I feel that the correct answer is that they are the business of another Department. But, if I may use crude language, I think there is a bit of "fug" at times, and I hope that we shall get something done to remedy it as soon as may be.
EARL FERRERS: My Lords, can the noble Lord say whether the equipment used will incorporate breathalysers?
THE EARL OFDUNDEE: Will it incorporate the use of natural gas?
A NOBLE LORD: We get enough of that.

BRITISH SUBJECTS IN THE CONGO
THE EARL OFDUNDEE: My Lords, I beg to ask Her Majesty's Government a Question of which I have given them Private Notice—namely, whether her Majesty's Government will make a further Statement about the safety of British subjects in the Congo.
THE LORD PRIVY SEAL (THE EARL OF LONGFORD): Yes, my Lords. My noble friend Lord Walston will be making a Statement at a suitable moment after 3.30 p.m. There will also be a statement by Lord Shepherd about the Royal Ordnance Factory at Woolwich.

BUSINESS OF THE HOUSE
LORD SHEPHERD: My Lords, I should like to inform the House that, in view of the large number of speakers
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in the Foreign Affairs debate, it has been arranged through the usual channels that that debate shall be extended over two days. The debate will therefore begin to-morrow, Tuesday, and will be concluded on Wednesday night. The noble Earl, Lord Gosford, has withdrawn his Unstarred Question on the Concord project; and the Second Reading of the Registration of Births, Deaths and Marriages (Scotland) Bill has been postponed. I trust that these arrangements will be for the convenience of your Lordships.

COMMONS REGISTRATION BILL [H.L.]
LORD MITCHISON: My Lords, I beg leave to introduce a Bill to provide for the registration of common land and of town or village greens; to amend the law as to prescriptive claims to rights of common: and for purposes connected therewith. I beg to move that this Bill be now read a first time.
Moved, That the Bill be now read 1a. (Lord Mitchison.)
On Question, Bill read 1a, and to be printed.

subsequently MINISTERS OF THE CROWN BILL
2.54 p.m.
Order of the Day for the House to be put into Committee read.
Moved, That the House do now resolve itself into Committee.—(The Earl of Longford.)
On Question, Motion agreed to.
House in Committee accordingly.
[The Lord Merthyr in the Chair.]
Clauses 1 to 4 agreed to.
Clause 5:
Consequential amendments and repeals
(2) Subsection (2) of section 5 of the House of Commons Disqualification Act 1957 (reprinting of Schedule 1 as from time to time amended) shall apply to provisions of that Act other than Schedule 1 as it applies to that Schedule.
VISCOUNT DILHORNE VISCOUNT DILHORNE moved to leave out subsection (2). The noble and

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learned Viscount said: I have put down this Amendment as a probing Amendment. Section 5 of the House of Commons Disqualification Act, 1957, provides for altering the First Schedule to that Act when Amendments have been made to that Schedule by Order in Council under subsection (1) of that section of the Act. That is a convenient system, so that anyone who is considering whether or not he is, or may be, disqualified from standing for election to the House of Commons can look at the Schedule which should be up to date at that time. It is obviously right that if, under Section 5 (1), it is possible to amend the Schedule by Order in Council there should be provision for reprinting the Schedule as amended. What puzzles me is that power is now taken, by this particular subsection (2) of Clause 5 of the present Bill to reprint also the Act, as amended. What puzzles me is why this power to reprint the Schedule, as amended, given by subsection (2), should be applied to the body of the Act as a whole when it is not possible to amend the 1957 Act by Older in Council. There may be some technical reason for it, but at the present moment it escapes me.
When we passed the 1957 Bill and it became an Act, we put into it these provisions for amending the First Schedule and for republication of the First Schedule as amended. There are no provisions in the 1957 Act for amending that Act; nor does this Bill purport to give power to amend that Act. Why this present sub-section, applying subsection (2) to the Act as a whole, is required puzzles me at the moment, and I have put down this Amendment in the hope of eliciting from the noble and learned Lord an explanation of the reasons for this provision. I beg to move.
Amendment moved—
Page 3, line 9, leave out subsection (2).—(Viscount Dilhorne.)
THE LORD CHANCELLOR (LORD GARDINER): This matter is a little complicated and a little technical. As your Lordships know, if you want to know what the law is you find an Act which deals with it, Act A. Then you have to look to see whether there are other Acts which have amended, or perhaps repealed, Act A. Whether that is sensible or not (I have always thought it was not), that is, in fact:, what you do. So
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there may be a chain of Acts amending one another. There has been one exception to this general way of dealing with Statutes. There was a Naval Discipline Act in 1922. This was a further Naval Discipline Act amending earlier Acts, and one section of it stated:
"A copy of this Act with every such enactment and word inserted in the place there assigned, and with the omission of any portion of this Act directed by any such amending Act as aforesaid to be repealed or omitted from this Act, shall be prepared and certified by the Clerk of the Parliaments and deposited with the Rolls of Parliament, and His Majesty's Printers shall print in accordance with the copy so certified all copies of this Act which are printed after the commencement of such amending Act."
That is a curious provision. If you have an Act and you amend it, the Stationery Office, when they next reprint, are, as it were, to take advantage of any Amendments that there have been and to reprint the Act as amended.
Then 33 years passed and in 1955 the Members of another place were considering the House of Commons Disqualification Bill—this was the Bill which did not become law. One of the things that everybody was unhappy about was the phrase "office of profit under the Crown". Everybody said that it is difficult to know exactly what that term means and what it does not mean. So the matter was remitted to a Select Committee for consideration. The noble Lord, Lord Spens, whom I see here, was, if I remember rightly, as Sir Patrick Spens, Chairman of that Committee. There appeared before that Committee the then learned Attorney General, the present noble and learned Viscount, Lord Dilhorne, who suggested that it should be possible to specify in a Schedule all the different offices of profit under the Crown. The Committee accepted that proposal.
Then the noble Lord, Lord Spens, the Committee's Chairman said, "Well since, obviously, future offices will be created in the future, ought we not to make provision for altering the Schedule by an Affirmative Resolution, so as to save the necessity for a new Act?" The Committee agreed with that proposal. Following that, as I understand it, another member of the Committee suggested that, as it is important to all prospective Parliamentary candidates and their agents to know for certain whether or not some particular office was an office of profit under the

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Crown, it would be convenient if, instead of their having to hunt through the Acts and all the statutory instruments, each time the Act and Schedule were reprinted the Schedule was reprinted up to date. And the Committee accepted that view.
So it came about that when the then Attorney General, now the noble and learned Viscount, Lord Dilhorne, introducted the revised Bill in another place it included this provision which, after some slight amendment, one now finds in the House of Commons Disqualification Act, 1957, requiring the reprinting of the Schedule up to date. That was the position when the present Bill was introduced in another place and it did not contain any provision of this kind.
But it was then pointed out, I think by the Public Bill Office, by Parliamentary draftsmen and others, that if no alteration were made on this point, as the present Bill is also amending other parts of the House of Commons Disqualification Act, 1957, one would now have the Stationery Office reprinting with the Schedule up to date, but with other parts of the Act not up to date. Anybody who looked at the First Schedule would say, "This has obviously been printed up to date as Parliament has altered it since." But other parts of the Act would not be so up to date, and this would be something of a trap.
There were, therefore, altogether some five alternatives. One was to leave the trap as it was, which seemed obviously unsatisfactory. The second was to introduce a new type of Consolidation Bill, repealing the Act of 1957 and consolidating with the present Bill: that course obviously was not appropriate. The third was to repeal the reprinting provision contained in the 1957 Act; but that would have been a rejection of the view which Parliament had taken in 1957, that it was a great help, and indeed of importance, to Parliamentary candidates and agents to be able to have an up-to-date list in that way. The fourth alternative—and this was very seriously considered—was whether it would not be the right solution to ask the Stationery Office to include a note saying, "The Schedule has been reprinted up to date, but there have been alterations in other parts of the Act and they have not been shown—so look out!" That was considered, but I think the noble and learned
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Viscount will agree with me that it would be very undesirable to start a practice by which the Stationery Office include notes, whoever may have authorised them, on reprinted Acts of Parliament.
So the best alternative was thought to be that which is now contained in Clause 5 (2), so as to provide that
"Subsection (2) of section 5 of the House of Commons Disqualification Act 1957 (reprinting of Schedule 1 as from time to time amended) shall apply to provisions of that Act other than Schedule 1 as it applies to that Schedule."
That is the reason for that provision in the circumstances which arose and it was, it is suggested, the sensible thing to do. For those reasons the Government do not feel able to accept this Amendment.
VISCOUNT DILHORNE: While I would not perhaps go so far as the noble and learned Lord in saying that one could have five alternatives, no doubt there were five choices; and I am very grateful to him for the explanation he has given as to why the Government chose the particular solution that is now embodied in subsection (2) of Clause 5. It is obviously convenient that as the 1957 Act is amended by this Bill, the 1957 Act, when it comes to be reprinted, should be reprinted in the form in which it will have effect as amended. That, I entirely agree, is a suitable and desirable course. Of course, the Bill as drawn makes provision for the reprinting of this particular Act, unlike other Acts, if it should happen to be reprinted in the future, in the form as amended. It may be that that is a matter of drafting, as there is no provision either in the 1957 Act or in this Bill for making further amendments to the 1957 Act by Order in Council. So one may take it that subsection (2) is merely to secure that any reprint of the 1957 Act will be of the 1957 Act as amended by this Bill. I make no apology for having put down this Amendment, because we have obtained an explanation of a provision which was rather obscure. I must say that the answer we have been given by the noble and learned Lord is satisfactory. Therefore. I beg leave to withdraw the Amendment.
LORD DOUGLAS OF BARLOCH: Before the Amendment is withdrawn, I should like to take this opportunity of saying that although the method which

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has been adopted here apparently has only one precedent in this country, it is by no means a novel device. On the contrary it is quite a usual thing to provide that, when Statutes are amended by subsequent legislation, they shall automatically be reprinted in a form containing the Amendments which have been made. That is of enormous convenience, because it saves the tedious search to find out whether, in fact, amendments have been made and to try to fit them into the original Statute. I hope that this precedent will be extended to many other pieces of legislation in this country. It will be a great convenience to everybody; it will make for certainty in legislation, and it will probably make for better and more accurate drafting.
LORD CONESFORD: I should like to ask one question of the noble and learned Lord. Having heard the various choices which were open to Her Majesty's Government, it seems to me that they have chosen the best of the five. The question I should like to put to him is: Will there appear somewhere on the face of the document, when the 1957 Act is reprinted, either the date of the reprint or a note stating that the Act is reprinted as amended—something which shows that it is not the original 1957 Act?
THE LORD CHANCELLOR: Yes; I understand that that will, in fact, be done.
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
On Question, whether Clause 5 shall stand part of the Bill?
VISCOUNT DILHORNE: I should like to ask one question on Clause 5. During Second Reading we had some discussion with regard to the position of Ministers of State. I think that it is now clear that Ministers of State will in future count in the total number prescribed by Clause 3 (2) of this Bill, whether or not they are appointed at a salary. Does the same apply to a Secretary of State? I raised this question on Second Reading, and I do not think the noble and learned Lord answered it. I think I am right in saying that the Secretary of State for Wales was appointed, but not, in the Government's view, at a salary, and it was for that reason that the law was, in the Government's view, not broken by accepting the limit of eight prescribed by Statute. Could that
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happen again, with the Bill in its present form?
As I say, I raised this question in my Second Reading Speech, when I drew attention to the fact that the problem arose not only in relation to Ministers of State but also in relation to Secretaries of State. As the noble and learned Lord did not, I think, answer me on the point on that occasion, I put it to him again. If by this Bill, which increases the total, we are, as we have been told, stopping the adoption of a device to evade the clear intention of Parliament by appointing Ministers of State without a salary, is there also something to prevent the appointment of Secretaries of State not at a salary, and therefore not counting in the total? I should be grateful, in view of what has happened in regard to the Secretary of State for Wales, for an explanation from the noble and learned Lord on that point.
THE LORD CHANCELLOR: I think the answer to that question is this. The limit is a limit on the number of Ministers who may sit and vote in another place. It falls short of being universal, because it relates to the holders of listed offices which do not amount to a universal category. The list has the following relevant features. First of all, it includes Ministers in charge of Departments and Ministers not in charge of Departments. Secondly, all (he former are mentioned by their titles individually, except Secretaries of State who are mentioned generically. Constitutionally, they all hold the one office of Secretary of State. It happens that there is statutory provision for paying salaries to each of the individual Ministers in charge of Departments mentioned in the list, and to eight Secretaries of State. The Bill will extend these powers to the new Ministers and to a ninth Secretary of State.
This is, however, quite irrelevant to the question of whether they count against the limit. For example, my right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Wales cannot be paid until the Bill authorises payment of the ninth Secretary of State. But he counts against the limit, and has always so counted against the existing limits. He is one of the 26 Members of another place who already count against the limit of 27 in respect of senior ministerial offices, and he is one of the 65 who already count against the limit

