Lords Sitting of 24 February 1965

Preamble
The House met at half past two of the clock {Prayers having been read earlier at the Judicial Sitting by the Lord Bishop of Leicester), The CHAIRMAN OF COMMITTEES on the Woolsack.

LORD BUTLER OF SAFFRON WALDEN
The Right Honourable Richard Austen Butler, C.H., having been created Baron Butler of Saffron Walden, of Halstead in the County of Essex, for life—Was (in the usual manner) introduced.
The Lord Burton—Took the Oath.

RATES INCREASES AND LONDON GOVERNMENT
2.41 p.m.
LORD LEATHERLAND: 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 to what extent the increases in the county rates recently announced for Essex, Kent and Surrey can be attributed to the reorganisation of Greater London Government; and to what extent the new rates announced by various authorities in the Greater London Council's area show increases attributable to a similar cause.]
THE JOINT PARLIAMENTARY SECRETARY, MINISTRY OF LAND AND NATURAL RESOURCES (LORD MITCHISON): My Lords, the answer to both parts of the Question is that it is not possible to make any exact attribution. But under the London Government Act the Greater London Council is to pay transitional assistance next year to Essex, Kent and Surrey. If all factors are taken into account, the 5d. mentioned in Section 70 of the London Government Act, 1963, is an approximate indication of the increases in the county rates attributable to reorganisation. The cost to
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ratepayers in the Greater London Council area is just over a penny rate.
LORD LEATHERLAND: My Lords, is my noble friend aware that the severance has imposed an extra burden on the ratepayers of Essex of 1s. 3½ d. in the pound; that 5d. of this will be payable immediately this year, and that the sum will increase yearly for the next eight years until, in the eighth year, it reaches the full sum of 1s. 3½ d. in the pound? Is he further aware that the new Essex will have to pay for 59 per cent. of the services of the former Essex out of only 48 per cent. of the rateable value of the former county? In regard to those boroughs which have been annexed to London, is my noble friend aware that the rates at Chingford will go up by 3s. Id. in the pound; at Romford by 2s. 3d. in the pound; at Leyton by 1s. 11d. in the pound, and at Waltham-stow by 2s. in the pound, the bulk of the increase in each case being directly attributable to reorganisation? And will my noble friend bear in mind—
SEVERAL NOBLE LORDS: Speech!
LORD MITCHISON: The short answer to that is that I am well aware of the general position, which indeed was foreseen in the section of the London Government Act to which I referred. But I am afraid that I do not carry in my head, though I am now aware of what my noble friend has told me, the detailed application to each district. I cannot add anything more precise; I do not think that it is possible to add anything more precise to what I have said already. But if I may say something further to my noble friend, the Government are well aware that the question of rating generally, and the distribution of the burden of paying for services partly local in character as between the Central Government and local authorities is a matter which the Government are reviewing at the moment. Your Lordships may have noticed indications in the Press and elsewhere that the review is actively proceeding. I appreciate the difficulties which this change may well have caused to local authorities. It is for this reason that that section was put in. But the whole matter needs, and will receive, full review.
LORD LEATHERLAND: My Lords, may I thank my noble friend for holding

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out this hope to harassed ratepayers? May I further ask him to bear in mind that, when one speaks of an increase of 3s. in the rates themselves on the new assessments, they are roughly three times as big on the old assessments? Therefore, a 3s. increase is a 9s. increase in the rates, and that is staggering.
LORD MITCHISON: May I add this? We hope to be able to help the harassed ratepayers, but we must have regard also to the harassed taxpayers.
LORD BROCKWAY: My Lords, may I ask my noble friend whether it was this Government or the preceding Government who were responsible for the introduction of this measure?
LORD MITCHISON: From the date of the Act, the previous Government.

GOVERNMENT AID FOR SILO WORKS
2.43 p.m.
LORD FORBES: 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 they will undertake to review Government financial assistance to farmers in respect of buildings used for silage, owing to the need not only to give further encouragement to the conservation of fodder to replace imported feeding-stuffs, but also to recognise the existing anomaly that buildings for silage, unlike other farm buildings, do not qualify for assistance under the Farm Improvement Scheme, except in certain very limited specified circumstances.]
THE MINISTER WITHOUT PORTFOLIO (LORD CHAMPION): My Lords, financial assistance to farmers to encourage the making of silage is obtainable under the Silo Subsidies Scheme which is due to finish at the end of July this year. As this subsidy is included within the Annual Review which the Government are now conducting with the Farmers' Unions, I am sure the noble Lord will understand that it would
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be inappropriate for me to say more at this moment about its future.
I agree about the importance of this method of fodder conservation and it is for this reason that a separate scheme is in operation, and it may be helpful if I explain the relation between this scheme and the Farm Improvement Scheme. The Silo Subsidies Scheme provides assistance towards the cost of erecting a silo, and if the silo is to be covered by its own roof it provides assistance towards the cost of that as well. The Farm Improvement Scheme, on the other hand, seeks to assist long-term improvements of many kinds for the benefit of agricultural land. If a composite building is to be erected and the proposal can be fully justified in relation to the general needs of the holding, then farm improvement grant may be paid on the whole building even if a part of it covers an unroofed silo. We do not pay farm improvement grant on the silo works themselves because, as the noble Lord will appreciate, it is important from the point of view of public accounting to avoid the possibility of paying grant on the same item twice from two separate sources.
LORD FORBES: My Lords, I thank the noble Lord for his very comprehensive reply. May I ask him whether he really appreciates that farmers and the agricultural industry in general are very concerned over this anomaly?
LORD CHAMPION: Yes, my Lords, the Government are seized of this, and I rather think this will be one of the considerations which will be borne in mind during the negotiations which are now going on in the Annual Review.
LORD BALERNO: My Lords, may I ask the noble Lord whether he is aware that the construction of silos for silage is of a more sophisticated nature than it used to be in the days when they were merely pits dug out by pick and shovel, and that the modern type silo construction may well be considered as a long-term improvement of the farm?
LORD CHAMPION: Yes, my Lords, I am sure my right honourable friend will bear this in mind, and I am sure the noble Lord's question comes at an appropriate time.

IMPLEMENTATION OF THE NEWSOM REPORT
2.47 p.m.
LORD SANDFORD: 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 they will set out the steps they are taking, and the educational authorities are taking, to implement the Newsom Report; and to say what further steps they have in mind.]
THE MINISTER OF STATE FOR EDUCATION AND SCIENCE (LORD BOWDEN): My Lords, the Newsom Report, apart from recommending an early raising of the school-leaving age, made a large number of recommendations about the curriculum of the children to whom the Report related—those aged 13 to 16 of average and less than average ability—together with recommendations relating to buildings, equipment, the training of teachers, and the subjects on which further experiment and research were needed.
The major recommendation for Government action was the raising of the school-leaving age, which is now planned to come into effect in the academic year 1970-71. In general I feel sure that the remaining recommendations have been taken very seriously by local education authorities and schools, and my right honourable friend's Department is taking a full account of them in its forward thinking about curriculum, teacher training, and design of buildings and equipment. The Schools Council for the Curriculum and Examinations, which has recently been set up, is making a general study of the new approaches to curricular questions which will be required if all pupils are to receive full advantage from extended secondary education when the school-leaving age is raised. Moreover, a number of research projects related to the Newsom recommendations are in train, partly under the ægis of the Schools Council and partly under that of my right honourable friend's Department. Other projects are likely to be started as the Schools Council pursues its work.
LORD SANDFORD: My Lords, while thanking the Minister for that reply, with
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the sentiments of which we should all agree, may I ask him how he squares those sentiments with a cut of close on £1 million in the schools minor works building programme announced by his right honourable friend in another place last week?
LORD BOWDEN: My Lords, I do not wish to get involved in the details of the difference between a minor work, a mini-minor work and a minor-mini-minor work, or we should spend a great deal of the afternoon upon it. I can summarise by saying that the total amount to be spent on schools is very significantly greater. I speak from memory and I am open to correction, but I think it has gone up by something like 20 or 25 per cent. this year. The only change has been a difference in the method by which certain very small items of expenditure are to be controlled by the Treasury and by the central Government, instead of being left entirely to the local authority. The total sum has gone up but one particular part of it only has gone down.
LORD SANDFORD: My Lords, would not the Minister agree there with the statement, certainly not denied by his right honourable friend in another place, that the effect of this, for instance, in Hertfordshire—Sir John Newsom's own county where he was chief education officer—is a cut from £560,000 to £380,000 in the coming year? Is this, or is this not, having a significant effect on the implementing of the Newsom Report?
LORD BOWDEN: My Lords, I cannot of course comment in detail on Hertfordshire. But I repeat that the total sum to be spent on school building is about 25 per cent. up. This is an accounting problem rather than a total problem, and there is to be a change in the way in which certain sums are to be listed. What we are doing is, I think, to remove from the total sum about £2 million or £3 million, which, together with about another £20 million, is being added to the programme as a whole. I think the noble Lord need have very little hesitation in accepting this statement. If the noble Lord desires it, we will let him have a written answer about the matter. It is a matter of very great technical detail.
LORD NEWTON: My Lords, does the noble Lord realise that the cut to which

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my noble friend Lord Sandford has just referred will inevitably mean that local education authorities will be able to do less improvements to the oldest buildings, many of which will have to be used for many years to come? I am thinking particularly of very necessary improvements like those to sanitation accommodation, which can be made out of these "mini-minor" sums of money.
LORD BOWDEN: My Lords, I do not think this is true, and in any event I think it ill becomes the Party opposite to complain of the state of the buildings which we now have in our schools, which your Lordships will recall need something like £1,300 million spent on them to bring them up to a minimum useful standard. We are increasing the total amount of money being spent by something like £20 million next year, and the total change which this minor legal alteration will make is to transfer from one part of the fund to another an item of the order of about £2 million. I can assure the noble Lord that the total sum is much larger than it was, and I do not think the fears which he has expressed are really justified.

BUSINESS OF THE HOUSE
LORD SHEPHERD: My Lords, it may be for the convenience of the House if I inform your Lordships that at a suitable moment after 3.30 p.m. my noble friend Lord Bowden will be making a Statement on the development of higher education, and my noble friend Lord Mitchison will be making a Statement on Manchester housing.
Perhaps it would also be convenient to inform your Lordships that in view of the length of business to-morrow dinners will be available for Members who remain.

FORESTRY
2.55 p.m.
THE EARL OF DUNDEE THE EARL OF DUNDEE rose to call attention to the future progress of public and private forestry in the United Kingdom; and to move for Papers. The noble Earl said: My Lords, forestry is an art which is practised by the State as well as by private foresters in most free coun-
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tries, including countries like the United States and the West German Republic which have never enjoyed the blessings of a Socialist Administration, but where there is a considerable proportion of State-owned forests. In Sweden, on the other hand, where they have had a Socialist Government for more than a generation, I believe that there is only 20 per cent. of State forests compared with 80 per cent. of private.
The reason for this duality of enterprise is that most men prefer to grow crops which can be sown and harvested in one year, instead of having to wait 60 or 120 or even 180 years, according to the type of tree which one is planting. The only men who do this are those who are capable of entertaining a strong affection for people who have not yet been born and who, perhaps, never will be. But the State, on the other hand, can afford more easily to look forward beyond the lifetime of a man, and to act on the assumption that somebody, anyhow, will probably be here in a hundred years' time.
In Great Britain the State took no part in forestry, except to a very small extent with the Crown Lands, until the Forestry Commission was set up 45 years ago. Therefore, we have not yet got any State forests which are mature. Indeed, most of our forests planted since the war have not yet even reached the thinning stage. Fortunately, there were a number of private owners, both in Scotland and in England, who in the 18th and 19th centuries established 2 million or 3 million acres of woods, most of which, though not all, were reasonably well managed. These woods enabled us to meet the exceptionally heavy supply requirements of two world wars, during which nearly all our mature woods and most of our immature woods, too, had to be felled to meet the emergency. That is the reason why in the 20th century British forestry must be mainly concerned with planting. While questions of management and marketing are of the highest importance, our primary objective must be to replant the great areas of woods which were devastated by the necessities of war-time economy, and to increase our total area of woodland by planting a great deal of new land which is at present used for purposes less advantageous to our national economy.
There are three reasons why we ought to do this. First, we learned from the two wars that it is unsafe for an island like Britain to have such small reserves of so essential a commodity as timber. Next, we are still, I think, importing as much as 95 per cent. of our timber consumption, and since world consumption is going up it would be a very great advantage to our balance of payments if we could produce a great deal more at home, as most commercial countries do. I think we are still the worst-wooded country in Europe except Portugal, but I hope that will no longer be so by the end of this century.
The third reason is that there are certain parts of this country, notably the Scottish Highlands, which are being depopulated. This depopulation is bound to go on, and indeed to get worse, so long as the almost mono-cultural system of hill sheep farming continues to be the principal rural occupation. My Lords, forestry employs about ten times as many men directly as an average quality sheep farm. It employs a great many more indirectly on ancillary industries, and in terms of monetary value the national wealth which it produces annually is four or five times as great.
There is a parish in Argyll called Dala-vich on the shores of Loch Awe where the Forestry Commission began planting in its earliest days on a considerable scale. Fifty years ago this parish had a population of only 55 persons and of those only 11—just one-fifth—were children of school age. Now, in 1965, the population of the parish is 373 persons of whom 126 are children of school age. So it will be seen that the population has multiplied by seven and it is not longer an ageing population—one-third instead of one-fifth are children of school age. Would it not be a good thing, my Lords, if all the Scottish Highlands were like that? The noble Lord, Lord Hughes, is, I know, particularly concerned about this question of depopulation. I do not know whether he has ever looked at the figures—probably he has—of those parishes in the Highlands or the uplands where a considerable amount of planting has been done. I think I am right in saying that in every parish where the Forestry Commission employs 25 per cent. or more of the working population, that is about 10 per cent. of the whole people, there has
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been an increase of population between the Censuses of 1951 and 1961. contrasted with a decline everywhere else.
My Lords, I have made more speeches than I care to remember about this in the last 35 years, both in the House of Commons and here, and I have always been critical of the slowness of our progress; but, of course, as time goes on we all learn to distinguish between what we want and what we are likely to get. There is usually quite a big difference, in many matters besides this. How big a forestry programme do we really want in this country? I think it is rather ironic that in the twentieth century, the century of economic progress increasingly guided by Government planning, the most ambitious and most comprehensive of all proposals for planting in Great Britain should be that put forward in 1909 by the Royal Commission on Afforestation, which reported in that year, at a time when laissez faire still dominated our economic thought. It recommended that no less than 9 million acres should be afforested: half a million in Ireland, 2½ million in England, and no less than 6 million in Scotland.
My Lords, if it had been possible to accept and to apply that recommendation, let us say, over the period of 60 years, it would not have been in time to give us any help in the First World War, and only to a very small extent, from early thinnings, in the Second World War. But by now, in the 1960s, we should already be getting a large benefit to our balance of payments and to the revenue, and the depopulation of the Scottish Highlands would by now have been halted and put into reverse.
But, of course, the first programme which was actually adopted, in 1919, was much smaller than that; and it was not attained. The forestry policy of the inter-war Governments vacillated up and down like a switchback the whole time. The Forestry Commission was ruled by Sir Roy Robinson, a very good and capable civil servant, but not the type of civil servant who impels his superiors to rush forward joyfully in hot pursuit of bold, imaginative, hazardous adventures. On one occasion he actually refused an offer from the Treasury of a substantially increased annual grant-in-aid because he thought a smaller programme would be steadier and safer. Then of course, as

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anybody might have foreseen, two or three years later the Treasury imposed a savage cut upon this more modest grant-in-aid which the poor man had agreed to accept!
Nevertheless, my Lords, between the wars, from 1919 to 1940, leaving out the Crown Lands woods, which were taken over, the Forestry Commission planted very nearly 400,000 acres, at a net cost of £10 million. Some of your Lordships may have read the Report of the House of Commons Estimates Committee on Forestry which was published last summer, and if it interests you to abstract from the financial calculations in this Report that particular block of our state forests, the 400,000 acres planted between 1919 and 1940, you will find (applying to them the values which are assigned here: the acreage values appropriate to their age groups) that their value is now, in 1965, just about £100 million. And in twenty years' time, when they have moved up into the higher age groups, their value will be about £200 million. I know that there has been inflation since this planting began. But can we be sure that there will not be more in the next forty years?
Of course, to get a true calculation one has to add on compound interest on the £10 million planting costs, but on the credit side of the account one can put the growing revenue from thinnings which is now coming in. I think this has been one of the best national investments we have ever made. Whatever the Bank of England may say, I think it would have been a lot better if it had been a lot bigger. The same applies to the private planting which was done between the wars. The amount of private planting done with the approval of the Commission, and receiving the State planting grant, amounted to 126,000 acres; and from a national point of view, in my submission, that has been an equally good investment.
Our present programme, on which we are now engaged, is based on the 1943 White Paper which was adopted then by the Government and agreed to by all Parties. It was in the middle of the war, and in time of war both politicians and civil servants are apt to be more acutely aware of the advantages of forestry than they sometimes are in times of peace. This White Paper propounded
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what was called "the desirable programme" which we all agreed to follow: 5 million acres of productive woodland by the end of this century, of which 2 million were to be old woods which would be replanted and rehabilitated, and 3 million of new planting. The programme was divided into five decades. In the first decade we were to plant 1, 100,000 acres, and in the second decade 1,500,000. The figure later tapered off; but for the first two decades it was estimated that private planting would constitute about one-fifth of the whole—and, after that, more.
Now private planting, in fact, as your Lordships will see from the early part of this House of Commons Report of the Estimates Committee, has in fact exceeded the target which was set. I am not going to say much about private planting, although I hope that many of your Lordships who are going to speak will say a good deal about it, but what I should like to say is this: that I think the whole-hearted co-operation and confidence between the Forestry Commission and private foresters is to the advantage of both, and also to the advantage of the country. As will be seen from this Estimates Report, some of the witnesses who gave evidence on behalf of private planters had certain complaints to make about difficulty of access of Ministers, and so on, and I have no doubt that their representations will be given full weight. But these, my Lords, are not serious criticisms. I have been planting now for forty years on a modest scale, and I am sure that those of your Lordships who have done a great deal more planting than I have will agree that private forestry and public forestry by the Forestry Commission ought to be interdependent; that both have a great deal they can do to help each other in their work, and that their national aims and objectives ought to be the same.
I had thought of mentioning the taxation of private woodlands, because so much talk is in the air about tax reforms, but I have given my views about this to your Lordships before in previous debates, and it is a very tedious subject. All I will say is: leave things alone. Do not try to meddle with the present state of affairs. For reasons of time, I do not want to go into the details of that, and I hope it may not be necessary.
But now, my Lords, for the Forestry Commission. They, as your Lordships know, have fallen heavily behind the programme contemplated in 1943, which should have been approaching 2,600,000 acres by now. But the reason they have done so is not that they have been badly treated by the Government, as they were before the wars: the reason simply is that they have not been able to acquire enough land to justify a larger annual rate of planting. Therefore, if we think, as I do, that the rate of planting ought, in the national interest, to be increased, we must then consider what can be done to enable the Commission to acquire more land more quickly.
I think that perhaps the answer may be slightly different for England than for Scotland. So far as the English problem is concerned, I gave notice to the noble Lord, Lord Mitchison, that I would remind your Lordships of the speech made almost exactly ten years ago to-day—on February 23, 1955—by the late Lord Jowitt, who moved a Motion on forestry similar to this. He spent most of the time talking about the English common lands, of which I think there are over 1½ million acres. He brought forward powerful arguments representing that a great deal of these common lands were almost entirely wasted and were eminently suitable for afforestation. Lord Jowitt was promised a Royal Commission, which was set up in December, 1955, and which reported in July, 1958 (Command Paper 462). In the evidence given by the witnesses for the Forestry Commission before this Royal Commission it was suggested that about 400, 00 acres of common land would be suitable for planting. I inquired last week how much had been planted on common lands since the publication of this Report six years ago, and the answer was precisely 370 acres.
I know so little about the English common lands that I am not going to offer any advice on the subject. I do not know what difference is likely to be made by the Bill which occupied so much of your Lordships' time in Committee yesterday afternoon. I just do not know how it will affect the question of forestry; but we all want to be careful, I am sure, of ancient rights of commoners, and also of amenity. The particular case where
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some planting has been done is at a place called Allerthorpe in Yorkshire, and I am informed that the entire body of commoners were anxious that this land should be planted. They wanted the Commission to have it, and so did the Lord of the manor. Everybody was longing for it to be planted. But they found that the legal obstacles to conveyance to the Forestry Commission were so insuperable that they had to request the Forestry Commission to exercise its powers of compulsory purchase, which it had never done before—and I believe that even that took seven years before it was finished.
As for amenity, on that, again, I am not an authority. Lord Jowitt represented to us, I remember, that a very large proportion of the English commons were covered mostly with bracken and thorn bushes, which does not sound either particularly beautiful or particularly useful; but I have not seen enough of them to judge that. We must be careful of all the views of the national rural preservation societies, and so on, although I often rather wonder whether they are not based not so much on true aesthetic appreciation of loveliness as on the natural disinclination to have any change. If it is proposed to plant a hillside, you hear Lord protests from everybody, "Ah! The beautiful hill: so grand and majestic in its barren, unproductive solitude. How can you possibly desecrate it by planting these hideous trees all over it?" But then, 50 or 60 years later, when the trees are planted and the woods have grown up and the time comes to cut it down, you get the Lord howl: "Ah, these beautiful woods! Surely you cannot cut them down."
My Lords, all I shall do is to ask the noble Lord, Lord Mitchison, if he can tell us whether his new Ministry of Land and Natural Resources has any novel ideas about this question of the English commons, and I hope your Lordships will forgive me if I devote my few remaining remarks to Scotland. I have at home an old map of Britain printed in the reign of Queen Anne by a gentleman called Herman Moll, who describes himself as geographer to the Queen. On his map there is in Scotland the most profuse and detailed information on every parish, both geographically and economically; but further South there is nothing but the bare outline, nothing except the legend

