Lords Sitting of 6 February 1964

Preamble
The House met at three of the clock, The LORD CHANCELLOR on the Woolsack.
Prayers—Read by the Lord Bishop of St. Albans

RAIL CLOSURES AND LUGGAGE ACCOMMODATION ON BUSES
3.5 p.m.
LORD STONHAM: 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, when buses are approved as an alternative to branch line railway passenger services, they will implement their promise of an adequate alternative, by ensuring that the buses have sufficient capacity for bulky luggage and that they provide reasonable connections with main-line trains.]
EARL FERRERS: My Lords, it is the function of the area transport users' consultative committee to consider whether any special arrangements would be necessary, if closure took place, to secure an adequate alternative service. Any alternative bus service must be licensed by the Traffic Commissioners in accordance with the provisions of the Road Traffic Act, 1960, and it is the practice of my right honourable friend the Minister of Transport to bring to their attention as appropriate views expressed by the consultative committee about the need for co-ordinating particular services. Similarly he would see that any evidence of special requirements for luggage was brought to the bus operators' attention.
LORD STONHAM: My Lords, is the noble Earl aware that the Traffic Commissioners could not possibly approve luggage trailers because they are not legal when towed behind buses? Is he further aware that the Prime Minister guaranteed that no railway line would be closed until there was an adequate alternative service? I inquire, is it the Government's view that an adequate alternative service would have to be reasonably equivalent
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to the service it replaces, and that that means that adequate luggage capacity is a necessity?
EARL FERRERS: My Lords, if I might remind the noble Lord, Lord Stonham, of the words of my right honourable friend the Minister of Transport which he spoke on March 27, 1963, he said [OFFICIAL REPORT, Commons Vol. 674, col. 1320]:
"…I shall see that where necessary adequate alternative means of transport are available…."
I would remind the noble Lord that the words, "where necessary" are obviously an imperative part of the condition, because it would be unrealistic to expect a service to be provided unless there was a need for it. With regard to the trailers and excess luggage space, it has been found in practice that where extra luggage space has been available it has not been used.
LORD STONHAM: May I remind the noble Earl also that on November 12 the Prime Minister gave this promise of adequate alternative transport, without the words, "where necessary", in response to a Question by my right honourable friend the Leader of the Opposition; and that is more up to date and weighty than the authority which the noble Earl quoted? May I also ask him whether he is aware that on January 20 Mr. Marples, when inspecting a protype luggage trailer, suggested that it might be used on roads where trains were to be replaced by buses, and that this would meet one of the objections to branch line closures; and that he proposed introducing regulations to permit trailers to be towed behind buses? What answer has the noble Earl to those points?
EARL FERRERS: My Lords, with regard to the last point of the noble Lord, Lord Stonham, the Minister has attended demonstrations of luggage trailers which may be suitable for drawing behind buses. Whether or not there would be use for them is, of course, a matter for consideration. They would have to be licensed by the Traffic Commissioners if they are to be used, and if the regulations by the Minister of Transport are altered to permit them.
EARL ALEXANDER OF HILLSBOROUGH: My Lords, is the noble Earl aware that, in regard to the lines

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already closed, there is a seething feeling among the local population because they are inadequately provided for now? Ask any of the people up and down the land from Tollesbury to Kelvedon, for example; ask the people from Brightlingsea to Colchester what would have happened if they had not got a complete revision of the original decision to close the line down. Ask the nearly 8,000 members of the population of Maldon about the closing of their line to the important junction at Witham—people who were daily users on the journey to London. "Where necessary" is not being properly interpreted at all. You are not getting the feeling of the people.
EARL FERRERS: My Lords, I am sure the noble Earl appreciates that, where a line is closed, the people who object can do so in front of the transport users' consultative committee, who then make their recommendations to the Minister; and before the Minister closes the line, if he considers that there are any extenuating circumstances which require additional bus operations—which has been the case recently—he stipulates that those bus services should be provided by the Railways Board before the line is closed.
LORD SHEPHERD: My Lords, would the noble Earl not agree that the assurances he has mentioned this afternoon, assurances of which we are well aware, apply only when a railway line is in fact closed? Would the noble Earl not agree from his knowledge that British Railways are progressively withdrawing trains from lines without effecting a closure? Therefore, would he not agree that the public and the local authorities are not in a position to raise the matter with the consultative committee? Could the noble Earl say how, in those circumstances, the local authorities or interested parties could raise the matter, either with the Minister or with the consultative committee, in order to see that, where railway trains are being withdrawn without closures, adequate bus services and luggage facilities are provided?
EARL FERRERS: My Lords, I think the noble Lord will find that the transport users' consultative committees have been available the whole time for people to make representations and complaints
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to them, at the same time as making complaints to the Railways Board. The purpose of the transport users' consultative committee is to accept those complaints and to pass them on where they think they are justified.
LORD STONHAM: My Lords, we have got beyond the stage of the consultative committee on six lines in the South-West and one in Cirencester, where the Minister has given conditional approval to closure, the condition being additional buses. But, in view of the assurance given by the Prime Minister that the alternative would be adequate, I would say that it cannot possibly be adequate until there is accommodation for luggage, and that cannot be provided until Parliament approves regulations permitting luggage trailers to be towed behind buses. Will the noble Earl convey these observations to his right honourable friend, and if I put another Question down later will he then be able to answer it and give an indication of the alternative the Prime Minister regards as adequate?
EARL FERRERS: I will certainly convey the noble Lord's point and shall be only too pleased to answer a Question should he put it down, but it seems to me that the whole crux of the matter rests on what is the noble Lord's interpretation of the word "adequate".
LORD STONHAM: My Lords, it is really based on what interpretation the Prime Minister gives the word "adequate". That is what we want to know, and I want to stop these lines being closed before we find out.
EARL FERRERS: My Lords, I rather gathered that that was the noble Lord's object.

THE NATIONAL BUILDING AGENCY
3.17 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 what will be the most immediate tasks of the National Building Agency which they propose to establish.]
THE FIRST LORD OF THE ADMIRALTY (EARL JELLICOE): My Lords, the National Building Agency will offer expert advice to those who propose to build, whether public authorities or private clients, and to their professional advisers. It will also assist in pooling their building requirements so as to encourage the larger orders necessary for industrialised methods of construction.
Simultaneously, the Agency will be making contact with those who control building systems, whether they are consortia of local authorities or building contractors, and with leading manufacturers of components, in order to establish and maintain the best possible basis for its advice.
The intention of my right honourable friend is that, in order to carry out these tasks, the Agency should equip itself rapidly with highly qualified staff who are familiar with the best modern methods.
LORD BOSSOM: My Lords, in thanking my noble friend for that Answer, may I ask whether he can tell me when this Agency will begin to function?
EARL JELLICOE: My Lords, my right honourable friend is certainly not proposing to let the grass grow under his feet, and these consultations are already going on. It is his hope and expectation that they will lead to his being in a position to announce the appointment of the board and the managing director very shortly and in the Agency's beginning operations in a few weeks' time.
EARL ALEXANDER OF HILLSBOROUGH: My Lords, may I ask whether the powers and this board and managing director have yet been finalised? Shall we be informed as to what the powers are?
EARL JELLICOE: My Lords, they are, of course, set out in the White Paper which has been published and with which I am sure the noble Earl is familiar.
EARL ALEXANDER OF HILLSBOROUGH: Yes, but I understood they were going into further agreements. Are there further agreements?
EARL JELLICOE: My Lords, I do not think they are necessary.
LORD HAWKE: My Lords, has the last answer but three any reference to the Green Belt?
EARL JELLICOE: My Lords, I cannot recall what my last answer but three was, but I am sure that it has not.
LORD STONHAM: My Lords, could the noble Earl say whether that answer has any reference to stopping the grass growing on the railway lines?
LORD BOSSOM: My Lords, is there any danger of setting up an Agency which might be regarded as upsetting the building consortia movement which is now going on quite actively.
EARL JELLICOE: My Lords, I do not think there will be any such danger. The Government, as my noble friend knows, are doing everything possible to encourage the formation of consortia of local housing authorities, and this has also been a very useful technique in the school building field. It is certainly my right honourable friend's intention that nothing this public Agency does shall in any way interfere with, or cut across, the work of those major consortia. But it is his expectation that the smaller housing authorities will find this new Agency and its services extremely useful and will help them to get ahead more rapidly with their building operations.
LORD BOSSOM: My Lords, in thanking my noble friend for that information, may I express the hope that it will be as successful as it ought to be.
LORD MORRISON OF LAMBETH: My Lords, will the noble Earl, in relation to this matter, try to persuade his colleagues in the Government not to send out posters and advertisements saying that "We"—the Conservative Party or the Government—have built so many houses, so many schools, when they know perfectly well that the houses and the schools have been built by local authorities and not by the Government at all?
EARL JELLICOE: My Lords, I think the noble Lord has made a very good political point from his point of view.
BARONESS HORSBRUGH: My Lords, does the noble Lord not think that if these houses and schools were not built, then there might be some noble Lords

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on the other side of the House who would say: "Why have not the Government built them?"

UNITED NATIONS AND THE CONGO
3.19 p.m.
LORD COLYTON: 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 action the United Nations forces in the Congo are taking to assist the Congolese Government in restoring law and order in Kwilu Province.]
THE MINISTER OF STATE FOR FOREIGN AFFAIRS (THE EARL OF DUNDEE): My Lords, The United Nations carried out successful rescue operations, particularly of missionaries, in consultation with the Congolese Government. The latter, who are primarily responsible for law and order, have, I understand, made no request for United Nations military intervention. No British subjects are known to be in the area.
LORD COLYTON: My Lords, we have all seen the accounts of the horrors that have been perpetrated against missionaries and Congolese officials in this province. I would ask my noble friend whether he is aware that these terrorists are led by a man called Pierre Mulele, who was a former Minister, under Lumumba, and is a trained Chinese Communist guerrilla, and are acting under the orders of Christophe Gbenye, who is the head of the Communist organisation in Brazzaville dedicated to overthrowing the central Congolese Government. Will Her Majesty's Government ask the Secretary-General of the United Nations to suggest to the Congolese Government that United Nations troops should be used not merely to rescue missionaries and others from this area, but also to restore Congolese control of the territory and restore peace there—incidentally, in the way that was done against the peaceful and stable and pro-Western régime in Katanga under President Tshombe?
THE EARL OF DUNDEE: My Lords, the United Nations' strength is now very much reduced in the Congo. I do not think the Secretariat would take action unless they were requested to do so by the Congolese Government.

PROPOSED GHANAIAN MISSION TO BRITISH GUIANA
3.20 p.m.
LORD COLYTON: 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 what proposals have been put forward for the dispatch of a so-called "goodwill mission" from Ghana to British Guiana.]
THE MINISTER OF STATE FOR COMMONWEALTH RELATIONS AND FOR THE COLONIES (THE DUKE OF DEVONSHIRE): My Lords, the Government of Ghana have informed our High Commissioner in Accra that, with the agreement of Doctor Jagan and Mr. Burnham, an unofficial mission is planning to visit British Guiana shortly.
The members of the mission are Professor Abraham of the University of Ghana; Doctor Makonnen, director of the African Affairs Centre; Mr. Morris and Mr. Lomotey. I understand the purpose of the visit is to try to help Doctor Jagan and Mr. Burnham to resolve their differences.
LORD COLYTON: My Lords, is it not really the most extraordinary thing to suggest sending a mission from a one-man, one-Party dictatorship, which has just abandoned the rule of law, out to another Commonwealth territory which has been lying under the menace of Communism for some years and where a most highly delicate constitutional experiment is now being worked out with a view to independence? Will not Her Majesty's Government now step in to cancel this extraordinary proposal, which seems to me the height of folly?
THE DUKE OF DEVONSHIRE: Under the present Constitution of British Guiana immigration into British Guiana is a matter for local Ministers.

BUSINESS OF THE HOUSE
EARL ST. ALDWYN: My Lords, I should like to inform your Lordships that there will be a statement by the noble Viscount, Lord Blakenham, on education at a suitable moment after 3.30 p.m., and also a statement on the Channel Tunnel link by the noble Earl, Lord Dundee.

CONSOLIDATED FUND BILL
EARL ST. ALDWYN: My Lords, on behalf of my noble friend Lord Carrington, I beg to move the Motion standing in his name on the Order Paper.
Moved, That Standing Order No. 41 (No two stages of a Bill to be taken on one day) be dispensed with for the purpose of enabling the remaining stages of the Consolidated Fund Bill to be taken this day.—(Earl St. Aldwyn.)
On Question, Motion agreed to.

OFFICES COMMITTEE
THE CHAIRMAN OF COMMITTEES (LORD MERTHYR): My Lords, I beg to move the first Motion standing in my name on the Order Paper.
Moved, That the Lord Champion be proposed to the House as a member of the Committee on the House of Lords Offices in the place of the late Earl of Lucan.—(Lord Merthyr.)
On Question, Motion agreed to.

COMMITTEE OF SELECTION
LORD MERTHYR: My Lords, I beg to move the second Motion standing in my name on the Order Paper.
Moved, That the Lord Shepherd be proposed to the House as a member of the Committee of Selection in the place of the late Earl of Lucan.—(Lord Merthyr.)
On Question, Motion agreed to.

CONSOLIDATED FUND BILL
Order of the Day for the Second Reading read.
THE CHANCELLOR OF THE DUCHY OF LANCASTER (VISCOUNT BLAKENHAM): My Lords, I beg to move that this Bill be now read a second time.
Moved, That the Bill be now read 2a.—(Viscount Blakenham.)
On Question, Bill read 2a.
VISCOUNT BLAKENHAM: My Lords, I beg to move that this Bill be not committed.
Moved, That the Bill be not committed.—(Viscount Blakenham.)
On Question, Motion agreed to.
Then, Standing Order No. 41 having been dispensed with (pursuant to Resolution), Bill read 3a, and passed.

INDUSTRIAL TRAINING BILL
3.25 p.m.
Order of the Day for the Second Reading read.
VISCOUNT BLAKENHAM: My Lords, I beg to move that this Bill be read a second time. The Bill has as its subject matter the men, women, boys and girls who are employed in the industry and commerce of this country, so we are dealing here with the nation's greatest asset—its manpower. We have few natural resources, and no country depends as much as we do on the quality and competitiveness of the goods that we export. If we are to survive and prosper in an increasingly competitive world it will be only by developing to the full the skills and talents of all our people.
It has for many years been an accepted doctrine that the responsibility for training the skilled workers that industry requires should rest on industry itself, but in the last two or three years the climate of opinion within industry has changed. A number of organisations and individuals have helped to bring about this change, and in this some of us here in this House can claim, without, I believe, undue immodesty, to have played our part. Certainly there is now widespread agreement that the present arrangements for industrial training are simply not good enough.
They are not good enough, my Lords, for three reasons. First, they have failed to produce skilled workers in the numbers

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that industry requires. Ever since the war, with few exceptions, skilled workers of various kinds have been in short supply. This has held up expansion in many sectors of industry, and not least in those parts of the country where unemployment has been higher than the national average. Skilled workers create employment opportunities for the unskilled. Despite the good work done by the Industrial Training Council (and I see that my noble friend Lord McCorquodale of Newton who was a former President of the Council, is to speak) and other organisations in recent years to step up the number of apprenticeships, there are ominous signs in some parts of the country that skilled labour is in increasingly short supply. If we are to pursue successfully the policy of economic growth which is vital to our future, we shall undoubtedly need many more skilled workers than we now have, or are likely to obtain if present practices continue.
Our existing arrangements have also failed to provide enough training of the right kind and of a sufficiently high standard. At one end of the scale we have training which is probably unequalled anywhere in the world; at the other extreme we have what might more properly be called, not training but what I can describe only as "time exposure". Training has tended to be concentrated on the traditional apprenticeship occupations, while the increasingly important technician grades and various new classes of operative have been largely ignored. Many firms have failed to take advantage of the opportunities for technical education which the enormous expansion of the technical colleges and other institutions of further education have placed at their disposal.
More generally there has been a failure to bring training practices up to date and to exploit new techniques of training. During my period of office as Minister of Labour I asked some of the leading apprentice-employing industries on a number of occasions to re-examine their existing training arrangements to see whether they measured up to the needs of the second half of the twentieth century, and I must tell your Lordships that I was, quite frankly, deeply disappointed with their response, and particularly at the rigid adherence to
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that "sacred cow", the five-year period of apprenticeship. Only in the building industry are there signs of this being adapted to modern needs.
Thirdly, and lastly, our present arrangements have resulted in some firms providing, and paying for, training, while others have done no training at all but have obtained the skilled workers they need by poaching from those who have. Here undoubtedly is a sphere in which virtue has not been its own reward. It is surely only fair that all firms which benefit from training should pay their share of the cost of providing it.
It was the need to remedy these shortcomings—the shortage of skilled manpower, the uneven standards of training and the unfair distribution of training costs—that led the Government at the end of 1962 to publish its White Paper on Industrial Training. The proposals in the White Paper were the subject of first-class debates in both Houses of Parliament, and provoked lively discussion in industrial and educational circles all over the country. Officials of the Ministry of Labour, in close co-operation with the Ministry of Education and the Scottish Education Department, discussed them in detail with industrial and educational organisations. This involved them in no fewer than 150 meetings of one kind and another. This Bill is the outcome. As your Lordships will see, it has been drafted in the closest consultation with those who are likely to be most affected by it.
This is a Bill of major importance and one that is intended to be revolutionary in its effect. It is surely both remarkable and encouraging that a measure of this kind should have won such widespread support. I believe that the Bill provides the means for real and lively partnership between Government, industry and the educational world to improve training in industry and commerce. While industry must continue to bear the major burden of cost and responsibility, the Bill recognises the important part which educational institutions can play in assisting it to obtain its skilled manpower at all levels. The provision of facilities for further education will remain, as now, the responsibility of the education authorities. But it is impossible to keep training and

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education in two watertight compartments.
The decision to raise the school-leaving age to sixteen, which my right honourable friend the Minister of Education announced in another place last week, is bound to have an effect on industrial training and work to its ultimate advantage. Similarly, as the Newsom report recognised, the last year at school will gain a new sense of purpose if it is more closely linked with the industrial world of which the school leaver will eventually find himself a member. Newsom, Robbins and this Bill all form part of a coherent pattern. In carrying out his responsibilities under the Bill my right honourable friend the Minister of Labour intends to work in the closest co-operation with my right honourable friends the Minister of Education and the Secretary of State for Scotland. I can assure your Lordships that this partnership between the three Departments will be a very real one. I thought it right to dwell on these important general issues which have influenced the Government in the introduction of the Bill.
I should now like to turn to the Bill's main provisions. Clause 1 enables the Minister of Labour to establish training boards for such activities of industry or commerce as he may specify. Before he sets up a board, the Minister will be required to consult organisations representing employers and employees in the industry concerned. The wording of the clause, which is similar to that in the Industrial Organisation and Development Act, 1947, allows considerable flexibility in the definition of an industry. I must make it clear, however, that the Minister's intention is to establish boards, not for certain occupations or groups of occupations, but for industries as that term is normally understood. This means that boards will be responsible for a fairly wide range of occupations, and that a number of boards will be concerned with the same or similar occupations. This could certainly raise problems. But I have no doubt that, by a sensible use of the power given by the Bill to appoint committees, and by the application of common sense, these can be overcome. I am quite sure that an occupational approach, cutting across the existing organisation of industry, would have proved quite unworkable.
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The composition of the boards is laid down in the Schedule.
LORD SHACKLETON: My Lords, may I interrupt the noble Viscount, to ask whether he would care to expand a little on what he means by "industries"? I think he said it was commonly understood. This, I realise, is a fundamental difficulty in the Bill, and it would be helpful if he could illustrate how it would work.
VISCOUNT BLAKENHAM: My Lords, I think a simple illustration in answer to the noble Lord is this. Obviously, if one takes the chemical industry or the coalmining industry, or many of our major industries, there will be a large number of engineers working in those industries in one capacity or another. Therefore, although technically they are engineers, they do not come within the engineering industry and, as such, have to be trained in the skills in which normally an engineer within the engineering industry would be trained. Therefore, I think it was right to stick to this industry approach rather than the occupational approach.
On the question of the composition of the boards, all a board's members will be appointed by the Minister. They will consist of a chairman, who must have commercial or industrial experience an equal number of employer and worker members; and members appointed after consultation with the Minister of Education and the Secretary of State for Scotland. In addition, the Minister of Labour and the Education Ministers will each be empowered to appoint an officer to attend the meetings of a board, but not to vote.
Paragraph 5 of the Schedule provides that neither the chairman nor the educational members shall have a vote on matters relating to the imposition of a levy. I think this is right. The employers in the industry will have to pay the levy, and the workers will be directly affected by the decisions of the board. I would describe this as the principle of "no taxation without representation" in reverse. Those directly affected by the calling of the tune will decide how much the piper is to be paid.
On all other matters the educational members will have a right to vote, as

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will the chairman. Because there will be no casting vote it would in theory be possible for the board to reach no agreement on the levy proposals it should submit to the Minister.
I would, however, draw your Lordships' attention to the reserve powers which Clause 7 gives to the Minister. If a board fails to submit proposals, the Minister can direct it to do so. If it fails to carry out this direction the Minister can dismiss the board and replace its members by his own nominees. These are drastic powers, but the very fact that they exist should be a strong incentive to a board to reach agreement on this point.
Clause 2 sets out the functions of the boards. A board will have two main duties: to ensure that the amount of training in its industry is sufficient, and to publish recommendations about the nature and length of training for different occupations and the further education that should be associated with that training. Boards will be required to exercise their functions in accordance with proposals submitted to, and approved by, the Minister. Before a board can decide the amount of training its industry needs, it will have to decide what its future requirements for trained manpower are going to be. Your Lordships will agree that this will not be an easy thing to do. Technology refuses to stand still and the pace of change is likely to increase rapidly. Just as the blacksmith has given way to the motor mechanic and the riveter to the welder, so the need for some skills will decline and others will take their place. Not only must boards be prepared for this; they must positively encourage it and adapt their training programmes accordingly.
The Manpower Research Unit which has been set up in the Ministry of Labour will do everything it can to assist boards to do this necessary piece of crystal gazing. In addition, of course, they will co-operate very closely with the economic development committee now being set up by the National Economic and Development Council. Having decided what the manpower requirements of its industry are likely to be, a board will then have to make sure that sufficient training is done to meet them.
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The Bill empowers a board to make grants to employers and others who provide training of which it approves. This will enable a board, if it so wishes, to make use of facilities available in Government training centres and of courses of integrated training and education provided by the technical colleges. A board will have the power to organise, or support, group training schemes in which a number of employers join together to provide training for their employees. A board will also be empowered to set up its own training centres if it considers this necessary. These are some of the means which a board will have at its disposal for carrying out its duty to ensure that sufficient training is available.
As for standards of training, though the board's views will be expressed in the form of recommendations, these will be recommendations only in the sense that no employer will be obliged to follow them. If, however, an employer wishes to obtain a grant from a board for the training he does, he will have to comply with the recommendations which the board has made. This financial weapon is likely to prove a very effective sanction. It was suggested in another place that boards should be given the power to make it compulsory for employers to release their apprentices to attend educational classes at technical colleges. To do this would be quite contrary to the spirit of the Bill. It will, however, be within the powers of a board to recommend that release to attend classes of further education should be an essential constituent of the training for a particular occupation. Any employer who failed to comply with this recommendation would find himself unable to obtain a grant from the board.
The powers of the board will relate to all occupations and to people of all ages. A number of people have assumed that, because the Bill does not use the word "retraining", and because it does not specifically mention adults, the board's responsibilities will be limited to the initial, basic training of young people. This is most certainly not the case. I have already referred to the quickening pace of technological change. I am quite sure that, in future, industries are going to have to devote an increasing proportion of their training effort to