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of 70 in respect of the full list of ministerial offices. Therefore I would respectfully suggest that the noble and learned Viscount was inaccurate when he said that the Secretary of State for Wales was appointed without salary so that he would not count against these limits.
As regards Ministers not in charge of Departments, the list includes several mentioned individually; for example, the Lord President, the Lord Privy Seal, the Financial Secretary to the Treasury and the Parliamentary Secretaries of named Departments. It also includes two generic groups: Parliamentary Under-Secretaries of State and Ministers of State. But their position, I think, is clear, and the effect is that every member of the Government who is in another place, but not in charge of a Department, whatever his title, old or new, and whether or not he is paid, counts against the limit on the number of Ministers who may sit in another place.
Clause 5 agreed to.
Clause 6 [Interpretation and short title]:
3.14 p.m.
VISCOUNT DILHORNE VISCOUNT DILHORNE moved, in subsection (2), to leave out "Machinery of Government" and insert "Ministers of the Crown". The noble and learned Viscount said: Your Lordships will remember that, in the course of the Second Reading debate, we had a considerable discussion with regard to the Title of the Bill. I do not propose to repeat to your Lordships—I do not think your Lordships would wish me to do so—the observations that I made then to show that the present Title of the Bill is a complete misnomer. I think the noble Baroness, Lady Horsbrugh, supported me in that view.
I have put down this Amendment to change the Title of the Bill, because I think that the Title I propose is the right Title for the Bill, whether it be good or bad. The first clause of the Bill deals with the position of three Ministers. Looking at the Statute Book, one finds that usually when new Ministries are created one has a separate Act of Parliament dealing with each of them, like the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries Act, 1919, the Ministry of Civil Aviation Act, 1945, and the Ministry of Defence Act, 1946. Of course, it was not until the
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passage of the Ministry of Defence Act that the noble Earl, Lord Alexander of Hillsborough, was created Minister of Defence. There are a series of other Acts of a similar character relating to particular Ministers.
Now we have Clause 1 of this Bill dealing with three Ministers of the Crown and their Departments. Clause 2, in particular, is very similar in the ground it covers to a Section 1n the Ministers of the Crown Act, 1937; and so, indeed, is Clause 3, although what preceded Section 3 in the Ministers of the Crown Act, 1937, was altered by the House of Commons Disqualification Act, 1957. So when I look at those three clauses, and also at Clause 5, it seems to me that the right Title for this Bill will be, "Ministers of the Crown Act". It will, I think, be a great convenience to people who have to refer to this measure to know it by that Title which has a link with the Act of 1937, and, indeed, with the Act of 1957.
I do not propose to take up any more time upon this matter, but I do suggest, for the reasons I advance to-day and, indeed, for the reasons that were advanced during the course of the Second Reading debate, that this is the right Title for this Bill. The noble and learned Lord did his best to defend the present Title. I somehow felt that he was rather speaking to a brief on that occasion, as Lord Chancellors sometimes have to do. I hope that, on reflection, he will agree with me that it would be an improvement to this Bill to change the Title to "Ministers of the Crown". I beg to move.
Amendment moved—
Page 3, line 25, leave out ("Machinery of Government") and insert ("Ministers of the Crown").—(Viscount Dilhorne.)
THE LORD CHANCELLOR: I do not think it would be possible to improve such a very good Bill as this, but at the same time, of course, I recognise that almost any Bill can have any one of about six different Titles, and that what the Title is is really entirely a matter of personal opinion. Here is a Bill constituting three new Ministries, and making various changes to the limits in the number of Members of another place who can there sit and vote. It is a Bill dealing with the machinery of Government; at the same time, of course, it is

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also dealing with Ministers of the Crown and, unless one wishes to be pedantic, either one Title or the other would be perfectly appropriate. I still think that, on the whole, "Machinery of Government" is perhaps rather better, but the Government have a lot to do and we do not want to lake up time on something which really does not matter at all, and on that footing they are prepared to accept the Amendment.
VISCOUNT DILHORNE: I would thank the noble and learned Lord for what he has said. I do not agree with him that it does not matter at all what this particular Bill is called. I think I could pray in aid some observations that he made when sitting on these Benches, about the need for Bills to be in proper form when they are passed. I do not want to say anything which will detract from my recognition of the fact that Her Majesty's Government have now indicated their first acceptance of an Amendment to any Bill in your Lordships' House in the present Parliament. I hope that this is a precedent which will frequently be followed, because, of course, the Amendments which we put forward are Amendments which are always well worthy of acceptance. I welcome this. I had been gaining the impression that the riding instructions given to the Chief Whip, and to the Ministers in charge of Bills here, were not to accept any Amendments at all. I am glad no find that that impression is negatived by the acceptance of this Amendment, the importance of which I, for one, would not seek to minimise.
On Question, Amendment agreed to.
On Question, Whether Clause 6 shall stand part of the Bill?
LORD CONESFORD: I rise not to delay the acceptance of this clause as amended, but merely to ask the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor to consider a point which I think he may not have considered and which slightly troubles me. It is the first subsection of Clause 6 which provides as follows:
"Any reference in this Act to any enactment is a reference thereto as amended by or under any other enactment including this Act."
Strictly, that seems to me to make nonsense in certain places. If he will look, for instance, at Clause 3 of this Bill,
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the noble and learned Lord will see that this Bill makes Amendments to the House of Commons Disqualification Act, 1957; and that is a reference to an enactment. But if we are to treat that reference to an enactment as embodying the amendments that this Bill makes, then this Bill has already made them when it mentions them. I have little doubt that this subsection will do little harm, and may in certain eventualities do some good; and I am convinced it must have been put here with some purpose. Nevertheless, it does not seem to me strictly to make sense. As far as I know, it has never been considered by any court of law, and I should be grateful if the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor would perhaps consider the point to see if there is anything in it.
THE LORD CHANCELLOR: This is a new point. Clause 6 (1) is, I feel sure, in a very common form in which we have all been very used to seeing it. Whether this ingenious suggestion has ever been made before and, if so, what the answer is, I do not know; but I shall be glad to consider it.
VISCOUNT DILHORNE: I do not know that this really is in a common form. I do not think it can do any harm, but it does add a little to the obscurity in reading the Bill. I shall be grateful if the noble and learned Lord will look at it, because I do not think it is common form. I cannot myself remember any precedent for it, although I may be wrong. I should like to know—perhaps the noble and learned Lord can tell me later; I do not want to hold up the passage of this Bill—what was the object of this unusual form here. I do not think it ought to become a precedent unless there is good reason for it.
LORD SILKIN: I am delighted to find this new-found zeal on the part of noble Lords opposite for clarity in legislation. I have drawn attention to obscurities in the past, but I must say I never got very much satisfaction. I hope we can work together now to ensure that future legislation is made much more clear.
THE LORD CHANCELLOR: If I may speak again, I am sure that I have seen this in exactly the same form in

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other Statutes, but I have said I will make inquiries and I shall certainly do so.
Clause 6, as amended, agreed to.
Schedules agreed to.
House resumed: Bill reported with the Amendment.
Then, Standing Order No. 41 having been suspended (pursuant to Resolution of December 10), the Report of the Amendment received.
3.25 p.m.
THE LORD PRIVY SEAL (THE EARL OF LONGFORD): My Lords, I beg to move that this Bill be now read a third time.
Moved, That the Bill be now read 3a—(The Earl of Longford.)
VISCOUNT DILHORNE: My Lords, I should just like to say a few words on the Third Reading of this Bill because it is, indeed, an important measure. It was described by several noble Lords in the course of the Second Reading debate, and, in particular, by the noble Lord, Lord Morrison of Lambeth, as a measure of constitutional importance. I do not think that anyone with experience of the workings of another place could really quarrel with that description—it is a Bill of great constitutional importance. Although efforts have been made to minimise its effect and to treat it as a complex and technical measure and no more, it is in fact a great deal more; and I do not myself think it would be right to pass a Bill of this kind without saying a few words in the course of the Third Reading debate.
During the Second Reading debate there was some controversy between the noble Lord, Lord Morrison of Lambeth, and the noble Earl the Lord Privy Seal as to the proportion of Members of the Labour Party in the other place who were now Ministers and Parliamentary Private Secretaries in the Government. The noble Lord, Lord Morrison of Lambeth, suggested the number was about 50 per cent.; the noble Earl the Lord Privy Seal suggested it was no more than one-third. I saw in the Press, in the Daily Telegraph, that in this controversy, as in so many others, the noble Lord, Lord Morrison
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of Lambeth, was right, and that it is nearly 50 per cent.
THE EARL OF LONGFORD: My Lords, may I interrupt at this stage? Of course, no one reads the columns of "Peterborough" more carefully than I do and I am always very grateful, as we all are, for favourable attention there; but it was stated in the passage from which the noble Viscount has drawn his wisdom that there were 298 Labour Members of Parliament in the House of Commons. There, of course, it was totally wrong, so I hope the noble Viscount is not basing himself entirely on the excellent Peterborough.
VISCOUNT DILHORNE: My Lords, I have no reason to question the general accuracy of the gentleman to whom the noble Earl refers as "Peterborough", but I think that that difference and, as the noble Earl suggests, that error, has not much altered the balance, and that it is nearly 50 per cent., which were the words I used. I think it is much more nearly 50 per cent. than one-third, which is what the Lord Privy Seal suggested.
I do not myself believe that anyone can regard such a high proportion of members of any particular party being members of the Government in another place as something which does not affect both the Constitution and the operation of Parliament. It is indeed a serious matter, and here we have this Bill giving statutory effect to what has been done, abolishing the limit of 27 which was prescribed by the 1957 Act. There was nothing in the 1957 Act to suggest that that limit was imposed for the purpose of securing adequate representation of Her Majesty's Government in your Lordships' House, but I suspect myself that, whether or not that was one reason for it, another reason was to prevent Parkinson's Law from operating with regard to Government posts.
During the Second Reading here we had it prayed in aid that there were fewer Parliamentary Secretaries than there had been before. What has happened? We have got more Ministers of State. When we had this limit of 27, that was some check on the upgrading of ministerial posts. I do not know—one does not know exactly—what are the present various functions of all these

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Ministers of State, but I shall be very surprised if the functions of some of them differ materially from the functions previously discharged by Parliamentary Secretaries. I am sorry that this limit of 27 goes, because I think it served a useful purpose in preventing the increase in status of various ministerial offices without an extra burden of ministerial duties. This Bill, in my view, makes an important constitutional change, the far-reaching effects of which it may not be very easy to discern at the present moment. But it also does one further thing, and for this I can commend the Bill. Whatever the limits it prescribes, it is now clear that it prevents the: same kind of operation from being conducted as was conducted immediately after October 15.
I said on Second Reading of this Bill, and I said in the debate on the Address that, as I saw it, Section 2 of the 1957 Act was a statement of the intention of Parliament that there should be a limit, and an effective limit, on the number of Ministers in the House of Commons. I have put twice to the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor whether or not he agreed that that was the clear intent of Parliament. I have had no answer except to say that what was done was lawful. That was not the question I raised. My question was as to the intention of Parliament as evinced by the Statute, and my contention has not been denied. Now, at least, from what the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor has said, we are sure that the same device cannot be operated again; that it will not be possible in future to get round this enlarged limit by the device of appointing Ministers without a salary. That is an improvement.
I think it is right to say that when the 1957 Act was passed, or, indeed, when the 1937 Act which also contained a limit on the number of Ministers in Parliament was passed, no one contemplated that anyone would seek to evade the clear intention of Parliament by adopting a device of this kind. But I welcome the Bill because it will stop that kind of thing from happening again. I am not able to give support to the great enlargement of the number of ministerial offices, or to the great enlargement of the number of Ministers in the House of Commons. But for the
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part of it that will stop this device from being repeated, I think this Bill deserves the support of your Lordships' House.
3.34 p.m.
LORD MORRISON OF LAMBETH: My Lords, before the Government reply, may I ask that this point about the proportion of Government people to Back-Benchers in the House of Commons be cleared up? I was not dogmatic on the point in my speech on Second Reading because I have not been able to count the numbers there and I was not sure about it; but there is a conflict between the noble and learned Viscount, Lord Dilhorne, and my noble friend the Leader of the House. Since my noble friend has all the resources of Government research behind him and he or somebody else will know what the figures are, I should like to know the total number of ministerial Labour M.P.s and the total number of Government office men—Ministers, Whips and Parliamentary Private Secretaries must all be included for this purpose—and whether these are paid or unpaid and the percentage they bear to the whole of the Labour Members of the House of Commons. I think that as a matter of history and fact it would be useful to have this information. I should be glad to have it as I have not been able to check for myself what the facts are.
THE EARL OF LONGFORD: My Lords, may I answer that point before the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor replies to the speech of the noble and learned Viscount, Lord Dilhorne? As my noble friend Lord Morrison of Lambeth says, all the resources of the Government are available. We have them, but do not always have them here and at this moment available. I can give most of the answer with certainty, and I do not think I shall be wrong about the rest. The limit is 91 Ministers in the House of Commons. Up to now, 31 Parliamentary Private Secretaries have been appointed, and this makes a total of 122. More than half the Members of Parliament are Labour Members and I think the total number of Labour Members in the other place is 316. I hear somebody say it is 317. It might be 317. But if one takes it as 316, which is more favourable to the noble and learned Viscount, that gives a proportion of slightly less than 40 per cent., which is nearer one-

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third than one-half. That is the actual position.
LORD CONESFORD: My Lords, I believe, as I said on the Second Reading debate—and I do not propose to repeat myself—that this is a very important and a very bad Bill. Therefore, I cannot pretend to welcome it on any grounds whatsoever. But I quite agree that it should now have its Third Reading on the obvious grounds that, however bad it may be, it principally concerns another place which has, in fact, passed it. I think the most serious innovation made by this Bill is that it makes an important constitutional change without the Government's having sought any prior agreement between the Parties. I gave that as a principal objection in my speech on the Second Reading debate in which I strongly supported the arguments put forward by the noble Lord, Lord Morrison of Lambeth. I rise only because for once I could not agree with my noble and learned friend Lord Dilhorne that this Bill should be welcomed on any grounds whatever.
THE EARL OF SELKIRK: My Lords, may I add one point which has not been mentioned? We often hear this Parliament spoken of as the "Westminster model"; and we must remember I think that almost anything we do here is watched and sometimes slavishly copied by many countries all over the world. Many of your Lordships have seen the way in which our methods of Parliament have worked in other countries. In many cases it is almost touching to see the slavish way in which they copy almost every office we have in the House. Now this Bill will be watched, too.
The noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor said that in this country the growth of the strength of the Executive since the war was largely due to secrecy. My Lords, I hardly think that is true. We see all over the world to-day a great growth in Executive strength. I am not arguing for weak democratic Government; I believe that democracy must be strong. But there are cases where the Executive has been given very much too much strength—sometimes through the Army, sometimes through a one-Party system, and sometimes by limiting the franchise; and there is another simple way, and that is
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to get control of the Members of an elected Chamber. I want to give this warning because I think that what we do here is watched carefully, and that is something that we should never entirely forget.
LORD SOMERS: My Lords, the noble Lord the Leader of the House made a statement just now that more than half of the Members of the other place are Labour Members. Is he not slightly mistaken there? I was under the impression that, owing to the unfortunate effect of the three-cornered fight in the Election, fewer than half were Labour Members.
THE EARL OF LONGFORD: My Lords, it is easily cleared up. We have an overall majority of four. That must mean that we have 317 Members and everybody else put together has 313. It is certainly the fact that we have an overall majority of four.
3.39 p.m.
THE LORD CHANCELLOR: My Lords, may I first say a word about the loophole about which the noble and learned Viscount, Lord Dilhorne, was concerned? For the reasons which I have ventured to give in Committee, I think that what it amounts to is this. In future a Minister who is not in charge of a Department, and any Minister who is in charge of a Department and is in the list, will be caught by the limit on the number who may sit and vote in another place. This will be so whether they are paid or whether they are not paid. A loophole is deliberately left, because the only category not caught by the list is that of Ministers in charge of new Departments. Such Ministers will be able to sit and vote in another place, even if the full complement allowed by the limit is already taken up. Such Ministers, of course, will cease to be exempt from the limit as soon as their offices are included in the list, which may be done either by Act of Parliament or, in certain cases, by a Transfer of Functions Order.
For reasons which I ventured to suggest on Second Reading, there is still the fact that this Bill does not raise any constitutional issue. I did not say that it was my opinion that the control of the Executive by Parliament had been

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reduced by secrecy—I did say that it is a general view. Of course, what is essential for any Opposition is to criticise and to be able to criticise; and they can get to a state of affairs, particularly on Defence matters when they know so little of the facts that it becomes impossible for an Opposition to criticise, unless, having recently been in power themselves, they know the facts.
So far as the control of the Executive by the Legislature is concerned, as I ventured to point out on Second Reading, the proportion by which new Ministers have been added to those in the previous Administration by this Government is exactly the same as the proportion by which the previous Government increased the number of Ministers compared with the previous Administration. What no one has pointed out, in any of the discussions on this Bill, is why the last Government increased in that proportion the number of new Ministers over those whom it had been thought necessary to have in the previous Administration. After all, it is not as if they were a Government that were bursting to do things. I am not suggesting that conserving things might not be a proper thing to do. It is not as if, whether there had been years of stagnation or not, the last Government's record for activity was outstanding. But it seems to me to be natural when, after a long period out of office, we have the Party of change coming in and bursting to carry out as soon as possible the many changes which during the course of the Election they had declared their intention of carrying out, that they should want some increase in the machinery of Government to enable them to do that. And that is the main purpose of this Bill. For these reasons, I trust that the Bill will be read a third time.
On Question, Bill read 3a, with the Amendment, and passed, and returned to the Commons.