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printed in large capitals: "Part of South Britain called England". And when I look at the list of speakers in our debate to-day I wonder whether this might not be true. If the noble Earl, Lord Bradford, will forgive my saying so, I wish he had more allies in this battle.
In Scotland we are doing a bit better than in England. The last Report of the Forestry Commission shows that the Commission have planted trees at the rate of rather over 30,000 acres a year (33,000 last year), while private planters have accounted for another 14,000. That is much better than the figures between the wars, but it is not enough to fulfil the desirable programme and to bring about a major breakthrough in the Highland problem by the end of this century. Therefore I would submit to the Government that we should seek to increase it and try to attain our objective by the end of this century instead of a generation later. I think the first thing we have to do—and this is something which I hope we are always trying to do—is to interest public opinion in forestry more than we are doing now and more than we have done in the past. The Scottish Landowners' Federation has always done its best, both before and since the war, to persuade its members to offer land which is good plant-able land, and which they do not intend to plant themselves, to the Forestry Commission. We have done that not only privately but also publicly, in the quarterly magazine of the Federation; and I think we have had some success.
But, my Lords, there is a great deal of prejudice against the Forestry Commission among some landowners, among some farmers and among other sections of the public, for all sorts of reasons. In so far as the prejudice is based on economic grounds, it is entirely wrong and in reasoned argument it cannot be sustained; but in so far as it arises from the desire to protect the security of farm tenants who have been there for a long time it is entirely understandable and good. Some 150 years ago, when sheep farms were a novelty, they were the unpopular innovation which was taking the people out of the glens and substituting sheep. But now, 150 years later, they have become the established thing, and in the course of those 100 years or so sheep grazing
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has done a great deal to destroy or lower the fertility of our hillsides. But they are there—some have been there for generations—and we must try to work with them and try to help all those farmers who want to stay and go on with this type of farming to improve their farms; and this we do by means of hill-farming schemes. And we want to help those who desire to stay on in this way to plant more of their holdings. I suggest to your Lordships that we should encourage all schemes to that end.
I do not want antagonism between agriculture and forestry; we all want integration. But I think it is with the object of helping integration, and of satisfying doubts and concern on the side of the farm community, that we have established the rule, both in England and Scotland, of departmental consultations concerning purchases which the Forestry Commission is about to undertake. But I have submitted to your Lordships before that I believe this is a useless, delaying practice, which does no good to agriculture and delays the process of afforestation. I think we ought to integrate them by free, voluntary action and not by restriction. What happens is simply that when the Forestry Commission offers to buy a farm, much of which is suitable for planting, there has to be a fairly long confabulation between the Forestry Commission and the Department. Though I think the Department is very much better than it used to be about "giving the green light", this confabulation does cause delay; and during that delay the vendor of the farm sometimes gets fed up and accepts an alternative offer from somebody else. What I would say is this. Give the Forestry Commission the same freedom as a private individual has to buy a farm immediately it comes on the market, and to decide whether to plant it or not. If you must have this departmental confabulation, then have it after the farm has been bought and not before.
May I give your Lordships one small example of how this interdepartmental debate works? It concerns a small sheep farm of some 550 acres, in West Perthshire, which was farmed by an owner-occupier who could not make a living out of it because it is poor land. He wanted to get a job with the hydroelectric scheme at a good wage, and to keep his house with a few acres of low

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ground and 100 acres of high and unplantable ground. He offered to sell the remaining 400 acres of good plantable ground to the Commission. Then the Department of Agriculture said, "No, you cannot break up a viable unit." So the holder had no alternative but to sell his farm, since he could not afford to go on with it. It was bought by a private purchaser who did not agree that it was a viable agricultural unit and who proceeded to plant the 400 acres. So the objective of afforestation was achieved. But in this case it might have been better if the Forestry Commission had done it, because the land adjoined 6,000 acres of forest which the Commission had already planted; and it might have been happier if the farmer owner could have kept his house which the purchaser has to use for a forester whom the Commission could have housed elsewhere. I would submit again that it is much better to allow complete freedom of action in these matters and not impose restrictions which delay forestry without really helping agriculture.
I must conclude with a brief word on the recent Report on Land Use in the Highlands and Islands by the Advisory Panel, of which one member is a distinguished relation of the noble Lord, Lord Mitchison. The Report deals with forestry in paragraphs 52 to 84. Of course, for forestry purposes we can rule out Orkney and Shetland, where trees will not grow much because of the climate and soil, and we are really dealing with the five mainland counties, Argyll, Inverness, Ross and Cromarty, Caithness and Sutherland. It is estimated that there are about 1¾ million acres of ground which could be planted, though it is unlikely that we shall ever plant the whole of that. About 400,000 acres are planted already and the rate of planting is about 12,000 acres a year by the Commission and about 4,000 a year by private planters. The Panel recommend that the Forestry Commission planting should be stepped up to 20,000 acres a year. I think that that is a good recommendation, which could be carried out. I think that it ought to be practicable.
I am sorry that in paragraph 60 the Panel approve what I always regard as the cumbersome and futile departmental palaver about a farm before it is bought, and I think that this would very likely
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prevent the realisation of the 20,000-acres target. But I think that it is a target which we ought to try to achieve. If it began now and was continued for 35 years, that would mean 700,000 acres by the end of the century, and if we add the 400,000 acres already planted plus private planting, it would not be too much, but it would be getting on for our ultimate target. The Panel make some useful suggestions in paragraphs 72 and 82 about helping farmers who want to keep their holdings as ordinary sheep farms, to plant parts of them which are suitable for afforestation, and also make suggestions designed to make it easier for crofting schemes to be integrated with forestry schemes. These are not new suggestions. They have often been made before and they were discussed a good deal at the time of the Zuckerman Report some years ago, on which we had a debate in your Lordships' House. But these are all suggestions which I hope the Government will consider favourably.
If I have a general criticism to make—I have a good many detailed criticisms, but I will not make them—it is that, all the way through, the Panel are inclined to assume that a sufficient number of skilled supervisory officials will be available to make sure that all the conditions they want to see are carried out; but that does not happen in real life and I think it is much better that we should act through free agents. Let the Commission be free to buy and the sheep farmers free to buy or lease their farms, and let us help them in every way by forestry grants and agricultural grants. Let them each do their best to integrate freely but do not try to integrate them by prohibitions or restrictions or bureaucratic restraints. I will not say anything about compulsion, because compulsion already exists, although in practice it may not be used. I think that if compulsion were used it would then be a case for all this consideration beforehand by the departments. If we are going forcibly to take away sheep farms and do something else with them, then there is a case for careful consideration, and possibly appeals, before compulsion is applied, but if it is a question of free sale and free action, then I think that there should be no restrictions at all, nothing but help in the appropriate manner from the Government.
I suppose that the Panel may soon be superseded by the new Highland Development Board. I see that the Bill was introduced in another place yesterday. As I have said before, we welcome this Board and, among other things, I hope that it will be successful in bringing about an increase in the forestry programme in the Highlands. I am sure they will realise the need for more publicity, better public relations, more films and television programmes, more public documentary features of every kind, showing the advantages of forestry, showing what is happening and the benefits that are going to result, so that we may get the support of the entire people and get away from this wretched idea that there is some antagonism between forestry and agricultural interests.
The Board may well have to have many virtues, particularly the virtue of patience. We have always to be patient in dealing with Highlanders. I remember, when in 1938 I held the office which the noble Lord, Lord Hughes, now holds I met a big deputation from the local authorities in the Highlands. We were trying to see what could be done to promote new industries in the Highlands suitable to the Highland character. We spent two hours discussing what was meant by the phrase "suitable to the Highland character", and we finally decided that what it really meant was a factory which did not have a factory whistle. We have to be patient, anyway, about forestry, because trees take such an unconscionable time to grow and anybody who is against them always has the best of the argument to begin with, because it is difficult to show anything reproductive happening and it takes a bit of effort to project one's imagination ahead for fifteen or twenty years and understand the statements of those who are in favour of doing more. But let us remember that if even the modest programme we are engaged in now had been in force at the beginning of this century, how grateful we should be now to our great-grandparents. I hope that this new Highland Development Board will have enough imagination, that they will be progressive and forward-looking enough, to have for their motto "That our grandchildren may be grateful to us."
I beg to move for Papers.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF HIGHER EDUCATION
3.39 p.m.
LORD BOWDEN: My Lords, with the leave of the House, I should like to make a Statement which is being made in another place. The Government have now considered the recommendations of the Robbins Committee for the expansion of teacher-training places, the creation of new universities, and the designation of Special Institutions for Scientific and Technological Education and Research. The Robbins Committee recommended a 10-year programme designed to provide by 1973-74, 390,000 full-time higher education places in universities, colleges of education and technical colleges in Great Britain. The Government accept the objectives of 390,000 places in higher education by 1973-74, and of 218,000 places in universities. The Government have now decided that 122,000 of the remaining places should be places for training teachers. This will nearly double the number of students in training. In addition, my right honourable friend is urgently examining all possible ways of increasing the output of teachers from existing facilities.
These measures will not only contribute significantly to the widening of educational opportunity which was promised in the gracious Speech; they will also secure a further large increase in the output of teachers for our schools. My right honourable friend is keeping the whole subject of teacher supply under close review and looks forward to receiving shortly the next report of the National Advisory Council on the Training and Supply of Teachers.
On the question of new universities, the Government have considered the advice given by the University Grants Committee, and it is now clear that the target of 218,000 university places in 1973-74 is within the capacity of existing universities and other institutions of university status.
As your Lordships know, the colleges of advanced technology in England and Wales and the Heriot Watt College in Scotland will be given university status and added to the University Grants Committee's list from April 1 next; and the University Grants Committee will in due course advise the Government on

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the means by which the Royal College of Art and the College of Aeronautics, Cranfield, should also be brought within the ambit of the Committee.
No change in these plans is involved; but apart from this and such developments as the creation of separate universities at St. Andrew's and Dundee, the Government have decided that no more additional universities or accessions to university status will be needed for about ten years, with one exception. They are actively considering the possibility of creating within that period a completely new technological university institution in the North-East. The Government will, of course, examine well before the ten years are up the possibility that more universities may be needed thereafter.
The Government have also considered, with the advice of the University Grants Committee and the Advisory Council on Scientific Policy, the important recommendation of the Robbins Committee that five institutions should be developed and designated as a category of superior institutions to be known as Special Institutions for Scientific and Technological Education and Research.
They wholly accept the principle of selective development and expansion of technological education at a high level. They consider, however, that this will be best achieved not by creating a separate category within institutions of university status, but by continuing the build-up of the three specialised institutions named by the Robbins Committee (Imperial College, London, the Manchester College of Science and Technology, and Strath-clyde University). These will be given priority in the provision of finance, both capital and current; moreover, as I have said, the creation of a new technological university in the North-East is now being urgently examined. But the Government do not accept the recommendation to select one out of the ten colleges of advanced technology for special treatment; and they have decided, on balance, against giving any institutions a special designation as SISTERS.
The House will see that the Government accept the substance of the Robbins Committee's proposals on this matter. But, as to method, they prefer to encourage and expand the many promising developments in the technological departments of other universities, includ-
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ing colleges of advanced technology; and they wish to prevent the false impression arising, that a first-class technological education is only available in a small handful of institutions.
The Government will keep the whole development of higher education under review, with particular reference to the need to increase the supply of scientists and technologists.
LORD ABERDARE: My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord for reading us this long and detailed Statement, although, of course, one of the major decisions contained in it—the decision not to build additional universities—is already well known to us, as it was published in one of London's evening newspapers last night. However, this is a most important Statement, and we should like to give it careful consideration before making any comment upon it.
VISCOUNT DILHORNE: My Lords, could the attention of the Leader of the House be drawn to the matter to which my noble friend Lord Aberdare has just referred? This is, I think, the third occasion on which we have had a Statement' the contents of which, or the material part of the contents of which, have already appeared in the Press. I hope that something can be done about this.
LORD SHEPHERD: My Lords, I certainly take the noble Viscount's point. He will appreciate that there is some difficulty in this matter. There is some what might be called intelligent anticipation, and sometimes it is right, and sometimes wrong. But if there is any point in what the noble Viscount has said, I will see that it is dealt with.
VISCOUNT DILHORNE: My Lords, I do not think this could have come within the area of intelligent anticipation. It looked much more as if the horse had been let out of the stable.
LORD BOWDEN: My Lords, perhaps I might comment on what the noble Viscount has said. There has been, to my certain knowledge, on I think three or four occasions, newspaper comment substantially in accordance with the Statement; and there have been at least half a dozen times when newspaper proposals have been at variance with it. There

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are very few opportunities open to the Government, and the fact that some intelligent journalist should have hit on the ones that the Government have chosen seems to be almost inevitable. I was not aware of the fact that this particular "leak" had occurred yesterday, so I cannot comment upon it. But I recall that on several occasions in the past, going back at least a year, there have been not dissimilar proposals.
LORD NEWTON: My Lords, I entirely agree with my noble friend Lord Aberdare that this is an important Statement, and we shall have to study it very carefully. I understood that there are not to be any SISTERS, as such, but that the Government propose to build up the three special institutions which the noble Lord mentioned in his Statement. May I ask the noble Lord whether there will be a separate allocation of capital for that purpose?
LORD BOWDEN: My Lords, this is a most important point. The University Grants Committee is at this moment considering the amounts of extra recurrent grant which are most urgently needed, and I hope to be able to make an announcement before long. I think it is important that the Government's policy on this should be clear to the House. It is not possible, unfortunately, in a matter of this kind to achieve success by dividing one's limited resources impartially and equally among all competing claimants. The Americans have long since decided that they can establish successful schools only by encouraging what they have called centres of excellence, and this they have done deliberately by providing extra funds for the new institutions. We in this country inevitably must go the same way.
LORD LEATHERLAND: My Lords, may I ask my noble friend (and I speak as treasurer of one of the new universities) whether the decision not to create more universities during the next ten years will involve the existing new universities—the Essexes, the Sussexes and so on—in a more rapid programme of development than has so far been laid down for them?
LORD BOWDEN: My Lords, it is difficult to comment in detail on the plans of these individual universities. I would merely say that when the Uni-
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versity Grants Committee inquired of all universities how rapidly they could expand, the sum total of expansion so vastly exceeded expectations that it was decided that it was far better to expand existing universities more than had been proposed, rather than add new ones. It inevitably follows that most existing universities will expand more than has been proposed. But, without notice, I cannot say to which particular ones this refers.
LORD BROWN: My Lords, I may have missed it in the Statement, but will the special technological institutions be responsible to the University Grants Committee or to the Department of Education and Science?
LORD BOWDEN: My Lords, they are all three responsible to the University Grants Committee now, and they will retain this allegiance. But, of course, the University Grants Committee has allegiance to the Department of Education and Science.