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enabling adults to acquire new skills and to adapt themselves to new processes and techniques. Therefore, I want to make the point very clear that adults come within the scope of the Bill.
Clause 4 provides the fuel for the board's machinery: the levy. Every board will be required from time to time to impose a levy on employers in its industry. The purpose of this is, first, to raise the funds to enable the board to carry out its functions; secondly, to provide an incentive to employers to train; and, thirdly, to distribute the costs of training evenly between all firms. I have already referred to the fact that the board's proposals on the levy will have to be submitted to the Minister. If he approves them he will make a levy order accordingly.
Apart from the requirement to supply information, the obligation to pay a levy is the only duty which the Bill places on an individual employer. No employer will be obliged to train. But it will no longer be possible for a firm to obtain its trained manpower at the rest of the industry's expense. The converse is also true. It will be possible for the firm which provides more than its fair share of training to receive back from the board in grant more than it pays in levy. I think we can expect many of the firms which now provide excellent training, and have the capacity to do more, to take advantage of this, to their own and the industry's good.
Clause 5 empowers the Minister to make grants or loans to training boards. The main part of the cost of the boards' work must be met by industry through the levy. But the Government think it right that the Government themselves should make a contribution, and the limit of £50 million included in the Bill shows the very real importance we attach to this. Both the amount of the Government contribution and the way it is to be applied will be a matter for discussion with individual boards as they are set up and formulate their plans. I have already touched on Clause 7 and the reserve powers this gives to the Minister. These will apply not merely to levy proposals
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but to all the proposals which a board is required to submit to the Minister. It is the Government's fervent hope that these powers will never have to be used.
My Lords, the only other clause which I should like to draw to your Lordships' particular attention is Clause 11. This provides for the setting up of an advisory body to be known as the Central Training Council. There are some people who argued that the Council should be an executive body. They wished to see it play a rôle similar to that which the Bill gives to the Minister, and to be responsible in some measure for the implementation of the Bill. I am afraid the Bill has disappointed them, but, I think, rightly so. It would have been a constitutional anomaly to give to a Council which was not directly responsible to Parliament responsibility for implementing the Act and dispensing considerable sums of public money. But let there be no doubt that the Central Training Council will have the power to exert an important influence, as an advisory body, on the development of industrial training in this country. My right honourable friend will certainly seek its advice on a wide range of issues and I would expect its reports to have a considerable impact.
My Lords, I believe this Bill will achieve two things. As the years go by it should make for a big improvement in our industrial efficiency, and so increase our capacity to raise our living standards, while at the same time making a positive contribution to the development of the new countries and to the maintenance of peace in the world. It will also offer to all those in employment in industry or commerce a far better opportunity of developing their talents to the full. On both these broad counts I commend the Bill to your Lordships. Progress is sometimes difficult to measure, but in asking your Lordships to give this Bill a Second Reading I am asking for a milestone to be erected on the road to greater prosperity for the country and greater fulfilment for millions of our people? I beg to move.
Moved, That the Bill be now read 2a.—(Viscount Blakenham.)

EDUCATION AND CIVIL SCIENCE
3.46 p.m.
VISCOUNT BLAKENHAM: My Lords, with your Lordships' permission I wish to read to the House a statement which has just been made in another place by my right honourable friend the Prime Minister. It will be convenient, I think, if I use his exact words. They are as follows:
"When the Government made their statement on the Robbins Committee Report on Higher Education, a decision on the machinery of government for education and civil science was deferred until public opinion should have had opportunity to express itself.
"After taking full account of the views that have been expressed, I have concluded that the right course is to have a single Minister with total responsibility over the whole educational field, who should be Secretary of State for Education and Science. Under him, there will be a single Department, but it will include two distinct administrative units, and this will give the organisation something of a federal character. Broadly speaking, one unit will be concerned with the schools in England and Wales, and the other with civil science, and, through the University Grants Commission, with institutions of university status. The detailed allocation of work between these two units will be adjusted in the light of experience. The Secretary of State will be supported by two Ministers of State.
"There will be no substantial change in the responsibilities of my right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Scotland. Scottish universities will be financed through the University Grants Commission, and will thus be within the sphere of the Secretary of State for Education and Science. The Secretary of State for Scotland will continue to be consulted on the appointment of members of the University Grants Commission and on other university matters.
"As regards civil science, we shall in general follow the recommendations of the Trend Committee on the organisation of civil science. Two new bodies will be formed out of the Department of Scientific and Industrial
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Research: A Science Research Council, responsible for supporting research in the universities in pure and applied science; and a separate agency for Industrial Research and Development to take over the majority of the research stations now managed by the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research and to support industrial research. It is also the intention to form a Natural Resources Research Council. The detailed scope of these bodies is at present under discussion. These bodies, together with the Medical Research Council and the Agricultural Research Council, will become the responsibility of the Secretary of State for Education and Science. The National Research Development Corporation, which promotes the development and exploitation of inventions, will, however, continue to be associated with the Board of Trade.
"There must be close co-operation between the research agencies and the relevant Government Departments, and this will be recognised in the arrangements for appointing members of the controlling bodies.
"Legislation will be required, for instance, to set up the new scientific agencies, but the changes in ministerial responsibilities need not wait. The new Department should begin to function at the start of the new financial year, and a more detailed statement will be made nearer that date. My right honourable friend the Lord President will then become Secretary of State for Education and Science. My right honourable friend the Minister of Education will become one of the Ministers of State, and I have invited him to continue to sit as a member of the Cabinet."
My Lords, that concludes the Prime Minister's statement.
LORD SILKIN: My Lords, we are very much obliged for that long and complicated statement. I must confess, speaking for myself, that I find it very difficult to follow all the ramifications of all the Committees that are to be set up. On the face of it, it looks as if these scientists will be engaged much more in sitting on committees than in doing their actual work. I wonder whether it would be possible to clarify the statement by the

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issue at some time of a White Paper, setting out in rather more detail what all these various committees are to do and their relationship to one another. It is quite impossible to follow that from this statement. It is desirable that that should be done before the legislation is introduced, so that we may have a debate on it in this House, and possibly have some influence on the legislation later on.
As to the new administrative procedure, we on this side welcome it, because it is exactly what we put forward in the debate on the Robbins Report and on other occasions. I should like to ask this question. The new Secretary of State for Education will be the present Lord President and Minister for Science. Will he continue in his office as Lord President as well, or as Minister for Science? That is not stated in the statement. Secondly, we are told that the present Minister of Education will continue as one of the two Ministers of State for Education, but we are not told which. Will he be responsible for schools, or will he be responsible for universities themselves? We are told that he will continue to sit in the Cabinet. And what about his fellow member of the "federation"? Will he be a member of the Cabinet? Who will he be; and, of course, what will be his functions? There are many gaps left in the statement which I think we must have filled, before we can express any view on it. But so far as the broad statement on administration is concerned, as I have said, we welcome it and it is exactly on the lines that we put forward in the debate on the Robbins Report.
LORD REA: My Lords, I wonder whether the Minister could explain one point. He said that under the Secretary of State there will be a single Department, including two administrative units. Does the word "include" mean comprising two distinct units? Are there going to be more? Finally, I should like to support the noble Lord, Lord Silkin, in saying that we should very much appreciate a White Paper on this matter, and the opportunity of debating it in further detail.
VISCOUNT BLAKENHAM: My Lords, if I may, I will just answer some of those questions. I am very grateful to the noble Lord for saying that he welcomes
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in principle the decision that the Government have made; and I think the noble Lord, Lord Rea, also echoed that sentiment. Of course, this is a fairly complicated set-up. I think the noble Lord will agree that my statement was quite long enough, and if it had been rather longer it might have been even more confusing. I will certainly see that the representations of both noble Lords are brought to the attention of my right honourable friend the Prime Minister. I think that when noble Lords have had a chance of reading this rather long statement it will, in fact, appear easier to understand than on first listening to it. I will certainly see that the idea of a White Paper is considered in the proper quarters. As to the question of the position of the Ministers of State, broadly speaking they will be in charge of the schools, on the one hand, and the universities and science, on the other; but each, in fact, will give general support to the Secretary of State. I think that answers that question. So far as my right honourable friend the Lord President is concerned, he is Minister for Science as well as Minister of Education.
LORD SILKIN: My Lords, that does not altogether answer my questions. Perhaps they were rather long. One question was: will the new Secretary of State continue to be Lord President? I gather he will continue to be Minister for Science. The other question was about the second Minister of State. We are told nothing about him. What will be his exact function? Broadly speaking, one Minister of State will be responsible for schools and the other for the universities themselves, although they may overlap to some extent. Who will the other person be? For which department is the present Minister of Education going to be responsible? Will it be schools or will it be universities? Also, will the second Minister of State be in the Cabinet, like the present Minister?
VISCOUNT BLAKENHAM: No. I think I made it clear in my statement that the present Minister of Education is staying on in the Cabinet at the request of the Prime Minister, and there is no question of the other Minister of State being in the Cabinet. The present Minister has been asked to stay in the

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Cabinet because of the advice and help he can give to Government work in general. I do not think it would be right at this stage to define too narrowly what are the duties of the two Ministers of State. Broadly speaking, their responsibility will be divided in the way that I said, but they will also be responsible for giving general support to the Secretary of State in such a way as he lays down.
LORD TAYLOR: My Lords, are we really to understand that the former Lord President of the Council will now be Minister of Education, Minister for Universities, Minister for Science, Minister for Sport and, possibly, for the North-East as well? Because that is what it looks like. Really, this is almost too much. Are the Government aware that perhaps they have got it wrong? They did not follow the Labour Party policy quite closely enough. Are they aware that the Labour Party proposed a Minister of Education with two Ministers of State, but a separate Minister for Science? Surely, this is a downgrading of science in the structure of Government. Are these two separate Departments in the charge of these Ministers of State to have their own accounting officers, as the Admiralty, Air Force and Navy are to have, or are they to be a combined Department?
VISCOUNT BLAKENHAM: There will be two Votes under this Department. On the main point that the noble Lord raised, I thought at one moment that he was going to get into an argument with his noble friend, who, I think more generously, welcomed these proposals. I think the noble Lord, Lord Taylor, was trying to "pull the leg" of the Government. My right honourable friend the Lord President will certainly not wish to see that science is in any way devalued. I think the noble Lord knows him well enough to be able to guarantee, even better than I can, that this will not happen. But the proposals are as I have laid down. We think these are the best arrangements to make in the circumstances; and, of course, a great deal of detail, as your Lordships realise, has still to be worked out. But we thought it was in the interest of the House and of the nation as a whole that a decision on the broad principle should be made as early as possible.
LORD SHACKLETON: My Lords, does the noble Viscount realise that the Government's proposals with regard to science are entirely contrary to the Trend Report? Will he also appreciate that, though my noble friend who spoke from the Front Bench welcomed the general proposals, there will undoubtedly be great reservations on the subject of science in the widest sense? Might I also ask what the noble Viscount means by saying that the present Minister for Education will be staying on in the Cabinet? Does he mean that just he, personally, is allowed to occupy that chair, or is this a permanent appointment for him or his successor?
VISCOUNT BLAKENHAM: This is a personal appointment to the present Minister of Education, who is staying on in his own personal capacity as a member of the Cabinet.
LORD REA: My Lords, would the noble Viscount not agree that of the two subordinate Ministers one is bound to have much more influence than the other? Tweedledum is in the Cabinet, Tweedledee is not, although they are both responsible to Pooh Bah at the top.
VISCOUNT BLAKENHAM: That is an interesting suggestion, my Lords, and I wonder how it will work out. I think it will work out very well.
BARONESS WOOTTON OF ABINGER: My Lords, can the noble Viscount tell us whether, in this galaxy of Research Councils which is to be established, a place is to be found for a Social Sciences Research Council; and, if not, what provision is to be made for research into social sciences?
VISCOUNT BLAKENHAM: I think this is a point which certainly would be put to the new Secretary of State for his consideration.
LORD OGMORE: My Lords, might I ask the noble Viscount what effect this plan will have on the Welsh Department of Education? Will that also be split into two, or how is it proposed it should be managed?
VISCOUNT BLAKENHAM: I think that so far as Wales is concerned there will be no substantial change. The Secretary of State will be assisted by a Welsh Secretary, who will be a permanent

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official with direct access to the Secretary of State, as the present Minister of Education is assisted by the head of the Welsh Department. The University of Wales will, of course, come under the University Grants Commission.
EARL ALEXANDER OF HILLSBOROUGH: My Lords, may I ask whether the position with regard to agricultural research will bring to an end the relationship of the Minister of Agriculture to such research? Will the agricultural research stations, which have been in close touch with the Ministry of Agriculture, be taken away from them altogether? Because they have a great deal of local and regional effect.
VISCOUNT BLAKENHAM: Of course, as the noble Earl knows very well, the Agricultural Research Council has never been under the Minister of Agriculture. Again, I think the details of this will have to be worked out. At this stage I think it is too early to give an answer to that question.
LORD TAYLOR: My Lords, could the noble Viscount say whether the Lord President also looks after arts and museums, and whether he will continue to do so?
VISCOUNT BLAKENHAM: No, my Lords. The Treasury will remain the responsible Department for the arts and museums—except, of course, for the present museums, like the Victoria and Albert, which do come under the Minister of Education.
LORD OGMORE: And the Commonwealth Institute.
VISCOUNT BLAKENHAM: And the Commonwealth Institute, of course.

THE CHANNEL TUNNEL
4.2 p.m.
THE MINISTER OF STATE FOR FOREIGN AFFAIRS (THE EARL OF DUNDEE): My Lords, with your Lordships' permission, I should like to repeat a statement being made in another place by my right honourable friend the Minister of Transport on the Channel Tunnel.
"As a result of studies undertaken jointly, Her Majesty's Government
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and the French Government consider that the construction of a rail Channel Tunnel is technically possible, and that in economic terms it would represent a sound investment of the two countries' resources.
"The two Governments have therefore decided to go ahead with this project. The next step will be to discuss further, in particular, the legal and financial problems involved.
"Bearing in mind the very heavy burden of the two countries' existing commitments and the many other competing claims on their national resources, it remains to be decided when and how the expense involved can best be sustained.
"At the present stage of the discussions, the two Governments have not yet decided whether there is a rôle—and, if so, in what form—for the participation of private equity capital in the enterprise. It is clearly understood that, whatever happens, the Governments will have to have full control of any future operating company. This, together with the fact that private finance would require Government guarantees, must inevitably affect the final decision."
EARL ALEXANDER OF HILLSBOROUGH: My Lords, there are one or two questions I should like to ask about this. First of all, I see that these conversations have been brought to a certain stage of provisional decision between the two Governments. May I ask Her Majesty's Government whether the Chiefs of Staff and any existing defence committee of the Cabinet have agreed upon strategic and tactical considerations? Are there now no dangers in this method of crossing the Channel? We have had no statement on that yet, and I should like to know about it.
Then, in the penultimate paragraph of the statement there is a reference to the very high cost that would be involved in relation to the present national resources of both this country and France. In the face of that, references later in the statement do not seem to have very much point in them at the moment. Is the situation not that there has been a pretty wild gamble upon these shares of one certain organisation which is interested in the development of a Channel

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Tunnel? And what is the exact position of that company in the light of what was said by the noble Earl at the end of his reading of the statement? It seems to me to be a pretty extraordinary mix-up between, first, the apparent suggestion that the resources of both countries may be inadequate to deal with the problem and, secondly, what kind of steps would have to be taken by a Government in this country to take control of, and therefore probably to finance, a company which was also concerned with equity capital. It seems a rare mix-up to me.
THE EARL OF DUNDEE: In reply to the noble Earl's first question, the Chiefs of Staff have, of course, been consulted. We would not have made a statement of this kind without being sure of the defence aspects involved. On the last question put by the noble Earl, there is no question of the national resources of Britain and France being unequal to the strain of building a Channel Tunnel. It is not a very enormous amount compared with other projects to which we are committed. The question simply is: what priority should it be given, having regard to the load on the construction industries which both countries have to bear? We have to fit it in with our long-term national planning, and that is a question which is quite distinct from the other question of what rôle may be played by any of the private companies which have been considering this but which have not yet go to the stage of being able to put forward any capital to be employed in it. That is a question which must be decided by the two Governments concerned.
EARL ALEXANDER OF HILLSBOROUGH: My Lords, may I ask, in regard to the finance of this matter, whether very careful attention will be given to the points which have been raised in this House—and I have no doubt some will be raised in another place, also—with a view to considering what are our real resources and how they should be applied? We have one joint organisation at the moment with France with regard to the production of an aeroplane, but, so far as I can tell, there was no agreement made in advance as to which part of the expendi-
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ture was to be borne by us, although it was most likely, I gather, that we were to pay the majority of it. I hope there is going to be no such element brought into the financial discussions which are now to open. The other point I should like to raise (I should have raised it just now, and I apologise for not doing so) is this: are we to understand that any question of an underground road service between this country and France has now been wiped out altogether?
THE EARL OF DUNDEE: My Lords, on the first question, I would just say again that it really is a question of priorities in the use of materials and skilled labour. The noble Earl's point is a perfectly relevant one. He compared it with aircraft construction. I should not like to say offhand, but I would have thought that the kind of skilled labour needed for that is probably not the same as the kind of skilled labour needed for building a tunnel under the Channel. But these things have all got to be considered in relation to each other, in the same way as every Government weighs one planning project against another to decide which will come first, what kind of priority it shall have in our long-term planning. But the total estimated cost of the thing is not so very terrifying in relation to what we are doing in other directions.
With regard to the noble Earl's second question, about roads, our estimates are based on making an underground rail tunnel. We would be willing to consider an immersed rail tunnel if it should prove to be cheaper than that; but our estimates have been made on an underground bored tunnel. A road tunnel would have to be much wider; it would be much more expensive; and, at the same time, it would raise very serious problems of ventilation which might possibly involve construction of shafts in mid-Channel which might interfere with shipping. I think the two Governments are satisfied that it would not only be more economical, but probably more efficient and convenient to have a car ferry service in which there would be very prompt and efficient means of both taking on cars and putting them off at the other end.
LORD MORRISON OF LAMBETH: My Lords, could the noble Earl say whether the railway could itself carry at any rate passenger motor vehicles by wagons suitable for holding vehicles? The other point is this: can the Government say—and it seems to me they ought to be able to say—what is the estimated cost of this work? Can they say what is the estimated cost to the United Kingdom, and the estimated revenue—which is possibly a more difficult one? Nevertheless, may I submit to the noble Earl that it is really wrong for the Government and Parliament to be committed in principle to a very big venture of this sort—for which there is a lot to be said—unless Government and Parliament know approximately the financial liability and financial net result? It would seem to me very bad administration if that were so.
THE EARL OF DUNDEE: My Lords, the answer to the noble Lord's first question about cars is, Yes. But, regarding the second question, I should not like to give an exact figure now before the financial discussions between the two Governments have taken place. Both Governments are agreed in thinking that it would be a good long-term investment; that it would be well within our capacity; that it would pay; and that it would probably be cheaper in the long run than development of other methods now in use of getting across the Channel.
LORD KILLEARN: My Lords, may I ask a couple of very fundamental questions? First, may we take it from the statement that has been read that the Government have definitely decided on the construction of a tunnel? Secondly, if they have, has their decision ever been voted upon and passed in Parliament?
THE EARL OF DUNDEE: No, my Lords, we had decided en principe, as the French say, on the construction of a tunnel; that is to say, the two Governments will now have discussions in order to work out the details.
LORD KILLEARN: My Lords, I understand French fairly well. En principe is a phrase I know of old. It is all very well to decide en principe with somebody; but have the Govern
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ment decided they wish to support the construction of a tunnel?
THE EARL OF DUNDEE: My Lords, the reason why I use the term "en principe" is because I think it is generally recognised that things that are agreed en principe very often do not take place. I think that is common form; that is why I use the term. It is rather associated. We want the tunnel and so do the French. We both think it practicable; but we are not yet finally committed to it.
LORD KILLEARN: My Lords, if you agree en principe, has it been endorsed in Parliament? Is that what it means?
THE EARL OF DUNDEE: My Lords, that is exactly what it does not mean.
VISCOUNT AMORY: My Lords, as we are all getting very Continental, should I be right in thinking, that the rough interpretation of en principe would be "in principle"?
THE EARL OF DUNDEE: My Lords, it seems to me that my noble friend's French translation is unexceptionable; and, indeed, impeccable. The reason why there is some associated difference between the two phrases is, perhaps, that the French are slightly more apt than we are, to begin with the generalisation and not end up by doing anything definite.
LORD MERRIVALE: My Lords, as one who has raised this matter once or twice in this House—whether it is a question of en principe or in principle, thus speaking both languages fluently—I should like to say how much I welcome the Government's decision to go ahead with this project and to carry it a step further. I also welcome the fact that they have reached the conclusion that a rail tunnel is technically possible and would be a sound investment. But since I understand that among other problems which still have to be settled by the experts of both countries is the question of finance, may I ask my noble friend to bear very much in mind that one of the reasons why fiscal concessions have been asked for (and are considered by many to be desirable) is the great variation between taxation structures in this country and in France? And certain writers in the Press have

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argued that such concessions if granted would be only on a scale that are now given to shipowners in this country.
THE EARL OF DUNDEE: My Lords, all these details are to be discussed in the conversations referred to in the original statement which I read out. We must not make any presumptions about them at the present time.
EARL ATTLEE: My Lords, may I ask the noble Earl whether Dr. Beeching has been consulted as to the possibility of this line as compared with others?
THE EARL OF DUNDEE: No, my Lords, I do not think he has been consulted; but it may be that these plans will fit in well with some of his.
EARL ALEXANDER OF HILLSBOROUGH: My Lords, I want to ask the noble Earl this question: will the Government produce a White Paper at once to Parliament; and give an opportunity for a very early debate on the acceptance in principle which the Government have made of this enormous commitment? Shall we then be able to have Parliament assured of what the expected estimated figures would be; and what would be the terms upon which Parliament would be expected to approve the construction of this Tunnel? The last question is: In view of the references in the statement to-day to finance, may I ask whether the Government are making any suggestions or instructions to the Stock Exchange to stop dealings now in the present companies dealing with equities.
THE EARL OF DUNDEE: My Lords, with regard to the possibility of a discussion, that, of course, is a matter to be discussed through the usual channels and decided by the Leader of the House and the Opposition together. On the question of the White Paper, I could not give any undertaking about another White Paper. There was one before Christmas; but I have no doubt it will be considered and notice will be taken of what the noble Earl has said.
With regard to speculation on the Stock Exchange, the Government do feel it is only fair to those private companies who have been considering this matter to give the opinion that we find it difficult to see how, in any project of this sort, private equity capital could
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participate on any basis normally associated with the rôle of equity in a private company. And, in his original statement, my right honourable friend stated that the fact that private finance would require a Government guarantee must inevitably affect the final decision. But I would remind your Lordships that this is a joint Franco-British undertaking, on which we have both got to agree. We have to agree with the French on what rôle, if any, private equity capital should play. Therefore, this statement of the Government's present view of the subject is in very general terms, and it is subject to those discussions on financial proposals with the French which are referred to in my right honourable friend's original statement.
EARL ALEXANDER OF HILLSBOROUGH: My Lords, does not that mean that the Government ought to have found time to advise the City what they ought to do with regard to private equity at the present time? I agree that the statement goes far in suggesting what might be the position in general in future, but surely some advice should have been given to the people concerned. The noble Earl stated that we must agree with the French. Perhaps we may. But I do not think we are getting as good a settlement as we had over Suez.
THE EARL OF DUNDEE: Surely it two countries are making an equal contribution to the construction of a tunnel between them, they must have an equal say in the method of how it should be done, and one of them cannot dictate to the other. That is why I cannot go further than the general statement which I have made and which the Government only make because they think it is fair to make this general statement of their own views, subject to discussions with the French, in order that private concerns may not be given a false impression, which may be disappointing.
LORD HAWKE: My Lords, may I ask my noble friend whether he is aware that it is not only on the Opposition Benches that a debate on this momentous subject would be welcomed? Even though we may be in favour of it, we should like to have an opportunity of debate. Further, on the financial part, would my noble friend not agree that to the voters

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of this country, whether they vote Labour or Conservative, it would seem most extraordinary if a railway link between the two State systems of railways were to be financed by a private company?
THE EARL OF DUNDEE: My Lords, I am quite sure that many people are eagerly desiring a debate, and it is only a question of discussing, through the usual channels, what is the most convenient and useful time, from the national point of view, at which to arrange one.
LORD LATHAM: My Lords, can the noble Earl say whether General de Gaulle approves this in principle?
THE EARL OF DUNDEE: My Lords, the statement which my right honourable friend made in another place, and which I have just read, has been equally approved by the French Government.
LORD REA: My Lords, may I refer to the noble Earl's statement that the next step is envisaged, and remind the noble Earl that the last step has taken about a hundred years to take and I hope that the next step will be rather quicker?
THE EARL OF DUNDEE: My Lords, I think that both Governments will share the noble Lord's hope in that matter.