THE CONGO: SAFETY OF BRITISH SUBJECTS
3.44 p.m.
THE PARLIAMENTARY UNDERSECRETARY OF STATE FOR FOREIGN AFFAIRS (LORD WALSTON): My Lords, with your Lordships' permission, I should like to repeat a Statement being made by my right honour-
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able friend the Minister of State for Foreign Affairs in another place, in answer to a Private Notice Question on the safety of British subjects in the Congo.
"Since my Statement on December 14, only three of the British subjects then believed to be in rebel hands have escaped. These are: Miss O. McCarten, Miss L. Limmer and a Canadian citizen. They arrived in Leopoldville from Bafwasende yesterday. I am sorry to say that they believe that the other members of their Mission, including one man, three women and one child of British nationality, have been killed."
I am sure your Lordships would wish to extend the sympathy of the House to the relatives of these unfortunate people in their uncertainty and in the event that the worst has happened.
"At Banalia, the Government forces found the town deserted, but there were signs of violence and European clothing by the river. It remains possible that some of the eleven British subjects—two men, four women and five children—who were believed to be at Banalia, may have been taken somewhere else.
"Twenty-eight British subjects—not including Canadians—are now believed to be missing, of whom twenty-five are citizens of this country. The rescue columns of the Congolese Army are continuing to press forward."
THE EARL OF DUNDEE: My Lords, I thank the noble Lord for repeating this Statement. It is a very sad subject, and our sympathy will certainly be extended to the relatives and friends of all those who have been murdered in this savage way. Have we no further news from the Ambassador about the possible whereabouts of the other 28 British subjects who are missing? Is there nothing further we can do to ascertain their movements or any further suggestions that we can make by which we might possibly be able to assist in their discovery and rescue?
LORD REA: My Lords, on behalf of noble Lords on these Benches, may I also extend our great sympathy to those people who have suffered, and their relatives? Could I ask if the noble Lord is content with repeating what he said the other day, that we can do nothing for

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these unfortunate people? The noble Earl asked whether the noble Lord would say what could be done in the future. Can he tell us whether anything at all has been done by the Government in the past week or so to rescue these people from such a fate?
LORD WALSTON: My Lords, other than what I said last week, I am afraid there is nothing we can do. Our military attache has been constantly with the forces of the Congolese Army or in Leopoldville or in Stanleyville, and he is following as closely as he can; but in the uncertainty that prevails in that part of the world and the impossibility of finding exact whereabouts, I am afraid there is nothing we can do. As I said last week, we have a "Beverley" standing by in Nairobi to go and help to evacuate those who have been found and liberated. We have tried, and the International Red Cross have tried, to get permission to enter the areas which the rebel forces control, but beyond that I should be deceiving your Lordships if I held out any hope of being able to do anything else.
THE MARQUESS OF SALISBURY: My Lords, have we any contact with the leaders of the rebel forces, or any way by which we can communicate with them, either directly or by an intermediary?
LORD WALSTON: My Lords, so far as I know at this stage there are no means of legitimate and reliable contact with the rebel forces. What we have tried is to get permission for the Red Cross to go there, which would be a form of contact, but that has been refused.
THE EARL OF SELKIRK: My Lords, can the noble Lord confirm the suggestion in the Sunday papers that rebel activity might extend to other and perhaps more extensive areas of the Congo, and that this story is likely to go on for some time?
LORD WALSTON: My Lords, we have no knowledge to confirm what the noble Earl read in the Sunday papers.
THE MARQUESS OF SALISBURY: My Lords, may I ask whether there are British nationals in these other parts of the Congo to which the noble Earl has referred and whether any advice has been given to them that they should evacuate themselves or their children from the district? I feel that it would be very
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wrong for us to wait until the worst has happened.
LORD WALSTON: My Lords, I cannot give a firm answer on that matter, but I will certainly look into it and find out what these areas are and what knowledge we have of any British nationals who may be there.
LORD MERRIVALE: My Lords, why is it that Her Majesty's Government did not think fit to take advantage of the fact that President Tshombe has been visiting a number of European capitals and having discussions with General de Gaulle, and M. Spaak and other statesmen, by inviting him over here for discussions with a Minister of Her Majesty's Government, to see how possibly we could be of assistance to British nationals in the Congo? I believe it has been stated in the Press that Arab experts are now assisting the rebels in the Congo in guerrilla warfare. In view of the fact that we have our own experts in certain types of warfare, would it not have been possible to provide such experts, who would have been of assistance to the Congolese Army?
LORD WALSTON: My Lords, I can assure the noble Lord that there is no need for us to wait until the Prime Minister of the Congo visits Europe for him to be made aware of our concern at the fate of British subjects. We have been in constant touch with him and his Government about this through our Ambassador, and he is fully aware of the position.
THE DUKE OF DEVONSHIRE: My Lords, could I ask Her Majesty's Government if they have any information as to whether any other African countries, or other countries in the world, are supplying the rebels with arms?
LORD WALSTON: My Lords, we have indications that arms are coming from other sources. It is not in the most exact form in which we should like to have it, but we believe there are arms coming from other sources.
THE EARL OF DUNDEE: My Lords, are most of them from Europe, from China or from other parts of Africa?
LORD WALSTON: My Lords, I should not like to enlarge on that.
THE DUKE OF DEVONSHIRE: My Lords, I should like to press the noble Lord on this matter. He says "other sources". Would it not be right to tell the House what the sources are?
LORD WALSTON: My Lords, perhaps the noble Duke would be good enough to put down a Question on that.
THE MARQUESS OF SALISBURY: My Lords, would it not be possible to give an answer to this aspect of the question in the debate tomorrow or on Wednesday? That would seem to be the most appropriate moment, and it would give the noble Lord time to look into matters.
LORD WALSTON: My Lords, I will certainly do my best to see that one of the Government speakers does this.
LORD BALFOUR OF INCHRYE: My Lords, have Her Majesty's Government made it clear, through the radio or other means of communication, to the rebels and rebel leaders that in due course the Government will take every possible step to bring those responsible, both leaders and followers, to trial for these horrible crimes?
LORD WALSTON: No, my Lords, Her Majesty's Government have not done that. We should have no locus standi in a foreign country in attempting to bring local leaders to trial in that country.
LORD BALFOUR OF INCHRYE: Surely, my Lords, we should ask President Tshombe to reproduce a statement such as that: that the Government will use all their influence, either through President Tshombe or through some international organisation, in due course to bring those responsible to trial.
LORD WALSTON: My Lords, I think we can rely on the Government of the Congo to take what steps are necessary to deal with rebel leaders when they are caught.
LORD BALFOUR OF INCHRYE: My Lords, why should we rely on the Government of the Congo when there are possible steps that Her Majesty's Government might take for our own citizens?
LORD WALSTON: Because, my Lords, it is Congolese territory.
LORD RUSSELL OF LIVERPOOL: My Lords, when the noble Lord said in answer to another question that there were indications that arms were coming
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from elsewhere, did he not mean that there was evidence?—because, if he will take the trouble to find out, he will see that there is a great deal of evidence to show that arms are coming from other sources.
LORD WALSTON: My Lords, I should be glad to consider any evidence which the noble Lord has; and, as I have said, this will be answered, on such evidence as there is, in the debate to-morrow.
LORD RUSSELL OF LIVERPOOL: My Lords, have not the noble Lord and the Government better facilities than I have for finding out such evidence; and does not this mean that, as there is evidence, they could find it out if they wanted to?
THE DUKE OF ATHOLL: My Lords, could not Her Majesty's Government consider giving some form of financial assistance to British citizens in other parts of the Congo where it is feared that the rebels may succeed in making inroads into the territory?
LORD WALSTON: My Lords, we are prepared to, and do, in cases where need has been established, give assistance to British nationals when they have been released. But, clearly, if we are unable to get to them at the present time to rescue them, or even to know their whereabouts, it would be impossible to get assistance to them.
THE DUKE OF ATHOLL: My Lords, I meant the people who are not in rebel held territory at the moment, but who it is feared might be in rebel territory in future. This would be some encouragement for them to leave before their territory is taken over by the rebels.
LORD WALSTON: My Lords, if we were assured that such people wished to leave, but were unable to do so because of financial difficulties, we should undoubtedly help.
LORD ST. OSWALD: My Lords, I should like the noble Lord to be aware that, knowing him as I do, I am certain that he is applying the maximum of conscientiousness and humanity to this problem. If I were in the appalling situation of a hostage in Congolese rebel hands, it would give me considerable encouragement and comfort to know that such help

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as the British Government could extend was, to some extent, in the hands of the noble Lord. Holding the high opinion we do of the noble Lord, we expect a great deal from him in this matter.

FUTURE OF WOOLWICH ROYAL ORDNANCE FACTORY
3.55 p.m.
LORD SHEPHERD: My Lords, with your Lordships' permission, I should like to repeat a Statement that has just been made in another place by the Deputy Secretary of State for Defence. The Statement is as follows:
"During the last seven years, nine Royal Ordnance Factories, apart from Woolwich, have been closed in order to bring capacity into line with the reduction in requirements for munitions. There is still, however, a substantial surplus of engineering and gun making capacity in the two Royal Ordnance Factories equipped to do this sort of work, namely Woolwich and Nottingham.
"In order to keep both these factories running economically we should need to attract suitable new work to the value of something like £7 million a year for some years ahead. While it is the Government's aim to attract work into the Royal Ordnance Factories, consistent with their primary purpose of producing munitions for the Forces, I cannot foresee that an additional steady Lord of this magnitude of work suitable for these factories is likely to be forthcoming.
"It is clear, therefore, that our capacity for this kind of work must be reduced. Nottingham is the more modern of the two factories and for that reason more economical to run. Moreover, its capacity is more in line with foreseeable requirements. I am therefore forced to the conclusion that it is right to retain the Royal Ordnance Factory at Nottingham and that the decision to close the Royal Ordnance Factory at Woolwich cannot be reversed. The saving from this concentration of capacity is estimated at upwards of £1 million per annum.
"During the course of the investigation it has been represented that the
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Royal Ordnance Factories have in the past not been fairly treated in the allocation to them of work for which they are equipped to produce. Although I am satisfied that no change in policy could bring additional work to the factories on a scale which would justify retention of both Nottingham and Woolwich, it is important that the excellent facilities and skilled labour available in the Royal Ordnance Factories generally should be used to the maximum advantage. I am therefore putting in hand a departmental investigation into the way in which work is allocated to the factories. An investigation will also be made into the possibility of attracting contracts from sources outside the defence field. This investigation will be undertaken by my honourable friend the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Defence for the Army who will consult with representatives of trade unions and employers as well as with other Government Departments.
"I should explain that this announcement is being made now, at this unseasonable moment, in response to the need to remove uncertainty about the future of the Royal Ordnance Factory at Woolwich. The trade union representatives asked especially that this uncertainty should be removed as soon as possible, and though the confirmation of the decision to close Woolwich will be a disappointment to them, in the wider field of Royal Ordnance Factory activity as a whole it will have the advantage of dispelling certain anxieties.
"I should add that this decision is not going to result in immediate discharges. The pattern is simply that the process of rundown, halted during the examination of the problem, will be resumed. The necessity to discharge will depend upon a number of factors difficult to forecast but is unlikely to arise before the end of winter."
My Lords, that is the Statement.
EARL JELLICOE: My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord for repeating this Statement, and I would straight away agree with what he has said about the desirability of removing uncertainty

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in this matter, even at this unseasonable time. But, of course, I cannot refrain from remarking that this uncertainty would not have arisen but for this rather unnecessary review. May I, in any event, congratulate the Government on their wisdom in thus confirming the decision which was taken by the late Government? May I also express the hope that this conversion will form a precedent for the other decisions which the Government will shortly be taking in the course of their defence review?
Having said that, may I ask one further supplementary question? Can the noble Lord assure us that the London County Council, as a result of this decision, will be receiving the full windfall of land for housing purposes which they would have received under the late Government's decision?
LORD SHEPHERD: My Lords, I am most grateful for the response of the noble Earl. In regard to the review, I should have thought he would have accepted it as a necessary fact that a new Government should undertake a review of all its responsibilities. This was one which it felt bound to undertake, particularly in the light of the large number of men, who have given very loyal service, and who might well be in some difficulty by reason of loss of employment. Therefore, in the circumstances, we have decided that it is right that we should proceed. In regard to the second point., obviously housing is of major interest and a major priority in that area, and I assure the noble Lord that planning matters will be most carefully considered, both by the local authority and by the planning authority for the area.