FORESTRY
3.50 p.m.
Debate resumed.
LORD MITCHISON: My Lords, I am sure that I am speaking for the whole House when I say how grateful we are to the noble Earl opposite for the speech he has just made. It was, of course, as he would be the first person to admit, a thoroughly partisan speech in the interests of forestry. But it is the interests of forestry that we have to consider to-day. May I assure the noble Earl, since he made a speech on rather the same lines in the 1955 debate, that his force has in no way abated, his vigour of language is as great as ever, and I hope that he will, like the trees of which he was speaking, live for at least another hundred years.
With that somewhat extravagant beginning, I feel that it is the duty of a junior Minister, embarking on a forestry debate, to look at the list of speakers and to recognise at once two things about it. First of all, as the noble Earl has indicated, many of the noble Lords who wish to speak have Scots experience and will therefore, perhaps, be particularly concerned with Scottish problems. My noble friend Lord Hughes is going to wind up the debate, and he will be better equipped

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to deal with many of those Scottish problems than I am. The second thing I ought to recognise, in a proper spirit of humility, is that most of the speakers to-day—1 notice that Lord Jowitt said a similar thing in 1955—will know a great deal more about forestry than I do, and therefore what I put forward is put forward with the diffidence appropriate to someone speaking to those well versed in this particular subject.
I should like, therefore, to follow the lines of the noble Earl's speech to which we have just listened, and to take one or two points from it before I come to the more general considerations that seem to me appropriate in this case. I should, however, begin by accepting wholeheartedly what were almost his first words: that the reason why State intervention in the form of the Forestry Commission has been so valuable and, indeed, so necessary in this matter is that the State can look forward over longer periods; and that we are dealing with trees which in the last resort have the long lives he rightly attributed to them. It is, therefore, not a matter to take too much year by year. We have to look over a rather longer period, and we have to remember, too, that whatever the demerits of a "Stop-Go" policy in other matters, the demerits of a "Stop-Go" policy in forestry are obvious to all of us.
It is not the least use having a fantastic increase for a year or two, followed by a pulling back because too much money seems to have been spent, or for any other reason. Such a course is quite obviously wasteful. It is wasteful, not only in expenditure, but even more so in the proper use of manpower in these matters. After all, one of the most important sides of forestry, as the noble Earl indicated, is that it can give employment in the places where employment may not be easy; and it is a cruel form of kindness to give people employment for two or three years and then to have it stopped because the programme has been cut. It is not always avoidable, but we should aim at avoiding it so far as we can.
The present position as between private and public forestry is roughly (I do not think I need go into the exact figures) that the area planted under private ownership is about one-third of the area planted
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under the Forestry Commission. I have looked at the figures in the 1963 Report, which are more detailed, and what I give of course is only an approximation, but it gives us some sort of idea. The noble Earl, like many other forestry enthusiasts, rightly stressed the importance of forestry in reducing our import bill—an importance which we appreciate often with hardship in time of war and then, perhaps, may neglect to appreciate in times of peace. That is, of course, perfectly true, and it is true, too, that there are other countries in Europe and elsewhere with a higher proportion of wooded area than we have in this country—afforested area, perhaps I should say. But the last matter I think comes from the nature of the civilisation we have in this country.
We are primarily an industrial country. We are crowded in these Islands. Indeed, we know this to be so in connection with housing problems and many other matters, including the traffic problems which we often have before us. Therefore, one would not expect forestry to play a part of the same importance in that respect as it has in other countries. On the other hand, I entirely agree when the noble Earl said that it is in parts of the country where the population tends to drift away—taking his own case, the Highlands of Scotland—that forestry assumes a serious importance.
I pass on from that to repeat once more what I said just now, and to repeat it in relation to the Highlands of Scotland and similar areas. It is particularly important there that forestry policy should proceed equably—that is to say, that there should not be interruptions and sudden increases or decreases. The present position is that we are proceeding on a five-year programme for the years 1964 to 1968 inclusive, and the target during those five years is 222,000 acres of forestry planting. That figure means planting on new ground, and it does not include some 20,000 acres in which, during that period, the Forestry Commission will be replacing felled timber. The programme has gradually, during recent years under the previous Government, fallen a little from year to year. It has not been a rapid fall. I can give your Lordships the figures if anyone wants them, but it has been a steady fall in acreage, and there is no doubt, I think, about the reasons for it.

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The reasons are twofold. One is the difficulty of getting enough land. Everyone is concerned with this, and it is a matter which lies within the hands, not only of the Government, but also of private landowners to see to. The position is that everyone agrees that a considerable reserve is necessary. It averages at present about seven years' planting, and five years is said to be the irreducible minimum. I have heard ten years suggested as a desirable reserve. However that may be, we have a reserve probably just sufficient, but no more. Then, again, if one looks at the relative countries one sees that the reserve is proportionately greater in England than it is in Scotland or in Wales. Therefore, there is a case for seeing what one can do about Scottish forestry. I am going to leave it to my noble friend to deal with that in any detail, but that is just one way of putting it.
Before we leave that subject, may I pick up one sentence that fell from the noble Earl? He referred to a recent report by the Highlands and Islands Advisory Panel in terms for which personally I thank him, and he excluded the Orkneys and Shetlands. One wonders about the Outer Islands. It is the case at present that a great many efforts to plant trees in the Outer Islands have been unsuccessful, and I have seen trees growing up to the height of an adjacent wall and planed off by the wind at the top. There may be an answer to these things, and the Forestry Commission are not without hope that they may be able to use parts of Scotland—parts of the whole country, no doubt—which previously were regarded as quite impossible for forestry. If they can do that, it will be a considerable contribution. It may depend on the use of particular trees. I have been told about one called Pinus contorta. I could not, I think, tell Pinus contorta if I met it, certainly not on a dark night. But I would say quite generally that there obviously is room for research into this kind of question and that it is increasingly and actively being carried on by the Forestry Commission. It is one of their activities which certainly ought not to be forgotten. After all, use of a particular tree, or any other result of research, benefits not only the Forestry Commission, as the planters, but also others who wish to
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plant trees and who seek their advice in these matters; therefore it is a good thing that that research should be encouraged.
Before I leave that matter I turn again to one other point—I am coming on to other things the noble Earl said. I feel very conscious that there is a great deal that I am not yet in a position to say to your Lordships, not because I know it and am holding it back but because the results are not fully clear at present. May I take one or two instances'? At the moment a sub-committee of the Natural Resources (Technical) Committee is supplementing (he work of the Zuckerman Committee, which reported in 1957. That sub-committee is expected to report quite soon. The Report of the Highlands and Islands Panel, which bears a good deal on this locally, is quite recent in its publication.
There is a third body engaged in considering the scale of afforestation, and that is the Home-Grown Timber Advisory Committee; we have not heard their views yet. Therefore, from the point of view of full information, it might have been easier to give more at a later date, but I am trying to give what I can and what I hope will be useful to your Lord-ships. I ask your Lordships to remember, too, that we are a new Ministry. I think we are proceeding with diligence in this as in other matters, but we cannot devote the whole of our time to forestry. I am not sure it would be very wise to do so. Therefore, we shall profit, I hope, by what your Lordships are going to say one after another in this debate.
Turning back to the noble Earl's speech, I come next to the question of what is desirable by way of a programme, and I am afraid I can hardly accept what I understand was called the "desirable programme". It sounds delightfully Elizabethan, if I may say so—the sort of thing that might have been published perhaps in Spenser's time and is getting a little old. It was made in very different conditions at the end of the war. I think the thing to do nowadays is to look at what we are trying to do and to look at it broadly, and then see how we ought to be governed in considering what is desirable. I would not, for instance, accept the noble Earl's

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suggestion that the Forestry Commission ought to be able to purchase suitable land by agreement but without any consultation with agricultural interests. The corridors of St. Andrew's House are fairly wide, and I should have thought it was simpler to walk down the corridors and consult than for two officials to arrive with competing cheque books containing cheques signed in each case by the Secretary of State for Scotland. We do. not want a sort of scramble between Government Departments as to who pays most for what. This, surely, is something to be determined on broader lines than that.
I turn to consider—I am not going to take long about it—what the broader lines seem to me to be. I think to approach the question of a forestry programme and the place of forestry generally in the country purely as an economic problem is apt to be very misleading. If one is asked, "Does forestry pay?" I find that the question needs a lot of consideration before one can give any answer to it. What we are dealing with is something that is going to bring its fruit many years after planting, and one does not know what is going to happen to the rate of interest on money in the meanwhile, and all those other factors that a programming Treasury or Government have to take into account. One must, without doubt, have regard to some sense in these matters, and to treat it as an economic problem in that narrow sense seems to me to be inviting a certain amount of trouble.
I would regard it much more as a social question, and a social question with particular regard to the type of area that the noble Earl had in mind. I believe that we are all agreed on this: there is really no dispute that the importance of this question lies in bringing people back to the land in some cases, or helping them to stay there in others; and it is not merely the particular afforested area, the particular forestry venture in itself, that seems to me to be important. The existence in a village or small place of a body of men who have reasonably secure employment on fair terms is a sort of nucleus around which you can build other attempts to improve and ameliorate the life of that rural community. It is as a centre for rural life
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that I think forestry has its peculiar importance.
And where it is necessary for forestry workers to form little colonies of their own, as indeed is the case in many places, I am glad to know that the Forestry Commission is well alive to the importance not merely of building a dozen or twenty houses or whatever it is, and leaving it at that, but of seeing to it that not only the necessary things, such as schooling and the like, but also other advantages they would get in a more general settlement, are available for these comparatively isolated communities. This again is, of course, a counsel of perfection. But they are trying to do it, and I feel sure that they have the sympathy of all of us to succeed in the matter.
So far as this is an economic question, one has to remember that if these inhabitants of Highland communities are driven, say, to seek for work and housing in Glasgow, or if inhabitants of some other part of the country do so in some other large town, they are going to meet with a good many of the difficulties that affect this land at present. After all, the Highlands is a development area, and the other part of the country, where I understand a considerable area is available for forestry in the sense that it can be afforested, is the North-East coast. There, too, are the same difficulties both about employment and housing. It is not for me in this debate to compare one area with the other, but they certainly have that particular feature in common.
There is another side of this which is of importance to us in the community. When the Forestry Commission started it was started as a planting body. It was to acquire land and plant trees on it. Of course, as the trees ripened and were felled, it became a marketing body, too. The more this happened the more important marketing became in relation to the business of planting and managing forests. At present, marketing is a highly important feature of the Forestry Commission's work, and it is a feature which affects not only the Forestry Commission itself, but many others who may plant on a tolerably large scale.
Without going into more detail about this—I have here a list of various activities of that kind which are going on—I

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think the main marketing outlets at present are pulp in pulp mills (Fort William is the obvious instance), and a number of chipboard and other board mills that are being developed all over the country, usually by some private concern, with the benefit, in many cases, of a Forestry Commission guarantee to supply. That kind of development is highly important, because whatever may be the uses and final need for timber, it is quite clear that the immediate marketing of the particular timber that is grown may not be as easy as all that, unless it is taken one stage further and turned into pulp or board as the case may be.
We had quite recently in the Timber Trades Journal a word of appreciation on this. It was on November 7 last year. I must not be expected to accept every word, even of the Timber Trades Journal, as gospel, but it is useful to indicate how they are thinking. They say:
"Some years ago there were anguished cries that markets regarded by the home-grown trade almost as family heirlooms were on the way out. Yet to-day it seems that outlets potentially wider and more remunerative are appearing, and there is a challenge to the home industry to study them closely so that it can supply the right product. The new boards and pulp mills in Britain have undoubtedly meant a great deal to the timber growers of this country; and in the same way the motor ways have called for substantial quantities of timber for fencing. The coal mines, too, though moving towards complete mechanisation, still order home-grown timber for a number of purposes, although the overall demand is. of course, diminishing."
Broadly, I think that is an accurate statement of what is going on, and it seems to me that it is vital for the forestry of the country that this continuous exploration by both the homegrown timber body and the Forestry Commission itself should continue. Of course this is just another matter upon which research is highly necessary and advisable. I believe that at first there was a good deal of trouble about the the suitability of the forest products which came forward from the Commission. That, I think, is being lived down. One hopes that it is going to be borne continually in mind, and that we shall not have trouble from failure to take sufficient care with the treatment and handling of timber after it has been felled and is on its way to be marketed.
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I am afraid that a great deal of this must seem to your Lordships rather vague and general. I felt it myself when I had to consider what to say in this debate, and, while I collected a number of facts about it, I came to the conclusion that they were not really what we wanted to consider to-day. What we had to bear in mind, primarily and above all, was the programme in social terms and as part of the economic and social development of the country at large. You cannot just look round and consider a forestry programme by itself. You have to consider such matters as the one I have just mentioned, the alternative claims of agriculture. You have also to consider the whole question of the use that is to be made of the country and the countryside, including, I think, the amenity use. Forestry is not separate from amenities. I believe it is true to say that there are no national parks in Scotland. Perhaps there ought to be—I do not know. But there are arrangements for access to the forests. That, I think, is an important side of making forestry and forestry land perform a public function without seriously interfering with its primary purpose of producing timber.
Secondly, as I said just now, you have to consider forestry in relation to what is happening in neighbouring towns. You have to consider the possibility of bringing into the scope of forestry land which hitherto has been regarded as unusable for the purpose. What you are really doing is to try to fit this into the development of the country as a whole, and not to consider it as an isolated problem; not to consider it either as a problem of competition between private forestry and public forestry, or between forestry and agriculture, but as part of the improvement of our own country and its resources. It is in that spirit that I hope your Lordships will feel able to debate it to-day.
May I end by repeating what I said at a quite early stage? This is a matter of broad national concern, and in previous debates your Lordships have always shown a deep interest in the welfare of the country at large. It is therefore with confidence that I say that that spirit will surely inspire what your Lordships will have to say. It can be given practical application in another form. The

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shortage in forestry at present is not primarily a shortage of money, or a shortage of men; it is really a shortage of land on which to plant forests. That land can be made available by landowners in the country. One is very glad indeed to hear that the Scottish Landowners' Federation are all for supporting the forestry programme, and I hope their individual members will show, as many of them have shown, the same interest in the matter. There is no other way that I can see in which one can deal with the matter.
There are compulsory powers, and I think your Lordships might be interested to remember that the then Minister of State for Scotland, the present Leader of the Opposition in another place, said during that debate on February 23:
"The noble and learned Earl, Lord Jowitt, I will not say pleaded for, but broached the question whether the Forestry Commission should not ask for compulsory powers to be used. It is worth remembering that under the procedure a compulsory purchase order is quite likely to run the gauntlet of a public inquiry."
That must be the explanation of the delay in the instance the noble Earl quoted.
"That is not an easy procedure to get through when the interests of food production can be pleaded on the other side. But I should like to make it clear that, if the economic and the social circumstances justify it, the Ministers are ready to use compulsory powers in any individual case."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, Vol. 191, col. 407, February 23, 1955.]
I would not accuse the Leader of the Opposition of being a Socialist, and your Lordships will agree that if he said that on that occasion, you would not expect me to say any less on this. Nor, on the other hand, do I think there is really a case for saying any more than that. This is a field in which we seek co-operation between private and public concerns and interests. We seek it in the name of the nation as a whole and of ordered economic and social progress; and in all those causes I feel sure that both sides of the House will be ready to stand, as they should stand, together.

NEW TOWN IN LEYLAND/CHORLEY AREA
4.22 p.m.
LORD MITCHISON: My Lords, I have now changed my hat. With your Lord-ships' permission, I should like to repeat
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a Statement which my right honourable friend the Minister of Housing and Local Government has just made in another place about a New Town in the Leyland/Chorley area. Perhaps your Lordships will allow me to use his words, which are as follows:
"The Government have been considering as a matter of urgency how they can help Manchester to deal with its housing problems in a way that would contribute positively to the general prosperity and growth in the North-West. Like other great conurbations, Manchester cannot hope to provide houses within its own boundaries for all those living in slums and for its total natural increase. If decent living conditions are to be achieved in its bold schemes for central redevelopment, a substantial number of those re-housed must be found homes outside the city. In addition to all its secondary efforts to find sites for dealing with overspill, therefore, Manchester needs at least the equivalent of two new towns.
"The search for suitable sites took several years. Finally, last year, the choice fell on Risley—twelve miles from Manchester and only two miles from Warrington. This announcement was received with a good deal of doubt and criticism. Now I must inform the House that a detailed survey has revealed that serious subsidence and other geological defects rule out a large part of the area. It has been strongly urged that the whole Risley project should be abandoned. But in view of Manchester's urgent needs and the fact that some 13,000 houses can be built quickly here, I feel that on balance the right course is to provide these houses as soon as possible and to use the New Towns Act for this purpose. In view of its nearness to Warrington, it seems to me essential that the new development of the Risley area should form part of a comprehensive plan for the whole Warrington area. I propose, therefore, to start consultations at once in order to see how this can best be achieved. In particular I propose to discuss with the local authorities whether it would not be possible in carrying out this comprehensive operation to achieve a partnership of the

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kind we are now working out in Ipswich, Northampton and Peterborough.
"In addition to the Warrington-Risley project, Manchester will be able to rely on their own development scheme at Westhoughton, which I have now approved with some important modifications. This should provide for some 13,000 houses. Manchester would themselves carry out this scheme in co-operation with the local authorities concerned.
"But by themselves these short-term partial solutions—for that is all they are—would still leave Manchester without the assurance of long-term relief. In order to meet this need, the Government has decided to designate a site in the Leyland-Chorley area for a large New Town. In addition to providing for the long-term overspill needs of Manchester, this New Town—strategically well placed in relation to the road-rail network—should contribute to the industrial revival of the whole region, and form a new focus for urban renewal. I will shortly be discussing with Lancashire and the other authorities the appointment of consultants to carry out a detailed survey as a preliminary to designating the site under the New Towns Act."
LORD HASTINGS: I thank the noble Lord for repeating the Statement made by his right honourable friend in another place. It is disappointing that it is apparently not possible to go on with the building of a full-scale New Town at Risley, after all these years have been taken to find a suitable site, as was mentioned in the Statement. I would remind the noble Lord that, as I am sure he must be aware, the New Town of Peterlee, in County Durham, is built on an area which has either subsided or is still being mined and liable to subsidence. Techniques have been developed there for building on that land, but no doubt this has been considered in connection with Risley.
Apparently, Risley is now to form something in the nature of a town expansion of Warrington, rather than a New Town. As a result, it is necessary to find a completely New Town elsewhere. I would ask the noble Lord whether the area proposed to be designated at
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Leyland-Chorley is, in fact, one of those areas which had previously been examined and found on the first impression, so to speak, not to be suitable, and whether it has been necessary to come back to it to find a place in substitution for Risley. Also, I should like to know what sort of size of New Town is being envisaged.
LORD MITCHISON: My Lords, I am obliged to the noble Lord. I am afraid that I cannot tell him whether the Chorley-Leyland area was one of those looked at previously, but I will inquire and will write to him. If he then likes to make it public in the form of a Question, he can deal with it in that way. The point about Risley is not only subsidence, but also the character of the soil. I gather that the difficulty is that it was found to be very peaty; but again I will check on that.
The third point the noble Lord had in mind was the size of the proposed New Town. The Statement speaks of a "large New Town" and of course one knows the size of existing New Towns—something a good deal bigger than had been proposed for Risley, let alone what is now to be carried out at Risley. I cannot say any more about the size, and I doubt whether if my right honourable friend could, because he is employing consultants to look at the area. He will no doubt have to consider their report and their views before making up his mind and designating the New Town, and so fixing approximately its future size.
LORD HENLEY: My Lords, as Manchester needs the equivalent of at least two New Towns, is this going to mean that it also needs the equivalent of two new lakes? Is Manchester going to add, shall we say, Buttermere and Derwent-water to its shopping list, on top of Ullswater and Windermere?
LORD MITCHISON: My Lords, we use more and more water in this country, and we grow more numerous as a population. But on this particular question, the importance and contentious character of which I fully appreciate, I have no present information. It seems to me obvious that if there are going to be more people they will need more water. Where they get it from is a wider question, on which I had perhaps better not embark to-day.
LORD TODD: My Lords, in view of what has happened in the proposed Risley project, I wonder whether the Minister could tell me whether a thorough geological survey was made of this new area of Chorley before the decision to go ahead was taken.
LORD MITCHISON: My Lords, I am afraid that I cannot do that. There again, consultants are being employed, and I imagine that one of the questions submitted to them, particularly after the unfortunate experience at Risley, would have been whether they were quite sure that the site was suitable from that point of view. I hope and trust that they are not going to make the same mistake again; I should think it unlikely. We must be human about these matters. Decisions are made just before a General Election, and are sometimes hastened up a little with an Election in the offing. I do not want to make any Party point, but the period before an Election is obviously a period of Parliamentary time when things tend to get a little rushed and other matters are more in the minds of Ministers.