INDUSTRIAL TRAINING BILL
4.24 p.m.
Debate on Second Reading resumed.
LORD CHAMPION: My Lords, to get back to the Industrial Training Bill, it seems such a long time since the noble Viscount, Lord Blakenham, introduced this Bill, that I had nearly forgotten what it was all about, but I have certainly not forgotten the fact that the noble Viscount gave us a clear exposition of the Bill itself. Who better than he to expound the virtues of this Bill, such as they are? I understand, from Mr. Godber's speech in the other place, that the Bill owes its origin to the drive and initiative of the noble Viscount. As a parent, he ought to be able to tell us something about his child, and certainly this afternoon he has clearly expounded his Bill.
Both of the Ministers in charge of the Bill were formerly Government
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spokesmen on agriculture. It was my task in another place to oppose them from the Opposition Front Bench, and I came to respect the high qualities of both of them. I am sure that we shall follow the progress of this Bill, when it becomes an Act and if by any chance either of the two Ministers remains in a position of power, to see how he carries out its provisions. I notice that, by a coincidence, I am sandwiched between the noble Viscount, Lord Blakenham, and the noble Viscount, Lord Amory, who also was a Minister of Agriculture and opposite whom I had the pleasure of speaking.
I regard this Bill as another step forward in national economic planning, as another indication of the acceptance, even by a Tory Government, of the hard fact that the future prosperity of Britain necessitates a great deal of guidance, even interference (though we may not like the word), in the affairs of industry. Although I should not have thought it possible twenty years ago, I think it can be said to-day that the whole conception of planning is becoming a diminishing area of controversy. Indeed, in the statement we have just heard about the Channel Tunnel, this word "planning" came out in a number of places. The fault I find with this Government is that, though realising that economic planning is unavoidable, their steps towards it are too hesitant. They are still too afraid of firmly grasping the nettle. The result is that things that were necessary ten years ago are only being done to-day, when they are seen to be clearly inescapable.
The noble Viscount, Lord Blakenham, himself admitted that we had been lagging in this matter of skilled manpower for a great number of years. He pointed out, rightly, that there is a need for a vast expansion of our skilled labour force. Newsom, Crowther and Robbins have all pointed to this fact, and they have all made their various recommendations of how to meet it on the educational side. N.E.D.C. assume conclusively that without such an expansion one of the prime conditions necessary to foster economic growth cannot be met. Without it, our competitive position will deteriorate, we shall fall farther and farther behind and our struggle for even the small figure of a

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4 per cent. rate of growth will fail, and fail miserably.
I suggest, as the noble Viscount himself admitted, that Government intervention in this matter has been necessitated by the failure of employers, with certain notable exceptions, among whom I am glad to place the nationalised industries, to tackle this serious job of education. That so many of them have failed in the past is perhaps understandable. After all, why should one employer pay for the training of craftsmen if experience has shown him that he can poach the products of another's training expenditure? On the other hand, why should one firm train people only to see them drift away into the employment of a firm not so responsibly minded?
There is, too, the fact that, in all too many instances in the past, employers have regarded their apprentices as a cheap form of labour and have provided all too little in the way of adequate training for the apprentices they took on. In those firms, if the apprentices ever became craftsmen, it was as a result of an almost accidental picking up as they went along or because they happened to have the good luck to find real craftsmen to help them. I am hoping that this Bill will make it impossible for employers to shirk the responsibility which is clearly theirs.
If the employers have a clear responsibility in this matter, I am sure that the trade unions have a matching responsibility. For some of these trade unions, by firmly restricting the number of apprentices in certain crafts—even though it was done out of the fear of unemployment—have kept our skilled labour force very much lower than it ought to be. It is true, too, that all too many of the unions were interested in keeping competition for jobs down, rather than in ensuring proper training for the young apprentices. But, as in the case of the employers, there are some notable exceptions and the general picture of trade union acceptance of better schemes is continually improving.
Our job now, however, is not to wag an admonitory finger at either employers or trade unions for their past deficiencies, but by encouragement, and by the use of the powers contained in this Bill, to
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get them to co-operate with the State in this great task of meeting our future skilled manpower requirements. Here we have to ask ourselves: how does this Bill face up to the requirements? It is clearly an enabling Bill which with a few strokes gives the outlines and leaves to the Central Training Council, the boards, the Ministry of Labour and the Ministry of Education the task of filling in the details. To change the metaphor, it is a skeleton which needs (if I may adopt the horrible term used by the noble Earl, Lord Jellicoe, two days ago in this House) "fleshing out". I should have thought that this type of Bill was just about right for the purpose. For we are to some extent in this matter feeling our way; although, of course, the Bill is to a large extent based upon the experience of some of the best firms in this matter of the training of apprentices, of craftsmen and of others.
Starting with the boards, I am bound to say that it appears to me that the task to be given to them is truly a colossal one. For their job is not just the training of apprentices, as apprenticeships have been understood in the past: they are responsible for the training of technicians, craftsmen and operatives. If anyone wants a definition of those terms it is to be found in the White Paper, Better Opportunities for Technical Education. I must admit that in the past I have been a little woolly about them, and, judging by the way they are commonly used, so are many others. I gather, too (although I do not think the noble Viscount, Lord Blakenham, mentioned this), that they might, and probably will, even have the task of training for management. That possibility was mentioned in another place, and I hope that, with such a vast field to cover and such a great job to be done, the Minister will be able to find the exceptional man required to tackle a job of this nature.
These boards will have to decide the size of the levy to be imposed on employers, satisfy the Minister in this regard and squeeze out of the Ministry the grants and facilities they will require to enable them to carry out their training functions. Despite the explanation of the noble Viscount, Lord Blakenham, I find the financial provisions in relation to all this a little confusing, and I am certain, even if the provision of money is eventually on a fifty-fifty basis,

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as between the Ministry of Labour and industry, industry's contribution is going to be a very big one. It will mean a considerable levy on industry as a whole, and I should think it will be the job of the Minister to ensure that it is not a crippling one on some industries. What has the Minister in mind in this connection? Is he thinking in terms of a 50 per cent. grant by the State when these boards get going; or what? Is the £50 million that he talked about a pump-primer, or is it to be a once-and-for-all payment, after which the boards will themselves have to find the money? These are questions that I still feel have not been cleared up.
Somehow there will have to be a marrying of the efforts of the boards with the educational facilities provided by the Ministry of Education. How is this to be done? Is it going to be done through the educational representatives on the board? There will certainly have to be the closest co-operation between the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Labour. Indeed, some of my expert friends are not sure that this whole field of industrial training ought not to be brought within the function of the Ministry of Education, with the Ministry of Labour brought in in the more limited industrial aspects. For my own part, I think the decision here is just about right: that it should be with the Ministry of Labour, because, after all, the Minister of Labour is closely in touch with both trade unions and industry generally, and will, I think, have a greater understanding of them than the Minister of Education, separated, as he is bound to be, from the industrial side of the life of the country.
Is the Minister going to ensure that there is fairness in relation to the matter of the levy as between one industry and another? It may well happen, it seems to me, that one board may seek to spend too little and do too little, while another may seek to spend too much and do too much. That might result in unfairness as between industry and industry, and clearly the Minister, sitting where he does, will have to exercise his function in this connection.
Sitting over the boards in an advisory capacity there is to be the Central Training
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Council. I take it that it is expected to advise the boards and also the Minister of Labour. Clearly, this Council, like the boards, will need to be composed of men of very high calibre, whose advice will not be lightly disregarded either by the boards or by the Minister. For there will be some pretty knotty problems to be solved in connection with this matter of industrial training. Is this Council going to advise the boards on demarcation problems? It seems to me obvious that there are going to be serious problems as between industry and industry—for example: why should one industry pay for the training of workers who they know full well will, in so many cases, be employed in other industries? If, for example, I.C.I. is attached and pays this levy to a board which trains chemical workers, who is going to train the engineers and electrical craftsmen that I.C.I. must employ? Why should the engineers in electrical industries pay for their training? If anybody is clear about this aspect—and I noted what the noble Lord said in reply to my noble friend Lord Shackleton—certainly I am not.
In this connection, I see that one of my honourable friends in another place, a man who is particularly knowledgeable about technical education, suggested that in the sort of case I have cited it might be advisable to secure that some form of contribution is made by a firm to another board whose task it is to train the skilled workers it requires. In my example, this would mean that I.C.I. would have to make some sort of per capita contribution to the electrical and engineering boards. That is a bit complicated, and I admit it, but it is certainly something that is worth thinking about.
What is to be the function of this Council in relation to the future skilled manpower needs of the nation as a whole? Will it be expected to co-operate closely with the manpower research unit, or whatever body will be entrusted with the task of forecasting the pattern of the nation's need for skilled workers in the various industries, some of which, of course, are already established, and some of which are only just emerging? Such a forecast may well be imprecise, and probably will be, but efforts based on the broad proportions of such a forecast are likely to go nearer to meeting

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our requirements than a chance working of our existing system. If the Council is to co-operate with some planning body, will it be able to so strongly advise—and I have underlined those words in my notes—the boards that they will feel compelled to arrange for the training of workers far in excess of the immediate requirements of particular industries? Or, will the C.T.C. advise the Minister, who himself would have to use his powers to secure the compliance with the manpower needs as forecast for the country as a whole? Somebody has to exercise the planning function of ensuring that the right amount of skilled manpower resources is available in the sector where they will be most needed.
Yesterday, the noble Viscount, Lord Blakenham, said that the Manpower Research Unit would have to co-operate very closely with N.E.D.C., and I am sure he was absolutely right about that. But it is absolutely vital also that such a body as the Central Training Council shall have to co-operate closely with N.E.D.C. or the manpower research unit. In this connection, it seems to me that the powers to be given to the boards to enter into contracts of service or apprenticeships with persons might be of great value, and, of course, in other connections, too. This would mean that a boy might be apprenticed to a whole industry. This would be particularly useful in the case of any industry composed of small units, each of which would be unable to secure and maintain adequate training facilities. In the United States of America, I understand that this form of apprenticeship is entered into by the building industry. In addition to building here, I think of agriculture as a possibility, for I would say that agriculture is as much in need of properly trained manpower as any other industry. I sincerely hope that the noble Lord, Lord Walston, will speak and tell us something of his ideas on this subject this afternoon.
Then there is the vital matter of retraining. The Minister rightly stressed this. I say it is vital because the more the pattern of our industry changes under the impact of automation and the rest, the more will the retraining of the redundant workers become necessary. I should like to ask the Minister what part the Central Training Council and the boards will play in this. Or does the
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Minister still think in terms of this continuing to be a matter solely for Government training centres? If it is to be done by both, or all three, how is it to be apportioned and paid for? Whichever way it is done, the training or retraining of adults must be accelerated enormously if we are to deal with the problem of the declining industries.
I will not weary the House with figures on this point this afternoon, but if Members want some for the purpose of assessing our total efforts, they are to be found in the N.E.D.C. Report on Conditions Favourable to Faster Growth. The figures given there show that in our effort in adult training and retraining, by comparison with the small country of Sweden or the large country of the United States of America our effort is positively derisory. In this matter we are badly dragging our feet.
Most of my remarks this afternoon in the short time I have been speaking have been directed to what is broadly called industry, and I am conscious of the fact that in commerce there is as much need for trained workers as in general industry. In this connection, I sincerely hope that the noble Lord, Lord Shackleton, will give us the benefit of his firm's experience, for they, I understand, have an excellent training scheme. But there are too few training schemes for workers in commerce, and many of the points that I have tried to make here in relation to industry, as a whole, have equal validity in relation to commerce.
This is a small Bill, but a vast subject. It attempts not merely to face up to the task of making up for past deficiencies in our training methods, but to reach forward to the requirements of industry ten or twenty years hence. It tries to lay the foundations, even though they do not look too solid at this moment. But I think that is to be expected in the circumstances of this difficult matter.
I have asked a lot of questions. I believe that on this sort of subject it is vital that one should ask questions, because there must be much mind clearing by everyone concerned, including Ministers. Certainly all those concerned with this matter are anxious to know a number of things, and I hope we shall have some of the answers to-day. Clearly, some of the answers cannot

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possibly emerge until the boards have been set up and the Central Training Council itself has been set up. But having asked the questions and, I hope, put a few worthwhile points, I can assure the noble Viscount in charge of this Bill in this House that although we shall have to examine it further on Committee stage, we will not in any way unduly delay this Bill. We want to see it on the Statute Book as, I am sure, noble Lords on the other side of the House do. Like the noble Viscount, Lord Blakenham, I commend this Bill to the House.
4.48 p.m.
VISCOUNT AMORY: My Lords, it is a great personal pleasure to me to find myself following the noble Lord, Lord Champion, because, as he implied earlier, some five, six or seven years ago he and I used to cross an occasional sword. Although we used to hurl darts at one another with great eagerness, I think he will agree with me that our darts were not of the poisoned variety. I can assure him to-day that I have no desire whatever to draw any of his blood, because I find myself wholly in agreement with the excellent speech, if I may say so, that he has just made.
I am venturing to speak shortly to your Lordships this afternoon, because in, perhaps, my most respectable days, for nearly twenty years I was actively concerned with the management of a factory. I should like to give a very warm welcome to this Bill. I know how near the heart of my noble friend Lord Blakenham this matter has been, and it is owing to his enthusiasm and tenacity that the Bill is before your Lordships to-day. I should like also to say how much I am looking forward to hearing my noble friend Lord McCorquodale of Newton later in the debate, because he also knows a great deal about these matters.
I own that I should have preferred myself that industry had done this job without the necessity of Government intervention. I was one of those who hoped, after the Carr Committee, that that would happen, but after some improvement, then, for a bit, the rate of progress once more began to falter. Many of the bigger firms have been
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playing their part, and the difficulty has been concentrated mainly, I think, on the medium and smaller firms.
May I say how fair I thought the noble Lord, Lord Champion, was when I understood him to say, and certainly I would say, too, that the responsibility for our relative lack of success must be shared to some extent by both sides of industry, though the prime responsibility for the actual organisation of the training clearly falls on the employers. But, in any event, surveying the progress, or lack of progress, to date, I am quite clear myself that unless we are going seriously to handicap our efforts for expansion over the years ahead, we must set our sights higher, and it has become a matter of urgency to see that we get progress over a broader front than we have in the past. So I am wholly persuaded that the Government were right in their decision that the circumstances call now for positive action and participation through Government-sponsored agencies.
As regards the need for better training, if we are going to make full use of our national resources of manpower there can be no argument at all. The only question is how it can best be done. Would it be true to say that the kinds of training fall into three main categories? First, craft training; secondly, what one might call technical training—I am thinking of the kind of training for those numerous young men one sees in modern factories nowadays walking about in white coats with mysterious bits of paper in their hands. They know what they are doing, and they are a vital part of modern organisation. The third category is in the broadly managerial field.
I remember years ago, when I was a Minister in the Board of Trade, that we were concerned about the location of a big new industrial development which was foreshadowed, and I remember the chairman coming to see me and my asking him, looking ahead to the completion of the scheme, what sort of proportion he would envisage his manpower would be as between black-coated workers and manual workers. I remember how surprised I was those many years ago when he said, "Well, by the time these plants are completed I would expect that if we

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included white-coated workers with the black-coated workers we should want about 50 per cent. of each". That was a far higher proportion of black and white-coated workers to manual workers than we envisaged in those days as normal. But it is getting very close to that to-day. The purely manual workers are being replaced more and more by machines, but leaving skilled craftsmen—machine builders, toolmakers, repairers and maintenance men as a vitally important, continuing element in modern industrial organisation. Clearly, it is no good installing complex machines, electronically controlled, unless those machines are properly looked after and serviced by men who are up to the job.
Compared with the United States, I would think that as regards management training we just cannot hold a candle to them at present. As regards technical training, I think in the numbers we are turning out we are not yet as near what is required as they are. When it comes to craft apprenticeship training, in quality I think we beat them hollow. The problem is that we do not turn out enough.
Coming to the machinery of this Bill, it is clearly an enabling Bill, as it should be, and I am very glad to note, running right through the Bill, the theme of flexibility and discretion and the breadth of scope which the Minister is proposing to leave to the boards. I think that must be right. As regards the Central Training Council, as I think the noble Lord, Lord Champion, implied, the information we have as to what it will do is a little vague at present. Perhaps that is inevitable but it is rather difficult to see at this stage whether it will play an important part or, as sometimes has happened with other legislation, will become a body without much power or real influence. I hope that it will be the former and not the latter, because I believe there is an important job of inspiration and co-ordination to be done from the centre if the momentum and impetus is to be maintained. Therefore, I welcome the inclusion of a Central Training Council.
I hope, when it comes to the detailed composition of boards, that the Minister will remember that local government is a very big employer, and that it will not be unrepresented in some way or another on these boards. The real prob
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lem I should think, however, will arise in practice from the tremendous complexity of industry, a complexity which has often in the past proved the despair of the most able civil servants in trying to divide industry into a number of tidy, separate compartments. I think this is the point which was in the mind of the noble Lord, Lord Shackleton, when he intervened just now. I wonder how many boards will turn out ultimately to be necessary if the whole ground is to be covered.
Then, of course, there are the complexities which arise from the overlapping skills. They look very formidable indeed. Thinking back to my own factory days, in that one factory I think we employed about 1,500 people and we really covered at least three separate technical industries. The problem now will be, I suppose, how to see that the field is covered without the number of boards becoming unmanageable and how the geographic dispersal of units across the whole country in the same industry will be satisfactorily brought to a focus under the boards.
All those are quite formidable practical difficulties. I think perhaps the anxiety I feel most is the risk lest the administrative organisation may become rather top-heavy and very costly in supervisory manpower. We shall have to be very watchful to see that the real job of practical training is not smothered by a heavy blanket of bureaucracy and that the financial cost is not burdened, as a result, by an excessive overhead expense. I am sure the Minister will be alive to that as one of the practical dangers we must watch against. Clearly, the achievements of these boards will depend on the drive and enthusiasm they will impart to their work. Therefore, the method of recruitment of the members of the boards is going to be important. It will not be an easy task to find a sufficient number of people with the necessary practical experience who will have the time to devote to this important work.
My Lords, I was very glad to hear what my noble friend said about the partnership that is envisaged between the Ministry of Labour and the Ministry of Education. Clearly that is right, and personally I believe, as I think does the noble Lord, Lord Champion, that the