MUSEUM OF LONDON BILL [H.L.]
4.2 p.m.
Order of the Day read for the House to be put into Committee (on recommitment).
Moved, That the House do now resolve itself into Committee.—(Lord Champion)
On Question, Motion agreed to.
House in Committee accordingly.
[The Lord Merthyr in the Chair.]
THE CHAIRMAN OF COMMITTEES (LORD MERTHYR): This Bill has been amended by the Committee on Unopposed Bills.
Clauses 1 to 7 agreed to.
THE MINISTER WITHOUT PORTFOLIO (LORD CHAMPION)THE MINISTER WITHOUT PORTFOLIO (LORD CHAMPION) moved, after Clause 7, to insert the following new clause:
Use of premises acquired under s. 4
".The Board may use any premises acquired by them in pursuance of section 4 (1) of this Act, or allow those premises to be used (whether in return for payment or not), for the holding of exhibitions and meetings, the showing of films and slides, the giving of musical performances and the holding of other events of an educational or cultural nature."
The noble Lord said: I beg to move the new clause standing in my name on the Order Paper. The Committee will remember that in the course of the Second Reading debate the noble Lord, Lord Airedale, suggested that the Bill should contain a provision corresponding to Section 20 of the Public Libraries and Museums Act, 1964, which empowers the local authority to allow museum premises to be used for meetings, film shows, concerts, and other cultural provisions. I replied to the noble Lord to the effect that, while I thought Clause 3 of the Bill was sufficiently wide to include the things mentioned by him, I would nevertheless look at it again, particularly in the light of the point made by the noble Lord that if no such provision were included in the present Bill, it might create the impression that Parliament did not wish the Museum of London to be used for such purposes. That seemed to me to be a very strong point, and having regard to the representations of the noble Lord, and my subsequent consideration of the

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matter, I now move the clause standing in my name.
Moved, after Clause 7, to insert the said new clause.—(Lord Champion.)
LORD AIREDALE: I am very much obliged to the Minister, and I welcome this new clause.
On Question, Amendment agreed to.
Clause 8 [Employment of staff]:
On Question, Whether Clause 8 shall stand part of the Bill?
LORD AIREDALE: Clause 8 deals with the conditions of employment of the staff of the Museum of London. The noble Lord, the Minister without Portfolio, in explaining this clause to us on Second Reading said:
"… the pay and other terms and conditions of service of the staff will be on the lines of those applicable in local government employment…. Those of the staff of the Guildhall Museum who transfer to the Museum of London"—
and they are not civil servants—
"are therefore unlikely to find very much difference in their terms and conditions of service. For staff transferring from the London Museum, where Civil Service terms and conditions apply, the difference may be somewhat greater, and it is possible that there may be some feeling of apprehension on that score. I hope that what I am going to say may allay any such feeling.''—[Official Report, Vol. 261 (No. 14), col. 947, November 26, 1964.]
At the end of that part of the noble Lord's speech under this heading, he said:
"… it will be the intention … that the rates of pay and terms and conditions of employment of staff transferred to the new Museum will be such as, taken together, compare fairly with those which they now enjoy in the London Museum and the Guildhall Museum."—[col. 948.]
I presume that, if the new conditions are to compare fairly, that means that they will be not less generous than the conditions which have been enjoyed by these people up to now. So we seem to have the position that those of the Museum staff who transfer to the new museum, and who are at present civil servants, will feel a difference which is greater than that to be felt by their colleagues who are not civil servants, but, at the same time, will have conditions which will compare fairly with those which they now enjoy. I do not find those two statements com-
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pletely reconcilable, and I should not be surprised if there still lingered some apprehension in the minds of the civil servants affected in this matter. I wonder, therefore, whether the Minister would take this opportunity to expand his explanation a little further, and possibly he will be able to sweep away altogether these apprehensions which I feel may still exist.
LORD CHORLEY: I should like to add a word to what the noble Lord, Lord Airedale, has said: that there are possibly apprehensions which have not been swept away. I can assure the Minister that that is, if anything, an understatement. What he said, and what the noble Lord, Lord Rennell, said, in the Second Reading debate has caused rather more than apprehension, and even a certain amount of despondency. Lord Rennell, whose interest in this matter we know, made some remarks about nobody being forced to join the new staff if he did not want to, and that when those concerned saw the conditions, if they did not feel like going on, they need not. Though it is no doubt right that people should be warned, such remarks have a rather scaring effect.
I do not think there can be any question that those who have been working all these years in the London Museum, even if not technically civil servants, have been treated on the basis of being civil servants; and they have had the advantage of all the machinery provided in the Civil Service for dealing with salary claims and conditions of employment, those very important matters which mean so much to people who are at work. All these things seem to be slipping away. That is undoubtedly very worrying for them. As I understand it, there is quite a perceptible difference in the emoluments and other conditions of work as between the London Museum and the Guildhall Museum, and they are afraid—and it may be that this is wrong—that, in effect, they will be downgraded and find themselves worse off in several ways when the amalgamation has taken place.
I understand from what the Minister said in his Second Reading speech that there is no real fear of that, but undoubtedly there are the apprehensions among these people, who have worked

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faithfully for very many years. I understand that they will be approaching the Government between now and the time when this Bill goes to another place to ask them to hold discussions with the staff associations which exist for the purpose of protecting the interests of civil servants and other people who are more or less in the position of civil servants and who are members of those staff associations. I hope the noble Lord, the Minister, will be able, not only to reassure us on these matters, but to indicate that the Government will be prepared to discuss these problems with the staff associations during this period.
LORD CHAMPION: I think I can straight away give my noble friend the assurance that the Government will always be prepared to meet representatives of the staff associations to consider these matters. This is a subject that has been very carefully considered following both the representations that we have received and which were referred to to-day, and some others that we received from the noble Lord, Lord Ebbisham, on the Second Reading of the Bill, it is true on a slightly different matter. This seems to me to be perhaps the occasion to make a fairly full statement on this position, first as it applies to people who will cease to be civil servants and will come under a joint authority; and, secondly, on the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Ebbisham, regarding the possibility of ensuring in the Bill that there shall be a clause dealing with arbitration, and so on.
This is a whole scheme, and in it is this scheme for employment, the essence of which is that it is a joint venture by three authorities: the Government, the City Corporation and the London County Council. Because it is a partnership on equal terms, the local authorities are in a majority of two to one. That is as it should be for a Museum which will be predominantly a local museum, though, because the locality is the capital city of the United Kingdom, it is fitting that the Government should take a share. Since the Museum is to be situated in the City, the City Corporation will be the authority responsible for day-to-day relations with the Museum and for
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settling the terms and conditions of the staff, subject, so far as pay is concerned, to the approval of the other two authorities.
It is inevitable and natural that the terms and conditions of the staff of the Museum set upon these lines should as a whole be rather nearer local government practice than Civil Service practice. To provide that the staff should be treated as though they were civil servants would be anomalous and quite impracticable. As regards superannuation, it is a cardinal principle that the Superannuation Acts apply only to people whose remuneration comes wholly out of monies provided by Parliament. Only one-third of the remuneration of the staff of the Museum of London will come out of monies provided by Parliament, and that indirectly.
It may be said that as there are 70 staff in the London Museum and only 7 in the Guildhall Museum the new Museum ought, as regards matters affecting the staff, to approximate to the national museums rather than to the local authority ones. That would be taking a very restrictive and short-term view of the scheme. What we are doing is not just amalgamating a moderate-sized national museum and a small local authority museum; we are creating a new Museum on a quite different basis from both the existing ones. It cannot really be doubted, looking at the longer term, that the right arrangement for the Museum of London is that it should operate as a tripartite scheme but under the immediate aegis of the London authorities rather than the Treasury. Nor would any other arrangement be acceptable to the City. This is not to deny that there is a short-term problem as regards the staff of the London Museum who will be invited to join the Museum of London. These staff are understandably anxious to know as soon as possible exactly what this is going to mean for them. It would be premature to go into details, but some general assurance was given in the course of the Second Reading debate and this can be repeated and amplified.
Nothing will be done precipitably and there will be, as I have already said to my noble friend Lord Chorley, full con-

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sultation with the staff concerned. Clearly, no final decisions can be taken until the Bill becomes law and the Board of Governors is formally appointed, but there is no reason why in the meantime there should not be discussions between the Interim Board of Governors, the three direct authorities and the representatives of the staff of both the existing museums with a view to formulating within the framework of the Bill the grading structure of the new Museums and the terms and conditions that can be offered to the staff.
Any such discussion during this stage would have to be on a provisional basis, but if good progress could be made it would speed things up later and would shorten the period of uncertainty for the individuals concerned. One certainty is that if the staff of the London Museum are to be attracted to the Museum of London rather than that they should seek employment in one or other of the national museums, they will have to be offered fair and attractive terms, and the terms will need to be kept fair and attractive in the future.
There is great enthusiasm for this scheme on the part of the authorities launching it. It is intended to be a fine Museum—it is certainly going to be quite an expensive one to build—but it will become and remain a fine Museum only if it can recruit really good people to staff it. It will not get really good people if the terms and conditions offered are not such as to attract them.
That is really the part of my speech which I am devoting to the points put to me, particularly by the noble Lord, Lord Airedale, and my noble friend Lord Chorley, but I will continue from here, and I think it is perhaps right to do so because it all relates to staff and to the point put to me by the noble Lord, Lord Ebbisham. Perhaps I may interject and say how glad I am to see here to-day the noble Viscount, Lord Harcourt, who has done so much and to whom kindly references were made in the Second Reading. We are grateful to him for his work in this field. I will now go on to the statement that I want to make in reply to the point put by the noble Lord, Lord Ebbisham, on the question of negotiation of salaries and working conditions and the provision for dealing with disagreement and disputes.
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We have given a great deal of thought to this subject, and I would make it clear that we entirely sympathise with the idea behind this proposal—by "we" I mean the Government, the City Corporation, the London County Council and the Interim Board of Governors of the Museum of London. We fully accept that there must be negotiating machinery, with provision for reference to arbitration where appropriate. It is inconceivable that there should not be these arrangements, seeing that the Museum will operate under the aegis of three authorities, each of which has for many years been a party to such arrangements for its own staff.
The Board of Governors of the Museum of London will be appointed by the three authorities. Two-thirds of the governors are likely actually to be members of the City Corporation or the Greater London Council, and as for the remaining third, I cannot believe that the persons appointed by my right honourable friend the Prime Minister will be so unenlightened as to be opposed to the principles and practices of Whitleyism. It seems to us, therefore, it is really quite unnecessary to insert in the Bill a provision requiring the Board of Governors or the three authorities to set up negotiating machinery. We also think it would be inappropriate.
The Statutes in which such provisions are found relate to independent public corporations which are big employers, and in most cases virtually monopoly employers in their particular field. There are no such statutory provisions in the case of a local government staff or employees of the Crown. The Museum of London will be a body much more akin to the local authority and Civil Service world than to a big public corporation such as the Independent Television Authority. The absence of statutory provisions has not prevented Civil Service and local government employees, including the staff of the City Corporation, from enjoying what are generally agreed to be very satisfactory arrangements for negotiation and arbitration, and the staff of the proposed Museum of London can certainly rest assured that they will be provided with something equally satisfactory.

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I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Ebbisham, and other noble Lords who have been interested in the matter of the staff to be transferred and to come under this new body will be satisfied with the assurances that I have been able to give. I apologise to the Committee for having had to take so long about it, but this is; an important matter. I hope the Committee will agree that these assurances have been well worth while in the circumstances surrounding this transfer to what is bound to be a unique authority, a joint authority between the Treasury and two local authorities.
LORD CHORLEY: May I take the opportunity of thanking the Minister for that very careful statement, which I am sure will give a good deal of comfort to those who are concerned with these matters, and particularly for what he said about the readiness to enter into discussions with the staff associations?
Clause 8 agreed to.
Remaining clauses and Schedule agreed to.
House resumed: Bill reported with an Amendment.

DEVELOPMENT IN KENT AREA OF GREEN BELT
4.25 p.m.
LORD MOLSON LORD MOLSON had given Notice of his intention to ask Her Majesty's Government whether the decision of the Minister of Housing and Local Government overruling the decision of the Kent County Council not to permit development at Hartley represents a new policy with regard to a Green Belt around London.
LORD MORRISON OF LAMBETH: My Lords, before: he noble Lord, Lord Molson, puts his Question, may I raise a point of Order? The point I wish to put, which I have caused to be communicated to the Leader of the House and the Chief Whip, is that in regard to this debate about the Green Belt so much depends upon the merits of the case on either side that it would be more convenient if a Government spokesman could speak immediately after the noble Lord, Lord Molson, so that we could hear the Government case. I have put my name down to speak, but I should much prefer to hear the Government's case, as
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well as that of the noble Lord, Lord Molson. It could be done by bringing in a second Government speaker; or the noble Lord who is down to reply at the end of the debate could, by leave of the House, which I am sure would be given, speak once after Lord Molson and still wind up the debate. I do earnestly put it that, in the interests of the Government itself, it would be better if a Government spokesman could follow Lord Molson.
LORD MITCHISON: My Lords, if I might rise on the same point of Order (I did not know your Lordships had them), I think it would be better, from the point of view of the Government, to hear all the points that it is desired to raise. I am quite certain that in a matter of this sort noble Lords will have various views and various points to raise, and if whoever is to answer the debate has to answer speech after speech, then we should have repeatedly to ask the leave of the House.
LORD MORRISON OF LAMBETH: That was not the proposal.
LORD MITCHISON: If, on the other hand, one particular noble Lord is to follow me, how am I to answer him, and be sure it is the answer he wants?
LORD MOLSON: My Lords, I beg to ask Her Majesty's Government the Question standing in my name on the Order Paper. In this case a development company called S.R.L. Investments, Limited, bought two farms, consisting of some 429 acres, near Hartley, in Kent. As the land was in the proposed Green Belt it was not thought that it could be used for building purposes. Therefore the price paid was that of the land for agricultural purposes. The purchasers applied for planning permission to develop a village there. The rural district council, which possesses delegated planning powers, refused permission. This decision was confirmed by the Kent County Council.
The developers thereupon appealed to the Minister, who ordered a public inquiry and appointed Mr. R. G. M. Chase, Associate of the Royal Institute of British Architects and Member of the Town Planning Institute, to hold an inquiry. After a four days hearing Mr. Chase made his report recommending that the appeal should be dismissed. Notwithstanding