FORESTRY
4.34 p.m.
Debate resumed.
THE EARL OF MANSFIELD: My Lords, there is no Member of your Lord-ships' House who is better fitted to address you on the subject of forestry than the noble Earl, Lord Dundee, and he has done it to-day in his usual lucid and commendably brief fashion. With all that the noble Earl has had to say I am in complete agreement, except that I rather put forward the view that the difficulty which the Forestry Commission have found in obtaining more ground for the future usually lies in the fact that they have been unwilling—I think in most cases unable—to pay the market price for such ground as has come into the market.
Every year a considerable number of properties—I am alluding mostly to Scotland, of course—come into the market. These properties are advertised in papers like Country Life and Field and in other sporting periodicals, as well as in the daily Press. Often one is quite well aware that a considerable proportion of them have a large proportion
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of land which is suitable for afforestation. Why, then, do the Commission not buy? The reason, I am sure, is almost always because, owing to the stranglehold of the Treasury, the Commission are not able to offer a price which the owner can get elsewhere.
Many of these areas not only have a very high sheep value but are also good grouse moors, and if a man is able to get for the combined sporting and agricultural value a price decidedly in excess of what the Forestry Commission are able to offer him for the purpose of planting trees, no one, surely, can blame him for taking the better offer. The Commission have hitherto wisely refrained from exercising compulsory powers, and I hope that they never will have to. It may well be in certain cases in the future that the Commission may be driven to this length, but that would be a lamentable state.
I am entirely at one with the noble Earl, Lord Dundee, in his views on the importance of timber to the Highlands. Afforestation is really the only way by which the present population there can be not only maintained but restored somewhat towards its former level. The noble Earl stated that at least ten times the number of people would be employed in forestry as would be employed in sheep-rearing on the same ground. That statement erred on the side of moderation. It is not my intention to bore your Lord-ships with many figures this afternoon, but I think, for the benefit of those who are not familiar with the details of the rather lamentable battle that takes place on occasion between the protagonists of sheep farming, on the one hand, and of forestry, on the other hand, that it might be as well if this information were given.
The value of land from the point of view of producing sheep is, of course, a very varying one. One gets rich farm lands where it is a question of how many sheep one can carry to the acre. Seldom, if ever, I hope, would there be any question of planting such land. But when one gets up into the Highlands it is a question of how many acres are required to carry sheep, and in the Borders that varies from perhaps a little over two acres to between ten and fifteen or even more acres per sheep. In the past it was usually considered that the lowest number of sheep in a hirsel that one shepherd could look

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after economically was 400. Since then the position has changed. The shepherd's wages have risen very considerably, indeed; something which no one would grudge him, as a shepherd is one of the hardest working of all agricultural workers, themselves the hardest working of all workers. But at the same time it has to be borne in mind that the rewards for a sheep farmer have not increased in like measure.
The increases in the prices of mutton and wool have been infinitesimal in comparison with the rise in shepherds' wages. That means that the shepherd will now have to look after more sheep, and the economical hirsel has risen to 600 and is rising to 800, and it may sometimes go up to nearly 1,000, depending on the nature of the land. There are 640 acres in a square mile and, if you have land in which you need 10 acres for every sheep you require 10 square miles; and 10 square miles is not a reasonable amount to expect one shepherd to look after and to cover in a day. The result is that gradually, by sheer force of economics, the already unsatisfactory state of the agricultural population in the Highlands is becoming even more aggravated. If you take quite good sheep land where four acres are sufficient for a sheep, that means that, roughly speaking, one shepherd looks after perhaps 2,500 acres, and with the area of, say, a small glen of 10,000 acres there may be employment for four men.
Those who subscribe to the publications of the Forestry Commission will see that when they buy land they are able, roughly speaking, to plant up about 50 per cent. of it. I think that before long they will be compelled to plant about 60 per cent. But even taking the figure of 50 per cent. with a property of 10,000 acres, then 5,000 acres are planted, and it has been shown on the Continent of Europe, where trees, on the whole, do not grow as well as they do in this country, that when forests are properly under way they require approximately one man in permanent employment for every 100 acres of timber. That would mean that your 5,000 acres would employ 50 men, whereas before it would have employed four. That is a ratio of 12½ to 1.
Furthermore abroad, where of course the timber industry is of infinitely greater
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importance than it is, unfortunately, in this country, it is calculated that for every man employed directly in growing the wood some four are employed in processing. Therefore there can be no possible comparison, so far as employment is concerned, between forestry and sheep farming. I myself hold strongly to the view that forestry is the only thing which can really regenerate the Highlands, where the natural resources are so very limited, where we have virtually no material, where nowadays there is not very much fishing, where hydro-electric power will make life much more comfortable for people but will not afford much more work, where tourism at best can be but seasonal and where winter sports are very erratic, depending upon the type of winter we get. The result is we must be prepared for a considerable expansion of forestry, particularly in the North of Scotland, if we are to do our duty to the Highlands. That means that a lot of land which is now carrying sheep will be put under trees.
It will be asked whether there is any reverse to this medal. Of course, as in most human things, there is. There are some three disadvantages. The first is the loss of food, which is a point often brought forward by the sheep protagonists; but, frankly, the amount of food which will be lost by the transfer of land would not be sufficient to keep us going for one week in the event of a war and can be dismissed as negligible. The second is the really serious one from a sociological point of view. It means the disappearance of a considerable proportion of one of the finest classes of workers in the country; that is to say, the hill shepherd, a man who is better educated than one might expect, of independence of mind and often a great student of nature. That, however, is inevitable.
The third objection is one which I fear will not be regarded as such on the Government side of the House, although I feel it very strongly. It is that, because of our economic conditions, by far the greatest part of this forestry expansion will have to be carried out by the State, which means that more and more land will be diverted from private to State ownership; and that, my Lords, is something which I say frankly I abhor. First of all, it has to be remembered that the Forestry Commission, efficient

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though it is, like any other Government Department is inefficient when compared with the best private foresters. In this connection I should like the noble Lord, Lord Mitchison, or the noble Lord, Lord Hughes, to state categorically what is the average cost of planting an acre of trees under the Forestry Commission, taking into account all the costs involved. I can guarantee that it will be very much higher than under even moderately efficient private ownership.
That being the case, what are we going to do to encourage forestry? The noble Lord, Lord Mitchison, spoke about marketing, in which he was fully justified because, as my noble friend Lord Dundee said, the person who plants trees has very little expectation of making money out of them in his own lifetime. If a young man starts planting when he comes of age and lives to 80 he will see little, if any, of his own plantings clear felled. He will possibly be getting money by selective felling of the oldest ones, and from the middle-aged ones he may get a certain amount from the larger thinnings; but the man who plants trees is really planting for generations yet to come.
The private landowner who is planting to-day is not looking for a vast fortune for his descendants, but he feels, with justification, that if he is expending these very large sums of money, even with the very good planting grants which are now in existence, his descendants ought at least to have some reasonable recompense for his own frugality. That is where we must hope that, with all the big new ideas on taxation, some adumbrated and others still menacing us from the clouds, there will not be anything done that will defeat this object, because I can assure your Lordships that if that happened it would be an end to the expansion of private forestry.
My Lords, we badly require guaranteed markets in this country. It does not matter how efficient we make ourselves, with the assistance of the Scottish Woodland Owners' Organisation and similar bodies, if we are not going to be able to sell our trees what is the point of growing them? The same applies to the Forestry Commission. The noble Earl, Lord Dundee, said, with all too much truth, that we are importing some 90
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per cent. or more of our timber. Surely, when a very large proportion of that could be produced at home, thus saving us a great deal of foreign exchange, particularly in hard currency, that should encourage this Government—or any Government—to see that forestry, both public and private, was made profitable. There was actually a time (and I say this seriously and truthfully), between the wars, when it was found cheaper to bring pit props into the ports of Fife from Archangel by sea rather than transport them by lorry from central Perthshire. This may seem, and is, the epitome of ridicule; nevertheless, it is a fact. It is up to any Government in power in this country to see, in the interests of the nation as a whole, that such a state of affairs is not repeated.
There has been a little talk of pit props to-day, but unfortunately the wooden pit prop is largely on its way out. The mines are becoming steadily fewer in numbers, and the older mines are being replaced with modern ones which tend to use steel rather than wooden props. This by no means appeals to many of the miners, who consider that when the wooden prop began to crack it gave audible noise that the roof was likely to come down, whereas there is no warning with the steel prop. Be that as it may, the pit prop market appears to be on the way out. For small timber there remains only the possibility of bulk conversion for plasterboard, chipboard or pulp, and that is where the Government, by loans and, if need be, by subsidy to set up plants, can do a very great deal to assist, and can encourage those who are planting to-day to continue with their efforts.
The noble Lord, Lord Mitchison, talked about forestry serving a social purpose. If by that he means that woods, public or private, are to be thrown open for the use of the public as a whole, I must enter a caveat, at least until they have attained a fairly ripe age, because there is nothing more dangerous than people wandering about in young woods—and it is, of course, so often young people who go into those places, for purposes which I will leave to your Lordships' imagination. From the timber owner's point of view, those purposes do not matter, but what does matter to him is that in the intervals

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between other occupations, these people smoke cigarettes, and all too often the result is a forest fire. If the noble Lord, Lord Mitchison, will look at the various reports of the Forestry Commission he will see what very great damage has been done in that way and how much public money has been wasted. Every private owner with woods of any size has had fires in them, and while no-one wishes to prevent the people of this country from wandering about woods, it must be understood that, in the national interest, such wanderings must not take place until the woods have reached an age where the danger of fire is nonexistent, or at least minimal.
My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Mitchison—who, with becoming modesty, admitted that he had no very intimate knowledge of woods—said that he was prepared to listen to what was said. That is at least a promising beginning, and we must hope that the present Government will look with sympathy upon what could, in England, be a very much more important industry than the average Englishman realises, but which, in the Highlands of Scotland, is life and death so far as the population of that area is concerned in the future.
4.51 p.m.
LORD SEGAL: My Lords, I hope that I may be allowed to add my own words to those of my noble friend Lord Mitchison in thanking the noble Earl, Lord Dundee, for raising this subject today. Those of us who still remember him in another House, under another name, in his undergraduate days, must feel that not least among the many services he has rendered to this House and to the nation must be counted his initiating this important debate, on a subject on which he is able to speak with so much authority. I must confess that the only possible advantage of the attenuated Benches on this side of the House is that any attempts on the part of the noble Lords opposite at tossing the caber are more than likely to miss their mark.
Anyone would have to be a very determined seeker after Party strife who would claim that the growth of our national forests has shown any appreciable change with the change of Government, or that trees are particularly sensitive to the alignment of these Benches or to the
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weight of opinion in the Division Lobbies of this House. In fact, I think we can quite honestly concede that this Government have so far done very little to assist afforestation. We must not, however, think of them too harshly on this account, for I am informed on good authority that the average period of gestation for any new afforestation policy is something like forty years, which must be deemed rather a long expectation of life even for a Conservative Administration. Why, even a third of this period is regarded in some quarters as almost too long a period for continuous Tory rule.
My own qualifications to speak on this subject are slender in the extreme, and probably less than those of any other Member of this House. For, if I had to declare my special interest, it could certainly not be in therô le of a landowner. In fact, my own direct interest does not go beyond the possession of some 18 trees of an assorted Japanese miniature variety which arrived in a box as an unsolicited gift around last Christmas time and which are still lying, I regret to say, in their original wrappings. So, I am afraid, it is likely to be some time before I am able to qualify for a special Government grant as a dedicated private woodland owner. My main object, however, in participating in this debate is to stress one or two points of general interest arising from the last statement of policy on afforestation (or was it only a declaration of intent?) made by the previous Government in both Houses on July 24, 1963, and the added emphasis laid on them in the Seventh Report of the Estimates Committee, issued on July 8, 1964.
In the statement of July 24, 1963, the then Government asserted that the Forestry Commission should aim, in the following ten years, from 1964 to 1973, at planting another 450,000 acres, in addition to its existing 1¼ million acres. It further exhorted the Forestry Commission
"to bear in mind the need to provide public access and recreation, and to devote more attention to increasing the beauty of the landscape".
These are fine words, and reflect great credit on the previous Administration's intentions. Such matters as increasing the volume of our home-produced timber,

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and of its benefits to our balance of payments—for I understand that our wood-using industry is now handling about one-third of our largest group of imports, valued at some £450 million a year—I must leave to more expert speakers to discuss; also such matters as the increased acreage planted by some private owners, whether by extension of dedicated woodland or by the approved woodland schemes; or the reasons why, out of the 2¾ million acres of woodlands now in private ownership, some 1 million acres have been allowed to develop into scrubland or bracken, thus rendered almost useless for afforestation.
I should, however, like to ask what progress is now intended by the Government in promoting the aesthetic and protectiverô les of the forest, and its use in encouraging open-air recreation, as suggested on page 10, paragraph 20, of the Statement of Forest Policy in the 44th Annual Report of the Forestry Commission. I ask this advisedly, because in the Seventh Report of the Estimates Committee, issued a year later, there is this very remarkable paragraph, No. 80 on page XXVI:
"While your Committee have no reason to believe that the Forestry Commission's education services are not being administered effectively, they are not convinced that overall responsibility for educational matters ought to be borne, as it is at present, by one of the Directors of Forestry. The educational programme is of such importance that your Committee would wish it to be either the direct responsibility of the Deputy Director-General or that of a new Director of Education".
They then go on to make this startling recommendation for a Committee, one of whose main objects is the scrutiny and pruning of public expenditure:
"Your Committee accordingly recommend that overall responsibility for education should be vested either in the Deputy Director-General or in a new appointment of a Director of Education".
Unfortunately, the Estimates Committee do not go on to state what they conceive to be the duties of this new Director of Education, and one is sorely tempted to try and follow out the workings of their minds. Are they perturbed at the wastage of trained foresters from the Commission, or the fact that so many students undergoing intensive training for higher degrees at one of the four univer-
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sity schools of forestry change their minds half way through the course and desert forestry for some more attractive or more lucrative profession, with better prospects of advancement? Indeed, they say that one student of forestry, after graduating, decided, on second thoughts, to enter the Church, where he felt his own previous experience as a forester would still be of considerable use to him—I imagine, in tending human saplings after his experience with sylvan saplings. Or are they thinking of the niggardly £17,000 out of the £437,000 spent on research in 1963 allocated to the universities and higher institutions for fundamental research in sylviculture?
Our prestige as a nation in forestry matters depends largely on the encouragement we give to fundamental scientific research, quite regardless of its direct applications to marketing schemes, or improving the quality of home-grown timber, or its effect on the volume of our imports or on our balance of payments. Or, were the Estimates Committee thinking of the wider role of education among the mass of our population, to which the noble Earl, Lord Dundee, briefly referred, of trying to instil in our school children from the earliest age a love and reverence for plant life in the same way as they are taught a love and reverence for animal life? It would appear to me that this education cannot be begun at too tender an age. In fact, it would be far easier to obtain dedicated students of forestry, and especially of sylvicultural research, and also far easier actively to prevent the careless starting of forest fires, which the noble Lord referred to so feelingly, if this reverence for plant life were inculcated in our school children even in the youngest classes throughout the length and breadth of our land.
In this respect I believe we are lagging far behind other countries. In America, for example, Arbor Day is recognised as a national holiday. In Israel, the "New Year of the Trees" has been celebrated annually since post-Biblical times as a special holiday, set apart, when the school children march in procession with a sapling in their hands to plant it in a specially dedicated garden. In our own country the ceremonial planting of trees seems to be largely reserved for Royal occasions.

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But, my Lords, could we not set apart one day in the year as an annual springtime holiday, when our school children could be shown in the morning coloured films of the beauties of our woodlands and our natural countryside, and given talks on the preservation of our forests? And could they not also be encouraged to go out in the afternoon to some corner of a public park or of newly-acquired common land (if the Bill concerned gets piloted through by my noble friend), or even to some of our disused allotments to plant their own saplings and subsequently to tend the growing plants? This is a job that cannot be left to our education authorities, with all their manifold preoccupations and activities in so many other directions. It is primarily a job for the new Director of Education of the Forestry Commission, appointed, as recommended by the Estimates Committee, on a full-time basis to carry out his duties in their widest possible application.
My Lords, I pass on to Paragraph 49 of the Report of the Forestry Commission dealing with the Forestry Exhibition held at Blackbushe in June, 1964. Could not this idea be modified and adapted for showing in our schools; and multiplied a hundredfold on a travelling basis, so that the work of the Forestry Commission could be brought home intimately to our schoolchildren, not only those in the older forms, but even among the younger children of the tenderest age? Dare I ask what the Government have done, or are doing, or, more important still, what they propose to do, in this direction?
I come now to Paragraph 50 of the Annual Report, headed "Publications" and listing eleven new publications issued during 1963. Among them are two booklets, one on Aids to Working Conifer Thinnings, and the other on Felling and Converting Thinnings by Hand. But, lest too much emphasis be laid on the thinnings, they also issue two excellent guides, one to the forests of North-East Scotland and another to the Forest of Dean and the Wye Valley. Could they not issue also some publications of direct interest to our schools, attractively illustrated and produced, so that our children will learn to keep and treasure them and, through them, be stimulated to a love and enthusiasm for the beauties of our countryside and woodlands?
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Finally—for I have already delayed this debate for far too long—I cannot desist from concluding with the time-old parable of the ancient sage who in the ninth decade of his life was found to be planting saplings in his back garden. His disciples came to him and said: "But, how come?"—or words to that effect. "Here you are, planting saplings which you can never hope to see growing to maturity in your lifetime!" And the sage answered: "My friends, I came empty into this world and I shall shortly be leaving it, empty as when I came. But I was able to enjoy the fruits of the vision and industry so thoughtfully provided for me by my own ancestors. Is it not right that I should think of my own descendants, and try to provide for them, in return, a little of the fruits of this bounteous earth which I myself have been able to enjoy?"
There are two modest observations that this parable evokes. One is that at no age in the lifetime of either an individual or a Government is anyone too old, or too young, to engage in the planting of saplings. The second thought is this. We in our own generation have been profligate in the misuse of the bounties of our woodland treasures. In two world wars, we have squandered our heritage. We have made such ruthless inroads into the natural beauties of our forests in order to cope with the demands of our war efforts that even to-day our countryside is despoiled. It is therefore all the more incumbent upon us now to bequeath to posterity a Woodland legacy that can still invoke for our generation something of a benediction, rather than a curse, from the lips of those who come after us.
5.8 p.m.
THE DUKE OF BUCCLEUCH AND QUEENSBERRY: My Lords, it has been widely hoped that the Government will be able to state clearly what they want from State and private forestry and that they will give full encouragement to both; and the friendly approach of the noble Lord, Lord Mitchison, to-day will be much appreciated, as will be the indications which he has given to us. I shall endeavour to say a few words appropriate to the requirements of forestry, although I should much prefer to be in the woods helping to grow good trees and to produce good quality timber. I would assure the noble Lord who has