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decision that the Minister of Labour should be the predominant authority there is right. I believe that that is the best plan. I hope that the fullest possible use will be made by the boards of the excellent technical colleges which are now growing up fairly rapidly all over the country. I have been amazed and delighted at the success of a technical college in my own local town, covering East Devon, which was built, in a very modest way, four years ago. It was all rather experimental for a rural area and originally catered for, I think, 85 full-time students. It already has about 170. That is a good story.
So far as the content of this Bill goes, I understand that responsibility is to be laid on the boards for training over pretty well the whole field: craft apprenticeship, process workers, technicians, management and retraining. And, like the noble Lord, Lord Champion, I think that the training, or retraining, of adults is a very important matter to-day if we are to get the structure of industry unossified (if there is such a word) and facilitate the growth of industry and, in some cases, the diminution of industries that have had their day. Of these categories, I should imagine that in some ways the training of a process worker or a machine minder is the most difficult. It is sometimes quite difficult in practice to devise a useful content for a worker who will spend his time minding a machine and nothing more. I remember going round a factory where there were some electronically controlled machines—your Lordships will know the sort of thing: a dozen machines all linked together. There was hardly anybody about, but I spotted one man at either end of this tremendous series of machines, and I said to the works manager: "I am glad to see that you still have to have two men there, in spite of your electronic gadgets". He replied: "Ah, but I have got an electronic gadget watching each of those men". It is sometimes rather an alarming picture that is presented. The best hope is that these really soul-destroying jobs are, I think, tending to get proportionately fewer with the growth of the more technical and interesting jobs.
Turning to the craft apprenticeship sector of the field, I would hazard a
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guess that that is the most straightforward of these branches. Generally, there is tremendous keenness on the part of youngsters going out to their first job when they get the chance of an apprenticeship. The raw material is most promising. In most parts of the country there are generally more of these youngsters seeking apprentices' jobs that there are opportunities for them. I believe there are needs in this sector of the field for shorter courses, more flexibility in the age at which youngsters can start an apprenticeship course that is to say, higher in some cases than has been normal in the past, and less rigidity generally, because youngsters to-day do pick up technical knowledge far quicker in general, I think, than their predecessors did. I am sure what I read somewhere about the importance of the first year of an apprentice's life is true: it is during that period that either the seeds of lasting interest may begin to germinate or they may become sterile for lack of encouragement.
About the capacities of these young people I think there is no doubt whatsoever. Your Lordships will remember the debate we had the other day on the Newsom Report when the point was brought out so strongly that, even in the category we were discussing then, many of these youngsters are clearly capable of greater challenges and skills than are envisaged at present. I think it is very encouraging to note how many of these young people are ready to forgo the easy money of dead-end jobs in favour of learning, at much lower remuneration for a few years, a skilled trade. I saw a survey the other day of the interests and aspirations of a group of apprentices, and it was good to see how many of these youngsters expected and wanted to continue progressive technical training well beyond the end of their normal apprenticeship. There is no doubt that in their minds the possession of skill is regarded as a worthwhile achievement.
That reminds me of an incident—I must say this because of the fact that I am following the noble Lord, Lord Champion. I remember on one occasion at home, in the field of agriculture, a farmer getting a bill for a repair of a machine by a local firm who had mechanics on the staff. The mechanic

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came and gave the machine one tap and it worked. The bill came in for £20. The farmer was rather angry and sent it back, saying "I want an analysis of this bill". Back came the analysis—"To tapping machine—10s.; to knowing where to tap—£19 10s.". I must not worry your Lordships more because, with the noble Lord, Lord Champion, there, I might be led away into all kinds of memories of other days.
This Bill inevitably deals with machinery. But we must not be misled—and I know the Minister will not be—into thinking that the creation of machinery is the same as the solution of the problem or the attainment of our targets. We must not shut our eyes to the fact that, though many firms in industry, and many trade unionists, have done an absolutely first-rate job in this field, there is a great deal of evidence that there are still many who, in their hearts, do not believe in the need for training; who are too ready to believe that the old ways will suffice, or that they can get by by attracting apprentices who have been trained by other firms. What I feel is needed, more than anything else, is first faith in the importance of this task, and then the will to make a combined effort to get far more ambitious results. As we agreed when we were debating the Newsom Report, we are at present wasting a valuable human asset in not providing full opportunities to our young people.
I referred when I was speaking to your Lordships the other day, to the experience we are getting in the field of Voluntary Service Overseas. Under this scheme we have a number of apprentices and ex-apprentices who are doing the most remarkable things in various countries; and they are showing that, presented with an opportunity, they have the initiative, the enterprise and the devotion to produce really remarkable results of which we all have every reason to be proud. Here, surely, my Lords, is a tremendous opportunity for positive co-operation by both sides of industry in a very practical field, a field free from political dogma or differences. I am sure all your Lordships will agree that we want to support in any way we can a measure which is clearly designed to increase the efficiency and the prosperity of our national industry and which also,
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as I think, by improving opportunities for individual skill and pride in the job, will add to the happiness and the satisfaction of all those who earn their livelihoods in industry.
5.10 p.m.
LORD BOWDEN: My Lords, on this, the first occasion on which I have had the privilege of addressing your Lordships' House, I find myself in a very difficult position. The Bill which is before us is concerned, I believe, with some of the most important issues with which this country has ever been faced. It is supported on both sides of the House and it has been enthusiastically welcomed in another place. It is supported, too, by industry and the trade unions; but, despite this, I view it with the greatest misgivings, for I do not feel that the remedies proposed in the Bill match the problems which the Bill purports to solve. This may seem heretical, and I ask your Lordships' forgiveness for saying this so quickly. I should like, if I may, to justify some of my fears and ask whether it is possible that some of the problems can, in fact, be solved, perhaps by minor Amendments to the Bill or in some other way. It is difficult to know where best to start, so I will begin with one of the problems which have already been mentioned by noble Lords on both sides of the House: the problem of what has been called adult training.
It has been said that we are aspiring to a rate of growth in our economic productivity of 4 per cent. a year. It has been computed by Professor Stone, in Cambridge, that if we are to achieve this we shall need by 1970 about 1½ million more skilled men, and we shall have occupations for 1,400,000 fewer unskilled men by that time. This is a large part of the total labour force of this country, which is perhaps 25 million in all. The number of people concerned is, after all, at least ten times as many as go to the universities every year.
How are we to contemplate this question of producing from the working force another 1½ million skilled men; and, at the same time, what are we to do about those whom the present system will leave without occupation? It is obviously impossible to take the men at the bottom, the unemployables, and train them and feed them in at the top. The

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only possible solution to this problem is that almost everyone in the whole working population shall have training which will fit him for one place higher in the industrial hierarchy than that which he occupies to-day. The whole of the working population of this country must have its standard of skill raised. If this is done, then in 1970 we shall have 1¾ million, or whatever the number is, more skilled men; and the unskilled men whom we now feel we must reject, ignore and cast aside as if they were outworn, will know that they are being fitted to hold a place in industrial society which they could not possibly accept at the moment. Everyone in the whole of the industrial machine will have been educated to one or two places higher in the hierarchy than he now occupies. Unless this is done, it seems to me that we cannot hope to get the force we need. If we lack it we cannot get our 4 per cent. growth; there will be no future in Robbins; there will be no future in Newsom; there will be no future in any of the major reforms which we are so urgently and anxiously awaiting.
Your Lordships may say that it is clearly and palpably impossible to educate 25 million people, but it is my belief that the very technology which made the problem so urgent has, in fact, provided the means for solving it. We have a vast experience in other countries of the ways in which mass education on this scale can be accomplished. I will mention just a few of them. We have in television what is by far the most potent single medium for instruction that the wit of man has yet encompassed. It has been used with tremendous success in America for an enormously large-scale experiment in adult education. The experiment began in the first instance as an attempt to educate people who could not get into universities. It was found that when the appropriate programmes were broadcast they were picked up and listened to by people for whom they had not been intended, and since the universities were prepared to mark the essays of anyone who submitted them, they discovered, to their astonishment, that some of their ablest, best and most anxious pupils were housewives and men and women who
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were housebound and could not get out and who switched on an educational programme instead of a "soap opera".
There is a vast potential for education in this way if it can be exploited. The time may come, I suspect, when we shall have education for industry as an alternative to "Music While You Work". I believe that this could be done were adequate provision made for it in the Bill and were the broadcasting authorities encouraged to develop the necessary techniques, which are difficult but quite possible, and were the necessary provision made for the use of television as a medium of instruction in this way. I have talked to the people who are going to run the second channel for B.B.C. television. They would most anxiously like to do such work, because they realise—and this is extremely important—that most of the programmes that have been broadcast over television for many years have been designed for people who were fundamentally literate, in the sense that they could enjoy reading books and could have obtained the information that they got from the programmes by reading instead. The majority of the people for whom I am now pleading are people who rarely read books for pleasure, and in any event are people who are studying disciplines which can be taught effectively only by the medium of the picture, and hardly at all through the medium of the written word. So may I plead that some provision be made in the Bill for the use of such a medium of instruction as television?
I now pass to other, similar techniques which have been exploited abroad, but scarcely at home. In America, correspondence courses are used as an extraordinarily important adjunct to the whole educational machine. I know of one university college—one can hardly call it anything else; it is, in fact, a correspondence college—in Washington, which has 25,000 students enrolled for courses in electronics. The courses are good; the organisation is superb. The courses are frequently "re-vamped" and changed and brought up to date. These courses are taken by people within industry who are anxiously struggling to better themselves. The Armed Services make provision for people to take the courses. They will help them with the cost of the courses. They will provide time for people to study; and again we have a

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medium of instruction capable in principle of handling thousands of people, whereas the ordinary techniques currently available—schools, universities and so on—habitually handle only scores.
There are other techniques as well. There are all kinds of new devices, new teaching machines. All of these are available. They have been intensely cultivated. They are useful, and it is essential that direct provision be made, in any Bill which we have concerned with industrial training, for their development and intensive use in this country. This, then, is perhaps the most important single conclusion I have to make. We now have to deal with 25 million people throughout the whole of their working life. Before we decided what to do at the universities, we had the Robbins Report. The Robbins Report was concerned with the education of perhaps 100,000 or 200,000 people for three years. The problems with which we are now concerned are vastly more complex, more difficult, far less understood and far more important than any that Robbins wrestled with. I hope that after we have passed this Bill the Government will take an early opportunity of appointing a Committee comparable in status, stature and importance and thoroughness to the Robbins Committee, to study the matters with which we are now concerned.
I should now like to pass to another extremely important aspect of this whole subject, which has been wholly neglected, so far as I can make out, by everyone on both sides of the House. I refer to the education of the graduates of the universities within industry, an enterprise commonly known in some cases as graduate apprenticeship. It is most necessary that anyone who has studied engineering should, soon or later, take his part in industry, and it is an essential condition imposed by many of the associations—for instance, the Institutions of Mechanical and of Electrical Engineers—that any man who wishes to become a graduate engineer, a properly authenticated engineer, a member of his professional association, should have practical training under supervision as well as the academic training which the universities provide.
This kind of training was given many years ago, for example, in Manchester. The first course was devised in 1902
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in Trafford Park, and it had quite an extraordinary influence on engineering education for electrical engineers throughout the whole of this country. In fact, in the 'twenties it was true to say that all the electrical engineers in England could be divided into two classes: those who worked at Metropolitan Vickers and those who used to work there. Metropolitan Vickers in those days trained almost all the graduate apprentices for the whole of the electrical engineering industry. It was thanks to the genius of that very great man, Sir Alexander Fleming, who did as much for electrical engineering as Jowett did for Oxford, and perhaps as Arnold did for Rugby—a man whose name should be revered in educational circles, but I am afraid has all too soon been forgotten by most—that this extraordinary contribution was made to education of engineers for industry. At this moment there are, I think, 400 graduate apprentices in Trafford Park. There are nowadays large numbers of graduate apprentices in other big firms. It is probably true to say that the cost of educating these men for the two years which their training lasts must be comparable to the total cost of running all the engineering departments in all the universities in this country. I have never succeeded in getting reliable figures, but the best estimates I can make suggest that this is not far from being the truth.
This problem can no longer be left entirely to the initiative of private industry. In the first place, for many years Metropolitan Vickers used to estimate that they kept not more than 40 per cent. of their products. This is the source of the rather crude jape I made a moment ago. It was perfectly right and proper that they should expect to lose most of them because these were the men who manned the whole of the rest of the electrical engineering of the rest of this country. But now that we are planning, and very rightly, to increase the number of graduates from our universities—and if the Robbins recommendations go through we shall do—I submit that it is unreasonable that the great firms should be asked to carry an even greater burden and share an even greater part of the cost of educating engineers.
Furthermore, the whole enterprise is getting much more complicated because of the greater variety of skills required.

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It is necessary now, for example, to arrange for courses for graduates in the arts to go into industry and to be trained there. Once again one finds that some people do all the training and others get all the benefit. Furthermore, there are certain types of industry which are made up of smallish firms which have never made any contribution to this kind of operation and for this reason tend rarely or never to be able to recruit graduates in numbers, with the result that they are in some cases lagging behind in the industrial world. A typical case is the machine tool trade. It consists of a large number of fairly small firms, and one or two big ones. They have hardly any proper graduate apprenticeship. In 1956 the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research made a survey and established that in that year the single firm of Schiess, in Dusseldorf, an immense machine tool factory, recruited 137 graduates. The entire British machine tool trade in that same year recruited two.
This kind of thing is inevitable if the operation of a training scheme for graduates within industry is left entirely to the initiative of private enterprise. In my view the Government must assume a certain part of the burden of the total cost, which is enormous; and furthermore, must be prepared to help these large industries to organise themselves. On the Continent this system has been developed very highly and in Aachen, the great technical university of Rhineland Westphalia, the Continental firms are so organised that all the students of Aachen study in some of the big firms or some of the small firms, and all industry plays its proper part in the development of graduate training within industry. It happens to be slightly different because most of the training takes place before the man finally gets his degree; but the principle is the same. In England a man takes five years to become an engineer, three years in a university and two in, say, Metropolitan Vickers. On the Continent it takes five or six years, four at university and a year and a half, or thereabouts, in industry. It is essential that this vastly complex and tremendously important operation should be regularised and organised somehow by
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a Bill of this kind, yet I see no reference in the Bill to any part of this extremely important problem.
I should now like to pass from this vast, important enterprise to something much smaller, though none the less important, and it is something that, on humanitarian grounds, the House should support. In Sweden there is a proper system of training for those unfortunate people who are called "lone women"—that is to say, women who have children but who have been deprived of their menfolk, either by divorce or widowhood. They have organised an extremely complex system by which these women can be looked after while they are training themselves for such jobs in industry as they are capable of accepting. This is a wholly admirable arrangement. It has never been adopted in this country, and I am sure your Lordships will agree with me when I say that the treatment we in this country mete out to our "lone women" is often mean and miserably inadequate. I think that this might be one way in which these poor souls could be allowed to look after their children with some sense of satisfaction and no sense that they were dependent on the charity of the State. I would commend this idea to your Lordships as a trivial but, to some people, important amendment to this Bill.
I pass next to a consideration of that part of the Bill which has so far received most attention. I refer to the training of apprentices and of the rest of the industrial population. In round figures, it is true to say that a third of all boys take apprenticeships of one kind or another on leaving school. When these youths sign their indentures they do so under conditions which seem to me to be quite deplorably disadvantageous to themselves. They have to accept such training as is given to them; they have no remedy against a firm which uses them effectively as unskilled labour—and cheap unskilled labour at that. Only the other day I heard of an apprentice who had served three years and had never done anything more than put switches into houses. This is no way to train an electrician; and the youth has no remedy against the firm. Furthermore, when he comes out of his time he is as much a craftsman as any craftsman who has been trained in some of the admirable and magnificent schemes

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which are operated in the same district to which some of his mates have been fortunate enough to go. I hope this Bill will have enough teeth in it to ensure that this quite scandalous misuse of the apprenticeship system is brought abruptly to an end.
There are all sorts of anomalies, too, in the way in which apprentices are accepted usually only up to the age of 16 years and 9 months. For instance, a youth who, having once been indentured, loses out because he has a row with his boss, or is ill, or because the firm goes bankrupt and the apprenticeship is wound up, may, if he cannot get another within a matter of weeks, lose for ever the chance of becoming a skilled man. Further, when he comes out of his time he may find himself a time-served but technically unskilled man. He may find himself a member of a craft which is losing in its importance, and he loses for ever the opportunity of becoming a skilled man in another craft—indeed, he may have lost the opportunity of becoming a skilled man at all. I believe this to be a very great social evil, and it is essential that this whole subject, which is vastly complex—far more complex than anything Robbins had to study—should be studied intensively by a committee with the authority which Lord Robbins so magnificently exercised.
I have said there is much wrong with the apprenticeship system. It is quite monstrously unreasonable that all apprentices should be bound for the same length of time; that they should, when they have completed their five years, be classified as skilled men, regardless of any test of their competence at the end of their time. It is absurd that the whole of a man's future should be based on the assumption that what he learned from the age of 16 to 21 is important and what he learns thereafter makes no difference whatever. This is ridiculously untrue. It may have been true once, but it certainly is not true any longer. So, somehow or other, this particular problem must be solved, and I see little evidence that the Bill proposes the mechanism to do it.
My Lords, I come to the problem of the two-thirds of the population—and it is absurd that one should come last to the two-thirds—who are in the unskilled, dead-end jobs. What kind of
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training are we devising for them? These, after all, are the people with whom Newsom was concerned. They are the people—many of them—who were rejected by the system at the age of 11. But many of them have very great talent, and I think it is essential that training should be provided for them. It should be their right to be trained, and they should not have to go and hawk themselves round from place to place, from dead-end job to dead-end job, in an attempt to find someone who will train them to do something useful. This, too, is a very great social evil, and I do not believe from the evidence in the Bill that it will be remedied, unless quite new provisions are brought into this measure which so far have not been mentioned.
I may have given your Lordships the impression that these things are impossible to do. I do not wish to do that at all, because we have before us one extraordinarily successful example in this country where problems as great as this have been tackled and tackled successfully. I refer, of course, to the coal industry. At the time of vesting day it was as backward, technically speaking, as it had been a hundred years before. There was no proper training scheme, the morale of the workers was low, the plant was worn out. To-day we have a complete transformation. One finds pits in which, until a few years ago, every single piece of coal had to be hewn by hand, by the efforts of sweating colliers lying in appallingly difficult conditions underground, but in which there is now no single contact between the coal and the man; everything is hewn, loaded and hauled by machinery. This is a revolution which has taken place in the last ten years and is as dramatic as anything with which this country can ever he concerned, either now or in the future.
This was achieved because of the extraordinary imagination and success with which the training programme was organised. They have now a system by which, first of all, hundreds of their people are sent to university every year, with university scholarships, at their expense. These are the men at the top. Going right down there is an immensely complicated system by which any promising boy or man, at any part of the

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coal industry, at any stage in his career, can climb the ladder, following what they call the "ladder plan", and better himself and qualify himself for positions of management. We must remember that, when we speak of industrial training, we are involved in the training of management as much as we are involved in the training of unskilled or skilled craftsmen.
So the coal industry has done it; but I ask your Lordships to think of just some of the advantages which it possesses. It was in a perfectly dreadful state, and everyone knew that something had to be done. Whether British industry as a whole shares the same conviction at the moment is more than I can say. But there was only one fundamental manager; there was the Coal Board, representing the industry as a whole. It was therefore able to organise a system of training with complete confidence that it was training people for itself, and if a man moved from one part of the industry to another it was not a net loss to one firm and a net gain to another. This gave it very great power and flexibility. It was dealing only with two or three unions instead of, as some industries have to do, with 20 or 30. It was therefore able to conduct negotiations between relatively few people. Finally—and I think it is only fair to say this—the training scheme was drawn up by an extraordinarily imaginative and versatile man who had, I think, an immense amount to do with the success of the whole operation. So, my Lords, this can be done; but I fear that the organisation which this Bill proposes will not have the advantages which made possible the extraordinary advance of the coal industry over the last decade.
I plead with your Lordships, if you accept this Bill—and we must accept it, for it is a necessary part of our development—not to believe that it will resolve or cope with the basic problems which beset British industry to-day. We still have to consider the implications on the unions of new training techniques. The whole of the trade union movement derives its structure from the training which its members have had. If this Bill does anything, it will change this training completely. How, therefore, is the trade union movement to be involved in
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it? Some of the trade union members have made most enlightened speeches on the subject; others, of course, are merely fearful. And, after all, why should they not be fearful, because their livelihood is at stake?
I ask your Lordships to imagine how some of you might think were it discovered that a new computer had been invented which would, if fed with appropriate information, work out with complete confidence the answers to legal problems posed to it, and make unnecessary the greater part of the legal machinery of this country. Suppose, therefore, that in the interests of efficiency it were proposed to rationalise the legal profession by dismissing half of the unskilled members, elevating the rest to the Peerage, and amalgamating the solicitors and the barristers. This is a kind of operation comparable in its complexity to that which we are asking the trade unions to accept. I beg your Lordships to believe that the problems are vexatious and difficult, but in my understanding the trade unions are anxious to solve them. But it seems to me that they cannot solve them unless a much more elaborate mechanism is proposed for the purpose than the Bill has yet proposed.
Therefore, I beg your Lordships to accept this Bill, but I beg you also to realise that in doing so you are accepting a system which would bring this country up to date, perhaps, as at 1939. It will not bring us the advantages we seek for the second half of the twentieth century. It might perhaps bring us to the point from which some of the Continental countries are now proposing to depart. They are most anxiously studying how to improve a system which is almost as good as we shall have when this Bill has come into effect. Therefore, I say to your Lordships that this Bill is a necessary first stage; it is no more. We have an immense field to conquer. We demand the help of the most powerful ordnance that the Government have at their disposal. This Bill, my Lords, is not a howitzer; I regard it merely as a small pipsqueak of a rifle.
5.38 p.m.
LORD MCCORQUODALE OF NEWTON: My Lords, it is my privilege, on your behalf, to express our appreciation and congratulation to the noble

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Lord, Lord Bowden, on his maiden speech in this House—a most informative maiden speech, as I think everybody will agree. I can only express the hope that we shall hear him often in our debates. He will not expect me to argue with him on some of the provocative things he has said this evening. I would just venture to suggest that I think Professor Stone was not entirely accurate, so far as craftsmen were concerned, in the calculations he made which the noble Lord and others have quoted. But I will not pursue that matter further. I will merely say that I think the whole House much enjoyed the noble Lord's speech, though some of us did not agree with some parts of it. We hope to hear him often in the future.
My Lords, I rise unreservedly to welcome this Bill, and I think I may do so not only on my own behalf but also on behalf of my colleagues in the Employers' Confederation. We should also congratulate the noble Viscount, Lord Blakenham, the original author of the whole scheme—the Bill and the White Paper which preceded it. We congratulate him both on his vision as Minister and, if I may say so, on his clarity of exposition to-day. A happy phrase about this Bill was coined in another place by Mr. Gunter, when he described the Bill as one of those measures which translate modernisation into reality. It is a good phrase, I think, but I would add to it that in fact the Bill gives the opportunity for us in industry to take this step, for it is an enabling Bill. It is up to industry and education, and all those who are to work the Bill, to make it reality. It is an enabling Bill. It is also, in my view, an extremely important one at the present time.
I wonder whether I might go back a little in the history of the matter. It is now six years since the Carr Committee—a powerful Committee composed of representatives of employers, trade unions, educationists and the like—issued their paper, the Carr Report. In paragraph 18 of that Report, if I might remind your Lordships, appeared this sentence:
"The effort of a Government should be directed to the expansion and improvement of the facilities for technical education, while the responsibility for the industrial training of apprentices should rest firmly with industry."
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I would say that opinions have moved forward since that day and since that expression, but that was a doctrine set forth authoritatively at that time.
In view of this statement, the Employers' Confederation asked the Trades Union Congress, the nationalised industries, various education authorities, the Ministry of Labour and the City and Guilds if they would join them in setting up an Industrial Training Council. This, when set up, undertook two tasks, as the noble Lord, Lord Williamson, will remember. The first immediate task was to urge industry to take advantage of the approaching "bulge" in school-leavers by making more apprenticeship places available, and in this I think we can claim that, after a rather hesitant start, we achieved considerable success; the number of places went up considerably. The second and long-term task that we were set was to make industry more training-conscious, to work out more modern methods of training and to insist that everybody, boy or girl, and not necessarily only the apprentices, should be the better for some systematic training—systematic training of some sort for all entering industry.
We also set up the Training Advisory Service, which under its chief officer, Mr. Meade, has done, I think we may claim, excellent service, and which has been enlarging itself week by week and month by month and is now operating on quite a considerable scale. At the risk of blowing our own trumpets, I would suggest, if I may, that it is at least partly due to the vigorous activities of our Industrial Training Council that the climate of industry, from the point of view of both employer and trade unionist, is now so favourable to, and ready for, a positive, governmental, national lead in this matter.
But I would say this. We in this country are, of course, so apt to run ourselves down and make little of our own accomplishments. We all here understand this: it is a national weakness. But others, and especially others abroad, tend not to understand it. At this moment we all hope to see a very great step forward in industrial training to meet the modern demands, but there are many people, who I feel ought to know better, who have