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this, the Minister has allowed the appeal, and S.R.L. Investments have received permission from him to build a new village to accommodate some 5,000 to 6,000 people. This decision is so flagrant and deliberate a defiance of the existing Case Law on the subject that it seems to imply, despite the Minister's denial in another place, a change of policy in regard to the proposed Green Belt for London.
I need not argue at length the case against the Minister's decision. He himself states at paragraph 8 of his Letter of Decision that he does not disagree with any of the facts found by the inspector. I will therefore confine myself, in dealing with the facts, to quotations from the inspector's report. He finds as a fact (paragraph 5):
"The site is part of the attractive gently undulating and well wooded scenery of the North Downs, and its southern half is included in the North Downs area of great landscape value as defined in the development plan."
He then goes on to deal with the commuter problem, and he finds, as his ninth finding:
"There is a railway station at Longfield about one and a half miles from the site on the main line to Victoria, but this line is already seriously overcrowded."
In paragraph 10 he says
"British Railways have informed the Authority that there is no prospect of improving commuter capacity in Kent in the foreseeable future."
Then, at paragraph 16
"The application includes no specific proposals for providing employment, but the site includes sufficient land for this purpose if required."
Then, in a subsequent paragraph, the inspector finds also that
"the site is part of good quality agricultural land in an area of generally inferior quality and is producing good crops with a high yield per acre."
He concludes:
"On balance I consider that the objections weigh against this proposal, in spite of its high quality in other respects, and that it ought to be rejected."
And in paragraph 99 he says:
"I recommend that the appeal be dismissed."
The Minister explains quite frankly his reasons for over-ruling the two local authorities and his own inspector. He says:
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"The Minister has, however, felt bound to consider the matter in the light of the pressing need to provide more housing for those who need it in London and the surrounding area."
We all understand the gravity of London's housing problem and we sympathise with successive Ministers who have to try to deal with it. But it has been the declared view of successive Ministers of both political Parties, and of the Labour Party, that the right solution is not to invade the Green Belt.
This matter was dealt with by the late Mr. Hugh Gaitskell, in a speech in another place on July 18, 1960. Dealing with the suggestion that the Green Belt was available for this purpose, he said:
"Some people say, 'It is really a matter of increasing the supply of land' … for building purposes by allowing some building on the green belts. We are emphatically and utterly opposed to any such suggestion … The green belts should be the start of the countryside, and not ditches between subtopias. Yet the Minister"—
of course, he was speaking then of a Conservative Minister—
"is doing nothing to stop this. As far as I can see it from his statement he is not even discouraging anybody from building on the other side of the green belts. The effect is clear though; it simply means that we have people working in the towns and living on the other side of the green belts, commuting between the two, with all the problems of transport, congestion and the ruin of the countryside…."—[Official Report (Commons), Vol. 627; col. 40, July 18, 1964.]
With regard to this particular application, we know the views of a Labour Member of another place, the Member for Hayes and Harlington, Mr. Arthur Skeffington, who lives in the vicinity. He says, in answer to an argument that has been put forward by the developers who are advised by Messrs. Span:
"I am afraid that all the detailed study of Messrs. Span cannot increase the capacity of the railways to take more people to town at the times they want to go, or to increase school places within years, or to cut down hospital waiting time. Some of us here have lost faith in the procedure of public inquiries referred to, "
There was nothing wrong with the public inquiry. The trouble was that the Minister rejected the recommendation of his own inspector. Mr. Skeffington goes on to say:
"The directors of Span say that the issue is that of providing houses for more people. I should have thought it was a profitable scheme for Span."

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Perhaps he should have said, "S.R.L. Investments".
It was indeed most profitable. I understand that the price paid by S.R.L. Investments was less than £80 per acre. After permission to develop the value will be over £6, 000 per acre. That figure is based on the value of building land in the neighbourhood. That is the advice that I have received. Naturally, I cannot undertake personal responsibility for its accuracy. If it is inaccurate, no doubt the Minister in reply will show that it is wrong. No feature of the Socialist Party's Election programme was more emphasised than their feeling that it was wrong that land in private hands and in the hands of builders and developers should go shooting up in value. They intend, we understand, to do something to put that right. But the electors would indeed have been surprised at the last General Election had they been able to foresee that the first important planning decision by the new Socialist Minister of Housing and Local Government was to give unforeseen and unforeseeable building permission to S.R.L. Investments, thereby increasing the value of the land at Hartley from the £35, 000 that they paid for it to approximately ½ million.
Why should this decision have been given now? We know that Her Majesty's Government were not satisfied with the conclusions of the South-East Study. They have told us that they are reviewing the whole matter. The Minister says so in his Letter of Decision. It has always been understood that this Government hope to avoid this great increase of more; than two million people in the South Eastern region between 1961 and 1981, and hope to distribute the population better. I sincerely hope that they will succeed. I regard" it as a matter of the utmost importance Why then, at this juncture, while they are reviewing the whole matter, take this sudden and irrecoverable, I fear, decision, which is a complete breach of the established planning code, in order to accommodate additional population in an area where the Kent County Council do not think they need or should be housed?
It may be that, when he comes to reply, the noble Lord opposite will say that a clear distinction must be drawn between the approved Green Belt and the
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proposed Green Belt. I think, therefore, that it is important to consider exactly what is the existing position with regard to the proposed Green Belt. In August, 1960, a sketch map was sent by the Kent County Council to the Minister. On January 4, 1961, the Ministry replied:
"In the meantime, and without prejudice to his consideration of formal proposals"—
I want to put that in, because this is a matter of custom and not, so to speak, a statutory provision until the formal consideration has been given—
"the Minister takes note of the sketch map proposals. He assumes that the Council will deal with applications for planning permission in the light of the sketch map and on the lines set out in paragraph 9 of Circular 42/55."
The effect of paragraph 9, taken with paragraphs 5 and 6, of that circular was to apply forthwith the policy of severely restricting building already operative in the approved Metropolitan Green Belt. Apart from the fact that the Minister could not be said to be committed to precise boundaries around existing towns, no distinction has been made hitherto between the approved Metropolitan Green Belt and its proposed extension. The same policy has been applied in both areas and has been upheld by a large number of decisions on appeal by successive Ministers.
Before I sit down, I should just like to quote what was said on the whole matter of green belts by Mr. Anthony Greenwood. He was speaking at Basildon New Town on February 22 this year. He was already Chairman of the Labour Party, which I believe he still is, in addition of course to being Secretary of State for the Colonies.
LORD MORRISON OF LAMBETH: He has just finished his chairmanship.
LORD MOLSON: But, anyway, at the time he made this speech he was Chairman of the Party.
LORD MITCHISON: But not the Secretary of State.
LORD MORRISON OF LAMBETH: He never said he was.
LORD MITCHISON: I am much obliged to the noble Lord for giving way, but the language he used—perhaps he overlooked it—seemed to imply that Mr. Anthony Greenwood was the Secretary of State at the time. Of course, he was not.
LORD MOLSON: I realise that he was not Secretary of State at the time. I cannot think that that is a very relevant intervention. I was referring in fact to his being Secretary of State at the present time. As the noble Lord may know, his Government came into power two months ago.
LORD MITCHISON: What is the relevance of that?
LORD MOLSON: He said:
"Already the green belts have been nibbled away because a weak Minister has yielded too easily to the speculators, and the hope of further concessions is pushing up the price of land still higher. An almost irrevocably damaged countryside and a dreary urban sprawl will be one of the most eloquent monuments in this country to the present Government."
Then Mr. Greenwood said—and this sounds strange now—that
"only by the return of a Labour Government would the green belts, or what was left of them, be saved."
4.45 p.m.
LORD MORRISON OF LAMBETH: My Lords, my noble friend who is to reply to the debate was somewhat in error as to the purpose of my intervention earlier on, suggesting that he or some other Minister should speak immediately after the noble Lord who has just resumed his seat. He said, in the course of his observations, that he could not contemplate that it would be useful if a Minister were to get up and reply after every speech made in the debate. But my noble friend knows that that is not what I suggested. All I wanted was somebody to come in after the opener of tie debate so that one could judge between the Government's policy and that of its critic. I thought that it was not quite in keeping, from what I know of the urbane and fair character of my noble friend, to imply that I had asked for a Government speaker after each speech in the debate, which is certainly what I did not do.
However, the point of the debate, so far as I understand it, is this. I speak without knowledge of the Government's reasons for what they have done or of the Government's Answer; therefore, I can speak only on the facts as they have been presented in newspapers. As the noble Lord, Lord Molson, has said, the Government may be able to prove that he is wrong about the facts and
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deductions. But one has to take it into account, and also the newspaper reports about it. I speak with feeling and sincerity about this because the Green Belt was an invention of the London County Council at the time when I was Leader of the Council. Therefore I am, so to speak, something of a father of the Green Belt around London.
I should like to recall to the House, very briefly, the motives behind the Council in launching that Green Belt scheme. Greater London is a vast built-up area. It is, I think, agreed by everybody, including Her Majesty's Government, that in fact it is too big; that it ought never to have been allowed to become as big as it is as a built-up area. The consequence of this is that people of all classes, but especially people who have not their own motor transport, or people who do not like driving motor cars in long queues and getting choked up on a Sunday when they come back, have quite a journey to make to get from the inner boroughs of London out into the green, natural countryside. The journey there and the journey back may undo all the advantage of the day or part of the day spent in the countryside which they have enjoyed.
The tragedy is that the Green Belt was not formed a hundred years ago, or at any rate fifty years before it was. It would have cost less; it would have been nearer to the built-up areas of London; it would have been far more useful. However, we did it in co-operation with county and county borough councils around London, whose co-operation was readily forthcoming on the terms of financial assistance which the Council offered to them. The whole point of it was to see to it that within reasonable distance Londoners could get to the countryside for fresh air and vigorous walking and so on. Consequently, the making of the Green Belt must be regarded as a somewhat sacred thing. If we play about with it, if we nibble at it (which was one of the terms used during the last Government's administration, partly by newspapers who supported the Government and, I believe—I am not sure; I do not wish to assert this—by Sir Keith Joseph himself) there is no end to where the nibbling may go.
LORD CONESFORD: My Lords, may I just correct one thing? I think I speak

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rightly from memory in saying that Sir Keith Joseph did in fact say that he would not permit nibbling at the Green Belt.
LORD MORRISON OF LAMBETH: I am much obliged to the noble Lord and will accept what he says. That is where I got a reverse impression of the word nibble. I am glad the noble Lord has now corrected me. In that case the Green Belt becomes a sacred thing which you must not mess about with. I know from experience that wherever you touch a piece of ordinary park—the Green Belt is not all parkland, but contains a lot of agricultural land and is none the worse for that—there can be an awful row about it. If you fetch a tree down, again there can be a terrible row about it. I have never resented these rows that have come along. It is a good thing that on matters of amenity there is a row, even if sometimes the amenity merchants are a bit unreasonable, as I have sometimes found them. But it is right that these principles should be held dear.
It is true that Greater London has a vast housing problem; that I know. If the old Government's South-Eastern plan goes on it will have a worse housing problem, because that policy was to increase the population of South-East England, which I think was unfortunate. But, my Lords, if every time you put marauding hands on the Green Belt, or for that matter on the public park and open space, you are justified in saying, "We need this land for housing", then there is no limit to the amount of open space or Green Belt that can be interfered with.
Who is going to interfere with it? The private speculative concern. I believe that the speculator says that, if he gets his own way, he will hand over so many of the flats, or whatever they are, to local government so that they can let them for rent. I do not know what the circumstances are, what the cost of the flats will be, or what the rents will be, but this ought not to influence us. This is an attempt to influence municipal opinion, or public opinion, in favour of the speculative concern. I do not say that there should be no speculative builders or no private builders, although I am naturally not in love with them, I must admit. But the
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speculative builder can be a soulless person, who is concerned almost entirely with the money he can make out of the community. Indeed, the figures that were given by the noble Lord who opened the debate, about the former value of the land, what was paid for it, and what its value is now, are a pretty serious reflection on anybody who wants to release that land for private development and private building. So that, therefore, does not occupy the speculator.
I am perhaps all the more disappointed in the Minister of Housing and Local Government because I have known him for a good many years. Years ago when he taught at Oxford we discussed public administration, public assistance and various other problems of local government, in which he took an intelligent interest. Moreover, he is known in the Labour Party as a Left-Winger. He probably got on the constituency section of the Labour Party Executive because he was known as a Left-Winger. I should be pained and hurt if my old friend Dick Crossman, known as a Left-Winger, now switched round to the Right and became among the reactionaries, among the defenders of private enterprise and speculative building development at the expense of the Green Belt, which we have all praised and about which quotations have been given this afternoon. I should be sorry if a man of the reputation of my right honourable friend the Minister of Housing and Local Government, with a distinctly Left-Wing reputation, opened himself to the charge that he has become reactionary, that he is making decisions which are bad, or had made this decision which is bad and certainly contrary to Labour Party principles and Labour Party policy.
I have not always agreed with him. I do not agree with him on this, if the facts are as they have been reported. But, nevertheless, I wish him well, as I do all the other Ministers. But it is not good if a Minister goes into office, and the machine gets hold of him and he then gives decisions which were denounced when they were thought about by the previous Administration, and he swings to the Right in this vigorous way. I admit that I have spoken on the basis of the facts as they have been reported, and it may be that my noble friend who is to reply to the debate will be able to prove that the facts as alleged are all

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wrong, that the Minister is not going to approve this action, has not approved it, and that he is standing by Labour Party policy on this matter. If he does that I shall be delighted and very much relieved, and I hope that that may be the case. But if it is the case that we are going to allow depredations on this matter of the Green Belt, then this will not be the last such decision, and parks and open spaces may be involved as well. I hope that my noble friend can give us assurances that it is all right.
It is true that this is in a rather different category from the original Green Belt, as the noble Lord opposite said, but, nevertheless, it has been handled and regarded as potentially a part of the official Green Belt. If my noble friend is not in a position to give us a satisfactory reply, perhaps he could postpone his reply to another time, and try to persuade his right honourable friend the Minister of Housing and Local Government to look at the matter again.
LORD MITCHISON: He has no power.
LORD MORRISON OF LAMBETH: It is done?
LORD HOBSON: It is an Act of Parliament.
LORD MORRISON OF LAMBETH: It is not an Act of Parliament; it is an administrative decision by the Minister. He was not bound to give that decision, was he?
A NOBLE LORD: He has given it.
LORD MORRISON OF LAMBETH: He has given it, I agree, and that may bind him. That is a fair point, but it is not a welcome point. But it was an administrative decision taken on his own responsibility, his personal, undivided responsibility. If the facts are as they have been stated and indicated, I am bound to say with sorrow—as one who had a great hand in the launching of the Green Belt—that I very much regret it, and I think the day will come when Her Majesty's Government will regret it as well.
4.57 p.m.
VISCOUNTESHER: My Lords, I should like to say straight away that the architect of this development, Mr. Eric Lyons, has in my opinion made what is
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possibly the outstanding contribution of any private architect to domestic architecture in this country since the war. Some share of that credit should also go to the developers, Span, to whom he has acted as consultant for many years. This is not an architectural issue; this is a planning issue. During the summer some of my colleagues and I were engaged on a detailed survey of a sample part of the South-East region, just outside the official Green Belt. Since the war, or at any rate in the last ten years, something like a million people have been housed in this region, in what the South-East Study calls the "outer country ring". What we wanted to discover was how this had been done in an area which is still shown as green, rural England on many maps. On the map in the folder at the end of the South-East Study this region appears to be innocent countryside.
We discovered two things. The first was that this had been done very largely by what is called infilling and extension of old villages and small country towns; that this work had been done very largely by speculative builders without the benefit of an architect; and that the damage done to these old places, to their character and charm, had now reached a stage at which the exercise must be called off. The second thing we discovered was that there seemed to be developing two kinds of landscape in the South-East. One was the truly rural, which I need not describe to your Lordships. The other was what we have decided to call the "residential landscape"—and I do not mean subtopia or suburbia. I mean a strange hybrid now beginning to appear all over the place, where the true feeling of the countryside—the silence, the solitude and the sense of space—has been subtly destroyed by the odd house, the odd pylon, the odd wire. This residential landscape, we discovered, occupied nearly as great an acreage as the truly rural landscape. It followed, we thought, that the rural landscape had now become so precious in this London region that it must not be sacrificed any longer: it must be protected at all costs, and development must be guided into the residential landscape, this hybrid landscape, and used to thicken it up. I believe that what we found West of London is equally true East of London and in the part of West Kent where this particular development is to be carried out.