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just spoken that the beautification of the countryside is not being overlooked and that every attention is given to it. I should also like to support him in the reference I think he made to encouraging young children, by way of interesting literature in regard to trees, do look after trees and, I hope, in particular, to be careful about trees in the neighbourhood of towns to avoid their being spoiled.
My Lords, everyone concerned with the advancement of forestry wants a quicker expansion and a fuller recognition of timber production as a necessary and important national industry, not because he is crazy about trees but because he knows that a much bigger contribution can be made to the national economy, that healthy employment in the country areas can be increased and that conditions generally in this country are favourable. While this implies a bigger acreage being planted by the Forestry Commission, we maintain that there should also be a steady increase under private ownership and that there are many places where this is more suitable.
I hope that enough has been said recently to show how great is the annual increase in consumption of timber in Britain and in Europe, and to show that we must do more here, now and quickly, if our position is to be better and not worse in twenty years' time. With an import bill around £450 million a year for timber and timber products, a most unfavourable item in the balance of payments, it is to be hoped that the Treasury will look more favourably upon investment in forestry. It has been indicated to some of us concerned in recent years with negotiations about forestry that the representatives of the Treasury regard forestry as an industry in which too much money, and not too little, is being invested. I hope that this impression is incorrect. But it is also disappointing to those among us who are anxious about this matter that we never have an opportunity to meet the Treasury representatives who, I understand, give these views to members of Governments.
It would be premature to discuss the special problems of the Highland counties in any detail, but I may briefly mention that in their solution increased forestry is certain to figure prominently. Full co-operation will be important to secure
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the provision of sufficient suitable land, with due regard at the same time to the effect on farming and on other important aspects of the Highland economy. It would be more beneficial in every way if private, as well as State, forestry participates. Private owners will be able more easily to carry out what the noble Lord, Lord Mitchison, was saying, I think, about the settlement of foresters and their families in villages with other people.
The noble Lord indicated the shortage of land belonging to the Forestry Commission as being a restrictive element in the planting of the acreage annually accomplished by the Commission. If this is a difficulty, I feel that we in Scotland should try more than ever before to provide land which is suitable and can be spared for forestry. But I myself feel that the difficulty has been more opposition from the Treasury to the expansion of forestry. If I can have an assurance about that, either now or at a later date, ! shall be pleased.
The provision of forests without injury to farming has often been a difficulty, and this is a very important matter at the present time. It is acknowledged that the Forestry Commission have always been able to secure voluntarily enough land to complete their programme, but there are now signs of more pressure for compulsory acquisition. I think that most of us hope that this can be avoided, and if it is tried prematurely, it will make the voluntary offer of land less forthcoming. I feel that the appeal by the noble Lord, Lord Mitchison, to landowners is one which we can take up, and I am sure that we can help more to encourage our friends to offer land to the Forestry Commission if they are not planting it themselves, and if it is suitable. I feel that a stronger lead is necessary from the Government and Parliament to try to make the nation more forest-minded and to bring home to everyone that a much larger acreage is required to meet our needs.
About the acquisition of land, I would say that there has been a steady improvement in the mutual approach among farmers and foresters. At the present time, the National Farmers' Union in Scotland is being most helpful in this matter, and I feel that there is more assurance of a sensible combination of farming and forestry. On the economic

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side of forestry, referring perhaps more to private foresty, it should be remembered that the prices obtainable by growers for their timber are much lower now than they were ten to fourteen years ago, whereas costs are much higher; and as wages of other industries go up, it is only natural that there is a continual rise in forestry wages also. As your Lordships know, the returns in forestry are slow, as well as low, and for the planting and replanting since the last war there will be a long wait before growers can expect a surplus and a profit on their expenditure. If they are encouraged to continue to plant and increase their acreage of trees, any surplus, or any available money, will be needed for this. If it is to take 65 years or so for the Forestry Commission to break even, then it must also be a long time in the private forestry sector.
Taxation has been devised by Parliament differently for forestry, because of the high initial and continuing costs, the long-term nature of the investment and the low ultimate return. I refer to this matter because many persons are disquieted by rumours of a change in forestry taxation and of the possibility of new taxation, which may remove from timber growers both the incentive to grow trees and the financial ability to do so. I would strongly urge the Government to act wisely about this, and to confer with the industry before any adverse changes are contemplated. I urge them to avoid any action that would discourage and reduce the efforts to add to the nation's timber resources, or the employment of families in the countryside; so that capital investment in timber production will not be discouraged at a time when we are asking for increased production of timber for many different purposes.
5.20 p.m.
THE DUKE OF ATHOLL: My Lords, I am going to assume, as the basis of my argument, that this Government, like all other Governments since the war, wish to encourage the private grower of timber. If this is not the case, I think there is little point in continuing this discussion further; but I am personally quite convinced that, like every other Government, this Government wish us to have thriving woodlands, grown by private owners as well as by the Forestry Com-
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mission. Like my noble friends Lord Mansfield and the Duke of Buccleuch and Queensberry, I am very worried about the taxation position on timber. In the last four months we have got used to government by threat, and I should be grateful if, when the noble Lord, Lord Hughes, comes to wind up at the end of the debate, one or two of the threats hanging over the timber industry could be removed.
As has been said frequently, growing trees is a long-term enterprise, and one expects to have equally long-term treatment, so far as tax is concerned, on the timber one grows. It is also, at the moment, only marginally profitable to grow trees; and this has been brought out by studies by Aberdeen University, among others. This makes it all the more necessary that woodland growers should have some security as regards their future financial position. Therefore, I should like to know—although I have little hope of being told at the end of this debate—whether the proposed capital gains tax will be applicable to the commercial felling of timber. At the moment, I gather from what the Chancellor of the Exchequer has said in another place that it probably will not; but if the noble Lord, Lord Hughes, could confirm this, I think it would set at rest the minds of all timber growers.
If the commercial felling of timber is not to be liable to this tax could we also be told whether the tax will be applicable to transfers of timber owing to death or by gift? If this is the case, it will lead to a most unfortunate position, because rather than hand over his maturing trees, or even half-grown trees, to his heirs and successors, an owner, in order to save the capital gains tax, will cut them all down and hand over the land as empty land. I sincerely hope that this will not be the case. Here again I should appreciate it if this could be confirmed or denied. And it would be helpful if that could be done at this moment, rather than later, because we are just entering the planting season, so far as timber is concerned, and I am sure that people would be far more inclined to plant trees if they were sure of the future tax position.
If additional taxation of the forestry industry is to be imposed, after estate owners have been encouraged by

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Governments of both Parties to enter into long-term and legally binding commitments by dedicating their land—which commitments involve very heavy expenditure—one must question the good faith of a Government that subsequently alters the whole tax position so as to render these commitments almost incapable of fulfilment. If this tax does apply to timber, it will undoubtedly in the very near future kill all private planting, the importance of which, according to the Highland Advisory Panel, cannot be overestimated in the remoter areas.
Assuming that we receive satisfactory replies from the Government to the above questions, what other factors are stopping people from growing trees—something which I think everyone who has spoken to-day considers is desirable? There are, of course, the people who will not grow trees at any price because they do not like trees. There is nothing one can do about that, except possibly to give the Forestry Commission easier powers of compulsory purchase of their land in those areas where it can be shown that it would be in the interests of the nation to plant trees.
But there are many people who would very much like to plant far more trees than they do but who, for various reasons, cannot do so. The first of these reasons is lack of capital. For the first 20 years of its life a wood is bound to cost the owner money. For the next 20 years he will probably break even. It is only after the trees are 40 years old that he can possibly hope to start making a reasonable sum of money on them. Could there not be some long-term finance? While I recognise that this is a difficult problem, I should hope that the Government might consider putting aside some money which could be lent for long periods, at a fixed rate of interest, for the purposes of growing timber. This problem is slightly helped by the fact that the Forestry Commission will lease land. I should like to give publicity to this fact, because I think that many people would be delighted to lease their land to the Forestry Commission for growing woods but at the moment do not realise that they can do so.
The second difficulty faced by the average private person in planting is that
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of obtaining advice. Possibly the planting of woods is a more technical problem even than agriculture. It is essential to plant the right trees, the right distance apart; to drain the land properly; and there are many other problems. Many people are simply put off by the fact that they do not know whom to turn to for this advice. The Scottish Woodland Owners' Association and its equivalent body in England are trying hard to put this right. I would therefore ask all people who want to plant woods but feel that they have not the necessary "know-how" to join these organisations, from whom they will be able to obtain the most expert advice which will save them making many mistakes in the future.
Thirdly, there is the difficulty of tenanted land. At the moment, if for various reasons a farm tenant wishes to plant some woods, he does not get compensation for them on his outgoing from his landlord. I can see that to alter this law would raise difficulties, but I would suggest to the Government that it might be worth studying so that tenants could plant, particularly, shelter belts, which in many cases can amount to quite an appreciable amount of timber. I think that if this law were altered one might find an easier relationship between the tenant and landlord when one or other of them wishes to plant timber.
Fourthly, in the remoter areas these is the difficulty of getting the labour required. This applies particularly to the fact that, if you are going to plant a large block of trees, for the first four or five years you need a lot of labour; then for the next nine years you do not need any; and then you need a small amount for thinning each year. This makes it difficult for the private owner to plant economically, if he has little labour of his own and lives in a part of the country—as is the case with most of the Highlands—where there is not much casual labour to be obtained. I was wondering, therefore, whether the Forestry Commission would consider lending (and by "lending" I mean that the private owner would have to pay for them; or perhaps I should say "hiring out") some of their employees to the private woodland owners in the more remote areas so that they could have sufficient labour when they require it at their peak periods.

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Fifthly, there is the difficult question of guaranteed markets, which has already been touched on by my noble friend Lord Mansfield. Probably forestry is the only form of agricultural land use in this country in which there is basically no guarantee of a market at the end of it. Most Governments have realised this and have done all they can to encourage ancillary industries dependent on forestry. But I should like to think that perhaps in the future there might be some form of guaranteed markets so that we, as woodland owners, know that when we come to thin and clear fell our trees we shall be able to get a reasonable return on the time, money and effort that we have put into that.
Finally, I think we must consider the other uses that can be put to land which many people would like to see planted. Personally, I am not convinced, even though it would give more employment, that all agricultural land in the more remote areas should be put under trees. I think in some ways this would be a pity. There are also other questions to be considered, such as the encouragement of tourism in Scotland. There are people who consider that hills covered with a mass of trees are not so attractive as the barren hills were when they first saw them. I do not agree with this theory, but I think it is one that has to be considered, particularly when you come to plant near well-known viewpoints. The Forestry Commission are much more careful about this now, I am delighted to say, and I hope that it will not be a problem in the future.
Secondly, on this particular subject, there is the fact that deer are becoming more and more profitable. Most of the venison shot is exported to Germany, and therefore it gives us valuable foreign currency. Much of the woodlands in the Highlands of Scotland could be used, when they have reached a sufficiently old age, for the winter shelter and feeding of deer, as a subsidiary purpose. I would hope, therefore, that the Forestry Commission and private woodland owners who do not do this would consider letting deer into some of their more elderly woods, so that we shall no longer suffer from the problem of deer trying to raid young plantations or agricultural land through being driven out of their traditional wintering areas by enormous
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deer fences. I realise that, for the first twenty years or so of any wood's life, you canot afford to let deer into it, but after that the damage they do is relatively small, and their value is increasing from year to year by a considerable amount, and is earning us quite a lot of foreign currency.
There is one other small point which I should like to ask the noble Lord, Lord Mitchison. I believe the Irish have done quite a lot of experiments in County Sligo, of growing trees on very wet, very bad, peaty land, which some of the west coast of Scotland resembles. Has his Department liaised with the Irish over this, or have the Forestry Commission liaised with the Irish? If so, are there any means whereby we can—and I speak now as a private individual—find out the result of these experiments which the Irish have conducted, and which I think would be of great interest to people who would like to plant woods on land which in many cases resembles the west coast of Ireland?
5.34 p.m.
THE EARL OF BRADFORD: My Lords, I should like to add my voice to the chorus of congratulations and thanks to my noble friend Lord Dundee for once again introducing the subject of Forestry to your Lordships' House, and for calling for an increased forestry programme. I should also like to express appreciation of the very encouraging speech of the noble Lord, Lord Mitchison.
When I saw this afternoon the list of noble Lords who were to speak in this debate, especially from this side of the House, it seemed to me that your Lordships might get a rather false impression that trees grow only in that far, damp, misty, but beautiful land, which lies somewhere to the North of England. As I heard noble laird after noble laird sweeping to the attack, and saw the long list of further noble lairds to follow me, I not only felt rather lonely as a spokesman for England, but seemed to hear the skirl of the pipes, and the strains of "The Flowers of the Forest". May I reassure your Lordships that we do grow trees South of the Scottish Border. I myself have tried to grow trees in the Highlands and in England, and I think I grow better trees in England than I do in the Highlands.

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On the subject of the Highlands (about which I must confess to be woefully ignorant, in comparison with noble Lords who have preceded me this afternoon), I would say that I believe that it is possible for trees and sheep to live together, and that the planting of large areas with trees does not necessarily mean the replacement of shepherds. It is my experience that trees and sheep can grow together, and can increase in numbers together. I hope that I am right in saying this, and that my noble friend Lord Craigton can also find that this is in fact the case.
In the past, in the matter of ministerial responsibility, forestry has languished as the junior partner, first, to agriculture alone, and latterly also to fisheries and food. This Cinderella status has been emphasised by the fact that although the Ministry had two "f's" a third—Forestry—was not added at any time, and by the fact that, although the Minister was responsible for forestry, his Ministry never have been. Ministers of Agriculture and Fisheries and Food have generally been far too busy with their other responsibilities to have much interest in forestry, and have generally confined their forestry activities to reading a prepared policy statement in Parliament once every five years. In fact, I find it hard to remember when a Minister of Agriculture last gave a lead to the industry in a public speech.
Her Majesty's Government have now taken the most interesting step of creating a new Ministry of Land and Natural Resources. I understand that among the many functions of the Minister is the responsibility for forestry in England and Wales. I am not clear, however, whether this is also a departmental responsibility—
LORD MITCHISON: My Lords, I am sorry to interrupt the noble Earl, but one has to be very careful with the Welsh. The Secretary of State for Wales has responsibility in relation to Wales. Perhaps I need not go into the exact relationship now.
THE EARL OF BRADFORD: My Lords, I thank the noble Lord for his correction. It is also not clear whether the Minister will continue to rely, as hitherto, on the Forestry Commission for
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advice on forestry matters, or will have within his Department an additional source of advice, as recommended by the Estimates Committee in their Report last July. In the absence of this information, it is very difficult to calculate the balance of advantage to forestry from the creation of the new Ministry. On the plus side, one can see that the Minister will include among his responsibilities such matters as National Parks and tree preservation orders. It can be only an advantage to have one Ministry, instead of two, dealing with these matters: it should make for better balance and understanding between amenity interests and forestry.
Possible disadvantages would seem to be, first, the separation of forestry from its sister industry, the land, at a time when there is much talk, and some action, of integration between the two. Secondly, I have a doubt whether a Minister, or a Ministry, concerned primarily with planning and land use is best placed to promote forestry as an important home industry. I very much hope, however, that we have a champion of forestry both State and private. It is, I think, of the utmost importance to have a correct balance between the two—that is to say, State forestry and private forestry. I think it is as well to remind your Lordships that private forestry is still the more productive partner, producing some 90 per cent. of the hardwoods and well over half of the conifers put on the market in this country. However, the State forestry will overtake the private side about 1970. Private forestry is ready to play its part in any programme of increased afforestation, but woodland owners have two essential requirements: stability of the industry and security and confidence in the future.
I have spent the last few years trying to recruit for the Timber Growers' Organisation, which is the equivalent in England of the Scottish Woodlands Owners' Association, of which we have heard. This organisation was set up at the request of the Government as an organisation representing woodland owners, and I have found that this question of confidence has been the main difficulty both in recruiting members to the organisation and in inducing them to dedicate their woodlands. In fact, I have had quite a tussle with some Members of your Lordships' House on the subject.

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It is, I think, a truism to say that forestry is a long-term undertaking, but he who plants spruce must wait 60 years to see it as saw-timber, pine 80 years and oak more than a century. Few men have the chance to see the maturity of the trees they have planted. Those of us who plant trees do so for the advantage of our grandchildren. The wish to hand on something worth while to succeeding generations is one of the strongest motive forces in tree planting, but without a feeling of security and confidence in the future few landowners would plant trees. It was the trees from private woodlands which made a vital contribution to victory in two world wars. Those trees would not have been there if the landowners of the 19th century had not had security and confidence in the future.
The need for more trees is greater now than ever it was. Uses of timber multiply. Our imports of timber and timber products are vast, exceeded only by those of food and oil. Whereas in the past we have had the bulk of the world's forests to choose from, Europe is now a net importer of timber. A world shortage is officially forecast by the end of the century. We shall need all the timber we can grow at home. It is real wealth from our own soil, the only permanently self-renewable raw material that we can grow, and with more uses than any other raw material. In any increased forestry programme, private as well as State forests must play their part. The planting record of private woodlands since the war is a good one, their proportion of the desirable programme having been handsomely exceeded in the last eight years. I think the noble Lord, Lord Mitchison, said private woodlands have been planting three acres to one acre of State forest. I think that was the case in the first ten years after the war, but the figures I have show that in the last eight years private owners have planted well over 272,000 acres as against over 462,000 acres by the Forestry Commission, which figures I think are accurate. I may say that in this England has more than amply played its part, as has Wales.
Confidence in the future is the main necessity. That confidence has been recently shaken, as several noble Lords have mentioned, by rumours of impending adverse fiscal measures, and the planting programme has been affected.
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Nothing could help more to bring about the desirable atmosphere of confidence than a firm declaration by the Government that no fiscal measures adversely affecting private forestry are now contemplated. The administration of forestry in this country is a remarkably illogical one, yet has worked well. The State forest authority has been responsible for the control of private forestry while being in direct commercial competition with it. Friction has been largely avoided in the past while the State forests have been largely in the establishment stage and because authority has been wielded in a benevolent and friendly manner by the Forestry Commission. I should like to pay my tribute to them for their ever helpful attitude, and in particular to the present Chairman the noble Earl, Lord Waldegrave, and his predecessor the noble Earl, Lord Radnor.
However, the State forests are becoming ever more productive; their production of conifers is likely to exceed that of private woodlands in about 1970, and (the element of competition may well become much keener. If the present structure of the industry is to remain, there will have to be close co-ordination on marketing matters to avoid the swamping of private forestry by its big brother. It is very desirable that there should be a real and close partnership between the three parts of the productive side of the home forestry industry—that is to say, State forest, private forestry and the home timber trade. To this end the setting up of area marketing liaison committees in England and in Wales was a promising beginning, and it is to be hoped that these will be consolidated and improved. One of the weaknesses at present is a lack of co-ordination and proper integration in the home timber trade, and it is much to be hoped that the trade can sort out its difficulties and become streamlined and strengthened in its organisation.
I have finished my main theme, but there are three other points which I think are important and which I should like to raise. The first concerns the growing of hardwoods. At one time Great Britain was largely covered by deciduous woodlands. The demands of the consumer are now largely for softwoods, and at least 90 per cent. of present planting is of conifers. There is, however, still a large demand for good quality hardwoods, and

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large quantities are imported. Unfortunately, for various reasons it is totally uneconomic to grow hardwoods here, especially oak and beech, which are the traditional deciduous hardwoods. I should like to ask whether an investigation of the possibility of special assistance in growing hardwoods on the better soils in this country which are still in private hands could be made.
Another point concerns forestry research, which I think is extremely well done by the Forestry Commission and the Forest Products Research Laboratory. But it seems to me that the standard forestry practice in this country is even-aged forestry, consisting of first blanket planting, followed eventually by felling and replanting, and this has become tacitly accepted as the best system. In many parts of the Continent this has been tried and discarded in favour of uneven-aged mixed forestry, with its many advantages such as greater growing volume, improved health of soil and forest, greater amenity effect, prevention of erosion, and so on. The only disadvantage, or the main disadvantage, is the difficulty of management, which I think should be accepted as more of a challenge than a difficulty. There are many who think that uneven-aged mixed systems should be investigated much more thoroughly in this country, particularly in the hilly districts.
Lastly, I should like to raise the question of hedgerow timber. We used to have great wealth of timber in our hedgerows and fields, but this has been much reduced and not replaced, and there is very little young growth. Some years ago a Committee sat on the subject under the chairmanship of the noble Lord, Lord Merthyr, and made a Report with many recommendations, none of which, I think, has been carried out. I have not given notice of this question, but I would ask whether this Report might be looked at again and whether there might be some possibility of implementing some of its recommendations. In conclusion, I would assure your Lordships that the private woodlands, in England at least, and Wales, are ready to play their part in the national economy, given suitable encouragement.
5.50 p.m.
THE MARQUESS OF AILSA: My Lords, I should like first to join with
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other noble Lords in thanking my noble friend Lord Dundee for initiating this debate. I feel that it has been far too long since we have had a debate on this subject. In my opinion, there is a feeling of uncertainty throughout the industry, and this is caused by a certain lack of positive direction coming from the Government.
As your Lordships know, by a combined effort between private owners and the Forestry Commission, a great deal has been done to replace the damage done to woodlands by the two wars. Private owners have been encouraged to invest capital. In this they have been encouraged by the Forestry Commission on behalf of the Government. They have been given tempting grants and an acceptable tax system. We now hear rumours that this tax system may be changed. I do not suggest that nothing should be changed, but I think that before anything is done great care must be taken to ensure that it does not do damage to the industry; that it will be beneficial, and will not be done just to satisfy the Inland Revenue who may not be too happy about their books. We have an industry to keep going. I would remind your Lordships of what has already been said several times, that the capital invested in forestry is a long-term investment, spread over many years, and it is absolutely essential to keep it coming in. As has already been said by the noble Lord, Lord Mitchison, we cannot have a "Stop-Go" policy. Capital must keep coming in if we are going to have a successful policy.
The other cause for uncertainty and disquiet is the manner in which these policies apparently are decided. One gets the impression that the Treasury feel that we foresters are a somewhat unnecessary evil, that we have to be placated. I wonder what account has been taken of the timber that is going to be produced in this country over the next few decades, and of the timber that is going to be required for consumption within this country. I am informed that there is every indication there will in fact be a timber shortage starting some time during the 'seventies and going on well into the next century. Therefore, surely it is absolutely vital that we have an industry that is capable of producing as much timber for the home market as possible.