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used the introduction of this measure to run down everything that has gone before. Of course there have been black spots in our training; everybody knows that. But there have been—and I was very glad the noble Viscount, Lord Amory, mentioned this—many very bright spots as well. How does anybody think that we could have reached the pre-eminent position in skilled manufactures which we occupy in this country if our training facilities had been as bad as all that?
I would beg people, noble Lords and others, when urging the necessity for a move forward and for great improvements—and, of course, many improvements and adaptations are required to meet the new automative age—not to run down the great efforts of so many on both sides of industry in this matter, for they have produced in this country skilled craftsmen who, I would claim, are second to none anywhere in the world. But what we want is more of them, and also an extension of training to those others, boys and girls, who are not in the skilled category and who are now getting little or no training or opportunity for further education at the technical colleges. This is what we hope this Bill will help us to provide. I believe that it gives a sound and flexible framework within which both sides of industry, the Government and the educational world can work together to modernise our training system. And it is most important that industry and education should co-operate, and that neither should regard the other as of paramount importance. Each has much to offer the other; and I believe that, if we get full co-operation, we shall go forward.
The emphasis of the Bill, of course, is on the new training boards to be set up, and on the Central Training Council. The boards, as I see it, will be of the greatest importance as policy-makers, and will have a wide discretion in their activities, and I am sure that this is right. The quantity of training, the quality of training, the length of training—all these will come under their ægis: and their work must be of cardinal importance to the industry to which they are attached. We all wish them well. But
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there is one point in their work which I should like to emphasise and which has not, I think, been mentioned to-night. One of the weaknesses of our present position is the lack of forward assessment as to the number and types of workpeople likely to be required in future years, and the sort of training they should receive.
This job of assessing future manpower requirements and identifying training needs for them is of cardinal importance, and I would suggest it is one of the first things to be tackled by the individual boards. Incidentally, these assessments, collected by the Central Training Council from the beards, could be a most reliable basis for the forward planning of manpower requirements which is now largely the responsibility of N.E.D.C.
To do this will mean the collection of reliable statistics by the boards—statistics about the recruitment of apprentices, about those in the semi-skilled trades, about wastage and many other details—if they are to formulate soundly-based training schemes for their industries and for the different categories of workmen in their industries. These schemes will also have to lay down, I would suggest, proper standards of training on a national basis. In conjunction with the Government training centres—and I am very glad that this has been emphasised by all the speakers up to now—the boards will have to make very definite plans for the training of work-people to meet the changing requirements of industry, and this matter will grow of more and more importance with the advent of the new automative and electronic devices in industry.
I trust, too, that much care and attention will be given by the boards, in conjunction with the Youth Advisory Service, to the matter of the induction of young people into industry. I am one of those who think that it is of great importance that boys and girls in their last year at school should be given an insight into the careers that they may possibly be following when they leave school, and not to be thrust without any preparation into industry. There is a very large amount of work to be done in this matter in conjunction with the Youth Advisory Service and I would commend it very

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much to the boards. I believe that many of the industrial problems of our day and the many industrial anxieties that we see among workpeople and employers will be solved or, at least, made much easier if proper attention is given to all young people on their introduction into industry which will give them a sound start to their industrial life. My Lords, I am sorry to be looking so much at the clock, but I am told that I have to stop at 5.53 for the Royal Commission.
If we really want to see good industrial relations in this country—and I would emphasise this—the start should be made when the boy or girl first enters into industry, because first impressions may last a lifetime. In passing, may I say that I consider the Minister very wise in keeping the appointments to the boards and Council as flexible as possible. There has been much pressure brought on him to put representatives of this body or that body on the boards and on the Council; but I believe that the flexibility of the scheme is of paramount importance and that he should keep his own control over these matters. I believe also that the Minister is quite right in making the Central Training Council an advisory body and not an executive body at the present time. The emphasis must be on the industrial boards; the advisory Council's work should be to help these boards and help the Minister in directing the activities of the boards where possibly they may be falling down.
House adjourned during pleasure.
House resumed.

ROYAL COMMISSION
6.0 p.m.
The following Bills received the Royal Assent:
Consolidated Fund,
Air Corporations,
Post Office (Borrowing Powers).
House adjourned during pleasure.
House resumed.

INDUSTRIAL TRAINING BILL
6.14 p.m.
Debate on Second Reading resumed.
LORD MCCORQUODALE OF NEWTON: My Lords, I will be brief in concluding the few remarks that I wish to address to your Lordships on this Industrial Training Bill. The thrust in the centre which our Industrial Training Council has endeavoured to provide over the last few years must come from the Central Training Council, which will have not only a wider membership but a more extensive remit than we had in the I.T.C. But we hope that the new Council will continue to carry out much of the work on which we have been engaged in the last years. What I think is important is that there should be no vacuum at the centre between the eventual passing of the I.T.C. and the full emergence of the Central Training Council. With this in mind, my colleagues will be discussing with the Minister of Labour the best way in which we can help to achieve a smooth transition from ourselves to the new Council. We are also pleased to know that the Industrial Advisory Service of the I.T.C., about which I spoke a moment ago and which has done such valuable field work, will be continuing in operation under the new Council.
I would suggest that the success of this important measure will depend upon the good will of those whose ultimate responsibility it will be to translate the ability into practice. This good will has been clearly evident in the various discussions which employers, trade unions and others have had with the officials of the Ministry of Labour. As some little time ago, on another Bill, I passed some strictures upon the staff of the Ministry of Labour and their consultations with industry, I wish to say on this occasion that they have been most meticulous and accommodating; they could not have been more helpful to us and, I understand, also, to the Trades Union Congress in the discussions and deliberations about the Bill. We wish to thank them for it. I am sure this good will will continue right through the discussions that must be held with the various industries by all these training boards. Of course, it is true that the success of the whole exercise will depend

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upon the calibre of the persons appointed to the boards and the Central Training Council, and upon the quality of the staff, whose job it will be to advise and assist these new bodies. That will be in the hands of the Minister, and we hope that he will be able to choose the right men and women to serve this training idea.
The Government's legislation offers a great chance for our system of industrial training to be developed along modern lines, flexible yet systematic, and I hope that it will be fully capable of meeting the changing needs of the country for trained manpower. I am quite sure that our great industries will wish to take full advantage of the opportunity which this Bill offers to them.
6.19 p.m.
LORD WILLIAMSON: My Lords, first of all I should like to join my noble friend Lord McCorquodale of Newton in offering congratulations to the noble Lord, Lord Bowden, on his well-informed and admirable speech this afternoon. I understand the noble Lord is a great authority on the subject. He is not only the distinguished Principal of the Manchester College of Advanced Technology, but he is also a very advanced engineer. I join with the noble Lord, Lord McCorquodale of Newton, in hoping that we shall hear the noble Lord, Lord Bowden, in this House on many occasions in the future.
I should like to refer to part of Lord McCorquodale of Newton's speech, when he mentioned those who denigrate the achievements of British industry on this question of training. I join with him on that. But I am sure the noble Lord will accept that while there are sections of British industry which can be proud of their achievements in training, there is a large field—too large—who have done no training at all. It was the Carr Report which pointed out that certain industries were training and then finding that the men they had trained were being seduced from their employment by firms who did no training at all; and that discouraged many firms who were trying to train their own technicians and craftsmen.
It is interesting to recollect that it is almost ten years since attention was focused seriously on the deficiencies of
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industrial training. In consequence, as has been pointed out, and as the noble Viscount knows very well, the National Joint Advisory Council considered this subject and appointed the Carr Committee, which commenced its work in 1946 and concluded its Report in January, 1958. But it was not until December, 1962, that the Government issued the Command Paper on Industrial Training. Therefore, it took five years to act upon the findings of the Carr Committee, with the one exception that there was the appointment of the Industrial Training Council, to which the noble Lord, Lord McCorquodale of Newton, has referred. But both he and, I am sure, the Minister will accept that the Industrial Training Council, because of its meagre resources, could only touch the fringe of the subject. However, I agree that they did what they could, and made some progress.
This is not the whole story of inaction and delay. The White Paper (Cmnd. 1892) admits in its first sentence that:
"Ever since the war industry in this country has been short of skilled labour."
And as the noble Viscount quoted in his speech
"an important factor in holding back the rate of economic expansion …"
Therefore, since the end of the war, twenty years of neglect and inaction have resulted in a more serious situation to-day than in 1945. I apologise for inflicting this history on your Lordships, but I do so only to emphasise that we should try now to make up for lost time. It is for this reason that I hope the Bill, whatever may be its defects—and there is not much time to put them right—will not be unduly delayed in reaching the Statute Book, and that expeditious action will be taken to get on with the job. After all, there is a great deal to do, and even if we start right away, we cannot expect any tangible results for four or five years, at the earliest.
I have referred to the past delay, and to the urgent need for positive action. It would be much more serious if, as time goes on, it turned out that the methods of organisation, or the effectiveness of the proposals in the Bill, were wasteful in operation or less fruitful of success than we all hope will be the case. I do not believe that this Bill is the whole answer. But it is at any rate

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a start, and it would be prudent to accept in advance a degree of flexibility so that adjustments can be made in the light of experience when the boards begin to operate. It is for this reason that I think it would be useful to refer—I sincerely hope net critically, but in a constructive way—to one or two aspects of the Bill.
First of all, the industrial training boards. The noble Viscount was not very clear when he was questioned as to how these were to be set up. In Clause 2 of the Bill reference is made to "the industry", which suggests that separate boards will be set up for separate industries. I believe that is the intention, but it would be useful to know how many and which particular industries it is proposed to include in these proposals. If the proposals of the Bill are to be generally effective, they should, in time, cover fairly well the whole of British industry and trade. If it is the intention that this training project should be universal, is it envisaged that each industry and each branch of commerce will have a specific training board? If the answer to this is "Yes," the question arises of the colossal organisation that will be required, the cost in personnel, the duplication of administration and physical effects, such as buildings and equipment, properly to implement the proposals. There are scores of different industries, both important ones and many minor ones, whose operations are nevertheless vital to the economy. I think there are something like 50 or 60 industries which are supervised by wages councils. If, on the other hand, it is intended to have training boards only in the most important industries, and only in the important sections of commerce, a large field of industrial activity will be excluded from the provisions of the Bill.
This impinges, of course, on the question of the levy, and whether some firms only will be compelled to pay it. Apparently, those firms in industries for which training boards are not established will not be required to contribute. Are we to understand that all those firms engaged in activities for which training boards may not be established are to escape the levy, notwithstanding the fact that most of them, if not all, will be employing skilled per-
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sonnel, probably trained by someone else, or in some way or another benefiting from the training which is going on? Surely there would appear to be an anomaly there. Does this not suggest that the most fair, the most simple, and the most generally accented method would be to levy all firms, possibly by a small percentage on wages and salaries, so that they all make an equitable contribution to training, especially when those firms who are training can recover some or all of their expenditure by financial rebates or grants?
Next I should like to say a word about the Central Training Council. I welcome the provision in the Bill for a central authority, the need for which was emphasised by noble Lords in the debate in February, 1963. But the duties and responsibilities of the Central Council, according to the Bill, seem to be very narrow and restricted. Let me quote the appropriate paragraph in Clause 11(1):
"The Minister shall appoint a council, to be known as the Central Training Council, which shall have the duty of advising him on the exercise of his functions under this Act and on any other matter relating to industrial or commercial training which he may refer to it."
So that the Central Council's function will be to advise the Minister, first, on his functions, or, secondly, on any matter that he may refer to it. So that the secondary duty will arise only if the Minister sees fit to make a reference.
I am sure that when, in the debate to which I have referred, noble Lords suggested a central authority, they had in mind functions very much wider and much more cogent. The noble Lord, Lord McCorquodale of Newton, in the debate in February, 1963, suggested that the central authority might provide, among other responsibilities, general advice and guidance on responsibilities and activities, assessment of training, analysis of jobs and occupations in terms of skill, planning systematic training schemes, syllabuses, training tests, et cetera.
There are other very important duties which will have to be carried out by some body. For instance (and I hope the Minister can give some answers to these questions because many people are vitally interested and are worrying about them), who will be responsible for inves

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tigating what is the extent of our skilled personnel now; in which fields are we deficient, and to what extent? What are to be the priorities for urgent action? Who is to consider and keep under review the type of training required; the volume of training; and the changes which may be required in the various categories from time to time? Where will the responsibility lie for correlating and co-ordinating the training objectives of the various training boards? How will one board know whether or not it is unnecessarily duplicating the training of other boards, and whose responsibility will it be to guard against certain skills not being catered for by any board? How are the boundaries of any particular industry, such as the chemical industry—which is an outstanding example—to be defined; and how will difficulties be sorted out where different boards claim autonomy over certain firms?
Surely these, or some of them, are matters which could usefully occupy the considerations of the Central Training Council. Or is all this work to be the prerogative of the Minister and his Department? Would it not be a good thing for the Central Training Council to meet representatives of the various industrial training boards from time to time, for the purpose of conferring and assessing progress, and perhaps to consider any problems which are certain to arise? Should there not be a link-up in this way?
The last matter to which I want to refer, my Lords—there are many speakers and I must not take too long—is the inspectorate. Again going back to the debate in your Lordships' House in February, 1963, the noble and learned Viscount, Lord Hailsham (as he then was), replying to questions raised by noble Lords on sanctions, said [OFFICIAL REPORT, Vol. 246, col. 815]:
"… the Minister will have power to appoint inspectors to see that the training arrangements … are satisfactory: and if they are not, he will have power to withhold the Government grant."
The noble Lord, Lord Carrington, in replying, made the same point, but I will not weary the House by quoting it. But nowhere in this Bill, so far as I can see, is there any provision for an inspectorate as promised. Or is it the case that the
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Minister does not need specific powers in the Bill for this purpose? My Lords, I will finish now. As I said earlier, there ought not to be undue delay in putting into operation the intentions of the Bill, but I am sure that if some of the obscurities to which I have referred are not clarified now, the time will soon come when confusion will call for their solution.
6.36 p.m.
LORD ABERDARE: My Lords, in the past few months in this House we have devoted a good deal of time to the subject of education. We have had two major Reports, that of the Robbins Committee and, more recently, that of the Newsom Committee, and in my opinion this debate on the Second Reading of the Industrial Training Bill completes a trilogy. For industrial training surely cannot be divorced from general education. But whereas the first two debates were concerned with general principles, we now have before us a Bill which seeks to do something specific to improve our system of industrial training.
As other noble Lords have pointed out, it is an enabling measure and does not in itself produce one extra course of training, but it will set into being machinery capable of expanding training facilities, and it is significant in marking the first entry of the Government into partnership with employers and trade unions in this sphere. It is therefore most important that in considering this Bill we see that the framework and the machinery it sets up are correct, and that the responsibilities laid on the various people who have to carry it out, and particularly on the training boards, are clearly defined.
The Long Title describes the Bill as
"An Act to make further provision for industrial and commercial training".
It is particularly on the aspect of commercial training that I should like to speak for a few moments. So far, it has hardly been mentioned, although I was glad to hear the noble Lord, Lord Champion, refer to it at the end of his excellent speech. Certainly it is one very important aspect which I think your Lordships should not overlook. It is clearly no good producing the finest aeroplanes or the best of machine tools if we cannot sell them.

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We have a current plan, as has been mentioned, to expand our economy by 4 per cent. per annum, and this, in turn, entails expanding our exports at a rate of 5 per cent. per annum. This, obviously, calls for skilled marketing and dynamic salesmanship, and our marketing managers and salesmen need just as much in the way of training facilities as our technicians and craftsmen. In fact, as I think has already been mentioned before, in this computer age there is a tendency for the manual working force to decline in numbers while the supporting force of the black-coated workers (as I think they have been called), the clerical and administrative workers, increases correspondingly. It is vital, therefore, that the training of this commercial type is proceeded with hand in hand with industrial training. Certainly many of our rivals do not neglect commercial training.
I expect that many of your Lordships will have read the excellent book by Lady Williams, under the title Apprenticeship in Europe, which was published last year, with a foreword by my noble friend Lord Blakenham, when he was Minister of Labour. Anyone who is interested in comparing systems of industrial training should certainly read this book, which is full of interesting facts and figures. I should like, with your Lordships' permission, to quote one set of figures relating to West Germany. There the Government, in conjunction with employers and trade unions, maintains a list of trades classified according to the skill and training required. For industry, there are 331 skilled trades, with 220,000 apprentices, and 138 semi-skilled trades, with 23,000 trainees. For commerce, the equivalent figures are 31 skilled trades, with 460,000 apprentices, and 5 semi-skilled trades, with 22,500 apprentices. As Lady Williams herself comments:
"… it is significant that commerce has the largest proportion of those undergoing apprenticeship training."
From those figures your Lordships will see that commerce has, in fact, more than double the number of apprentices in skilled trades.
In this country over recent years we have made, I think, considerable progress with our commercial training, and
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there now exists a well recognised and well organised ladder of achievement. The bottom rung has only just been hammered into place, with the Certificate of Office Studies only recently introduced, open at minimum age of 16 and involving two years' part-time or evening study. At the next stage is the Ordinary National Certificate or Diploma in Business Studies, again open at 16 to people with certain "O" level qualifications and roughly equivalent to the intermediate stage of a professional examination. Then there is the Higher National Certificate or Diploma in Business Studies. The minimum age is 18, and it requires certain "A" level qualifications or an Ordinary Certificate or Diploma.
To crown the whole ladder a Committee has recently been set up by the National Advisory Council on Education in Industry and Commerce, under the chairmanship of Mr. W. F. Crick, to consider the need for a final award in business studies roughly equivalent to an Honours degree. This Committee, I understand, has made its report to the Minister of Education, and I hope in the very near future we shall be able to hear from the Minister that there will be this highest award on the commercial training side.
I would join with my noble friend Lord Amory in commending the efforts of the technical colleges and the contribution that they have made and are making to our industrial and commercial training, and I should like to couple with them the colleges of commerce. Your Lordships will remember that the Report of the Robbins Committee drew attention to the importance of the work these colleges, both technical colleges and commercial colleges, are doing in commercial as well as technical training. And that Report pointed out that less than two-thirds of their full-time advanced students were studying science and technology. The remainder were mainly studying commercial subjects. That Report recommended that some of the area colleges might be considered for designation as regional colleges and they specifically included in the recommendation some of the colleges of commerce as their advanced work grows in importance. I know it would be a great encouragement to these colleges and to

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commercial education if the Minister were to act on this recommendation and upgrade one or other college of commerce to a regional college as appropriate.
Also in the field of commercial education, I should mention, I think, the excellent commercial apprenticeship scheme which the Association of British Chambers of Commerce started some years ago and which has attracted wide support from manufacturing industry, although there is still scope for additional expansion. It seems to me that the material is there, the facilities are there; the colleges exist and are doing the training. But what is wanted is greater use to be made of those existing facilities.
I approach this Bill, therefore, with the object of discovering how much further it carries the development of commercial training. It is most satisfactory at least that in Clause 1, establishing industrial training boards, it is quite clear that their scope includes commerce as well as industry, and I know that when appointing the members of these training boards it is highly undesirable—I agree with the noble Lord, Lord McCorquodale of Newton—to restrict the choice of the Minister. But I would just mention, in passing, that I hope in appropriate cases the interests of commerce may be looked after so far as appropriate industry is concerned when appointments are made to the training boards. I would also hope that the problems and the organisation of commercial education, which are very considerable, might well be a subject discussed by the Central Training Council at an early stage, and I would also hope that a member of that Council might be a person with considerable experience on the commercial side.
The real difficulty, it seems to me, about commercial training is that the skills cut right across all industries. Various noble Lords have mentioned problems in defining industries and the overlapping between them, and in the field of commercial training there is almost complete overlapping. The training required by people employed in accountancy, company law, marketing, clerical work, is common to all industries—engineering, building, chemical, textiles; it does not matter which. I
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think that this problem is likely to be best solved—at least I suggest this is a possible solution—only by establishing a separate board for commercial training; in fact, one of the industrial training boards should be a board for commerce. Only in this way do I think you can achieve the right amount of commercial training over the whole field with comparable standards throughout industry.
It might be thought as an alternative to having a specific board for commercial training that industrial training boards should set up a joint committee as envisaged in Clause 3 of the Bill. This clause is obviously useful where there is overlap between one industry and another—where two industries, for example, are both employing plumbers. But in the case of commerce I do not believe it is such a good or possible solution, for two reasons. The first is that I think it would be a pity to put commerce into a secondary rôle by delegating it to a separate and subordinate committee. But, more seriously as an objection, I see the fact that there would be great difficulties in that only where you had established a training board in an industry could a joint committee of those industries be charged with commercial training.
The result would be very unfair, because say the first two boards to be established were for engineering and building, and supposing they took their commercial education responsibilities seriously and established a joint committee for commercial education, then they would be paying a levy and training people in commercial skills who would then be available to other industries not paying a levy and not giving any training. This would result in a great deal of poaching, which has been brought up as a disadvantage in the present system, and I fear would not be fair and would not work well. I return, therefore, to what I see as the best solution, which would be to treat commercial employment as an industry on its own and to establish its own commercial training board at an early stage. Finally, I should like to give a warm welcome to this Bill, in the hope that it will stimulate increased industrial and commercial training, and to express the hope that in putting these provisions

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into effect the Minister will give at least equal consideration to commercial training as he does to industrial training.
6.51 p.m.
VISCOUNT SIMON: My Lords, as noble Lords from all quarters of the House have in general welcomed this Bill, I do not think that at this late hour I should abuse your patience by speaking of the general argument in favour of the Bill and of the provision of additional industrial training and commercial training in this country (a matter referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare), though there are certain matters of organisation to which I should like to call attention.
In introducing the Bill, the noble Viscount, Lord Blakenham, explained, rather briefly, I thought—and he has been questioned on this point on one or two occasions—that the Government had come to the conclusion that a division of responsibility by industries was the right way to approach this matter. I think that the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, has called attention to one great difficulty of doing that; and, indeed, the same applies—it has already been mentioned—to what I may call the common services skills: the engineers and the electricians, the people who serve in so many industries. I cannot conceive that it is going to be possible to set up training boards in every industry at the same time. The difficulties which the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, outlined, seem to me certain to arise. Some industries will be paying a levy, and others which have not yet reached that stage will be drawing the benefit of the training, and drawing away the people who have been trained at other people's expense.
Listening to the speeches, and particularly to that of the noble Lord, Lord Champion, it occurred to me that something on the following lines might be helpful: that in these common purpose skills to which I have referred, a man who had been trained should, as it were, carry a ticket with him, and when he went into other employment the levy in respect of his training would be recovered from his subsequent employer; so that the subsequent employer would pay back, per week or
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per month, so much to the industrial training board or to whoever had financed his training. It seems to me that that would be one way in which the burden could be fairly spread, and the advantages which we know have been obtained by firms snatching well-trained men from those who have spent money on training them, might be avoided.
Generally speaking, I think that the machinery outlined in the Bill is quite appropriate. I think that once this question of fixing the boundaries of industry has been settled, the industrial training boards will be soundly based. As your Lordships will remember, they have representatives both of the employers and of the employees, the trade unions; they have representatives nominated by what will now, I suppose, be the Department of Education and Science, who will keep in touch with the technical training facilities in the technical colleges, and so on. There is also (and I think this is a most important factor) a nominee of the Ministry of Labour who, although he has no vote, will sit on the industrial training board and, as I think, will be a link between the board, which is dealing with the particular industry, and the general body of expertise which will be growing up in the Ministry of Labour in the handling of these schemes.
It seems to me, too, that the provision that training can be undertaken beyond the confines of a single industry in part meets the difficulties which have been raised about this training of common service employees. It is specially laid down in the Bill that training can be arranged and approved with other parties. I must say that, on reading the Bill, I thought the intention was exactly that: that the textile industry could arrange to have its engineers trained by the engineering industry or by some other body set up for that purpose. To my mind, this gives great advantage. Not only is it the most economical way to train engineers, rather than having a number of different industries all training their engineers separately, but it also provides that the engineering employees in one industry are meeting their opposite numbers in other industries, and by the exchange of ideas we get this cross fertilisation.