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The first fault of this development, therefore, is that it invades the truly rural zone instead of tackling the far more difficult and far more worthwhile job of thickening up the residential zone. But, of course, we must expect this to happen if the area beyond the Green Belt is to remain a kind of "free for all", with all that that must involve in speculation and sprawl. I have referred to this as the area beyond the Green Belt because it can no doubt be argued that because it is beyond the approved Green Belt it is beyond the Green Belt. If we can establish that even beyond the Green Belt this kind of thing is a mistake, then, of course, a fortiori, in an area which is one of outstanding landscape value and which is in the proposed Green Belt it is even more unsuitable.
This brings me to the second point I should like to make. I mentioned just now that during the last ten years one million people have been accommodated in this so-called outer country ring which is beyond the Green Belt. To this one million the South-East Study proposes to add two million more, not in New Towns, in expanded towns, in new cities or in new communities of any kind, necessarily, hut by means of what it describes as "the normal processes of planning". From: he evidence that we have all seen on the ground, it is impossible to contemplate this prospect with anything but alarm. Opinions are bound to differ as to the extent to which the location of development should be rigidly controlled and the extent to which it can or should be left to the operation of the market. My own view is that this must vary with the intensity of use of a region, and that the South-East of England—one of the most beautiful, historic and congested regions in the entire world—can remain civilised only if a firm control is exercised there.
My Lords, a regional plan which controls one-third and leaves two-thirds to "the normal processes of planning" cannot be said to be the kind of control that the circumstances require; and in this development we have a case in point. Far from remedying the weaknesses of the South-East Study, which the Government have declared that they intend to do, the Minister has allowed this weakness to be exploited. It is the kind of planning familiar to us all dur-
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ing the last ten years, which encourages sprawl in Green Belt land and consumes untold man-hours on public inquiries—the man-hours of technical people desperately needed for creative work and work of real importance. It is the kind of planning that is based on the old and doubtful principle, "There is no harm in asking", when by now, surely, our regional planning in the South-East ought to be so firm that, in this kind of area, there should be no shadow of doubt that there is no point in asking.
I think this case illustrates the weakness of counties when they have to deal with issues of regional planning—weakness no fault of their own, but weakness inevitably if they are to be overruled in cases of this kind. It also illustrates, I believe, the inadequacy of a "once and for all" outline policy statement like the South-East Study. I am quite sure that there is no substitute for proper regional planning. We are told-—we are always being told—that regional planning is bound to come. My Lords, if we go on for long enough saying it is bound to come, it will never come.
5.6 p.m.
LORD CONESFORD: My Lords, in rising to join in the attack on this deplorable decision I wish to make it absolutely clear that I attack the disastrous decision of the Minister, not because the development which he has allowed will not be good in itself, or good of its kind, but because the site chosen is wrong. The disaster is not an architectural disaster: it is a planning disaster. I would associate myself entirely with what has been said by my noble friend Lord Esher about my friend Eric Lyons, the quality of his architectural work and of some of the work of Span Developments. My attack is not, as I say, on the architecture, but solely on the bad planning that allows the use of this site.
Because the site is wrong, the decision of the Minister violates every principle on which the planning authority, with the approval of successive Ministers, had hitherto been working. My noble friend Lord Molson, to whom we are indebted for initiating this debate, mentioned that on January 4, 1961, the then Minister wrote to the Kent County Council, assuming that they would deal with all applications for development within this

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extended Green Belt in accordance with the circular letter to which reference was made by my noble friend.
On April 15 of this year we had a very instructive debate on the South-East Study. During that debate a vigorous attack on many things—statements and policies outlined in that Study—was made by three noble Lords belonging to the Socialist Party who are now Ministers—the noble Lords, Lord Taylor, Lord Hughes and Lord Stonham. The noble Lord, Lord Taylor, initiated the debate, and the noble Lord, Lord Stonham, wound up. Those three Ministers attacked the assumptions of the South-East Study and implored the then Government not to treat it as though it were the last word. In that same debate a vigorous speech was made by the noble Lord, Lord Morrison of Lambeth, and one of the angriest speeches by myself.
My Lords, we were all in agreement on a great number of the points which we then put forward. The noble Lord, Lord Morrison of Lambeth—and I hope it will not harm either of us that in two recent debates we have supported one another—rightly drew attention to the amount of double talk on the subject of the Green Belt contained in that study. Well, my Lords, what has now happened? Every criticism made of that Study in this House and in another place has been wholly and utterly disregarded. And not merely that: this decision of the Minister goes far beyond anything that was suggested either in that Study or in the White Paper of the then-Government which gave their policy on the subject.
It is fair, I think, that I should mention that in paragraph 20 of the White Paper on South-East England the Minister did make it clear that in what I may call, for convenience, the "outer Green Belt", the extension of the Green Belt then under consideration, it might become necessary for some inroads to be made; and the Minister therefore would not approve it without further consideration. But he made it quite clear that he still valued that proposed extension to the Green Belt, as a Green Belt; and he made it clear that he would discuss with the local planning authorities what modification, if any, it might be necessary to make. He said:
"The local planning authority must also have the opportunity to re-examine, in the light of
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the latest estimate of population growth, the proposals they have made for extending the Green Belt. The Minister of Housing and Local Government does not therefore propose to approve these in their present form."
I say that, my Lords, in fairness to the Minister who has now made this deplorable decision. But if the rest of the paragraph of which I have just quoted the conclusion is read, it makes it clear that nothing like an enormous commuter village was going to be permitted and planted in the middle of it—nothing of that sort. I will not trouble your Lord-ships with the whole paragraph; I will ask noble Lords, perhaps, to take my word for it that the paragraph gives no sort of support to the decision that the Minister has now made. In fact, so far from doing so, it was relied upon by the Kent County Council in resisting this development before the inquiry.
I think noble Lords in all parts of the House recognise that in these planning matters I voice my considered convictions without regard to the views of the Government in power. That has been my practice ever since I came to this House, and I have backed my views with my vote. On two planning occasions I have been successful in my revolt against the Government which in general I supported, and the last occasion, of which, perhaps, I should remind your Lordships, was two and a half years ago, on May 29, 1962, when I proposed my Amendment to the Transport Bill dealing with office development in the County of London and subsequently carried it to a Division—and we beat the Government of the day by a majority of three to two. I may say on that particular question that, of course, I was unable to hold the whole of my victory, much, I think, to the regret of all Governments since that day. Nevertheless, such protection as does exist against the Railways Board making complete nonsense of the development of inner London resulted from the Amendment which I then carried and which was replaced in due course by a less good Government Amendment.
My Lords, in the April debate on the South-East Study my greatest criticism of that annonymous Report was on the two chapters, No. 7 (London Employment and the Office Problem) and No. 8 (Travel to Work in London). I said something to the House about the idiocy of build-

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ing all these offices in London and making worse the already insoluble problems of commuter traffic. When Her Majesty's present advisers took office, one of their early actions on offices in London gave me some hope that they would show some wisdom in planning matters. I am not going through the details of what they announced—much has not yet been discussed—but at least they seemed determined not to make matters infinitely worse by treating an enormous increase of commuter traffic as inevitable and as something against which they proposed to do nothing. Now, by the present decision, they are quite literally and deliberately creating a village for commuters in an extension of the Green Belt in an area of unspoiled countryside.
I shall avoid—as, I think, previous speakers, with the gallant exception of the noble Lord, Lord Morrison of Lambeth, have avoided—questions of whether and how far the South-East should have to provide for an increased population. We were unanimous on the last occasion against accepting the figures of The South-East Study without at least considering some of the alternatives. Nevertheless, I agree that it is a controversial and difficult matter to decide for what additional population the area chosen for The South-East Study will have to provide. But whatever the numbers for which the planning authorities in the South-East area ought to provide, whatever may be the increase for which provision should be made in the development plans, one thing, I think, is beyond dispute. In the opinion of most planners (with the exception of certain types of planners whom I will mention later) New Towns, by making a really substantial contribution, would be, for the reasons given by my noble friend Lord Esher, better than new villages in a wholly unspoiled countryside; and if there is to be any new development in the hitherto generally unspoiled country-side it should be in places where there is already some sporadic building and not on virgin, beautiful agricultural land. If any noble Lord is visually interested in the land that it is proposed to take for this new village, he will find an excellent photograph in the Architects Journal of the 9th of the present month.
My Lords, in dealing with The South-East Study the present Government have stated that they do not accept it all with-
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out further discussion, and have indicated that they will discuss it with those concerned. Surely that ought to include the Kent County Council. Why should the Kent County Council be excluded from those with whom it is worth discussing plans of this sort?
In developing my arguments about the Green Belt on the last occasion, and agreeing with many of the things which the noble Lord, Lord Morrison of Lambeth, and others had said about it, I criticised the implication of the authors of the plan that the whole idea behind the Green Belt was that it should be a playground for Londoners. With the noble Lord, Lord Morrison of Lambeth and others, I pointed out that it had a far nobler and better purpose than that. The authors actually suggested that the Green Belt's value to Londoners was somehow cancelled by the fact that parts of it were agricultural land to which the public did not have access. I pointed out that this was nonsense; that when we asked for a countryside near our cities, for the benefit of the dwellers in the towns, among others, it was not merely in order to provide a place in which they could play, but also to enable them to feast their eyes on something which would delight their vision and give them an insight into another side of the national life. After all, agriculture is not wholly unimportant. In the present instance the Minister of Agriculture was totally opposed to what is now being permitted by the Minister of Housing and Local Government under this decision.
Suppose for a moment that the Kent County Council had not allowed for sufficient increase in population in their development plan (and this may be the view of the Minister), and that the Minister, after taking all the relevant facts into consideration, had come to the conclusion that some more population ought to be accommodated, even in the extension of the Green Belt, than their plans provided, what should he have done? He should have told the Kent County Council that the County Council must provide for more population than this plan provided for, and should have asked them how they proposed to do it. Now, because a developer happens to have bought a couple of farms rather cheaply, the Minister says that he will allow that new village there, notwithstanding that the land is in the middle

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of an area of the Green Belt of great natural beauty.
To show that I have not been exaggerating, there are passages in the report to which I should refer. As my noble friend Lord Molson pointed out, it is convenient that the Minister should have accepted every finding of fact of his inspector. I find some of the arguments of the appellants, the developers, extremely significant. One contention will interest the House, I think; and I am certain that it will interest the noble Lord, Lord Morrison of Lambeth, with his concern for the Green Belt. In paragraph 39 of the report of the inquiry, the developers say that in the extension of the Green Belt what they want is not a "green belt" but a "green carpet", in which developments of various kinds should be inserted, giving, when seen from certain points of view, a certain impression of greenness.
I must say that I have some sympathy with the comment on that of the Kent County Council when they came to reply. It is worth quoting. The Council said (paragraph 60):
"The appellants' witnesses agree that the existing green belt should be inviolate, but consider that it is already wide enough and that outside it the idea of the 'green carpet' should prevail, peppered with patches of urban development—moth-eaten would perhaps be more appropriate—and none of it enjoying the degree of protection applicable in a green belt."
Another part of the case for the appellants I find equally enlightening. They point out that the provision made by the Kent County Council, according to the South-East Study, was not going to be nearly enough. So what do they say? They say that if those plans were carried out
"there would still be a deficit of housing land for over 80, 000 people in the Outer Metropolitan Region representing over a dozen New Ash Greens"
How right the noble Lord, Lord Morrison of Lambeth, was about what we can expect, if this policy is allowed to continue—a dozen new Ash Greens, and the case for every one of them will be at least as strong as this was.
But I think that perhaps the most remarkable of all my quotations and the most enlightening is Paragraph 41 which says:
"The new village would only be seen from quite nearby having no effect on any long
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distance view, and the landscape generally in the vicinity is featureless and no more than pleasant rural countryside—"
I am not joking, my Lords—that is the case for the appellants:
"… no more than pleasant rural countryside"
It is not a beauty spot. I always think that the whole conception of a "beauty spot" is responsible for more destruction of the beauty of this country than almost any other conception. What we wish to preserve is the ordinary countryside, and not simply beauty spots.
What of commuter traffic? I think that I ought to read a little more here, just to show your Lordships what is said; because if I did not read it, your Lordships would think that I was trying to be funny. Again this is part of the case for the appellants:
"It is true that Kent lines into London are generally overcrowded now at peak hours, but conditions on the line from Longfield are not so bad as on others and British Railways are carrying out a comprehensive review of their passenger service arrangements particularly south of the river".
That is to say, in effect, "Although the commuter position is appalling, in this particular area it is not quite so bad as it is elsewhere—so let us make it all equal." I am not joking. This is the case for the appellants. This is the case that the Minister of Housing and Local Government has now allowed. This is what is going to be done.
There is one other passage that perhaps I should read. It is from the Minister's decision letter. The remarkable thing about this letter is that he sets out quite clearly all the overwhelming reasons against what he is doing and practically none in favour of the action he is taking. I will read what he says in paragraph 7:
"While some increase in commuting is unavoidable, if urgent housing needs are to be met, the Minister accepts that any improvement in railway carrying capacity depends on a comprehensive review of the present pattern of services."—
in other words, something that has not yet happened, and we do not know whether it can possibly be successful.
"But he considers that in the meantime"—
the phrase, "in the meantime" seems to me matchless—
"the appeal site is better placed for development than many others in Kent."
That is the utmost the Minister can say in praise of this decision he has reached: that it would be possible, if one searched