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I should like to say that, in my opinion, the woodland owners have in the last few years done a tremendous amount to help themselves. They have formed associations and co-operatives, some of which we have already heard about. These in themselves have gone a long way to improve the management, to find better working methods, to find new markets and to exploit these. But still assistance is needed in various directions. Without going into too much detail, perhaps I might mention just one—namely, roads. Strangely enough, the policy in the past in regard to planting has been to plant big blocks, and as these have become ready for felling it has been absolutely necessary to be able to get into the woods to get the timber out. This has to be done by the use of heavy lorries, which entails the making of roads. These roads are exceedingly costly. Anything that can be done by the Government towards assistance in this respect would, I think, be gratefully received all round.
The other point to which I should like to draw your Lordships' attention concerns the small woodland owners. I am thinking of people who have under a hundred acres of woodland. These people in fact comprise 88 per cent. of all the private woodland owners within the country, and their acreage accounts for 25 per cent. of the whole. This is not something to be cast aside. It seems a pity that there is no provision for encouragement or assistance for them to put their woods in order. There is a scheme for small farmers. One wonders whether a scheme of a similar sort could not be put into effect for small woodland owners.
I think we all wish to see this industry as a really satisfactory industry, and one upon which we can look with pride. I hope that by the end of the day we shall have such guidance from the Benches opposite that we may know we may go forward with absolute assurance and confidence.
5.56 p.m.
LORD FORBES: My Lords, so many points have already been raised in this debate that I have been able to scratch practically all mine from my list. I am left with just two. My two points are, first of all, the use of land for forestry in upland areas; and, secondly, the rela-
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tionship of private forestry with the Government. In some parts forestry and agriculture have been clashing. This has been going on mainly in the upland areas, just the areas where timber and agriculture should be complementary to one another. Clash is by no means general, but it does occur. There are, and probably always will be, a few rather narrow-minded people who just cannot see the wood for the trees. Unfortunately, little do those people realise the importance of agriculture and forestry in our upland areas being complementary to-day.
My noble friend Lord Dundee raised the point that forestry does a lot towards giving employment. That is absolutely true. But I should like to correct the record slightly in this respect. I do not agree with him entirely. I think he gave the impression that if we had forestry all over the Highlands there would be no lack of labour. That is not so. I have been looking carefully at the figures, and one can see that in certain areas agriculture employs more per acre than does forestry. I admit that you get the opposite position as well; but I do not think it is right to say that forestry quite definitely employs more than agriculture. What we want is that both forestry and agriculture should help by giving diversification of labour.
I agree strongly with the noble Lord, Lord Mitchison. If it is not out of order to say so from these Benches, may I say that I greatly enjoyed his really excellent speech? The noble Lord, Lord Mitchison, pinpointed the fact that you cannot look at forestry in isolation. I have seen some areas that were completely devoid of livestock, mainly because there were no trees to protect the animals from devastating winds. In fact, it has been claimed that in some parts of the Borders shelter has added no less than 30 per cent. to the stocking of the areas. The complementary aspect of forestry and agriculture cannot be confined to employment and stocking of the upland areas.
There is another important aspect—namely, finance. Agriculture provides income—the bread and butter; but agriculture cannot expand without capital. It is in this respect that forestry can play an extremely important role, as a source of capital. Eventually, when it has been going long enough,

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forestry will provide income as well as capital; but at present the rule, rather than the exception, is that one generation sows or plants for the next to reap. Forestry is a sound investment.
But I would add the one proviso given by the noble Earl, Lord Dundee, and the noble Duke, the Duke of Buccleuch and Queensbury, in which they said that there must be no juggling about with taxation in regard to forestry. The very idea of forestry and agriculture living together helps to keep that essential balance which is so important to the conservation of our natural resources—soil, water, wild life, to mention a few. This, in its turn, makes the countryside attractive for people to live in and attracts others whom we want, such as the tourists. However, forestry in the United Kingdom is not something that should be carried on in vast areas having no boundaries, with the balance of nature allowed to get out of hand. Rather is it an industry that is, ideally, integrated with other land uses. In short, we want to see trees in many more places, but not in blocks running into hundreds of acres. Nor do we want the countryside to become nothing but dark green conifers so far as the eye can see—as I am afraid is happening in some parts of Scotland.
Hardwoods, although uneconomic in many parts, especially Scotland, must be planted by the Forestry Commission and by private owners. Not only do they relieve monotony, but they are also necessary in the interests of good sylviculture. In this respect, encouraging words must come from Her Majesty's Government to the Forestry Commission. And the Forestry Commission, in turn, must give encouragement, not only by word of mouth but also in the form of finance to private owners. The upland sheep or cattle farmer must be encouraged not only for the sake of good husbandry but for the amenity of other people to plant trees: trees to give shelter to his stock; timber for fencing; and—possibly most important of all—to give him a reserve of that much-needed asset, capital. This is not happening and the reason is quite clear to see. It is just a lack of education on the subject, although I heartily agreed
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with the noble Earl, Lord Dundee, when he said that more attention might be given to forestry on television. As I am associated with Independent Television, I would welcome, now that we have lost cigarettes, any advertisements for trees.
The reason why farmers do not plant trees is largely the high cost of establishing a small wood. The cost of fencing alone for a small wood can be as high as £40 an acre. This is very high when one considers that the final product may be worth only about £100 an acre. Might I suggest that the Government should advise and assist the upland farmer in the integration of farming and forestry? I would suggest that Her Majesty's Government should seriously consider giving a specially favourable grant towards the establishment of shelter woods (I emphasise the word "woods"; I do not mean belts) in upland areas.
Might I suggest that, as the benefit would mainly accrue to agriculture, the assistance so given should be administered by the Ministry of Agriculture and the Department of Agriculture for Scotland, and not by the Forestry Commission? I think that it would be far more appropriate that any assistance for this purpose should come from the agricultural side rather than from the forestry side, as the Forestry Commission are charged with entirely economic projects from the forestry point of view.
My second point concerns private forestry. We have already heard that there are to-day two organisations in existence, the Timber Growers' Organisation, in England and Wales, and the Scottish Woodland Owners' Association, in Scotland. I believe that these two organisations suffer from one great handicap: they tend to be the poor relations of the Forestry Commission. Not only is their voice relayed to the Government by the Forestry Commission or by the Forestry Committee of Great Britain, but, worse still, they have to rely on getting a share of the "cake" which the Government have already handed to the Forestry Commission. It is only natural that the Forestry Commission should indent on the Government for the type of "cake" they want, and it is that "cake" which the two private woodland organisations then have to get a share of.

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Unfortunately, the Forestry Commission may like chocolate cake, while private woodland owners would far prefer to have some spicy cake; so they do not always want a slice out of the same cake. The Forestry Committee of Great Britain can do much to see that the private woodland owners get the right "cake". But what is really needed is that the two private woodland organisations should have direct access to the Ministers concerned. I believe that that would be a great step forward, if we could achieve it. Finally, I would say that I am quite convinced that there is a great future for forestry. Forestry and agriculture must be complementary, certainly in the upland areas; and private woodland organisations must be able to have the ear of the Ministers concerned.
6.8 p.m.
LORD DULVERTON: My Lords, may I add my words of gratitude to those which have already been expressed by others to my noble friend Lord Dundee for introducing to-day's extremely interesting debate. My noble friend in his speech, which I enjoyed so much, referred to the recent report of the Highlands and Islands Advisory Panel. He touched on the subject of the crofters and the smaller farmers in the Highland counties and their possible participation in forestry in the hills of the North. That is a point my noble friend Lord Forbes has just picked up again, and it is the only one upon which I wish to detain your Lordships for a few moments this evening.
I should like to elaborate briefly on this point, for it is one that I believe holds special importance, and importance of a social nature. I hope that as such it will commend itself to the noble Lord, Lord Mitchison, who referred to his own interest in the social aspects of forestry. There have been suggestions on the part of certain crofting communities that they should organise themselves so as to join in the national forestry effort. There are many practical and great difficulties to be overcome if ways and means are to be devised to enable them to do this. Some people feel that they might be almost insuperable. It is worth a great amount of effort to try to start a process whereby the smaller farmer or landowner could play a part in the pattern of
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reafforestation in the Highlands and in the country as a whole.
There is a revolution or, if that is too violent a word, at least a metamorphosis of land use unfolding in those sparsely populated areas, and it is a change of emphasis from sheep to trees. That has already been touched upon very ably by many noble Lords this afternoon, but I should like to touch on one particular point. With the greatest respect to the Forestry Commission, there is a danger of the Commission's becoming not only a preponderant influence but, in some of the remoter parts, a monopolistic agency superimposed on the existing structure of the countryside. It would in the long view, socially and economically, be a great pity if this were to happen. To say this is not derogatory to the Forestry Commission, and I hope my noble friend Lord Waldegrave will believe me when I say that I would not make the point if I felt that way about the matter.
Something has been said about the need for private forestry to make an even greater effort than in the past, and with this view I, for one, feel great sympathy. But it is for the small farmer, and for those crofters who wish to engage in tree planting, whether as shelter for their stock or on a commercial scale or as a combination of both, that I want to put in a special plea. These men would be unable to make a start without encouragement, advice and, probably, assistance, backed up by the Government itself and by Government agencies. I am very glad to know from the Chairman of the Crofters' Commission that serious attention is being paid to one or two specific proposals which have been put before him and he is looking into the matter in order to see whether a pilot scheme or schemes could be put into effective operation to allow something of the sort to take place. He tells me, too, that the coming of the pulp mill to Fort William has done much to awaken the interest of communities and individuals, whose activities have perforce, for generations or even centuries, been limited to unremunerative sheep farming. Their interest has been awakened by the new promise which the great outlet of the pulp mill provides and which it will open up to timber.
The Chairman has told me of the difficulties—and I can well understand

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them—that stand in the way of starting the sort of pilot scheme that I have touched upon. If anything is to be done and a start is to be made, the sympathy and the advice of the Forestry Commission will be needed in large measure. I am sure this will not be lacking if viable proposals can be devised. But in some cases legislation and Government action will be necessary if a start is to be made in the direction I have outlined. I very much hope that the Government will regard the sociological importance of the possibility as being, in the long term, very great.
I would end as perhaps I should have begun, by asking the forgiveness of my noble friends from Scotland for my brief trespass North of the Border, even if they do not perhaps entirely agree with all I have said. I would trespass even further for a moment, having been much pleased by the noble Lord, Lord Segal, who told us of the ancient sage planting his trees, and offer noble Lords, with great temerity in the face of my Scottish friends, the motto of the Royal Scottish Forestry Society:
"Ye may aye be sticking in a tree, It will be growing when you're sleeping."
6.15 p.m.
LORD SOMERS: My Lords, I had not intended to intervene in this debate, but I should just like to say a few words to support very strongly what was said by the noble Earl, Lord Bradford, on the question of maintaining an adequate supply of hardwood. This is a subject about which I have felt very strongly for a long time. It is, I suppose, impracticable to do anything compulsorily, but there is no doubt that hardwood is needed and will continue to be needed. It is a very slow growing crop, but unless we keep on planting it we shall not see any stocks and, eventually, our country will be entirely devoid of it. As it is, it is becoming increasingly difficult to get really good seasoned English oak from any ordinary timber merchant.
I have often toyed with an idea which I think is entirely fantastic, but which, none the less, expresses what I have in my mind. That is the idea of legislation to force any private individual, when he cuts down a tree, to plant within the
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period of one year another of a similar species. In that way, it would be possible to prevent our present stock of hardwood from being diminished. That is probably not a practicable measure, but I wish something could be done to emphasise to all those who are planting trees that hardwood will always be a valuable crop.
6.17 p.m.
LORD BURTON: My Lords, I hoped that it would not be necessary to speak to-day, when so many learned Lords who have such a wealth of knowledge on this subject have already spoken. However, there are one or two points which I feel have not been fully covered and which are of vital importance to forestry. My noble friend Lord Dundee, to whom I must add my thanks, complained about the delay in securing clearance for the Forestry Commission to purchase land. On the other side, some of the agriculturists complain that it is too easy for them to purchase land. Of course, if the position is altered it would only add to the problems of the Forestry Commission. For instance, the agriculturists feel that all members of the agricultural executive committee should be consulted before clearance is given, and not just the chairman. Would it be possible, I wonder, for the Forestry Commission to purchase, largely on speculation, land which they think is suitable for forestry? This would involve their being able to sell, although I believe that at the present time they are very restricted in what they are allowed to do in this respect.
My noble friend mentioned the legal difficulties of acquiring common land—I think, particularly, in regard to England. But I should like to emphasise how difficult it is for the Commission to purchase croft land. In spite of the remarks of my noble friend Lord Dulverton, I feel that the answer is for the Commission, and not the crofters, to do the planting. It would be much better if the legal system could be made easier so that they could purchase and plant shelter woods.
There is a most important problem that has only barely been touched upon, and that is the fire problem. The wastage in our woodlands can be enormous. This summer I had two members of a Russian delegation staying with me, and I asked them how they competed with fire in Russia in their enormous woodland areas,

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which must be sparsely populated. They told me that they had mobile fire squads which were flown in. I do not know whether anything of this kind can be done here—perhaps by training some of our military services; but I feel that a lot could be done, for at present, once a fire is established in any of our woods, we have no facilities for putting it out. This problem is becoming greater as our woods become bigger. When they were quite small the fires could be beaten out with brooms, but now that they are coming to thicket stage proper fire appliances are needed to put out any fires that start.
Our fire services appear to be geared largely to house fires and not to woodland fires. For instance, when you call the firemen out to a fire they come out in leather-soled boots, without any tackets, which obviously are quite unsuitable in heather country. I have raised this point with the authorities, and there appears to be some difficulty with the Firemen's Union, but I cannot see that it is insuperable because it must be for the benefit of the firemen as well. Also I understand that the fire services are not allowed to tune in to the same wavelength as air services. When there is a large fire a spotter 'plane would be most useful, and I believe that the R.A.F. is most eager to co-operate; but, obviously, if the pilots could not tune in to the firemaster on the site such co-operation would be impossible.
We then come to the question of the Land Use Survey, which has been mentioned largely in agricultural quarters. I would emphasise the danger of this. The Forestry Commission make surveys, and this is admirable; but if there is a hard-and-fast ruling it is impossible to manage one's land properly. Many of your Lordships may have had experience of planning designations which, as you will know, it is very difficult to reverse, and if any land survey is to be made I feel that it must not be rigid. My noble friend the Duke of Atholl mentioned help from the Forestry Commission with private planting. I am sorry that he has left, but I would inform him that the Forestry Commission is most helpful and co-operative in this respect when it has men available. But, of course, if its programme is properly geared I should hope that men would not be available.
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The noble Lord, Lord Mitchison, mentioned the social problem. I feel that this is most important, though not perhaps in the respect taken up by some of my noble friends. It is most important that planting should not be done too quickly. There is a tendency for the Forestry Commission, when it gets a piece of land, to plant it as soon as it can. It has already been mentioned that after about five years there is a further period of from ten to fifteen years, when there is very little to do to those woods. At such times these men have to be taken a considerable distance to other lands where the Forestry Commission (though I gather that it is short of land in certain places) has land. It is the local difficulty which is the trouble, and I believe that to some extent the Commission has brought this difficulty on itself by planting these specific areas too quickly. It is difficult for the Commission, because it does not know what land it will have available, but this is a point that should be watched very carefully. For instance, on my own particular estate the Commission suggested that I should plant everything within eleven years. I refused to do that. I pointed out that I should have to build houses for the foresters and employ those men for eleven years, and there would then follow a period when I had nothing for them to do. I now have it on a 22-year period, which is far more satisfactory.
To some extent the Highland Panel's Report bears out the same thing. It says that there are 500,000 acres available and cleared for planting by agriculture. Now if this is planted at the existing speed of planting in the Highlands, those 500,000 acres will all be planted in 28 years. Together with existing plantings, this seems to be reasonable, and from the social aspect it would mean that the men would be in permanent employment. But the Panel's Report suggests that this planting should be speeded up, in which case, if their recommendations are adopted, the whole area will be planted within a period of 20 years. If that were to happen, I think that in many areas, for a period of years, men would have to be taken some distance to be employed.
One other small point is the question of land improvement. Trees are a great improver of land. Their roots go right down into the subsoil and they bring up