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That is, of course, of particular importance in management training. It is one of the great advantages that we already find in the systems of management training which have been started and which we look to see so widely expanded. In my own experience, I have found that young men who have gone into management training courses benefit enormously by meeting people who are engaged in similar activities in other industries. That is why I should have thought that a great deal of "crossing of the border" is really desirable in industrial training, and that to make the training too close within a single industry is probably not a desirable thing.
This brings me to one matter where, I am afraid, if your Lordships' House had closer rules of order I might be in danger of straying across the border. But I have a special reason for bringing this up, and I hope that I may be forgiven. It relates to the ports industry, in which I must declare an interest. The Government have put forward this Bill, which I think we shall broadly welcome, and they have at the same time introduced the Harbours Bill in which a quite different procedure is provided for industrial training. I do not know what the reason is. In the Harbours Bill which is now before another place it is provided that the National Ports Council shall be responsible for training—that it shall stand in the position of the industrial training board, and that it shall be under the supervision and, indeed, in certain circumstances, the direction, of the Minister of Transport, who, I venture to think, will not have in his Department advisers with nearly the same wide experience of these matters as has the Minister of Labour.
I cannot see why the ports industry should not enjoy the benefit of this Bill. I may be told that that is not prevented; and I know that I cannot ask the noble Viscount in his reply to deal with this matter, because it is not within his province. But I am asking him, if he would, to bring this matter to the notice of his right honourable friend the Minister of Transport. I do it to-day, risking being out of order, because of two things: one is that I think noble Lords will agree with me that fairly soon we shall reach that stage in the Session when
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Bills come from another place and we are advised that we should not amend them in case we lose the Bills. If Amendments are to be made, it is far better that they should be made in another place when Bills are under consideration there.
The second reason is that some small Amendment may be necessary to this Bill. Shortly before the Bill left another place, an Amendment was inserted which added words to paragraph 6 of the Schedule to provide that in any particular case the Minister, if he thinks fit, can authorise the Iron and Steel Board to appoint a member of an industrial training board. It seems to me that one might insert a similar Amendment to allow the National Ports Council to do that in appropriate cases. I believe that the National Ports Council has in some degree been moulded on the Iron and Steel Board, and I feel that that may be an appropriate Amendment to make. That is all the excuse I have for bringing the matter forward.
I should like to refer quite briefly to one other matter. I agree with Lord Champion that the financial provisions are extraordinarily vague; and, while I quite understand that the Minister wants to keep as free a hand as possible, it seems to me that in the interests of the industries concerned and in the interests of the industrial training boards there should be some indication of the circumstances in which loans and grants can be made. We do not, of course, want people trying to set their course so that they can get the maximum grant; but, on the other hand, it is a little unfair on the boards if they have not some idea of the sort of expenditure for which they can seek a grant. It would be unfair if grants were handed out to an industry on the basis of need, when that need had arisen, perhaps, from a lack of thrift in the past, whereas an industry which had set aside money for training was told that it did not have need and would not get a grant. That might happen unless the Minister were able to give some sort of guidance and perhaps write something in the Bill to indicate the circumstances in which grants might be given.
In that respect I should like to ask one specific question of the noble Viscount. When he was talking about what

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I might call discipline, he suggested that a firm which did not follow the advice of the industrial training board in regard, say, to the giving of day release to apprentices, or whatever it might be, could have pressure brought to bear upon it by having its grant withheld. I could not find in the Bill any provision for either the Minister or the industrial training board to make a grant to a firm, except in the case of a board making a grant in respect of expenditure incurred on training. Will the noble Viscount explain when he replies what could be withheld as a sanction against a firm which did not follow the advice of a board? I do not want to detain the House any longer, and I apologise for bringing in that one extraneous point, but I felt that it was important to find out now. I join with all other noble Lords who have spoken in this debate in warmly welcoming this Bill.
7.5 p.m.
LORD WALSTON: My Lords, the debate up until this moment has been concerned, quite naturally, mainly with urban matters and with the problems of great industries, and also with commerce. I hope your Lordships will not object if I ask you to turn your minds to the problems of the countryside as they are affected by this Bill. I say "countryside" advisedly, because there are many problems there which are not solely agricultural.
In the first instance I shall deal with agriculture and the need for increasing the facilities for the training of new entrants into the agricultural industry. I do not think there is any need to underline the fact that if we are to have the type of agriculture which will continue in the years to come to make the sort of contribution to the national economy which it h as made in the past, we need to have, to an increasing extent, trained workers. I a the not very far distant past—which many of your Lordships will undoubtedly remember, as I do myself—a farm had a certain number of skilled workers, stockmen, horse keepers, and possibly the odd tractor driver. They had their degrees of skill, and some of them considerable skill; but there were many men who were just ordinary farm workers.
That situation has gone entirely, and to-day there is scarcely a farm of any
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size where every man is not a skilled man—whether that skill is involved in looking after livestock or taking care of complex, expensive machinery, or whether it is in the newer techniques of controlling weeds and pests by chemical means. So it is manifest that, if we are to have a modern and up-to-date agricultural industry, we must have the means of training the new entrants into the industry so that they may become experts in their job. This need applies no less to agriculture than to the other forms of industry—matters which we heard so admirably described in a splendid maiden speech by my noble friend Lord Bowden.
When it comes to new entrants into the industry, if one looks at the statistics one sees that agriculture is not doing at all badly. There is in agriculture a larger proportion of young men under 20 years of age than, on average, in other industries. The average throughout the whole of the country in regard to workers under 20 is 10 per cent. of the total labour force. In agriculture the percentage is 16. Therefore, farmers employ a larger proportion of young men than do other industries. But the disquieting factor is not that agriculture does not attract young men, but that it does not retain them. If one looks at the figures one sees, as the men get older, something very different indeed. In the last eleven years the labour force in agriculture as a whole has dropped by some 30 per cent., but the age group between 25 and 44—in other words, the people who should be at their greatest productive capacity and becoming the specialists—has dropped, not as the whole agricultural force has dropped, by 30 per cent., but by 46 per cent.
It is manifest that although agriculture attracts a higher proportion than other industries attract at the younger ages, they drift away far more rapidly than they do from many other industries. That is something which should cause us grave disquiet. If we are not careful we shall be faced in another twenty years with an industry where the average age is far higher than it is in other industries. That cannot be good for the country or for agriculture itself.
I am glad to say that steps have already been taken, to remedy this to some extent.

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There is the agriculture apprenticeship scheme. There are many difficulties involved in it and there are many special problems of agriculture with which I shall not weary your Lordships, but I would pay tribute to those who have been interested in this scheme and who have given a great deal of time and effort to it. But, for all that, the results are lamentably small. Out of 18,000 in the age group 15 to 16 entering the industry there are only about 500 who go in under the apprenticeship scheme; in other words, something under 3 per cent. of the young men in agriculture are in any way formally apprentices. I know that there are a good many, and I have them on my own farms, who are in fact undergoing a period of training, and I think that is of some value. But it would be of far more value if the apprenticeships were more formal and coupled with the training on the farm itself, with the day releases or the week releases or whatever it may be, adding to the knowledge of agriculture by classroom work, by practical demonstrations, and by some academic adjuncts to the actual field work.
There are many reasons why this figure is so small, but it is quite apparent that one of the reasons is that there has not been enough push behind this scheme to get people into it. That is borne out by the fact that, where there are people specially engaged to encourage the farm apprenticeship scheme, the results are truly remarkable. The Industrial Apprenticeship Council made a grant, a very small grant but a grant for which the industry is grateful, of £3,000 a year for three years starting in 1961. That was matched pound for pound by the National Farmers' Union who, together with the two unions involved with agricultural workers, have put a great deal of very commendable effort into this apprenticeship scheme. So there has been between £9,000 and £10,000 over the last three years available to promote the scheme, and in three areas there have been organisers appointed to promote it.
The results are of very considerable interest and significance. In one area where there has been an officer appointed to promote this scheme, whereas in the year before he was appointed there were 53 apprentices per annum coming into
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it, there is now an average of 145 apprentices; in the second area the figure was 25 and has risen to 80; and in the third area it was 36 and has risen to 82. If your Lordships look at the various counties where these officers have been at work, perhaps you will find the figures are even more striking. I would remind your Lordships that the national average for apprentices in agriculture is just under 3 per cent., yet in Bedfordshire where there is an organiser the average is 26·4 per cent.; in Cambridgeshire—I am glad to see that my own county is second in the league table here—it is 24·7 per cent.; in Warwickshire it is 18·1 per cent.; in Huntingdonshire it is 16·2 per cent., and so on.
In every county where there is an organiser paid under this voluntary scheme, there is a very significant increase in the number of apprentices; and in those counties where there is no such officer they are well below the national average of 3 per cent. So I do urge upon Her Majesty's Government that they should learn the lesson from this very small field experiment and realise that, if they wish—as I believe they do, and as I believe we all do—to promote apprenticeship in agriculture, it is essential that money should be made available for encouragement and exhortation and advice, as has been done on this very small scale in the past.
I would just add one more small point, which I hope the noble Viscount, particularly in view of his past association with agriculture in a governmental capacity, and his present association with agriculture in a private capacity, will listen to with favour. This particular grant comes to an end in March. No matter how rapidly this Bill passes through its stages, it will not come into effect for some considerable time after that. I very much hope that means will be found whereby this very valuable work, which has been done in these past three years, will not go by the board during the interim period, but will somehow be carried on with Government finance, and, one hopes, also with finance from the industry itself. Because unless that is done, and unless it is pursued in a much more far-reaching way than has been done in the past, we shall find as the years go by that our agricultural labour force will not only decline in

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numbers—that has some good aspects to it—but alter in its constitution. There will be only the young and the old, and the really productive middle-aged will be absent, because the opportunities for the go-ahead type of young man, who is just the type wanted in agriculture, will not be there and he will look for his opportunities elsewhere.
When I started I said that I was going to deal with the rural question as opposed to the purely agricultural question. We must not forget that in the countryside there are very many industries in addition to agriculture. It is my contention that we should encourage those industries on social grounds, if for no other. We do not want to see this terrifying trend towards the cities, towards the conurbations, towards the industrial centres, continuing. We must do all in our power to see that in the countryside itself there are opportunities for employment, for earning good money, for having a good standard of living; opportunities for the ambitious, the interested, the skilled, so that they do not go away willy-nilly into the cities because there are no openings for them in the country itself.
If this trend, which is happening at the present time and has been going on for a long time, continues, we shall finish up with vast areas of urban employment, with all the horrors that Buchanan and others have described to us, with interspersed between them wildernesses of possibly uncultivated land, possibly ranched land, with just a few people living in isolated areas, who live there only because they have no alternative of going elsewhere, and who may in fact be forced to go into the cities, because all the amenities are there, where they find the schools for their children, the shops for their wives, the entertainments for themselves. That is a prospect to which none of us can look forward with any equanimity or pleasure. In order to combat that, we must in our rural areas encourage industries which are going to give opportunities for employment, valuable employment, and opportunities for the young men at present growing up in the countryside to develop the capabilities which are with in them.
There are many of these industries of a most surprising kind, and I think it would astound many people to realise
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what these industries are. It would probably also surprise many people to realise what a contribution these industries make not only to our home, domestic economy, but even to our export economy. Many of them specialise in types of products which have a very ready sale abroad, and that is something which should not be forgotten. We must not look upon rural industry as being purely a matter of thatchers and potters, and makers of hurdles and things of that kind. We have precision engineering as a rural industry; we have specialised brick-making; we have boat building—a rapidly growing industry; we have all types of plastic factories on a small scale, and many other industries of that kind which play a very important part in the whole of our national economy. I know that in some respects they come under the general ambit of the councils which we have already had described to us, but there are very special problems for them because of their comparative remoteness and mainly because of their very small size.
At the present time considerable effort is being expended in giving special help to these industries, and local education authorities, rural community councils in the different areas and the Rural Industries Bureau (with which I personally am very proud to be associated) have done a great deal to help the industries in every aspect, particularly in the apprenticeship side of their work. Great encouragement and assistance have in the past been given to apprentices in all these industries, and in many I have not mentioned, in the rural areas. I very much hope that the organisation as envisaged under this Bill—which I, also, in company with my noble friends, welcome—will pay particular attention to the very special problems of the rural industries; that they will not simply be lumped together with the vast industries in the cities, but will be treated, not entirely separately and specially, but so that their problems will be understood; and that they will be able to encourage into their own very small organisations the requisite number of apprentices so that, in the years to come, the industries which are situated away from the large cities—those in our country towns and in our villages—will be no less well placed than are the great factories and

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great industrial centres to obtain good apprentices and to carry on with well-trained young men and middle-aged men in order to promote their own efficiency.
My Lords, I think that this Bill has the beginnings of something very useful. How it will turn out depends upon how the powers which are in it are used. But, from the point of view of the countryside, both agriculture and industry, I sincerely hope that Her Majesty's Government will give particular thought and sympathy to the special problems which exist there.
7.23 p.m.
LORD MILVERTON: My Lords, my contribution to this debate will be very brief. I want to say one word about some of the machinery of the Bill rather than the principle: the machinery as it affects the carrying out of the principle. I share the general enthusiasm with which this Bill has been welcomed, and I need not say any more about that. But in the course of his speech, in passing, the noble Viscount, Lord Amory, emphasised the hope that local authorities, as large employers of labour, would be properly represented. That is the point that I want to elaborate in a few sentences.
The Association of Municipal Corporations has taken the closest interest in this Bill; but it is not, however, entirely satisfied with Clause 11, which deals with the establishment of a Central Training Council, and with whether that clause provides adequately for the representation thereon of local authorities, both as employers and as local education authorities. Paragraph (a) of subsection (2) of Clause 11 makes provision for consultation with employers' organisations regarding the appointment of six members, and paragraph (c) makes provision for consultation with the nationalised industries on the appointment of two members. No specific reference is made to consultations with local authority organisations as representative bodies of employers, but, prima facie, it might be supposed that the local authority associations came within the provisions of paragraph (a).
However, experience of the Ministry of Labour's practice when consulting representative employers' bodies suggests that the Association is unlikely to be
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consulted regarding the appointment of members under paragraph (a). I hope that the Minister can give a satisfactory assurance in this respect; but, if not, there seems to be every reason to ask for the Association to be placed in the same position as the nationalised industries, and that a new paragraph, relating to the local authority associations and analogous to paragraph (c), should be inserted.
The total number of local government employees is approaching 1½ million, excluding teachers, which is in excess of the nationalised industries taken separately and, indeed, is comparable with the nationalised industries taken together. The figures for the employees of the main nationalised industries are: gas, 126,000; electricity, 237,000; coal, 607,000; and railways, 530,000—in other words, a total of 1½ million. It may be mentioned that the interests of local authorities extend over a wide range of skilled workers in building, civil engineering, heating, ventilating and domestic engineering, electrical contracting and motor repairs. In addition, local authorities have a substantial, if not exclusive, interest in employees in parks and gardens, road workers and plant operators, street masons and paviours. The local authority employing interest in building alone is 150,000, which is probably greater than that of any single employer.
So far, I have been referring to the position of the local authority associations as employers' organisations, and I now want to say just one word in reference to their capacity as the representative bodies of local education authorities. The Association of Municipal Corporations has expressed the opinion that, having regard to the extent of the contribution which will have to be made by the education service to industrial training, the six educational members contemplated by paragraph (e) cannot adequately represent the educational interests. As the Minister of Education said in the Second Reading debate on November 20, the Bill is likely to result in a substantial increase in the integrated courses of education and training for first-year apprentices which have developed in recent years. Over 100 such courses are being provided by about 80 local education authorities in England

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and Wales, and they are attended by 3,000 apprentices, mainly from the engineering and construction industries. The Minister went on to say that he thought there would be a stimulus to their development as a result of the powers in the Bill, under which it will be possible for the Boards to pay grants to firms in respect of the cost of sending their apprentices to courses at technical colleges involving industrial training.
My Lords, the Association of Municipal Corporations is also anxious that the Youth Employment Service should be represented under paragraph (e), because of the link which that Service establishes between education and the industrial and commercial world. They regard the Youth Employment Service as primarily part of the education service, because throughout the greater part of the country it is administered by local education authorities; but should the Minister be prepared to give an undertaking that he will add a youth employment member under paragraph (e), apart from educational members, then, of course, the local authorities would be content. A further assurance is, however, still needed that the person appointed will be someone with practical youth employment experience. My Lords, those are the only comments I wish to make on the Bill; but I hope that the Minister will give the assurances which are asked for by the local authorities.
7.30 p.m.
LORD PEDDIE: My Lords, I regret that business connected with a subject that will later be under consideration by this House caused me to be absent from the Chamber when much of this discussion took place. At least in that respect the House will have the privilege of considerable restriction in the range of my comment on this Bill, lest I deal with matters that have already been covered by my colleagues. Like other noble Lords I welcome this Bill, even though it may represent only the first faltering steps towards a comprehensive industrial training. I think the greatest feature of the Bill is the recognition of the importance of manpower as an asset to this nation. Indeed, in presenting the Bill, the noble Lord did, to my great pleasure, lay great stress upon that fact.
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One is tempted to think that if that consideration to the manpower of this country had been given over the years, many of the industrial and economic problems we are faced with to-day would possibly not be so stark and important.
These are times when there is an increasing and justifiable interest in science; but I often think that there is a danger that people can come to believe that an army of white-coated wavers of test tubes can bring about conditions of unbounded plenty for this country. We welcome the development of science; but science alone is not sufficient to ensure the industrial development of the nation that we should like. There is need for the increasing application of science to the bench and the shop floor. That is why I welcome this Bill; because it will be a tangible step forward towards that end. We are living in a period of tremendous industrial and, indeed, commercial change; and our ability to maintain a decent rate of progress is dependent upon our capacity to adapt ourselves to new conditions. I believe that the facilities that could be, and I hope will be, afforded through this Bill will give greater encouragement and assistance in the rapidity of our adaptation to new processes and methods.
Reference has been made during the course of this debate to a system of apprenticeship. There is no doubt that in the past industrial techniques and skills were dependent on their being passed down from the old man to the young one through the process of apprenticeship. I know that it served a great purpose; and still does to-day. Nevertheless, there have been, and are increasingly to-day, considerable abuses within the system of apprenticeship. I know that many may be able to speak from practical experience of the appaling wastage that takes place because an employer uses a system of apprenticeship for the purpose of securing cheap labour for a period of years. It is necessary to develop a system of apprenticeship; but it must be a real one, one that will be adequate to meet changing conditions. The old-type apprenticeship might have been suitable in a static society; but the rate of change to-day is such that apprenticeship alone is not enough: there must

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go with it the facilities for providing these youngsters with technical training. I hope that it will be possible (I do not think it is within the compass of the Bill) to make the availability of such a system of technical training compulsory, so far as employers are concerned.
I know that the noble Lord opposite referred to the fact—though this is not clear in the Bill—that the Bill itself is not confined to providing training facilities for youngsters; and he emphasised the opportunities for retraining. This point I would endeavour to underline. I believe that the provision of facilities for industrial retraining is vital to-day. Many of us who are concerned with large-scale business are often greatly disturbed at the very necessary changes that have to be brought about and at the volume of redundancy. We recognise that technological change does, of necessity, create redundancy; and it becomes a moral and economic necessity to provide rapid facilities for providing retraining to make people available for the new type of job that could come along. I am told that in the United States almost every year nearly half a million people are rendered unemployed solely out of the redundancy that flows from technological change. Technological change, in itself is of economic benefit to the nation; but all these persons, unless they are provided with substantial retraining to equip them for the new jobs, can carry the weight and burden of the technological change that is brought about.
I should like to know whether or not there is power within the Bill to provide the opportunity for substantial retraining along these lines. I know that only comparatively recently in the United States a Federal Bill to deal with this situation has been introduced to make retraining compulsory. I hope that as a result of this legislation, individual firms—many of whom are doing a good job in this respect—will not restrict their individual activities because of the increasing participation of the State. I know—and I speak from personal experience in this respect—that many firms that expend considerable sums of money in providing training facilities experience poaching. Other firms come along who are spending
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nothing at all in this way; but they give transient encouragement to a person to go into their employment after he has secured the benefit of costly training provided by some other employer.
I am a director of a concern that employs about 55,000 people in industrial and commercial fields and it has a comprehensive training scheme. Within it, a residential school provides training over a wide area of industrial and commercial activities. A considerable number of employees, immediately after training has finished, leave the firm. Well, we cannot object to that; but at least one virtue of this Bill is that it provides the possibility that the burden of the costs of such training may be more equally shared within industry and commerce.
I would also hope that in the development of industrial training we are not losing sight of the importance of providing training facilities in commerce and in distribution. When we are considering economic costs relating to the production and distribution of an article, we often lose sight of the enormous and increasing cost there is in distribution itself. I think that is a field of activity to-day which is desperately in need of the advantages of technical training that can be encouraged under these facilities. I agree with the comment that was made by the noble Lord, Lord Milverton, with regard to the association of local education authorities. These authorities, over the years, have been the greatest single force in providing industrial training. Although it is indicated in the Bill that the Ministry of Education will be represented, so far as I can see there is no specific association of education authorities at regional level. In my opinion, that is where it is needed, and I should be glad to have some indication of whether it is proposed to bring about this closer association and, if so, how this will be achieved.
I feel sure that there will be a great increase in the demand for training as a result of this Bill and I hope that the local facilities will be available when the demand comes along, because I doubt whether even in the large industrial towns there will be ample facilities. I look upon this Bill, with all its imperfections, as a prelude to a