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all Kent, to find pieces of land which are even more unsuitable than that which he is going to allow to be developed.
I thank your Lordships for the patience with which you have listened to an angry old man, who sees nearly everything that he has fought for, inside Parliament and outside, being ruined by stupidity; who sees, after all the lip service that has been given to town and country planning, and all that has been said about protecting our countryside and improving the conditions of the physical surroundings of our people, this idiocy taking place.
There are known, among planners, to be various schools of planning. One school, now uppermost, I think, among the advisers of the Minister of Housing and Local Government, is what is known as trend planning. The nature of this planning is as follows. You discover the trend—in this case, that there are a number of people who, in spite of all the discomfort, would still like to commute from London into a new great village in the middle of an area of outstanding beauty in the extended Green Belt. You find that that is the trend, and your conception of the duty of planning is how to succumb to the trend. There is another school of planning which tries to use planning to improve the life and environment of our people, and to preserve those increasingly rare areas of outstanding beauty that are in reach of the Londoner and the inhabitants of others of our great cities.
When I was at one time a student of the classics, one of the tasks one had was to try to learn something about the authorship of a passage, by textual criticism and sometimes by applying one's critical faculty to various texts to see whether they were really by the same people. I am very much struck by the similarity of the thoughts behind three documents, and they are these: the arguments used by the anonymous authors of the South-East Study; the arguments used by the appellants, which were entirely addressed to those advisers in the Ministry of Housing and Local Government whom they imagined likely to be the ultimate people to advise the Minister on what to do; and the advice behind the Minister's decision letter. I find no difficulty in believing that those three different documents all have the same explanation.
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My Lords, I have some sympathy with the Minister. He is a man of high intelligence. I do not think he had given great thought to these particular topics before he took his present office, and I can imagine that great pressure was brought to bear upon him to come to the decision that he reached. In law, it is, I think, an irrevocable decision. There is only one thing that can be done which will save this extension of the Green Beit and prevent what is the absolute negation of good planning from taking place; that is, legislation. I think that it would need great courage for a new Administration and a new Minister to bring in legislation for the single purpose of reversing a decision which he is man enough to recognise to have been wrong. Nevertheless, I believe that Her Majesty's Government would be well advised to incur whatever ridicule might be involved in legislating against this decision, rather than be counted, as they will be counted, as those who destroyed all hope of preserving a most lovely part of South-East England.
There is one more word that I would say to the Minister who will reply to this debate. I hope he will not think that it is sufficient for him to reply giving the case as seen by the Minister of Housing and Local Government. It was that Minister's decision; but far more than that Minister is concerned, and nobody is more personally concerned than the Minister of Land and Natural Resources, whose Parliamentary Secretary is going to reply to this debate. The Prime Minister in another place, in answer to a Question on November 26 last, said this:
"My right honourable friend the Minister of Land and Natural Resources will participate in the formulation of the national and regional plans for which my right honourable friend the First Secretary of State has overall responsibility. My right honourable friend the Minister will be generally responsible for the availability of natural resources to meet the needs of the community and it will be for him to consider the use made of natural resources, the development of new resources and the better use of natural resources of which inadequate use is made at present. Land is the most important and urgent problem, and he will be responsible for the establishment of the Land Commission as soon as possible and for future policies relating to the availability of land as the community needs it."—[Official Report, Commons, Vol. 702 (No. 21), col. 214.]
I say that the Minister of Land and Natural Resources is already concerned

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under that first paragraph. But the answer continues to say that there will actually be transferred to him all the functions of the Minister of Housing and Local Government as regards National Parks, which were quite rightly mentioned in this connection by the noble Lord, Lord Morrison of Lambeth.
My Lords, I find it quite impossible to believe that, if the new Ministry is to be concerned at all with the allocation of land, including National Parks, longdistance routes and the rest, it can take a position of complete indifference on the matter before us, and simply think that it has nothing to say, once the Minister of Housing and Local Government has made up his mind. I should like to know from the noble Lord who is to reply how much consideration of this development allowed by the Minister of Housing and Local Government was given by his Minister, the Minister of Land and Natural Resources. How did his Minister decide that the Minister of Housing and Local Government was right, and that the Minister of Agriculture, who objected to the whole proposal, was wrong? I hope that we shall hear all that. I am sorry if I have taken too much time. But I have been speaking on a subject that has been a matter of a lifetime's concern, and I hate to see England destroyed by a piece of outrageous folly.
5.41 p.m.
LORD CHORLEY: My Lords, as some of your Lordships know, I am one of the "amenity merchants" to whom my noble friend Lord Morrison of Lambeth referred, and I should like to add my voice to what has been said against thi's decision by other noble Lords who have spoken this afternoon. My noble friend Lord Silkin, who is really the only Minister of Town and Country Planning that this country has ever had, said in his speech on the gracious Speech that he proposed from time to time to address the new Government as a candid friend. I thought that was an admirable sentiment. I do not know that I have actually heard him carrying out this promise, but we have had the great pleasure of hearing my noble friend Lord Morrison of Lambeth, with whom I worked during the war, do it more than once, and this afternoon very manfully.
I share something of the passion of the noble Lord, Lord Conesford, in this mat-
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ter. I could not help remembering, when he was talking about the harm which had been done to England by the conception of beauty spots, of a famous ironical remark—I do not know who the author was—saying that our generation had found England a place of beauty and was in danger of leaving it a place of beauty spots, which is very true.
I speak in the defence of rural England and the beauties of our country which, after all, have inspired our greatest poets. The reason why I think our poets are famous throughout the world is because they were inspired more by the beauty of England than by any other one theme, and this is the theme which runs throughout English poetry, which is one of our greatest contributions to the world. That undoubtedly transcends any Party political element that there may be in this subject and in this debate.
I am reminded, when I take up a rather critical attitude towards the present Minister of Housing and Local Government, of the debate we had on December 3 last year, when we were criticising a bad decision of the former Minister of Housing and Local Government in relation to the Green Belt on the North side of London, and in which I think two of the Conservative Peers who have taken part this afternoon, and at least one other, criticised their own Minister in a very able way. Several of those of us on what was then the other side of the House joined with them. So I hope it will not be regarded as altogether surprising if the very much worse decision which the new Minister has just given, in an even more important case finds me lining up with the same Conservative Peers whom I joined almost exactly a year ago to criticise that bad and unfortunate decision.
The detailed case against this decision has been made effectively by noble Lords who have spoken in this debate so far, and I do not propose to dot the i's and cross the t's. This decision letter is really the most extraordinary document that I have ever seen from a Minister. Mr. Crossman's intellect and intelligence has been emphasised by more than one speaker this afternoon, and I think the noble Lord, Lord Conesford, was certainly right when he said that this letter was written by the same hand that penned the South-East England Study.

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That had occurred to more than him. The phraseology, the mode of thought, and everything else is just the same. When Mr. Crossman, who is a very intelligent man, comes to ponder over these things later on, and sees what he has been made to say in that letter of decision, I think somebody is in for a "wigging" in that Ministry.
It is the most extraordinary document, as the noble Lord, Lord Conesford, said. Every argument against this appeal was put, and then the wrong decision was taken. The only argument in favour of the decision is that it will lead to houses for 5,000 or 6,000 more people. In effect, the argument is that by hook or by crook we must have housing for 5,000 or 6,000 more people, even if it is in a very bad place, even if it destroys the only really good agricultural land there is in that particular part of Kent, and even if it operates against all the principles of planning.
The Minister goes on to say that he quite agrees that this will give rise to a very difficult transport problem, adding to the commuting difficulties of these people, because he admits that they are mostly going to work in London and that they will not be able to get there comfortably. In effect he says: "Well, somehow or other they will get there, because somehow or other all these wretched people who commute into London every day, hanging on straps and breathing in germs of this, that and the other, in the end get into London, as these people will; so let us provide them with houses and subject them to this tiresome journey to London." They will not all go to London, because some of them will go into the Medway towns, where they will be equally crowded and equally in difficulties in getting there. I should think that this is the most extraordinary decision that ever came out of the Ministry of Housing and Local Government, or any other Ministry.
If you look at a large-scale map of Kent of this area, you will see there a quite substantial Green Belt, and I hope that the Minister is not going to take these technical points about the fact that it is not part of the original Green Belt. That argument was hit on the head before it was advanced.
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Obviously the original Green Belt was worked out rather quickly, largely by Sir Patrick Abercrombie, one of our greatest men in this line, and clearly it was going to have to be modified by extensions here and there. That has been done, and those extensions have always, as the noble Lord, Lord Molson, pointed out, been regarded as part of the Green Belt proper. I think it would be a legalistic and technical argument to try to make out that, because it was the extension and not the original Green Belt, what had happened did not matter very much.
Over the last years England has been subjected to what has been called the nibbling process in the Green Belt. The Conservative Governments started well with their first Minister of Housing and Local Government. Mr. Duncan Sandys, who was pretty sound on this sort of thing, presided over a Ministry of Housing at that time who were pretty sensitive to the claims of rural England. Since that time there has been a continuous decay. The nibbling process started because politicians are more interested in housing than in almost anything else. Mr. Macmillan went to the country on the basis of building more houses than anybody else, and Ministers of Housing and Local Government have since that time been Ministers of Housing primarily.
In the speech I made to your Lordships a year ago, I found that the amalgamation of the Housing Ministry with the Town and Country Planning Ministry was the primary source of trouble in regard to this particular matter, because building houses is not the same thing as planning England. There may very often be, and very often has been, and in this case there quite clearly was, a conflict between housing requirements and the requirements of good planning; and that will continue to be so. It is really altogether wrong that in the same Ministry there should be officials who are, in effect, holding the position of judges of their own plans, and who are first and foremost civil servants concerned with housing and only secondarily civil servants concerned with planning. So the result is that planning considerations go by the board and housing statistics, which are so important, are put in the bag. That will continue to happen.

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It is obvious to all of us who are in this movement that over the last few years the feeling in the Ministry of Housing and Planning, so called, has been hardening not only against the Green Belt but against the amenity movement—because it has been not only in relation to the Green Belt, but in relation to problems that have come up regarding National Parks and in all sorts of other ways in which Ministers have been concerned. I made this point a year ago, and in the interval the situation has quite clearly deteriorated. What has been described as "nibbling" has now become mouthfuls. Nobody could describe what is to be quite a large town in the heart of the Kent Green Belt as just a nibble; it is quite a sizeable mouthful. As the noble Lord, Lord Conesford, pointed out, before we know where we are there will be other mouthfuls of the same kind swallowed up in other parts of the Green Belt.
That is the difficulty: the calibre of the Ministry and the officials; and, after all, those are the people we are really concerned with. For here is a new Minister, who has never specialised in this sort of thing but who, as so often happens in English politics, is put in charge of a very important Department in the work of which he had never specialised in the past. I remember a very old friend of mine, a colleague at the School of Economics, who was also a politician and who was made a Minister in the House of Commons, saying to me that throughout his political career, which was a very long one, he had kept all sorts of files on all the different matters in which he was interested—and he was interested in a pretty wide range of topics. When the late Mr. Ramsay MacDonald made him a Minister, he went to his files and found that it was the one subject on which he had not a single entry. That is what happens in politics, and it leads to many wrong decisions. You have a man who, within a month of being called to high office of State, has to make a very important decision on a subject on which he knows practically nothing. Naturally, he eats out of the hands of his civil servants who, during the last years, have become hostile to the Green Belt.
LORD MORRISON OF LAMBETH: My Lords, I would interrupt my noble friend for a moment in order to be fair,
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for I think that for some years Mr. Grossman was a member of the Oxford City Council, in which he would have acquired a fair amount of local government experience.
LORD CHORLEY: No doubt he has acquired local government experience, but that is not experience in planning the Green Belt. So far as I know, and I have studied a great many of the admirable writings, from the one on Plato onwards, which Mr. Crossman has contributed to English politics, both on the theoretical and practical side, but I think he was like my friend who found that he had not studied the particular subject which he had been called upon to administer as the head of a Department. That is the difficulty. What other explanation is there that he should, in fact, have stepped into the shoes of the late Minister and proceeded to implement exactly the same sort of policy, a policy of housing before everything, and certainly before planning? These are the difficulties.
As the noble Lord, Lord Molson, pointed out, this is the most astonishing encouragement to the speculators. In the speech which I made to your Lordships a year ago, I pointed out how they were taking heart as a result of the decisions of the late Minister. There was the case of the building speculator who purchased a large area of land down in Surrey and gave a Press Conference at which he said that he had bought all this land at a quite reasonable price because it would not be long before the politicians were forced out of the position they had taken up about no building on the Green Belt. He said that the speculators would force them out of it. Within 18 months they are indeed being forced out of it, and I must say, as one who was a member of the Labour Party when Mr. Crossman was still at his "prep" school, that I find very hard indeed a decision which is going to encourage all the land speculators, not only around London but all over England, because there are the beginnings of green belts around many other of our large towns. Ought land speculation of this kind to be encouraged by a Socialist Minister who is supposed to administer a Socialist policy in the Ministry of Housing and Planning?
5.57 p.m.
LORD MITCHISON: My Lords, may I begin by clearing up two quite small