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minerals. Sheep had a great era last century, after the plantations had been cleared, and now they have steadily deteriorated. We are having to resort to the use of minerals and all sorts of "dope" which formerly we did not have to use, and this, I believe, is due to the fact that a lot of the inherent wealth of minerals in the ground has been soaked out of it. This is particularly so in the wetter areas of the West Coast, where the peat forms a type of slime after a number of years and the whole surface deteriorates. I feel where it is possible—and I know that it is possible only in certain places—there ought to be a rotation. After you have grown your trees you should not immediately replant but put on stock. The stock will benefit; you will lose any moss and such things connected with the trees, and the trees will benefit when they are replanted. So you should be able to increase the stock upon your ground and increase the whole mineral content of your soil.
Finally, I would say to my noble friend Lord Bradford that I hope he will come to the Highlands more often, because I think he will probably find they are not so misty as Shropshire.
LORD FORBES: My Lords, I think the noble Lord said he was afraid of the Lands Commission. What Lands Commission is this?
LORD BURTON: I was speaking of the Land Survey. There is pressure at the moment, I think, particularly from the Scottish Farmers' Union, for a land survey to be made, and I am saying that I hope that, before anything is decided, great care will be taken over this matter. 6.28 p.m.
VISCOUNT STONEHAVEN: My Lords, I want first of all to thank the noble Earl, Lord Dundee, for letting the Scots loose in your Lordships' House, and then to apologise for yet another Scotsman taking part in this debate. I am primarily a farmer and I am only in my spare time a forester. I believed a long time ago that ideally land which could not be used for farming should be put to use in forestry. Therefore, since that time, thirty years ago, I have planted ten acres every year, and occasionally
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beaten my programme, with the result that I now have 400 acres afforested. I can now see in ten-acre patches the mistakes I made twenty years ago. The shelter that this is now producing on the estate is quite invaluable. My tenants are coming to me and saying, "Can you plant us a shelter belt?", which is different from the normal farming outlook. They see the value of shelter belts and small blocks, and the use of ground which would otherwise lie idle. There is an enormous amount of this kind of ground which I think should be treated, and, I hope, profitably, in this way.
To my mind, integration is one of the biggest points at this present time. We have a great start with the Forestry Commission, which has done wonderful work. It has made its mistakes, but so have we all, and it has now got to the stage where I think we must look at the whole problem from a rather different angle. Before going any further, I must say that I liked the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Segal, about education.
My Lords, there is a farm adoption scheme, and I do not see why there should not be a forest adoption scheme. I am afraid the farm adoption scheme is not as healthy as it might be, but people are wrestling with it, and I think it is a good scheme. I think the same idea could be extended to a forest adoption scheme, to very great advantage. There is, unfortunately—and if one reads the Seventh Report of the Estimates Committee it will be seen that it is underlined two or three times—the scepticism of the Treasury with regard to forestry. I will not bother to read from the Report, but any noble Lord who wants to will find it there. They still look right down their noses at forestry, which I think is a great pity and discouraging to other people.
However, I should like to take up one point which is concealed discreetly almost at the end of the Report, because a lot has been said about the value of labour. I do not deny that value at all, but I think there is a word of warning here. This occurs at page 176 of this Report, and is Question No. 1443. It is about labour, and it is the Conservator, West Scotland, Mr. J. E. James, who says this:
"I may be in rather a peculiar position here. I have no rural sources of labour

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upon which I can draw. The only labour pool I can draw on is from the industrial part of Scotland, where one would not normally expect to get good country labour. The result is that if I wish to increase my staff or replace wastage, I have to go more or less to that pool, and I get a very poor class of labour. They have not been brought up to think in country terms. Many of them cannot even use an ordinary simple garden tool. So that, so far as quality goes, I am very doubtful whether we are really going to get the labour we need. We shall have to train what increases we want ourselves locally, which may be a slow and expensive business. But, if we can get the townsman who is prepared to live in the country, we shall have to face up to the expense and time needed to train him".
Further on, he says:
"I have a wastage in the Conservancy of over 20 per cent. In some years it has been as high as 55 to 60 per cent. That gives you an indication of the labour troubles we have."
In another set of questions, Mr. Millan asks:
"I am not quite clear why you have not got a pool of labour in your own area. You are operating in an area which suffers from unemployment and depopulation. Why is it that you cannot attract some of that labour, which otherwise drifts down to the towns?"
The answer is:
"We pick up an odd man or two in the islands and in the west, but the number of people we can get does not meet our requirements at all. I am drawing a parallel between west Scotland and east Scotland. In Aberdeenshire and Angus"—
I take exception to the fact that they have not put Kincardineshire in at all, but there it is—
"there is a natural agricultural population. They may be totally employed or not—I do not know—but the inbreeding of country work is inherently there. We have not got that here."
Mr. Millan pursues the point, and asks:
"But you are still operating in an area where there is depopulation, where young men are going into the towns?",
and the answer is:
"I would not think there is very much of that, except from the islands. In places like Oban, Lochgilphead and Campbelltown—those really are the three centres of population, I think—as far as I know there is no unemployment."
That is what was said by the Conservator. West Scotland. The point I want to make is that if you chase the shepherds off the land you cannot, in
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due course, employ those shepherds' sons, because they have gone. You have to bring labour back. I think you should have regard to that point and should encourage the shepherds to plant the jobs for their sons; endeavouring, however you do it, to keep the farm population, the agricultural population, on the land and to employ it, somehow, for the twenty years before it is fully employed in forestry.
A certain amount has been said about the shortage of timber that we are promised from Europe. The very recent F.A.O. Report pointed out that in certain kinds of timber, which is building timber and saw timber, the actual harvest had gone down, not up. But it had greatly increased for use in pulp and manufactured woods, which is a change of use. The danger of relying on that, so far as we are concerned, is that there are several alternative methods of making pulp for paper, if you have to use them. You can use bagasse, you can use straw or you can use flax for all these paper boards; and, if it really comes down to it, you can get a mature pulp wood crop in certain undeveloped countries in five years—such as, for example, Swaziland, where the rotation of pulp wood is five years. Trees just grow as you look at them. So the importation of pulp wood might be both a method of helping a developing country and a much more economical method of producing pure pulp—or, anyway, a very competing method for our own factories.
So far as the food trends are concerned, which I think one must consider, F.A.O. state that the balance of production is only just holding its own, even if it is doing that, in the very deplorable conditions as regards food that obtain at the moment in the world. Certain countries and certain areas are prospering, and it seems to me a logical thing—whether it happens or not, I do not know—to think that there will be a marketing sphere, comprised of Japan, Australia and New Zealand, which will take away, and very rapidly take away, any surplus mutton, lamb or beef. So I think we ought to be a little careful when we keep thinking that food comes in by the shipload whenever we want it. One day it may not. This is another reason why I think we have to be careful about chasing

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people off the hills; and it supports the other argument.
Now I said we should look at it from rather a different way. I think the accent now should be on marketing. The trees are coming in and are growing. When you start talking about marketing, I personally think that the first thing you should do, looking at Scotland, is to find your handy centres from the transport and communications point of view, and plant as much land as you can within a 50-mile radius around those points; because, although the Fort William Pulp Mills say that 100 miles is economic, or they hope it will be (they have in fact gone 137 miles) they do not want to go so far. Furthermore, whereas an uneconomic sheep can walk off the land, you have to transport an uneconomic tree off the land; and that is a point we must look at and plan.
So far as the N.F.U. survey is concerned I find myself rather in sympathy. What I want to do—and I want to do it unofficially, with the blessing and perhaps a little poking from the Government Department, as all these areas are covered by an N.F.U. committee—is this. To begin with, if any farmer does not belong to the N.F.U., that is his own fault; and there is a Scottish Landowners' Federation Committee, and if he does not belong to that, that is his fault too. Now, if those two bodies got together with the Department of Agriculture chap and the Forestry Commission chap, and had an unofficial and very rough and ready discussion, saying, "I think I should like to plant 50 acres here, or 20 acres there", you could at least then get something on a map and get a rough idea of what you are playing at. The whole thing at the moment is completely haphazard, and that, I consider, is something we should endeavour to stop.
There is one other thing that I want to say from the sylviculture point of view. You take out your worst trees when you are thinning. You do not take out the best trees; on the whole, it is usually the worst trees, at any rate at the beginning. Some of our trees are distressingly like inverted carrots. They are quite fat at the bottom and go up to a point with an enormous taper. Owing to the wind, to
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pigeons of starlings or other animals, a lot of them in a good many parts of Scotland where it is desirable to grow trees are bent or bowed. This can be overcome by a method employed in some of the younger countries and known as "finger-jointing". In the finger-jointing method you take the fat bottom of the tree after sawing and join it to the next part with a finger joint, and thus build up a standard building section of any length. You do not need to grow it in one length—that is something which you can produce only from the best trees. This is one way of overcoming the problem of what in my part of the world are called the "orra" trees.
Another method is to build up a standard building section of laminated wood. I think that these two methods should be started, at least experimentally, to produce a much more economic market for the bad timber which must be cut out anyway. Those trees would then produce a better price than one wouid expect to get for pulp. I should like to say one thing to my noble friend Lord Forbes. If he will appear at Blackburn Bridge—and I think he knows where that is—on Wednesday, March 3, he will find that the institution of which he is a director is televising an experiment on controlled burning in connection with forestry, carried out by Alginate Industries. This will take place providing it does not rain all the time.
6.42 p.m.
THE JOINT PARLIAMENTARY UNDER-SECRETARY OF STATE FOR SCOTLAND (LORD HUGHES): My Lords, at what used to be regularly referred to in your Lordships' House as "this late hour" (which was sometimes at a very much earlier hour than this) I have the choice of offending individual Lords by not replying to every point which has been raised or, worse, of offending every noble Lord by attempting to refer to every point which has been raised. I must therefore try to keep one eye on the clock and to steer such a course as will enable me to complete the voyage in a reasonable time.
First of all, I should like to say how much my noble friend Lord Mitchison and I have appreciated the range of this debate which, as new Ministers responsible for forestry, among other

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things, we have found extremely helpful. I can say at once that the point made by the noble Earl, Lord Dundee, about the need for co-operation and mutual confidence between the Forestry Commission and private forestry, which was accepted wholeheartedly by my noble friend, is also my own point of view. I can assure noble Lords that anything we can do, as individual Ministers, to help that frame of mind continue as the permeating doctrine in forestry will be done.
From that general statement I should like to go on to some of the points which have been raised in the course of the debate. The first—in point of time, and not because I wish to be controversial—is Lord Mansfield's suggestion that the Forestry Commission, as a public body, must, in the ordinary course of events, be a more wasteful organisation than private forestry.
THE EARL OF MANSFIELD: My Lords, I would not say "wasteful"; I would say expensive.
LORD HUGHES: Well, my Lords, I would regard unnecessary expense as being wasteful. However, whether more expensive or wasteful, in any event the information I shall give him acquits the Forestry Commission of either charge. It is difficult to give figures which are not capable of contradiction at one point or another when one must deal in averages (which is all the noble Earl asked for, and all that he could expect to be given), but in 1964 the average cost of the Commission planting was about £40 per acre. We believe that the cost of private planting was about the same, and in some cases a little more.
Having regard to what has been said on taxation and grants, to which I shall come back later, I would suggest that it is perhaps not in the interests of private forestry that the noble Earl, Lord Mansfield, should seek to prove that planting costs private forestry a great deal less than £40 per acre; otherwise the grant of £22 12s. would seem to be unduly generous. On that point I think the Commission can be considered to be doing an efficient job if one looks at it from the point of view of costs.
THE EARL OF MANSFIELD: Did the noble Lord's figure of £40 include all the overheads—administration and the like?
LORD HUGHES: My Lords, I doubt whether it would—I gather that it would not. On the other hand, I doubt whether the private forestry operator counts in all of what might be regarded as overhead costs in running the more attractive parts of his estate.
I want to go on to a point raised by the noble Lord, Lord Segal. We found his references particularly unusual but, at the same time, particularly attractive. On the matter of the Director of Education, all I can say is that it is premature to refer to this question at the present time, for this is merely one of some proposals made by the Estimates Committee which are being examined both by the Commission and by the Minister, and upon which it will be possible to say much more, of a more definite nature, at a later time—and I hope that it will not be too much later. On research, I am afraid that he did the Commission an injustice. The figure of £17,000 to which he referred was only the Commission's grant to the universities. Fundamental research and other research, such as in botany and genetics, carried out by the Commission is grant-aided from other sources. The Commission's total expenditure on research in 1964 was £500,000, out of its total grant of £13½ million. So I think it is a fairly high proportion of the money available.
LORD SEGAL: My noble friend will forgive me for interrupting, but I was fully aware of the fact that this figure had been allocated to the universities for research. I am sorry I did not make that point quite plain in my remarks.
LORD HUGHES: I thank my noble friend.
The final point about stimulating interest in schools we found a particularly interesting suggestion, and I am certain that the Commission will be very happy to consider this suggestion made by my noble friend. I should say, in connection with this matter, that, while the custom of the House prevents the noble Earl, Lord Waldegrave, from taking part in our debate by speaking, he has paid us the compliment of sitting through the

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whole of the debate, and I have no doubt that he will be paying noble Lords the compliment of acting on the suggestions which have been made (although he has not been able to comment on them), where it is appropriate or within the power of the Commission to do so. I express the hope that this suggestion is one which the noble Earl will take up in due course.
The noble Duke, the Duke of Atholl, raised the question of advice to private owners. Private owners can get advice from a variety of sources. First of all, naturally they can get it from their own organisations, and in particular from the Scottish Woodland Owners' Association. They can get advice from numerous consultants (though presumably that is rather more expensive), and also, where appropriate, from the Commission. I may say that they use this last source of advice freely. Perhaps the reason they use it freely is that they get it free. Finally, there are many contractors, large and small, who will carry out work for owners. In appropriate cases, the Commission do work for owners, on the basis that costs and overheads are repaid. In this connection, I hope they take into account every possible overhead which the noble Earl might foresee. On the other hand, having regard to the attitude of the Forestry Commission to private forestry, I think that their reckoning of the overheads will be on a fairly reasonable basis.
THE EARL OF BRADFORD: My Lords, I assure the noble Lord, from what they have charged me, that they do take in all overheads.
LORD HUGHES: As a Minister I cannot say that I would disagree with that. The noble Duke, the Duke of Atholl, raised the question of deer. The Commission work closely with the Red Deer Commission. However, they do not agree that the damage by red deer to plantations is not important; the age at which trees get beyond the stage of being damaged by deer probably comes down in the end to a difference of opinion. On the noble Duke's final point, the Commission and Ministers have been in close touch with the Irish Forest Service. In
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fact, it is true to say that there is a valuable two-way traffic in ideas between the Irish and ourselves, not only on planting in peat, but on all aspects of forestry.
The noble Duke, the Duke of Buccleuch and Queensberry, said that everybody wanted expansion more quickly and he mentioned the benefits which would accrue to production, to the balance of payments and to employment from an expanded forestry programme. I was glad to hear him say this, because forestry Ministers are also of that opinion, and in the consultations which must of necessity take place with our friends in the Treasury all that has been said by noble Lords to-day will be made full use of in pursuing our proposals. We particularly appreciate what the noble Duke has done in connection with encouraging his friends who are landowners to make land available to the Commission, and I wish to thank him for offering once again to give this service to the Commission. I hope that this time he will have an even greater response than on the last occasion, when it was very satisfactory. I also hope that it may be more lasting in every case, because some of his friends changed their minds after the first step had been taken. Their withdrawal cannot be placed at the door of the noble Duke. The effort to get them to make the offer was his, and it is for that work I wish to thank him, and it is that which I wish him to repeat, even more effectively.
Both noble Dukes referred to taxation changes, as did the noble Earl, Lord Dundee, and this question figured increasingly as the debate went on. My notes are particularly against what the noble Duke, the Duke of Atholl, said. I had warned several noble Lords beforehand about the danger of saying too much about this, but I did not know that the noble Duke was going to make a feature of this point and did not warn him. What he asked me to do was to anticipate the Budget statement. But he went on to say that he had little hope of getting an answer. As a prophet, the noble Duke is completely accurate. I would add a little warning. If he and other noble Lords go about assuming that the Government and my right honourable friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer have it definitely in mind

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to alter either the level of forestry grants or forestry taxation, they are in danger of creating a climate of opinion for the very thing they are seeking to avoid. Having regard to what the noble Earl, Lord Bradford, said about fire hazards and forestry, I think it may be unwise to shout "Fire!" about taxation before anybody has even struck a match.
The noble Earl, Lord Bradford, raised a point about the Committee on Hedgerows and Farm Timber. This Committee was appointed by the Forestry Commission and reported as far back as 1955. The Committee's recommendations were partly in the form of injunctions to the public and the private interests concerned, and partly in the form of proposals for legislation, which would have raised a number of complex issues. So far as the first is concerned, the Forestry Commission have respected the Committee's intentions. The complexity of the problems which are raised on the legislative side probably account for the fact that ten years have elapsed without any Bill coming forward. Obviously, it would be an act of rashness if, after a period of only a few weeks, I were to suggest that we were able to introduce legislation which defeated the combined efforts of the two successive Governments who were our predecessors. All I can hope for is that some more enterprising Members who have Private Members' Bills in mind may think of this, but I say that without implying that Her Majesty's Government would be able to find time for it.
I have mentioned what I consider to be two inaccuracies in the debate. I must say that the climatic description of Scotland by the noble Earl, Lord Bradford, was the inaccuracy that shone out like a blinding beacon of light. Frankly, I wondered where he had been. I wondered whether the noble Earl had been looking down from an aeroplane. The noble Earl wondered what advantage there would be in a change of Ministers. First of all in case his fears should be weighing heavier than his hopes, I would remind him that in Scotland there is no change. The Secretary of State remains the Forestry Minister. But to the less fortunate part of the country—in relation to forestry, not, I am afraid, in relation to many other things—one advantage of the change is that the Minister of Land
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and Natural Resources will be able to seek advice from his senior officers as well as from the Forestry Commission on the broader aspects of forestry policy in a way which was not appropriate for the Ministry of Agriculture previously to do. This does not mean, either, that the forestry Ministers will have fewer contacts with the chairman and officers of the Forestry Commission. So I think, on the whole, that the noble Earl would be justified in having more hopes than fears from the change.
The noble Earl also referred to the difficulties of a co-ordinated home timber trade, and hoped that it would be possible to have improvement. All I can say on this is that we echo his hopes, and anything which can be done by Her Majesty's Government in the sort of climate of opinion which we have at the present time about expenditure will be done. And I have no doubt that the Commission will be as co-operative on this aspect of giving help and advice as they have been on so many others.
The noble Earl might be interested if I read something from a paper which the busy lads in the Box have given me about research, because it has something which is of interest on the subject of hardwoods, which was raised by a number of noble Lords. The Forestry Commission have their own research branch, and, as I mentioned, their expenditure an 1964 was close on £500,000. The main lines of research and development are laid down by a committee representing all the interests concerned, now called the Utilisation Sub-Committee of the Home-Grown Timber Advisory Committee. This committee has laid down priorities for research, taking into account the joint programme agreed between the Commission and the Forest Products Research Laboratory. The highest priority was given to research for the improvement and more complete use of the marketing of low grade oak. Among the other matters dealt with by the Utilisation Sub-Committee in the last year have been markets for hardwoods, accelerated production for timber, and the use of home-grown timber in buildings and motorway fences. So I think the point that has interested a number of noble Lords, and which I would also say interested Ministers very