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great advance in industrial training. I believe that industrial training is something that is dynamic and should be encouraged. It is something which can make a considerable contribution to the economic development of this country and to the welfare of its workers.
7.42 p.m.
LORD LINDGREN: My Lords, first of all I should like to congratulate my noble friend Lord Bowden on his maiden speech, on the quality, on the contents and on the manner of its delivery. As a clerical worker who at one time had to include shorthand in his studies, the only persons I was sorry for were the shorthand-writers. Because of the speed at which his mind works and of his delivery, my noble friend's oration was remarkable, but most difficult, I am certain, even for the most expert shorthand-writers to take down. Not only do I hope that we shall hear my noble friend very often in the House, but also that he will co-operate with us on the Committee stage of this Bill, because his technical and industrial knowledge will be of tremendous help to us.
My noble friend gave me some encouragement because, in his opening remarks, he said he had some misgivings about this Bill. I have misgivings as well. I am not quite so optimistic about the outcome of the working of this Bill as was my noble friend Lord Champion, who opened the debate from this side of the House. I would join with my noble friend Lord Champion in congratulating the noble Viscount, Lord Blakenham, on his introduction of the Bill. As my noble friend said, he really is the father of the Bill and his interest in it is well known. My noble friend recommended the Bill as a step forward, but later on I shall try to show that whether or not this step is worth while taking will depend upon greater enthusiasm within industry itself than has been shown up to the present time.
In industrial training, we are almost at the same stage as we are in regard to the Factory Acts. The best employers are miles ahead of anything that this Bill will ever provide. What is needed is to look after the laggards and those who try to avoid responsibility in most spheres of industrial activity. My noble
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friend Lord Williamson, with his vast knowledge of trade unionism and of the organisation of those industries with which he was associated, was constructively critical of the Bill and asked some very pertinent questions. I hope that the Minister (I was just going to say the Minister of Labour, forgetting where I am and the changes that have taken place recently), the noble Viscount in charge of the Bill, will be able to answer these questions. Frankly, we want to get this Bill on the Statute Book, but whether the Committee stage is extended or contracted will largely depend upon the answers given to the points raised by my noble friend. Satisfaction on these points may make it unnecessary for Amendments to be put down.
I think we all tend to speak from our own experience and background, and I do so from this box to-night. My own experience is that of a youngster who left school before he was 14 and who has always been conscious of the lack of educational opportunities he has had. Therefore, for well over thirty years of my public life I have taken more than a passing interest, as a member of a local education authority, in trying to develop the educational opportunities that have been made available to everyone over that time.
I come to this Bill, I admit, with a bias towards education and training being under the Ministry of Education and local educational authorities rather than under the Ministry of Labour. The noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, and my noble friend Lord Peddie referred to the need for commercial training, my noble friend particularly emphasising this need in regard to the distributive trade. Both said that part of this work is already being done by the local education authorities, and I feel that it is a question of whether or not the development of technical colleges and colleges of further education would not be a better method of tackling this problem at the present time. There are the buildings, there is the organisation, the experience of dealing with employers and of providing the educational opportunities, schemes and courses suitable to industry. There is the teaching staff. And where the technical colleges do not exist and local education authorities have been prevented to date from providing

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colleges of further education, the local education authorities would be only too glad to provide the facilities if grants were given by the Ministry of Education in the form of loan sanction and approval. In spite of the excellent speech of the noble Viscount, Lord Blakenham, I must say that he did not convince me that there had been, or was likely to be, sufficient co-operation with the Ministry of Education and the local education authorities.
I agree most emphatically with the noble Viscount, Lord Simon, on the value of cross-fertilisation. The segregation of people within particular industries and groups might be very well in its own small way, but I am certain that, to get the best advantage of industrial training, the mixing together of students or trainees of all types within industry is a much better method. I think that a bringing together in training schemes in sections of industry which cover more than one trade is more likely to be effectively and efficiently brought about by the local education authority than through the Ministry of Labour.
My noble friend Lord Walston brought a breath of fresh air from the countryside with his reference to agriculture. Here, again, the L.E.A. already have experience in the field, and they have their agricultural colleges. Even in the most rural of counties they have some further education colleges, and there is opportunity for adult education and training. If one is going to cover a field such as agriculture, surely one ought to make the greatest use of the existing availability of buildings and skills, and, where necessary, expand those facilities, rather than try to create new buildings, new staffs and new organisations.
The noble Lord, Lord Milverton, is not in the Chamber at the moment, but I thought he put up a little special pleading for the Association of Municipal Corporations. I say that as one closely associated with local government. If local authorities, as such, are interested in training, surely the answer has been in their hands for well over fifty years.
That brings me to a further point. I think it is rather ironical that at the
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same time as the Robbins Report has been accepted in general terms by the Government, virtually establishing the principle that a young person should be allowed to pursue an educational course to the limit of his ability and it is the State's duty to provide the facilities, the Ministry of Labour produced this Industrial Training Bill for the "other half", as the Newsom Report refers to them, and despite the fact that there has been on the Statute Book for nearly fifty years provision for all young people to have educational facilities, at least up to the age of eighteen. For fifty years we have tried to get day release arrangements in industry accepted on a voluntary basis. My noble friend Lord Latham reminded me as I was sitting here during the debate that even a Conservative L.C.C. spent hundreds of thousands of pounds in the early days after the Fisher Act trying to educate employers in London to the day release of students.
All good employers, as I said earlier, have either made proper arrangements for the education and training of their young people or have co-operated with local authorities in doing so. But, let us face the fact now, the existing arrangements which the best employers have voluntarily entered into with local education authorities cover less than one-third of the young men and only about one in twelve of the young women. I admit straight away that there is a distinction between industrial training and day release arrangements. But one should be complementary to the other, and a firm that is prepared to co-operate in day release is the kind of firm which is watching carefully over the industrial training arrangements within its own organisation for the senior members of its staff, whether manual, technical or clerical. Legislation having failed for fifty years on a voluntary basis, I suggest it is not very likely that this Industrial Training Bill, which is only slightly more compulsory than the legislation already existing, will be such a rollicking success as the Minister of Labour thinks it will be.
The weapon which the Minister holds is that the local board should have the right to impose a levy. But here again the employer can pay the levy, but he still need not comply with any of the regulations which the board would like to impose. While he may pay, there is

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no guarantee, so far as I can see, that any member for whom training is desirable is likely to be released in order that training can be given. The Central Training Council have no power. Again, so far as I can see, it is only advisory, in spite of the fact that the Minister in his opening statement would have us believe that the personnel on the Council will be of quality and great notice will be taken of their opinion. I would say that the Ministry of Labour will be so anxious not to offend any employer who is defaulting that they are prepared to establish tribunals to determine appeals even against the assessment of the levy. To me, that seems to be a little weakening of the authority at the top and pandering to those who are grudgingly forced into the scheme.
I would agree that the Bill is only a framework for action. But no one knows how quickly things will happen, which industries will have boards, or when. I might put the question to the Minister: is it clear, for example, that whole categories of staff training are not envisaged for some time? En another place the Minister said that the scheme may eventually cover clerical workers. As an ex-clerical worker, I join with my noble friend Lord Peddie and the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, in asking why those associated with the clerical profession (if we may call it a profession) or those associated with commerce should not have the opportunities of training, as they have with the best employers today on the general basis for those engaged within those callings.
While there is some provision for independent members of the Council and the board, nevertheless, these disinterested parties are not allowed to vote on matters such as the levy. The Minister in his opening statement made reference to this and said, "No taxation without representation". I do not see how that applies in so far as the independent members of the board are concerned. I agree, of course, that it depends entirely on the personalities on the board how far the scheme is allowed to develop. Again, so far as I can see, it is not the duty of the Minister to get on with the job; he is merely empowered to do something, and if he does not want to be in a hurry he can make the process of consultation before making an Order as drawn out as likes. It is pretty clear
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that the Bill, as at present constructed, is not designed for speed.
It is not clear to me how such an industrial training board for an industry which is widely scattered over the country can possibly function effectively. Its problems and duties will be entirely local, and presumably it must have staff to carry out all its work, such as pay and allowances; to provide and plan for courses, and all the rest. One must ask the Minister (and the point was made by one noble Lord during the course of his speech this afternoon) whether or not, in view of the Ministry of Labour, plus the Ministry of Education, we are to have another bureaucratic organisation. Or will all the arrangements in regard to the Bill be in the hands of the local office of the Ministry of Labour?
With the greatest respect to the Minister of Labour, and to the Minister in charge of the Bill in this House, to me this is a half-baked scheme which has not been properly worked out with the Minister of Education, and certainly not with local education authorities who would normally, as I suggested earlier do this sort of job, and have had experience of it over a long period of time. By this I mean that not only are local education authorities doing the educational work normally expected in technical training, but in many instances they are carrying out industrial training as well. The note I made before coming into the House to-day was that I should give an example of my own home town. But as the organisation itself has already been referred to by my noble friend Lord Champion, we can show the example now. My noble friend referred to I.C.I. and to the wide range of various trades within the organisation. I.C.I., which is established at Welwyn Garden City, has arrangements with the local education authority not only for day release but also for the training of its apprentices. Of course it makes a large contribution to the cost of the scheme. I suggest that where the employer is willing and anxious that there should be a scheme, this type of organisation is much more likely to be readily adaptable throughout the country than the one set up under this Bill.
Having said all that—and there is a great deal more detailed criticism that I could add—I have to admit that the Bill

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can be regarded, as my noble friend Lord Champion said earlier in the debate, as a step forward. But that will be so only if there is the will and the determination to make it work. But what ought to be written into the Bill much more vigorously, I think, is that there should be the closest collaboration with the education authorities, and that it should be accepted by a board that part of its schemes should be for adequate release from industry of all young people under the age of 18 in order that they may pursue their educational studies, in addition to any industrial training that is carried on. Those arrangements could be within industry or by arrangements with the boards direct. If this is not done, it will be possible for boards so to construe their responsibility that we shall be back 50 years in our approach to the problem of education and the training of young people.
I was reminded, when making these notes, of the words of the noble Viscount, Lord Eccles, when speaking in this House the other day. I have not his exact words, but I do not think that in paraphrasing them I shall do him any injustice. As I remember his words, they were that he had never met parents who took their son away from a public school at 15 and sent him to work. Parents who can afford the fees keep their children in full-time education until the age of 16, 17 or even longer. I would suggest that what is right for children from one kind of home is surely right for all children. After all, we are not asking to go as far as the noble Viscount, Lord Eccles, would go. We are asking only that those in industry under the age of 18 should have some consideration given to their educational needs. The basic educational needs are vital, because, although it is true, as the noble Viscount, Lord Blakenham, said in his opening speech, that we are to have the school-leaving age raised to 16 in 1970, that is six years ahead, and a lot of water will go under the bridge before then. It has been my experience, in knocking around with youngsters in the educational field, that you cannot put old heads on young shoulders; and this is so often true. It is not until the youngsters, whether boys or girls, have got into the workshop that they really
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begin to realise what education means, and what they are missing in not having been able to continue their education. If they are to get the full value out of industrial training, then there must be that excellent grounding in normal educational subjects—and particularly mathematics, in engineering.
Here is this Bill, and here is an opportunity to insist, from this side of the House, that the Government have been shirking the issue. If this Bill goes through, we will try to get something worth while out of it, even if it is only to make the Government once again commit themselves—as many Governments have done since the Fisher Act of 1918—that the children under the age of 18 have a right to education for their own sake, and not merely to industrial training in order to satisfy the avarice of the nation. I must admit that I have been a little critical. We have become used, particularly with this Government, to being thankful for even half a loaf. But whether this half a loaf will be effective will depend on the power of the Ministry of Labour, and the organisation which is set up under it, to convince those laggard employers who over the last 50 years have failed to do so that they should take advantage of the educational opportunities that have been available on the Statute Book.
8.9 p.m.
VISCOUNT BLAKENHAM: My Lords, I must admit that the last speech, so far as I was concerned, was the most depressing speech concerning the merits of the Bill that we have listened to throughout this debate. The noble Lord finished his speech by saying that he had got used to accepting half a loaf, but he also talked about the whole Bill being "half-baked". I think I can confidently say that the Bill will prove far more digestible to him than he felt when he was speaking. I feel that it has been a good debate because many useful contributions have been made, and I think the fact that a vast majority of speakers from both sides of the House welcomed the Bill shows that it has more merits than perhaps the noble Lord, Lord Lindgren, who wound up for the Opposition, indicated.
Talking about contributions, I know that the whole House will agree with

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me that the contribution of the noble Lord, Lord Bowden, in his maiden speech, was something with which we were greatly impressed. I enjoyed listening to him, and he must not despair for one second that I do not agree with every word that he said. I do not wish to be controversial at this moment, and I hope that his contribution was the forerunner of similar speeches which I know will be heard with respect and interest by both sides of the House. I might make one comment on his speech. I would tell him that there is nothing in the Bill to prevent the use of television, correspondence courses or teaching machines or other modern teaching techniques, so that hope those who will be responsible for running the boards will listen to the wise words he used, and will see that, so far as methods are concerned, all the latest and most modern techniques are used.
The noble Lord, Lord Champion, who opened the debate, was kind enough to make a personal reference to my paternal position. I think I could be said to be part-father to some of the ideas behind this Bill, and therefore I am grateful to him and to other noble Lords for their kindly remarks. The noble Lord, Lord Champion, also asked whether the costs of the training boards would be met fifty-fifty by industry and Government. I did explain earlier that the main part of the cost would be met by industry. The amount of both the industry's contribution and the Government's contribution will have to be worked out, in consultation with each board as it is set up and as it formulates its plans.
The noble Viscount, Lord Simon, also raised this point: and he thought that more detail on this should be given at an earlier stage. But I must tell him that I cannot at this stage be more explicit, although, as I indicated in my opening speech, the £50 million limit is a broad indication of the Government's intention to make a significant contribution. The conversations for the setting up of the first boards are already in course of being arranged, and we shall be able to say more about them when the plans for these individual boards are agreed.
The noble Lord, Lord Champion, asked whether the Central Training Council would forecast the requirements and make sure that each board did suffi
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cient training to meet them. I am quite sure that the Council will, in fact, perform a very valuable co-ordinating rôle, but I think I must make it clear—and I hoped I had done so in my opening speech—that the responsibility for ensuring that sufficient training is done must rest securely with the boards themselves; and they will, of course, co-operate with the N.E.D.C. and the Ministry of Labour manpower unit in making the assessments the noble Lord had in mind.
My noble friend Lord Amory referred to the Training Council, as did the noble Lord, Lord Williamson. Although, for the reasons I mentioned in introducing the Bill, the Council will be advisory and not executive, it is intended that its functions should be wide, and (this is, I think, of particular interest to the noble Lord, Lord Williamson), that its influence should be made as effective as possible. Its views will be sought on the working of the boards of the various industries, and particularly on problems common to a variety of industries. Therefore, I think the Council will have a very useful effect in doing some of the co-ordination—a point which I think was worrying the noble Lord.
The noble Lord also referred to the question of inspection. Although the Bill does not mention inspectors as such, Clause 17 gives the Minister power to appoint staff. This will include the appointment of whatever inspectors are necessary to supervise the working of the boards. The boards themselves will be responsible for making sure that training given by employers for which a grant is paid is up to the standards the board has laid down.
I entirely agree with my noble friend Lord Amory, and also, I think, the noble Lord, Lord Lindgren, that great care and attention must be paid to see that we are not setting up too top-heavy a machine. That is not the intention. Of course, the answer is that we must be very careful in the recruitment both of the boards and of the administrative staff. We must see that we get people of high quality—and this is certainly the intention of my right honourable friend the Minister of Labour.
As was said by the noble Lord, Lord McCorquodale of Newton, much of the success of this scheme will depend on

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the good will of both sides of industry. Right from the very start this measure has had the good will of both sides of industry, and I am certainly not pessimistic that that good will will not continue to be forthcoming. I should like to take up one point made by the noble Lord, Lord Williamson, which was that there had been a great lapse of time since the Carr Committee recommendations. And he referred to the change of mind and atmosphere which had made this Bill possible. The noble Lord is a good friend of mine and I am sure he will not disagree with me when I say that as late as 1960, when I was Minister of Labour, I dared to say that the Carr doctrine was not perhaps as perfect as it was made out to be; and when I dared to say that the Government did have responsibility for these things there were certain people on both sides of industry who told me that I ought to mind my own business.
LORD WILLIAMSON: You did not.
VISCOUNT BLAKENHAM: I did not—that is why we have this Bill.
LORD WILLIAMSON: I am sure you did not get that from the trade union side.
VISCOUNT BLAKENHAM: I do not want to mention names, but I think there were names very close to the noble Lord. I will not say to whom they belonged.
I think also that the House will surely agree with what the noble Lord, Lord McCorquodale of Newton, said: that we should not run ourselves down too much—the noble Lord, Lord Lindgren, also made reference to this point—and that where our training is good, it is very good indeed. One can go to so much of industry—I think it was the noble Lord, Lord Bowden, who mentioned the Coal Board, and I could mention some of the great engineering firms and some of the major chemical firms and so on in this country—where we have an absolutely first-class training system which I think compares with anything else in the world. The whole problem is to try to level up the bad to a far higher level than they reach at the moment.
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Perhaps I should have made this clearer in my opening speech, but I wish to pay tribute to the Industrial Training Council, whose powers are admittedly somewhat limited but who have done a very good job indeed. What is more, there is certainly no intention of curtailing the efforts of the training advisory service which the Industrial Training Council has set up.
The noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, I think was quite right to stress the importance of the commercial as well as the industrial side of training. He made it quite clear that he realised that the commercial side, as well as the industrial side, is mentioned in the Bill. I will certainly see that his suggestion for a separate board to deal with commercial training is put to my right honourable friend. I noticed that this suggestion had considerable support from the noble Lord, Lord Peddie, and one or two other noble Lords who spoke.
The noble Viscount, Lord Simon, asked me a specific question about what the likely arrangements were going to be so far as the ports were concerned. Should the Minister of Labour, in consultation with both sides of the ports industry, come to the conclusion that a training board should be set up, nothing will have been lost if the National Ports Council have been active in this field meanwhile. In fact, I would say that the more they do, the better it will be. On the other hand, it may prove to be the case that for the ports industry, with their very special characteristics, which the noble Viscount recognises exist, the National Ports Council and the National Docks Labour Board are the most appropriate bodies to deal with the matter. In that event my right honourable friend would doubtless be happy to see these two get on with the job. But I think, this is a matter which must be worked out and thought out, and the noble Viscount must not necessarily conclude that some special arrangements will not be made for the ports industry.
I think it was the noble Lord, Lord Lindgren, who said that Lord Walston had brought a breath of country air into the debate. That, I naturally welcomed. He talked about the farm apprenticeship scheme. I think he was right to point out the fact that there

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had been disappointments as to the number of employers who had been taking on apprentices in the farming industry, and the figures he gave for certain counties showing that they were very much higher than the national average were very interesting, and I know they are truthful ones because this matter gave me considerable concern when I was Minister of Agriculture in a former age.
LORD LINDGREN: It cannot have been a former age.
VISCOUNT BLAKENHAM: It seems a former age, about five years ago. I cannot say much more at this time on agriculture because I think the noble Lord probably knows that at this moment the industry are discussing with my right honourable friend the Minister of Labour the future of the apprenticeship scheme. But I will certainly see that my right honourable friend's attention is drawn to the speech that the noble Lord made. I think the noble Lord would agree that the main emphasis in the last five years has been on the development of courses for young workers in the industry. Over that period the number of employees released one day a week to take classes has risen from 2,000 to nearly 7,000, and it is expected to rise still further as employers begin increasingly to realise the benefits of this form of education. I think this gives a slightly more balanced picture than concentrating entirely on the apprenticeship scheme, important as I personally think that is.
The noble Lord, Lord Milverton, and the noble Lord, Lord Peddie, raised the question of local authorities, and the noble Lord, Lord Lindgren, was rather scathing in some things he said. I think it is right that a great many local authority employees are liable to be brought within the scope of the board, and that therefore local authorities will in any event have an important contribution to make on the Council. But I can assure the noble Lord, Lord Milverton (who regretted that he could not stay), and the noble Lord, Lord Peddie, that my right honourable friend the Minister of Labour will give very careful consideration to the points they have made.
I do not want to detain your Lordships any longer, except to conclude as I started by saying I think it has been
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a very good and useful debate. I am most grateful for the courtesy shown and the contributions that have been made, speaking as I do, both opening and winding up, for the Government. Quite generally, we feel on the Government side that there is going to be a far closer partnership between education authorities and the Ministry of Labour than I think the noble Lord, Lord Lindgren, imagined. This is going to be a real partnership on the Government side, and having got the Government side right, I think that once we get these boards in action we are definitely going to see a real and proper partnership in industry between Government, education authorities and both sides of industry.
On Question, Bill read 2a, and committed to a Committee of the Whole House.