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personal points. I can assure the noble Lord, Lord Molson, that when I interrupted him earlier, I was merely trying to correct what I thought was a verbal slip on his part. If I did any more than that, it would have been impertinent. I should not like him to feel that I was trying to put a substantial point in that particular way. May I turn to an even more serious case? May I assure my noble friend, Lord Morrison of Lambeth, whom, after all, I have known for many years, that I had No 1ntention of dictating to him in any way what he did in this matter. I merely felt, and having listened to the discussion I still feel, that the Government would probably be criticised by so many people from many different angles—and that indeed has been the case—that if I tried to reply separately, which I know is not the usual course, it was bound to lead to confusion, and that if I left one congent and forceful speech, as I rightly considered it would be, from the noble Lord, Lord Morrison of Lambeth, until after I had spoken, then it might go unanswered altogether; and that, I am sure, is the very last thing that the noble Lord would have wished. I took him to want a reply and I will give it to the best of my ability. I imagine that if the noble Lord wished to speak again afterwards, the House would give him leave. Certainly, I would not object.
I think the most convenient thing I can do for your Lordships is to start by reading out what the Minister for Housing and Local Government has asked me to say. And may I clear up one point at once? This is not a decision for which the Minister seeks to put any responsibility on any one but himself. Part of what I am going to read out now is actually in his own handwriting, and my only complaint about that is that it is not very legible. Having done that, may I then, as a second part, do something which clearly he was in no position to do—that is, deal separately with the various points that noble Lords have made.
I hope I shall not be thought to be impertinent if I say that personally I found the debate exceedingly interesting, not merely because of strong feelings that are held about the subject but also because of the very wide differences of approach introduced by noble Lords in making their speeches. None of them,
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I may say, has shown any real enthusiasm for the decision.
The Question—and it is perhaps just as well that one should read this out again; it is quite short—is this:
"To ask Her Majesty's Government whether the decision of the Minister of Housing and Local Government overruling the decision of the Kent County Council not to permit development at Hartley represents a new policy with regard to a Green Belt around London?"
That is the Question I am called upon to answer. I begin by reading. There are two inter-related questions here: first, the Government's policy on the Metropolitan Green Belt, and, second, the recent decision of my right honourable friend the Minister of Housing and Local Government to allow an appeal at Hartley in Kent. I should like to look first at the Metropolitan Green Belt and at the way in which it has developed. The original Green Belt proposed in the Abercrombie Plan was a fairly narrow belt encircling London. This was incorporated in the development plans of the local planning authorities and was approved by the Minister of Housing and Local Government when those plans were approved, generally in the late 1950s.
Meanwhile, the planning authorities had put forward proposals for widening the Green Belt. These proposed extensions have not been formally approved by the Minister, but local authorities were asked in 1955 to apply the same control in proposed as in approved Green Belt areas. Both the approved Green Belt and the extensions were conceived in a very different climate of opinion from the present one. Then the planners looked forward to a fairly slow growth of population. Now the expected population increase gets bigger every time the figures are revised.
The Government's measures to hold population in other regions will help to take pressure off the area around London. But with rising standards of living, with people marrying younger and living longer, we must expect even the existing population of London to give rise to a continued growth in the number of new households. This has implications for the Metropolitan Green Belt and more especially for the proposed extensions. The local planning authorities are, in response to a request from the previous Minister, already reviewing the approved Green Belt to see whether any small parts

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that are of little Green Belt value can be released for housing. They are also re-examining the extensions in the light of the expected population increases. My right honourable friend is looking to them to approach this difficult problem in a constructive way.
I turn now to the particular case referred to by the noble Lord. This concerns a proposal to build a new village of a very high standard of design, at Hartley in Kent. The site is included in the Kent County Council's proposed extensions to the Green Belt, but these have not been approved by the Minister, either finally or in detail. They have been treated like the other Green Belt extensions. I do not want to add to what the noble Lord has said about the arguments on both sides, though I am not quite certain I have heard many arguments on my own side. But I should like to look at the conclusion of the Inspector who heard the arguments and saw the sites. He found some points in favour of the development—namely, that it
"would make a useful and imaginative contribution to the problem of housing in the outer metropolitan region";
and that its
"effect … on the countryside from the scenic point of view would not be more serious than would be tolerated even in the proposed extension of the green belt, if the proposal were sound for other planning reasons."
On the other hand, he found that the "village" would be too small to attract industry or offices, and that the inhabitants would have to work elsewhere. This would mean travelling either to neighbouring towns with which road and rail communications were not wholly satisfactory; or to London, which would mean traffic on an already overburdened railway line. The Inspector also gave some weight to the agricultural objections. Taking all these points together, the Inspector considered that the objections weighed against the proposal, in spite of its high quality in other respects; and he recommended that the appeal should be dismissed.
My right honourable friend had then to reach his own conclusions on the appeal. This was a finely-balanced case. The proposal was one for an imaginatively planned model village with architecture and landscaping of a high order.
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In making his decision my right honourable friend had to take account of the advantages of securing this high quality development, the pressing need to provide more housing for those in London and the surrounding area who need it, and his Inspector's view that there was no objection to the development of the site as such. In all the circumstances, my right honourable friend concluded that the benefits of allowing the development would outweigh the disadvantages. He therefore allowed the appeal.
I would emphasise here that, although the Minister's conclusion was different from his Inspector's, he was not, in fact, in disagreement with him so far as the Green Belt aspect of the case is concerned. The Inspector thought that the site could be developed in the way proposed without any serious effect on the countryside. His recommendation to dismiss the appeal was based on quite other factors, which my right honourable friend felt were outweighed by the merits of the proposal.
I hope I have said enough to show that my right honourable friend's decision in the Hartley case is not to be regarded as a first nibble portending a swallowing up of the Green Belt. As I said at the outset, the Green Belt cannot be looked at in isolation from the pressures it will have to withstand. If Green Belts are to be maintained over the years great care must be taken in drawing their boundaries in the first place. Moreover, if the proposed extensions to the Green Belt are to be guarded against constant seepage of minor development into the large villages which gradually erodes their amenity value, a courageous decision must be taken from time to time to sanction compact development such as the model village at Hartley. These were my right honourable friend's reasons.
Now I turn to consider, in the light of the Question before us today, one or two of the points made by noble Lords—or, I hope, all of them. If I fail to answer any of them I shall be only too glad to send the best answer I can afterwards. I want to say one thing to begin with. The framing of town and country legislation, as I understand it, is that in the first place a decision is made by a planning authority and that decision is then subject to review by

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the appropriate Minister, who always has been, and still is, the Minister called the Minister of Housing and Local Government. That review is, of course, a statutory matter; it has been for very many years in the town and country legislation; and the decision that was taken when these parts of the law were passed was that the Minister should do it, and that there is no appeal from the Minister. He has in fact been entrusted by Parliament with the duty of making up his mind on questions, some of which may be quite narrow whilst others may be of considerable national importance. I remember a recent case about the centre of London—I think it was in Piccadilly—which obviously, being a quite different type of matter, went beyond the immediate local concern.
That being so, there is no provision for Parliament to review in any way the decisions of a Minister. They are, of course, rightly and properly subject to criticism afterwards, and it is always open to an Opposition, if they wish, to take a Supply Day in another place or to put down a vote of no confidence in the Minister in question; but that is all. Consequently, whatever we say here to-day, whilst certainly and obviously having great value as criticism, the decision cannot be altered. If I may say so with the greatest respect to the noble Lord, Lord Conesford, I think it is slightly fantastic to suppose that when a Minister has made a decision which he thinks is right, special legislation is going to be passed by the Government of which he is a member in order to reverse it. I think that has a touch of unreality which is really out of place in this important matter.
Turning from that to the particular points that have been made, I would remark that the noble Lord, Lord Molson, described what had happened as a "flagrant and deliberate defiance of Case Law". I am not quite sure what he meant by that. So far as I know, there is here no question of law—Case Law or anything else. All I would say is that if he meant that it was an extraordinary innovation, the fact is that previous Conservative Governments, for many years now, as a number of noble Lords have pointed out, have been allowing incursions into the Green Belt. It may be that this is a large one—it certainly is; but it is not the
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first time that it has been done. In many cases those were incursions into the area of, shall I call it, the Abercrombie or the Morrison Green Belt. These are, after all, the extensions, and it is not entirely a legalistic distinction, as somebody suggested, as between the Green Belt itself and the proposed extensions.
Noble Lords, referring to the proposed extensions, rightly pointed out that there was to be a severe restriction on planning permission to build in those areas; and a similar phrase was used in another context. The fact is that the proposed extensions are not on the same footing as the Green Belt itself, because they have not had the detailed consideration and approval of the Minister. In practice, they are treated as not quite the same, but with many of the restrictions which are made in full as regards the Green Belt itself. Putting it roughly, they are three-quarters of the way to the Green Belt, but they are not the whole way. There really is a difference.
LORD MOLSON: My Lords, may I just interrupt to deal with that point?—I tried to deal with it in my opening speech. Under the letter which the Minister sent to the Kent County Council on January 4, 1961, it was requested that the the same principles should be applied to the proposed Green Belt as had been applied to the approved Green Belt. The position really is this: the same policy has been applicable in both areas, but whereas the first has statutory force by reason of its area being defined, the proposed extension to the Metropolitan Green Belt is defined as to its area on a sketch map of which the Minister has taken note, and the policy applicable is stated in a ministerial circular. Since that date, the Kent County Council has received a large measure of support from the Minister in his decisions on appeal in the extended area. That is what I meant by "Case Law", I did not mean the cases decided in the courts.
LORD MITCHISON: My Lords, I am much obliged to the noble Lord. I really did not understand what he was after at that point, but I thought it was this. This bears out exactly what I had in mind. In the instructions to county councils, including the Kent County Council, the councils were asked to apply the same principles; and

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I think it would be exceedingly inappropriate for the Kent County Council to allow an incursion, certainly as large an incursion as this, into the Green Belt. That is my own feeling about it in the light of that letter. That, I understand, has been the practice of the Ministry. But I repeat that in fact previous Ministers, whatever Sir Keith Joseph may have said about it, allowed quite a number of minor incursions into the extended Green Belt. That is what I think it really comes to. I do not think there is any difference on this issue between the noble Lord and myself: that these areas are nearly the same, but that in extensions there has been a little more laxity on the ground I gave, in that the extensions have never been approved by the Minister.
If I may just pick up one particular point, so far as I know the Green Belt is not defined by Statute. I am subject to correction on this. I think it owes its existence to its inclusion as a matter of policy—and high policy, too—in the development plans of the authorities concerned. I do not think you can turn up a Town and Country Planning Act and find a line drawn on it like a national frontier. I think that is the way it has happened.
LORD MOLSON: My Lords, I think that under the Act the position is that when it is approved, the plans are approved, and they are statutory under the Town and Country Planning Act.
LORD MITCHISON: My Lords, that is perfectly true. But that applies, of course, to a great many things besides the Green Belt; and there is no statutory provision that a given area in a given town shall be kept for residential purposes. That depends on the development plan, which has statutory effect by reason of the town and country planning legislation. In this particular instance the land has not that status, because this provision has never even become part of the Development Plan. But I agree that when we get into that sort of area, that is legalistic. The real, substantial point here is that extensions to Green Belts are not the same as the original (as I prefer to call it, if my noble friend will allow me) Morrison Green Belt. They are not the same as that; they have never been approved.
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I turn from that to other points: that the Green Belt should be the start of the countryside. This was quoted, I think, from the late Mr. Gaitskell in a debate in 1960, and I am not sure that I did not take part in the debate myself. That is true enough, but I think that in considering a question of this sort it is essential to remember one thing: that these people are going to be housed somewhere, somehow. They are not going to be housed in the middle of London at present in present conditions. There are necessary restrictions in London. If their housing is not built in this area, it will be built somewhere else, and it will be built in what is partly country. I looked at the map of the surrounding area in the Kent Development Plan and, sure enough, there were quite a number of minor cases where development had been allowed in the extended Green Belt.
Turning from that to the position of the developers, I think that I ought to make myself quite clear over this. I share fully the apprehension felt by noble Lords, and the criticisms made by noble Lords about the extortionate profits often made by developers. I was very glad that it was said from the Benches opposite. When we come to consider the proposals for setting up a Lands Commission, I hope that noble Lords will remember what they have said to-day and will tell us how best they think this difficulty could be met. But I do not think the right way of dealing with extortionate or excessive profits, if they exist, is to deal with a particular case on a planning application. The right way of dealing with a question of this sort is by a general provision, not by a particular one. The intention of the town and country planning legislation is, and ought to be, that the broadest national considerations should determine an application if it goes, as this one undoubtedly does, beyond mere local matters.
I was asked about what was going to be done about the houses which were to be built at Hartley. This company, the applicants, are a subsidiary of Span. They propose to build houses for sale, and although the figures have not yet finally been settled, they propose to build them for what I might call moderate incomes, to be sold at a price of somewhere between £3,700, or perhaps rather lower, and £5,000. I hope that I have told

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your Lordships what you wanted to know on that matter.
I should like to pick up one remark, and one only, made by my noble friend Lord Morrison of Lambeth. I entirely agree with what he said about the Green Belt being in many ways something which should be regarded as a sacred thing. If you do not give it some character of that sort, then you may never be able to restrain the constant "nibbling" which has been going on. I quite agree with that. On the other hand, I think that perhaps the question we are discussing to-day is whether a sacred cow can grow. And I think that sacred cows can grow and should grow. When one has laid down a Green Belt in the time of Professor Abercrombie, many years ago; when one has had extensions to it afterwards, and when one considers the new extensions to it, then it is quite impossible to say that the principle of the scheme is being violated if proper development in it is allowed, either by way of extension or, exceptionally, by way of putting a village of this sort into it. The noble Viscount, Lord Esher referred, I notice, to the amount of "nibbling" which has been going on in recent years. That is quite true.
The noble Lord, Lord Conesford, described this as a deplorable decision, a disastrous decision—both those things in the first sentence; and he said it was idiocy. I have missed most of the other words. I appreciate—and I have known the noble Lord for some time—that he feels very deeply and sincerely about this matter. I think it was Cromwell who, before a battle, went among his troops and urged them, in un-Parliamentary language at the beginning, to remember that they might be mistaken. I sometimes feel on questions of this sort that it is advisable to remember that one may be mistaken; that this was a finely balanced decision and that in fact there was a very great deal to be said on both sides.
If I may try to summarise it—and I hesitate to do so—I would say this. It is not only a question of housing the growing population of London in present circumstances; it is also a question of housing them and not allowing
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oneself to be cramped and hindered by decisions that were made many years earlier in different circumstances. That seems to me to be the sum of the matter here, and however sacred this type of thing may be, it can and should be adapted to changing circumstances. Nobody looking at the face of this country in recent years, looking, for good or ill, to the drift towards the South-East of England, and looking at the rate at which the population grows (or the rate at which households grow, as my right honourable friend put it in the passage which I read out) can really feel that decisions of this kind which have been taken in the past are necessarily immutable or appropriate in modern circumstances. I would say, therefore, that this is not a nibble and that this is no change of principle. This is the application in different circumstances of the same principle which my noble friend Lord Morrison of Lambeth so stoutly laid down and carried into force many years ago.