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much, is one which the Commission are dealing with in a most practical way.
The noble Marquess, Lord Ailsa, referred to the attitude of the Treasury. I did not hear him perfectly and I was not certain whether he accused the Treasury of considering that foresters were a necessary or a non-necessary evil. I hope that he was doing the kinder thing and saying they were considered a necessary evil. But, in any case, I think he is being a little hard on the Treasury. I can speak from only a few months' experience, and I speak perhaps a little unwisely at the beginning of some negotiations which might be tough. All I can say (in case they are likely to be reading this speech) is that we have not found them unduly unreasonable on this matter, but we should expect them to live up to their best records rather than to seek to emulate the poorer ones.
The noble Lord, Lord Forbes, disputed the figures of labour and employment which were given principally by the noble Earl, Lord Mansfield. I should like to say how interesting the figures submitted by the noble Earl were. He was most careful to point out that there was a wide range of employment. I do not think what he said was inconsistent with the point of view put forward by the noble Lord, Lord Forbes, because the noble Earl, Lord Mansfield, did say that there was some very good land which it would be really criminal to turn over to forestry, and where the production, even in terms of sheep, was very high. But then it went to the other range, where the number of acres per sheep was very high and the production was very low. So I think that probably, taken over the average, and having regard to the fact that the disputes about the use either for sheep or for trees is much more frequent in the upland areas, where the land tends to be more of the poor variety rather than the reverse, I should find it difficult to disagree with the figures put forward by the noble Earl, Lord Mansfield.
LORD FORBES: My Lords, I am sorry to interrupt, but for the sake of the record I must say that I did not dispute the figures of my noble friend Lord Mansfield. What I said was in relation to what my noble friend Lord Dundee
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said about the Highlands. I thought he gave the impression that forestry gave much greater employment in the Highlands than agriculture did. I said that this was not so in all cases.
LORD HUGHES: I think I could equally acquit the noble Earl, Lord Dundee, of making a charge of general application. He also spoke of a range of employment; and obviously if you take the most favourable range, the noble Earl, Lord Dundee, would be wrong, but if you take the least favourable range, he is very right. Probably if you take an average the noble Earl is still right; and I should think that it was in averages that he was talking.
On the subject of finance, where there have been by this time a number of suggestions for additional grants—grants for road purposes was one; and another was mentioned which escapes my memory—the noble Lord, Lord Forbes, said that what the Forestry Commission asked was not always what the private owner would want: the Forestry Commission might like chocolate cake, whereas the private owner might like a spicy cake. I rather thought that the emphasis on the taxation of grants was in danger of creating what I suggest is an erroneous impression, and is a very extreme case.
The noble Lord, Lord Dulverton, in his intervention in Scotland, but not in Scottish affairs (because this is not a Scottish debate, but a United Kingdom debate), had no need to apologise, for the point of view he expressed was not put forward by any other noble Lord, and I found it most interesting. I can assure him that the point about crofters or small farmers and land owners joining in afforestation work is one with which the Government are in complete agreement. We believe that these people have a part to play. I shall have a little more to say about that later on when I deal with a point made by the noble Earl, Lord Dundee.
The noble Lord, Lord Burton, raised the question of fire hazards. I am going to depart from the advice I was given, because I have been given an answer and dared to use it. I had better not look round. The information is that, so far as the Forestry Commission are concerned, the fire-service arrangements are really excellent. They have a highly

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organised radio-controlled fire-fighting service. They do the best they can for private forestry, which is to act as a good neighbour. They cannot, of course, undertake to maintain a fire service which would be capable of servicing all their own areas and the areas of all other adjoining proprietors. I am quite sure that in this matter they, like I, would be particularly anxious to follow up the information which the noble Lord, Lord Burton, gave as a result of the inquiries which he put to the Russian people, with their much greater forests and presumably much greater fire hazards. I certainly should wish to follow up this suggestion.
The noble Viscount, Lord Stonehaven, referred to his tenants' appreciation of shelter belts. I was glad to hear this, because, as he said, this is very much against the run of things. When it is suggested to the small farmer that putting up shelter belts is both in his own interests and in the interests of forestry, too many of them think that the Forestry Commission, or those interested in forestry, are trying to "put one over" on the farmer. This is not the case at all, and I hope that what the noble Viscount has said about the appreciation of this in practice will receive the publicity which would be so helpful and of great advantage, both to agriculture and to forestry. It will help in breaking down what is in many ways an unnecessary antagonism between forestry and agriculture.
There was an impression which seemed to be held by more than one noble Lord that the Forestry Commission have an arbitrary restriction placed on them by the Treasury as to the price they can offer for the acquisition of land. This is not so. Generally speaking, the Commission have little difficulty in agreeing a price, and in very few cases is the price the stumbling block in the acquisition of land. In fact, there have been cases where the Treasury have authorised a figure of up to £15 per acre for land which a number of years ago, say ten years ago, might have been worth only £4 or £5 per acre. I think that will confirm that there is no fixed figure in mind. But, having said that, I should perhaps add that I should not like to create the impression that the Forestry Commission are allowed to go ranging over Scotland offering £15 an acre for land.
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On the subject of guaranteed markets—and this was another point raised by a number of your Lordships—the best guarantee is the fact that we have to import 90 per cent. of our requirements of timber. I cannot think of a better guarantee to encourage people to go into the production of timber than to know that at the present time only one part in ten is provided from home resources. Therefore, with an efficient industry (and no one has suggested that forestry in this country is inefficient) the opportunities for breaking into this market, if not guaranteed in so many words, offer the next best thing to a guarantee that any industry could look for.
THE DUKE OF ATHOLL: My Lords, surely much of the imported timber is grown far more cheaply abroad, because it is natural timber. I agree that in the future it will be worked out, but at the moment the only cost is that of cutting and transporting the timber to where it is required. This is what worries so many timber growers in this country.
LORD HUGHES: Let us hope that the fears on the two subjects, the ability to compete with imported timber and that of taxation, both prove equally groundless.
Many of the points raised in opening the debate by the noble Earl, Lord Dundee, have already been dealt with by my noble friend Lord Mitchison, and I should like to take up some of those which my noble friend deliberately left to me. Before doing so, may I say that the noble Earl, Lord Dundee, speaks with an authority which comes from his long interest in the subject, plus the fact that he is a distinguished forester in his own right. My noble friend Lord Mitchison agreed, as do I, with his point (to which I have already referred, but I think it is worth repetition) that the closest collaboration and mutual confidence between private forestry and the work of the Forestry Commission is an absolute essential for successful forestry operations in this country. I think I can justly claim that the Commission have a good record in this respect, both in the way they have administered the grants schemes and from the technical advice and assistance which they are always willing to give to private landowners. This

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is something which we all hope will continue in the future, because the activities of both the Commission and private landowners contribute to the nation's timber resources, and there is no essential reason why one method should be preferred to the other. We should hope in the interests of the country, to see the maximum contribution coming from both sources.
I do not propose to go quite so far back into the matters to which the noble Earl referred in opening his speech, but he referred to the "undesirable programme" recommended in the 1943 White Paper. I think it is important, as my noble friend Lord Mitchison has already pointed out, to remember that this was prepared during war time, and the strategic considerations, which were a very important factor in the minds of those who drew it up, do not have quite the same validity at the present time, although we should be foolish if we were to ignore them in their entirety. I should say that the policy of Governments in recent years has been based on the reviews of the 1958 and 1963 Working Parties on Forestry Policy. The 1958 Working Party considered that the strategic case for forestry was no longer of the same validity, and since then the procedure has been on the basis of quinquennial reviews and, I would suggest, on a more realistic appraisal of what is required in the national interest in modern circumstances.
This does not, however, mean that we are not anxious to see a substantial and continuing programme of afforestation; and, as the noble Earl has pointed out, one of the keys to the situation is the rate at which land can be acquired for planting. In Scotland, the Commission have in the last five years acquired 117,000 acres and planted 161,000 acres. It is, however, significant that the land reserve at the end of 1964 was still slightly higher than it was five years previously, due to reclassification of land and to the Department of Agriculture clearing more land than was originally intended for planting. What we are concerned about, however, is not only the rate of acquisition for the Scottish programme, but also the distribution of the acquisition. At present no land is becoming available to the Commission from the extensive and very plantable
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grouse moors in the southern and eastern Grampians, and it is in this area that the Commission have a sizeable work force which is now being used to less than its full capacity. This rather emphasises the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Burton. It is my hope that the Commission will succeed in acquiring more land in this area in the near future—and I hope that the noble Duke, the Duke of Buccleuch and Queensberry, has a fair number of friends in that area.
I readily agree with regard to the difficulties foreseen by the noble Earl in persuading hill sheep farmers to make over land to forestry. Both the Forestry Commission and the Department of Agriculture are at pains to adapt planting programmes to minimise the conflict with farming, but it remains the case that there is a lot of prejudice on the part of Scottish hill farmers against afforestation. Your Lordships in general—the Duke of Atholl and Lord Forbes in particular—who have spoken to this point, may be interested to know of an experiment which the Department of Agriculture in Scotland has proposed to the Black Face Sheep Breeders' Association. This is designed to demonstrate how much land on many extensive hill farms can be planted up without any detriment to stock-carrying capacity. I hope that the Breeders' Association will be able to give their full support to this experiment, which would involve the survey of a number of hill farms throughout Scotland by officers of the Department's Land Staff, and the Forestry Commission. As I say, the object of this exercise is to show that some part of the nation's afforestation requirements can be met by planting on smaller blocks of existing farms, thus integrating farming and forestry, to the benefit of both.
I think at this point I should also refer—and I cannot remember which noble Lord raised the question—to shelter woods rather than shelter belts. This is a point which is referred to in the land use report of the Highlands Panel, and as your Lordships know, my right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Scotland is considering this report at the present time, and I will particularly draw his attention to the fact that that point has been raised in to-day's debate.

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The noble Earl had some stringent comments to make on the procedure whereby the Commission consult other Departments before they buy land. My understanding is that he is a little off the beam here. In recent years a great deal of trouble has been taken to make sure that the machinery for giving agricultural clearance works speedily. In fact clearance can be given by my Department in three days. With anybody else that is almost equivalent to deciding before you have been asked. The Forestry Commission have assured the Minister on several occasions that they are now satisfied with the pace at which the machinery operates. The noble Earl will note that that sentence includes the words "they are now satisfied"; the presumption is that there was some time in the past when the noble Earl's strictures were justified. I have not gone sufficiently into the matter to be able to claim the credit for the new Government. I have the feeling that they were satisfied before we appeared on the scene.
In recent years we have also taken care to ensure that Forestry Commission proposals to acquire hill farms are not objected to if the hill farm is on the small side as regards viability. Your Lordships will be aware that the minimum of hill farming viability is rising steadily with increasing costs, and a decision has more and more to be taken on giving the hill unit to forestry or retaining it as a farm. No doubt mistakes have been made, but by and large the Commission's view is that they are reasonably satisfied with the way things work. In the last five years, during which the Commission acquired close on 120,000 acres and bid for a good deal more than this, there were only three occasions where agreement at official level could not be obtained with the Agriculture Department so that reference to Ministers was necessary.
It is true that an anomalous situation can arise when the Forestry Commission—because of what appear to be good agricultural considerations—are prevented from offering for a unit whose subsequent owner himself plants the land. This may in some cases be because a private owner, in deciding whether or not to carry out afforestation, bases his judgment on such considerations as tax
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liability or other personal circumstances. The only way of dealing with this problem would be to carry out a land use scrutiny of all private planting proposals which are put forward for grant. This would need legislation.
To come now to the wider picture. As your Lordships are aware, the present Government have made clear their determination to make a reality of regional economic planning. In some areas—particularly the Highlands—forestry must be a front runner in future development. This is bound to be a subject which will attract the early attention of the new economic planning machinery. The proposition until now has been that the main benefit to be derived from afforestation is increased stability in the rural population. It is the case that the establishment of communities of forest workers can strengthen the structure of rural areas, especially when, as now happens, the Forestry Commission add these communities to existing small towns and villages. It can, however, be argued that the benefits of afforestation in a regional development context are much more substantial. The establishment of the pulp mill at Fort William, for example, demonstrates that afforestation can provide an industrial core for the Highland economy. Where timber can provide an industrial base, there should be a multiplier effect on employment in associated wood processing and service industries.
Your Lordships would not expect me to refer at any length to the Bill which was introduced yesterday in another place and which will establish a Highland Development Authority. I was very pleased at the words of welcome which the noble Earl gave to this Bill. Having said that, perhaps it will be sufficient if I say that a large and sustained Highland afforestation programme is an essential complement to the setting up of the new Authority. The Highland Panel's report on land use contains many interesting and constructive suggestions. Coming at this particular time, it exemplifies and illuminates the many problems which the machinery will have to tackle.
To sum up, the 1963 Statement provided for a programme of 450,000 acres in the ten years 1964-73, which was quite

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a good outlook in comparison with previous figures. This was the situation which the present Government inherited, and as forestry Ministers frankly we are not too happy about it. It will therefore not surprise your Lordships to hear that, as an integral part of regional planning, we are now looking carefully at the implications of an increase in the size of the programme.
Finally, I would join in the remarks made by all noble Lords who have taken part in the debate in expressing thanks to the noble Earl, Lord Dundee, for having initiated it. Once again a debate which is predominantly a Scottish debate—because of those who have taken part, rather than because of the subject—has shown how interest in something which is for the general benefit of Scotland does not find this Table any barrier to discussion, and that we discuss it as if we were all sitting round a board room table instead of on Parliamentary Benches. To the noble Earl, Lord Dundee, for having introduced the debate, for the very thoughtful way in which he did so, for the useful suggestions which came both from him and from all other noble Lords who have taken part, I express the very grateful appreciation of Her Majesty's Government.
LORD SOMERS: My Lords, could the noble Lord give an idea what the Commission's policy is with regard to hardwood?
LORD HUGHES: I made a reference to the fact that the Commission are encouraging research into the use, the economic use, of hardwood. If we are to persuade people to grow more hardwood the first thing is to satisfy them that they or their successors or, much more likely, the successors of their successors, are going to have a market for it. I think the Commission are tackling this in the right way in trying first to get an economic use for the hardwood.
7.28 p.m.
THE EARL OF DUNDEE: My Lords, I am most grateful to all your Lordships who have taken part in this debate, particularly the two Ministers. Before I ask leave to withdraw the Motion, I shall do no more than pick up one or two
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loose ends which I see lying about. I quite agree with the noble Lord, Lord Mitchison, that we need not be bound by the "desirable programme". He pointed out that it is more than twenty years old. The only reason I referred to it was because we are not doing as well, and I suggested that we should do at least as much. If the noble Lord meant that we should do better, I am with him.
The noble Lord, Lord Hughes, also referred to the desirable programme by saying that the strategic arguments are not quite the same to-day as they were in 1943. Of course the strategic arguments change in all sorts of ways in five years, or in two years, but I hope that that does not mean that our forestry planning can be changed whenever the strategic arguments do—because in that case we should not get any long-term planning at all; and I am sure noble Lords opposite cannot be in favour of abandoning long-term planning. Many of us have oak trees which were planted about the year 1800, because the Government of the time, which was a farsighted Government, pointed out that the war against Napoleon was depleting our supplies of oak to make warships and they must be replenished. That was done, and some of them are now being cut down—but not, of course, for the purpose of building the kind of warship that Nelson commanded, although with a purpose just as profitable to the nation. So I hope that any change in strategy will not be used as an argument (I was rather afraid that here the noble Lord was going over to the Treasury side) for cutting down this programme.
LORD HUGHES: My Lords, may I say that, if I were expressing the hopes of Her Majesty's Government, what we should like to do is to take the best years of the previous Administration and hope that we could accomplish that as our minimum.
THE EARL OF DUNDEE: My Lords, I am glad to hear the word "minimum".
The noble Lord, Lord Mitchison, also drew a rather happy picture of two gentlemen walking down a corridor in St. Andrews' House, each with a cheque book. Of course, the point is that it would be only the Forestry Commission who has the cheque book. The other cheque book is not at St. Andrew's

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House, but in the drawer of a private offerer. That is what I wanted to avoid. I also agree with Lord Mitchison's quotation from Lord Home in the debate ten years ago about compulsory powers. I think it is a good thing that they should exist, and I quite agree that in individual cases it may sometimes be a good thing that they should be used. But of course, we cannot rely on it as a major means of getting land, because in the great majority of cases it would be taking the sheep from sheep ground, and that would antagonise the farmers. I think that gradually an improvement in public opinion towards forestry is taking place. I hope this will continue.
My noble friend the Duke of Atholl mentioned loans for planting, and suggested that we ought to have them. I am not sure whether or not he is aware that we had them until a short time ago. I borrowed myself and I have not yet finished paying the loan back. But when I was on the regional committee of one of the Forestry Commission areas, I found that there were an enormous number of people whom we tried to persuade to do more planting but who did not know that they could borrow. We were beginning to get people more interested when the loans were stopped. I do not know whether that was because of the Commission or of the Treasury. I think loans are an entirely good thing, because in the long term forestry is obviously something which, like housing, ought to be financed with a loan. The only qualification I would make is that if there is any hope of starting loans again this would have to wait until the bank rate returned to less than 7 per cent., especially in Scotland, where interest rates are supposed to be 2 per cent. above the bank rate, and no forester or anybody else would pay that rate of interest.
The noble Duke also spoke about ancillary industries. No one has congratulated the late Government on making the big loan which they did to Wiggins, Teape for the new pulp mill. I did not have anything to do with this as a member of the late Government. I did not have to give any attention to forestry as a member of the Government. I think I can say, without there being anything personal in it, that it is one of the best things for forestry that ever happened in Scotland; and it is an argument for speeding
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up our planting programme now because most of the materials for the mill at the moment come from abroad. But there is this great market which is now located in the West of Scotland, and it should be a great encouragement to Scotland and private planters to speed up the planting programme.
My noble friend Lord Bradford said something which I think I must again stress in case it was missed. He pointed out—and I hope there is no doubt about it—that in the Highlands you can have both trees and sheep. Of course you can. Trees do not mean that sheep are going to disappear. In the County of Argyll, where most planting has been done, about 9 per cent. of the whole county has either been planted or is about to be planted, but there are now more sheep there than there were before the planting began. Of course, at some places planting may displace some sheep. But there is no reason why it should displace agriculture. Look at the example of Austria. All the plantable ground in the uplands and highlands is covered with fine timber. But there is plenty of agriculture, though perhaps not in the same pattern as we have in the Highlands. It is more in the uplands. There are stock rearing and farming, although perhaps not so many sheep. But you can certainly have both trees and sheep.
LORD HUGHES: My Lords, on what the noble Earl has just said, may I suggest that this may encourage the Black Face Sheep Breeders' Association to take part in the experiments along these lines which the Commission are now undertaking, to prove to those who are still doubtful that sheep and trees can go together?
THE EARL OF DUNDEE: Yes. I could tell the noble Lord equally interesting stories in regard to that from my own experience. I think I mentioned it in a letter which he may have seen; but there is no time to go into it now. I am glad he should make that reference. I was really hoping to hear of some indication about expansion from the two Ministers who spoke. Naturally, they have got to be cautious about it. But I was glad to hear Lord Hughes say that the Forestry Ministers are in favour of expansion; and when he referred to the Highlands Development Bill he said, I think, that forestry

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was going to be a front runner. I hope that it will be a "must" for our Highland policy about which the Government will make up their minds, and that we are going to have a bigger planning programme than we have now.
That is really my primary purpose in putting down this Motion to be discussed by your Lordships. I think it is a good thing to discuss it in this House, because there are so many of your Lordships who know far more about forestry than I do, and we have had the benefit this afternoon of a great deal of well-informed advice. I am glad to have what I feel is an assurance from the Ministers who have spoken that they seriously intend to
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do more planting than has been done up till now. I beg leave to withdraw the Motion.
Motion for Papers, by leave, withdrawn.

INDUSTRIAL AND PROVIDENT SOCIETIES BILL [H.L.]
Reported from the Joint Committee on Consolidation Bills, with Amendments, and recommitted to a Committee of the Whole House.
House adjourned at twenty-three minutes before eight o'clock.