HIRE-PURCHASE (No. 2) BILL [H.L.]
8.26 p.m.
Order of the Day for the Third Reading read.
THE MINISTER OF STATE, BOARD OF TRADE (LORD DRUMALBYN): My Lords, I beg to move that this Bill be now read a third time.
Moved, That the Bill be now read 3a.—(Lord Drumalbyn.)
On Question, Bill read 3a.
Clause 3 [Requirements relating to hire-purchase agreements and credit-sale agreements]:
LORD DRUMALBYN LORD DRUMALBYN moved, after subsection (1), to insert:
"(2) In the said section 2(2), after paragraph (d), there shall be inserted the words 'and
(e) either—

(i) the agreement is signed by or on behalf of all other parties immediately before or immediately after it is signed by the hirer, and the copy referred to in paragraph (d) of this subsection is there and then delivered to him, or

(ii) if, in a case not falling within the foregoing sub-paragraph, the relevant document (that is to say, the document which, on being signed as mentioned in paragraph (a) of this subsection, became the agreement) was presented, and not sent

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to the hirer for his signature, then immediately after he signed the relevant document there was delivered to him a copy of that document in the form in which it then was, or

(iii) if the relevant document was sent to the hirer for his signature, then at the time when it was sent there was also sent to him a copy of that document in the form in which it then was';

and in the proviso to the said section 2(2) for the words 'or (d)' there shall be substituted the words' (d) or (e)'.
(3) In section 3(2) of the principal Act, after paragraph (c), there shall be inserted the words 'and
(d) either—

(i) the agreement is signed by or on behalf of all other parties immediately before or immediately after it is signed by the buyer, and the copy referred to in paragraph (c) of this subsection is there and then delivered to him, or

(ii) if, in a case not falling within the foregoing sub-paragraph, the relevant document (that is to say, the document which, on being signed as mentioned in paragraph (a) of this subsection, became the agreement) was presented, and not sent, to the buyer for his signature, then immediately after he signed the relevant document there was delivered to him a copy of that document in the form in which it then was, or

(iii) if the relevant document was sent to the buyer for his signature, then at the time when it was sent there was also sent to him a copy of that document in the form in which it then was';

and in the proviso to the said section 3(2) for the words or (c) there shall be substituted the words' (c) or (d)'."
The noble Lord said: My Lords, I hope your Lordships will not be unduly perturbed by the formidable list of Amendments on the Order Paper; they are really all concerned more or less with the same point. You will recall that during the Report Stage of the Bill on Tuesday, the Amendment I am now moving was on the Order Paper. I explained it along with Amendment No. 7 on the Order Paper to-day and then withdrew it. I said that I was doing that in order to give your Lordships more opportunity to consider the Amendment than if it had appeared on the Order Paper for the first time to-day, as it would otherwise have done. During the short debate which followed, I said that in this Amendment we were implementing the intention behind the first part of the Amendment to the cooling-off provisions that the House carried in Report Stage on January 30.
The intention was that a person who signed a document which was or might become a hire-purchase or credit-sale agreement should immediately have a copy to retain. This copy would be additional to any further copy he might be entitled to receive later. We thought it right that the principle that the hirer should have a copy immediately should be of general application; that is to say, that it should apply to cases where the document is signed at the shop or on the premises of the owner as well as the cases subject to the cooling-off provisions.
This Amendment contains two subsections in virtually identical terms. I have explained them before. I think there is nothing more for me to do than to move the Amendment, but before doing so perhaps I might just comment on an observation by the noble Lord, Lord Airedale, who picked up the words there and then "in sub-paragraph (i). I thought perhaps he was not attaching sufficient importance to the skill of the draftsmen. But the draftsmen assure me that they do mean "there" as well as "then"—there and then jointly and severally. I beg to move.
Amendment moved—
Page 2, line 31, at end insert the said subsections.—(Lord Drumalbyn.)
LORD PEDDIE: My Lords, we welcome the acceptance of the general principle that was involved in our Amendment, that the hirer should have a copy of the agreement immediately. But, quite frankly, although the suggestion is made in these Amendments that that principle be made universal—and there may be some case for that—we would take this opportunity of emphasising that the real value of the copy is found on the doorstep, rather than in the store. Whilst we have no objection to its universal application, there is no doubt that the immediate possession of the copy is best justified on occasions where there is door-to-door trading. Even though there appears to be general acceptance of the point of view that we persuaded the House to accept, we regret that there is not included in this Amendment the suggestion which the House did accept: that there should be on the copy of the agreement an indication of the name and address of the person to whom the goods should be returned.

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It is late in the day to be pressing that point, but I still feel, and my colleagues feel, that it is an important point. Probably it will be argued in another place. The draftsmen have presumably indicated that there are certain legal difficulties. One difficulty, apparently, is that at the time of a door-to-door transaction it is possible that the agent may not know the name of the owner; in other words, he will not know the hire-purchase company that will take on the hire-purchase business. But that is a rare case—in fact, I doubt whether it will ever arise. I think that where a person is engaged upon door-to-door transactions, persuading people to take goods on hire-purchase, he will in every case know the name of the hire-purchase company, otherwise he is wasting his time.
LORD DRUMALBYN: My Lords, would the noble Lord forgive me, so that I might perhaps expedite the business? I had rather expected to have an opportunity of dealing with this point when we come to the Amendment which omits the clause that was incorporated in the Bill.
LORD PEDDIE: Yes, I agree, but this is a prelude to it. I have made reference to the point that in this Amendment there is no indication of what is an important principle so far as we are concerned—that of the inclusion of the name and address of the person to whom the goods are to be sent. However, I make that comment only with regard to this Amendment.
On Question, Amendment agreed to.
LORD DRUMALBYN: My Lords, this Amendment, and the next, are both consequential and drafting Amendments. I beg to move the first Amendment.
Amendment moved—
Page 3, line 4, leave out ("(d)") and insert ("(e)").—(Lord Drumalbyn.)
LORD PEDDIE: My Lords, I am not going to repeat the comments I made a few moments ago that have a bearing upon this Amendment. I see, and appreciate, some of the arguments that has been advanced—
LORD DRUMALBYN: This is a consequential Amendment.
LORD PEDDIE: Yes, it is consequential.
On Question, Amendment agreed to
LORD DRUMALBYN: My Lords, I beg to move Amendment No. 3.
Amendment moved—
Page 3, line 11, leave out ("and (c)") and insert ("to (d)").—(Lord Drumalbyn.)
On Question, Amendment agreed to
Clause 4 [Right of cancellation of certain hire-purchase and credit-sale transactions]:
LORD DRUMALBYN: My Lords, when I explained during the Report stage that the Government proposed to introduce the Amendments which your Lordships are considering to-day, I also said that this would involve taking out the words which had been inserted by the Amendment carried on January 30. That is what this Amendment does. I realise that this still leaves part of what was contained in that Amendment—namely, telling the hirer from the beginning the name and address to which he may return the goods, if that is what he wishes to do. We are looking as a whole at the mechanism for the operation of the cooling-off provisions, and this is one of the matters which arises. The solution may well lie, I think, in the eventual inclusion in the Bill of powers like those under Clause 5(3) and (4) in relation to the copy of the agreement to be sent to the hirer. We could then prescribe words to go at the top of the first copy telling the hirer his rights. We should, of course, have to keep these words brief or we should defeat our purpose.
The first point to get across is that the hirer has a right to cancel and need only send a notice to do it. What I have in mind that we might add is that he need not return the goods but that should he wish to do so, he can send them to the address given. In this way I think we could cover the point to which many noble Lords attach importance without running a risk of confusing the hirer about the minimum that he needs to do in order to cancel the agreement. I hope your Lordships will agree to let us work out just how best to do this, and that in the meantime you will agree to this Amendment which I now beg to move.
Amendment moved—
Page 3, line 29, leave out from ("premises") to end of line 33.—(Lord Drumalbyn.)
LORD PEDDIE: My Lords, with those assurances, I would accept the Amendment. I appreciate the difficulties that have been involved. It seems to be obvious that there is an earnest endeavour to follow out the idea that we put before the House.
LORD GRENFELL: My Lords, I must say that I am distressed that we were not able to accept this point, or rather to reverse this Amendment tonight. I think it is absolutely fundamental. May I again stress the case of the housewife who has taken on a commitment—it may be simply a hair dryer or something like that. Her husband comes back and she tells him, and he says, "We cannot afford this article. You have signed something." He then immediately says to her, "Where did you get this from?" and you cannot get away from the fact that she has to answer, "I do not know". I fully accept the assurances which my noble friend has given, but I think it would have been a happier thing if this Amendment, which was passed on the Committee stage, could have gone forward to another place and then, if necessary, could have been cancelled out there. At this time of the night it is useless to argue about it; but I think it is important to say that once this had been done, it is unfortunate that it should have been reversed at this time of night and at this stage of the Bill. I would not in any way wish to impede the progress of the Bill.
LORD SHEPHERD: My Lords, may I say just this in response to the noble Lord opposite? This has been a pretty long battle. We fought it on Committee stage and we fought it on Report. I think we have won the battle, having regard to the assurances of the noble Lord opposite. I am sure that he will see that the words that we want will be written into the Bill. Whilst, perhaps, there is some reluctance to seeing the words of a victory being removed, we have achieved what we set out to do and we can, I think, look with confidence to the Government to see that the words that we want to meet the spirit which was felt in the House in Committee and on Report will be written into the Bill
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in another place. At a later stage we shall see those words ourselves, because the Bill will come back to us for approval.
LORD CHORLEY: My Lords, as one who had something to do with this Amendment in the first place, may I say how much I agree with the noble Lord on the other side in his reaction. I felt most disturbed about it when I first saw the Amendment; but the Minister has given pretty explicit assurances which I think we can accept. I hope the Bill will not come back here without the insertion of something really satisfactory from that point of view. I will reserve my fire, and hope that it will not be necessary to make further comment.
On Question, Amendment agreed to.
LORD DRUMALBYN: My Lords, this is a consequential Amendment. I beg to move.
Amendment moved—
Page 4, line 25, leave out ("(e)") and insert ("(f)").—(Lord Drumalhyn.)
On Question, Amendment agreed to.
LORD DRUMALBYN: My Lords, this, too, is consequential. I beg to move.
Amendment moved—
Page 4, line 28, leave out ("(d)") and insert ("(e)").—(Lord Drumalbyn.)
On Question, Amendment agreed to.
Clause 5 [Information as to right of cancellation]:
LORD DRUMALBYN LORD DRUMALBYN moved, at end of subsection (2), to insert:
"and as if, in paragraph (e) of the said section 2(2) and in paragraph (d) of the said section 3(2), sub-paragraph (i), and in sub-paragraph (ii) the words 'in a case not falling within the foregoing sub-paragraph', were omitted."
The noble Lord said: My Lords, this is the Amendment which I moved on the Report stage and which, after I had explained its purpose, I withdrew so as to allow your Lordships more time to consider the matter. This Amendment is made necessary by Amendment No. 1 to which your Lordships have just agreed. When I explained that Amendment, I referred to the first category of cases where a copy already required under the 1938 Act is handed over at the time of signature. That is a circumstance which is not applicable in cooling-off cases

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because, as your Lordships know, that copy must be sent through the post. The effect of this Amendment is, therefore, that sub-paragraph (i) of the two subsections introduced by Amendment No. 1 does not apply to cooling-off cases. The hirer or buyer will in these cases receive one copy from the salesman and later receive through the post the copy which is also required under the 1938 Act. I beg to move.
Amendment moved—
Page 5, line 14, at end insert the said words.—(Lord Drumalbyn.)
On Question, Amendment agreed to.
LORD DRUMALBYN: My Lords, the next four Amendments are consequential; they are drafting. I move.
Amendments moved—
Page 5, line 18, leave out ("(d)") and insert ("(e)")
Page 5, line 19, leave out ("(e)") and insert ("(f)")
Page 5, line 33, leave out ("(c)") and insert ("(d)")
Page 5, line 34, leave out ("(d)") and insert ("(e)").—(Lord Drumalbvn.)
On Question, Amendments agreed to.
Clause 21 [Extension of principal Act to Scotland]:
LORD DRUMALBYN: My Lords, Amendments 12 to 22 represent the application to Scotland of the Amendments we have been considering.
Amendments moved—
Clause 21, page 21, line 19, after ("3(1)") insert ("(2), (3)")
Schedule 2, page 35, line 39, leave out ("(d)") and insert ("(e)")
Schedule 2, page 35, line 47, leave out ("(d)") and insert ("(c)")
Schedule 2, page 35, line 48, leave out ("and (c)") and insert ("to (d)")
Schedule 2,page 38, line 24, at end insert ("and
(e) either—

(i) the agreement is signed by or on behalf of all other parties immediately before or immediately after it is signed by the hirer, and the copy referred to in paragraph (d) of this subsection is there and then delivered to him, or

(ii) if, in a case not falling within the foregoing sub-paragraph, the relevant document (that is to say, the document which, on being signed as mentioned in paragraph (a) of this subsection, became the agreement) was presented, and not sent, to the hirer for his signature, then immediately after he signed the relevant
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document there was delivered to him a copy of that document in the form in which it then was, or

(iii) if the relevant document was sent to the hirer for his signature, then at the time when it was sent there was also sent to him a copy of that document in the form in which it then was.")

Schedule 2, page 35, line 28, leave out ("or (d)") and insert ("(d) or (e)")
Schedule 2, page 35, line 47, leave out ("(d)") and insert ("(e)")
page 39, line 39, at end insert ("and
(d) either—

(i) the agreement is signed by or on behalf of all other parties immediately before or immediately after it is signed by the buyer, and the copy referred to in paragraph (c) of this subsection is there and then delivered to him, or

(ii) if, in a case not falling within the foregoing sub-paragraph, the relevant document (that is to say, the document which, on being signed as mentioned in paragraph (a) of this subsection, became the agreement) was presented, and not sent, to the buyer for his signature, then immediately after he signed the relevant document there was delivered to him a copy of that document in the form in which it then was, or

(iii) if the relevant document was sent to the buyer for his signature, then at the time when it was sent there was also sent to him a copy of that document in the form in which it then was.")

Schedule 2, page 35, line 42, leave out ("or (c)") and insert ("(c) or (d)")
page 40, line 1, leave out ("(d)") and insert ("(e)")
Schedule 2, page 35, line 2, leave out ("(and (c)") and insert ("(to (d)").—(Lord Drumalbyn.)
On Question, Amendments agreed to.
LORD DRUMALBYN: My Lords, I do not wish to detain your Lordships for more than a few moments, for I have only a few words to say. This Bill was welcomed on Second Reading from all parts of the House. Its purpose is to improve and extend the protection which the law gives to people who acquire goods on hire-purchase and credit-sale terms. At the same time, there is no wish to prejudice the legitimate rights of other parties to these transactions and, as noble Lords have stressed, there should be no greater interference with normal trading practice than is strictly necessary. The various suggestions which have been put forward during Committee and Report stages were all, I think, aimed at improv-

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ing the Bill as a means of achieving this general purpose. As your Lordships know, I have on a number of points undertaken that the Government will seek to amend the Bill in another place since time has not permitted the introduction of the necessary Amendments in your Lordships' House.
There are a few matters on which I should like to say a word to-day. One matter which was much discussed at an earlier stage was the mechanism by which the cooling-off provisions are to operate. As I indicated on Report stage, we intend to review its provisions in the light of everything that has been said to see how they can be improved. But, before your Lordships part company with the Bill, it may be helpful if I try to sum up. There is no divergence of view about the objective: the right to cancel shall be brought clearly to the hirer's attention; the right shall be simple to invoke; everything possible shall be done to avoid giving the salesman an opening for somehow talking the hirer out of exercising the right.
In the light of the discussions in your Lordships' House, there are several points that we shall look at. First, there are the arrangements to bring the existence of the right, and the means of exercising it, to the hirer's attention. These will particularly need to be looked at again now that a copy of the document is going to be left with the hirer immediately, in advance of the copy through the post. Secondly, there is the whole matter of the return of the goods. There is general agreement that the customer should not have any obligation to send them back. But I think the provision which safeguards him if he prefers to do so is at present too narrow. Noble Lords have emphasised that the customer may be anxious to be rid of the goods as quickly as possible, and we must make sure that he can do so. Another point is that the customer should in any case not be saddled with responsibility for the goods for an unreasonable time. I think the way to deal with this is probably, as I said at an earlier stage, to put a limit on the length of time for which his responsibility to take reasonable care of the goods shall run. We shall consider these points and others which have been
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mentioned, and I hope that we will then be able to frame Amendments which will improve these provisions.
Next, I should like to mention the question of ensuring the legibility of hire-purchase agreements. The noble and learned Lord, Lord McNair, moved an Amendment in precise terms on this. I said that I accepted the principle. I suggested that this was a matter which might best be handled by giving power to the Board of Trade to make regulations. I was asked whether I could move an Amendment at the Third Reading, and I indicated doubt but said I would see whether it could be done. I did, however, give the noble Lord, Lord McNair, a definite assurance, which he accepted, that if this were not possible the Government would introduce an Amendment in another place. I just want to say now that it was not possible to frame the Amendment in the short time available since the Report stage, and to confirm what I said about the Government's intention.
When this Bill was last before your Lordships' House the question was again raised whether the county courts should be given jurisdiction over all actions arising on agreements to which the principal Act will apply. This is a matter on which I am in close consultation with my noble and learned friend the Lord Chancellor. As I have already told your Lordships, the effect of extending the principal Act to goods with a hire-purchase price of up to £2,000 will automatically be to give the county courts jurisdiction to entertain an action for the return of the goods where more than one-third of the hire-purchase price has been paid. It may well be that the county courts should also be able to deal with an action for the return of the goods where less than one-third has been paid.
The position is more doubtful with regard to claims for money only, for it may not be right to give the county court power to entertain claims far beyond its ordinary jurisdiction simply because they arise out of hire-purchase agreements to which the principal Act applies. As my noble and learned friend the Lord Chancellor indicated on the last occasion, this is a matter which must be considered against the whole background of the jurisdiction of the

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county court and the distribution of business between that court and the High Court. It has not been possible in the time available since the question was first raised to come to any definite conclusion, but I can assure your Lordships that the matter is receiving urgent consideration and will be dealt with when the Bill reaches another place.
My Lords, this brings me to the end of what I wish to say. There are other points we have undertaken to deal with. To recall just one, we intend to give a hirer who has failed to make a payment a right to a reminder and to 7 days in which to make good his omission. There are, of course, other matters to which we are giving further consideration, notably Part III of the Bill. I believe that the Bill has been improved and will be further improved as a result of the consideration in your Lordships' House. I wish only to express my personal gratitude to your Lordships for your assistance in enabling me to conduct this, the first Bill for which I have been responsible in your Lordships' House. I appreciate your courtesy and patience, and it only remains for me to move that this Bill do now pass.
Moved, That the Bill do now pass.—(Lord Drumalbyn.)
8.48 p.m.
LORD PEDDIE: My Lords, I would take this opportunity of expressing on behalf of this side of the House our appreciation of the courtesy shown to the House by the noble Lord, Lord Drumalbyn, during his handling of this Bill. We regret, of course, that acquiescence did not always accompany the courtesy he showed to us. We have now come to the end of an intensive examination of this Bill and, with the noble Lord opposite, I hope that a better Bill has been created out of the consideration given to it by this House. We have felt on many occasions that the Minister has been kept on a very tight rein and that speed of progress has been the dominant factor. This has given him very little area for the exercise of the discretion which we hoped we should have received, or indeed the practical application of his several acceptances of principle. I am glad to learn from the remarks he made a few
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moments ago that there are one or two points made by noble Lords on both sides which have been accepted.
I sympathise in the fact that the Bill itself carries many marks of haste in drafting. This House in presenting its Amendments has had its effect on the Bill. I am sure the House is aware, as this has not passed without comment on previous occasions, that there was no reference to this Bill in the Queen's Speech. While the Bill was certainly welcome, we feel that two of the most significant points in the Bill could have been dealt with twelve months ago when the Private Member's Bill was introduced. At least I shall indeed lay claim to personal satisfaction because the presentation of my Bill immediately following the Queen's Speech spurred the Government into speedy action.
There are a number of outstanding points, some of which the Minister has already dealt with, others which he has expressed his willingness to consider, and I am sure that is as much as we can hope for at this stage. Among them—and I do not think this was referred to—was the rebate scheme which my noble friend mentioned during the Committee stage, to allow for the predetermination of the rebate to which a hirer will be entitled in consequence of an earlier settlement. Reference has been made to the serving of the statutory notice following default by the hirer, particularly in circumstances where less than one-third of the hire-purchase price has been paid, and that is undoubtedly a matter deserving of consideration.
While I think we all welcomed the principle involved in Part III of the Bill, at the same time I believe there was a recognition that the machinery suggested for dealing with this particular question was somewhat cumbersome; and possibly the opportunity might present itself for dealing with this particular matter. I am pleased, too, to hear the indication that there is to be further urgent consideration of the problem arising out of the uplift to £2,000 which will mean that many hire-purchase cases which normally would have gone before the county courts will no doubt now have to go to the High Court, with consequential expense and possible delay. I am glad, indeed, that that matter, which I appreciate is one

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of considerable difficulty—as it must be—is being considered.
Naturally, my Lords, during the course of the discussion and in the criticisms expressed by noble Lords, a great deal of emphasis has been laid upon the bad practices, so far as hire-purchase is concerned. I would take this opportunity of saying that it would be wrong if this led to a belief that we on our part had a universal condemnation of hire-purchase. We certainly do not have that. Hire-purchase can and does offer useful service to the community, but I believe that it is in the interests of both hirer and owner if these transactions can be conducted on a basis that is equitable and conforms to good standards of business conduct. Anything which improves the relationship between the hirer and owner is to the good of both. I am sure that we have not heard the end of hire-purchase, and I hope that this Bill when it becomes an Act will make a substantial contribution towards improving the relationship between hirer and owner, and add to the service that hire-purchase renders to the community.
LORD CHORLEY: My Lords, may I, at the risk of bringing down the powers of wrath on my head, add just a few words to what my noble friend Lord Peddie has said about Part Ill of this Bill? We did not have a chance of discussing it at Report stage. I do not want to discuss it now in any detail, but these proposals for registration and licensing have been received with a good deal of feeling of perturbation by many lawyers who are interested in this sort of work. The suggestion made by my noble friend Lord Shepherd, on behalf of the finance companies, has in these same circles been regarded as a very interesting proposal. It is felt that it might well provide a stopgap during the time the Law Revision Committee set up by the noble and learned Lord on the Woolsack (or by his predecessor) is considering the whole problem of the legal rule under which a man who does not own property cannot transfer it to somebody else—which of course is the basis on which Part III of the Bill has been drafted. It is felt that there is an inroad into the general law here which is of a serious character, and that it may not work at all well.
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As the noble Lord himself said, it is a complicated provision. If these arrangements proposed by the finance companies could, in fact, be worked over a few years, while the whole of this legal problem, which is one of the most important problems in the law, is being worked out on a new basis, this might be a matter of very great value. We have in the insurance world at least two cases where insurance companies have themselves operated schemes over quite a number of years, which has obviated the necessity for statutory intervention. I am thinking particularly of the case where, owing to the voidance of insurance policies, people who have been injured in motor-car accidents would not have been able to receive compensation, but are enabled to do so, under the scheme which is operated by the insurance companies. That scheme has worked perfectly well now for a substantial period of time, which suggests that this scheme might very well work equally well. If assurances could be obtaincd, I think there is a great deal to be said for looking at this matter very carefully, with a view to seeing whether, while the Law Revision Committee is producing its report, it would be possible to carry this matter through on that sort of basis.
On Question, Bill passed, and sent to the Commons.

HIRE-PURCHASE BILL [H.L.]
LORD PEDDIE: My Lords, I beg leave to withdraw my Hire-Purchase Bill.
Bill (by leave of the House) withdrawn.

BARONY OF DUNSANY
Report made from the Lord Chancellor that Randal Arthur Henry Baron Dunsany, in the Peerage of Ireland, has established his succession to the Barony of Dunsany and his right to vote at any elections of Representative Peers for Ireland which may be held in future under Statutes in force relating thereto to the satisfaction of the Lord Chancellor; read, and ordered to lie on the Table.