Lords Sitting of 28 April 1966

Preamble
The House met at three of the clock, The LORD CHANCELLOR on the Woolsack.
Prayers—Read by the Lord Bishop of Lincoln
Several Lords—Took the Oath.
The Lord Willis—Affirmed.

PRESS PUBLICITY OF JUVENILE COURT CASE
3.10 p.m.
LORD MERTHYR: My Lords, I beg leave to ask the first Question which stands in my name on the Order Paper.
[The Question was as follows:
To ask Her Majesty's Government (1) whether the publication in the Daily Telegraph on March 5, 1966, of the name, address and photograph of a girl concerned in proceedings before a juvenile court constituted an offence against Section 49(2) of the Children and Young Persons Act 1933, or against any other enactment; (2) if so, whether proceedings are to be taken against these or any other offenders, and, if not, why not.]
THE JOINT PARLIAMENTARY UNDER-SECRETARY OF STATE, HOME OFFICE (LORD STONHAM): My Lords, it is not within the province of Her Majesty's Government to state whether in the circumstances of a particular case an offence has been committed. This is a matter for the courts to decide. The answer to the second part of the noble Lord's Question is that the Director of Public Prosecutions decided, in consultation with the Attorney General, that it was not desirable, nor in the public interest, to institute proceedings in respect of the publication to which the noble Lord refers.
LORD MERTHYR: My Lords, does this mean that whilst small provincial newspapers will be prosecuted for this criminal offence, these nine large daily newspapers will go scot-free? Does not the noble Lord think that it will be most un-
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fortunate if no proceedings whatever are taken and a precedent of this kind is set?
LORD STONHAM: My Lords, I agree with the noble Lord that it is a most unfortunate thing that a number of newspapers, including the newspaper mentioned in the noble Lord's Question, departed from their normally high standards in this regard. I do not see, however, that this can be taken as a precedent. Any case of this kind must be considered as an individual case. I hope there will be no more. The Director of Public Prosecutions has always in mind the main purpose of Section. 49, which is the protection and welfare of the child, and he decided that in his view the disclosure of the girl's identity had not in fact resulted in any prejudice to her, and that it was not desirable, nor in the public interest, again to ventilate the matter by instituting proceedings which would cause the girl to be the subject of further publicity.
LORD MERTHYR: My Lords, if it is thought that further publication will harm the child in other cases, will not the whole purpose of this section be defeated and will it not therefore be a dead letter?
LORD STONHAM: My Lords, I do not agree that the whole purpose of the section will be defeated, and I hope that the public reaction to what has happened, which is exemplified in the noble Lord's Question, will help to ensure that there is no recurrence of conduct of this kind, which I agree is disgraceful.
LORD BALFOUR OF INCHRYE: My Lords, arising out of that reply, may I ask whether, if the Director of Public Prosecutions does not feel it appropriate to commence proceedings, Her Majesty's Government would report this case to the Press Council?
LORD STONHAM: My Lords, that is not a matter for Her Majesty's Government to decide. This is a matter of which the Press Council must be fully aware. One other point which had weight with the Director of Public Prosecutions was that, had it been taken further, it would not have been within the jurisdiction of a juvenile court to deal with the matter. It would have had to go to another court, in which case there would have been no question, if the child were not required

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to give evidence, that her name and circumstances would have been known and the whole unsavoury nature of this case would have been revived, to the detriment, we believe, of the child.
BARONESS WOOTTON OF ABINGER: My Lords, does the noble Lord not think that public interest is likely to be exactly the opposite to what he has said—namely, that it will now be seen that publicity can be given in these cases, and others will seek to get similar publicity?
LORD STONHAM: My Lords, I hope that my noble friend is wrong in assessing the situation in that way. I feel that it would be right for me to say that any newspaper which was sufficiently ill-advised to share her view would do so at its peril.

FINES FOR NON-ATTENDANCE AT SCHOOL
3.15 p.m.
LORD MERTHYR: My Lords, I beg leave to ask the second Question which stands in my name on the Order Paper.
[The Question was as follows:
To ask Her Majesty's Government (1) whether the maximum fine for a first offence of a parent failing to send a child to school is £1; (2) if so, whether they consider this to be adequate; and, if they do not, whether they will, as a matter of urgency, largely increase it.]
BARONESS PHILLIPS: My Lords, the answer to the first part of the Question is "Yes". The answer to the second part is that Her Majesty's Government do not consider the amount to be adequate. They have been considering the question as part of a large-scale review of small statutory fines and have noted the matter for action when a suitable opportunity occurs for proposing legislation.
LORD MERTHYR: My Lords, I am much obliged to the noble Baroness for that Answer. I only want to ask one supplementary question, and it is this. Would she agree that if the penalty for this particular offence were adequate the facts emerging from my first Question this afternoon might never have done so?
BARONESS PHILLIPS: My Lords, the noble Lord knows, both as a magistrate and as a new member of the Front Bench, that I cannot give a direct answer to that question.

KENT QUARTER SESSIONS BILL [H.L.]
Read 3a, and passed, and sent to the Commons.
MERSEY DOCKS AND HARBOUR BOARD BILL [H.L.]
Read 3a, and passed, and sent to the Commons.

DEPUTY CHAIRMEN OF COMMITTEES
3.17 p.m.
LORD SHEPHERD: My Lords, on behalf of my noble friend the Leader of the House, I beg to move the Motion that stands in his name on the Order Paper.
Moved, That the Lord Merthyr, the Lord Archibald, the Lord Ailwyn, the Lord Cawley, the Lord Airedale, the Lord Douglas of Barloch, the Lord Strang, the Lord Grenfell and the Baroness Wootton of Abinger, be appointed the panel of Lords to act as Deputy Chairmen of Committees for this Session—(Lord Shepherd.)
On Question, Motion agreed to.

PROCEDURE OF THE HOUSE
THE CHAIRMAN OF COMMITTEES (THE EARL OF LISTOWEL.): My Lords, I beg to move the first Motion standing in my name on the Order Paper.
Moved, That a Committee be appointed to consider any proposals for alterations in the procedure of this House which may arise from time to time, and whether the Standing Orders do or do not require to be altered to effect such alterations; and that the Lords following, with the Lord Chancellor and the Chairman of Committees, be named of the Committee:

M. Salisbury,

E. Longford,

E. St. Aldwyn,

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E. Swinton,

V. Dilhorne,

V. Goschen,

L. Ailwyn,

L. Amulree,

L. Carrington,

L. Champion,

L. Harlech,

L. Henderson,

L. Henley,

L. Morton of Henryton,

L. Rea,

L. Saltoun,

L. Shepherd,

L. Silkin,

L. Strang,

L. Wade,

L. Wilberforce,

B. Wootton of Abinger.

—(The Chairman of Committees.)

On Question, Motion agreed to.

HOUSE OF LORDS OFFICES
THE CHAIRMAN OF COMMITTEES: My Lords, I beg to move the second Motion standing in my name on the Order Paper.
Moved, That a Select Committee on the House of Lords Offices be appointed; and that the Lords following, with the Lord Chancellor and the Chairman of Committees, be named of the Committee:

D. Wellington,

M. Cholmondeley,

M. Lansdowne,

M. Salisbury,

M. Willingdon,

E. Attlee,

E. De La Warr,

E. Dundee,

E. Longford,

E. St. Aldwyn,

E. Scarbrough,

E. Swinton,

V. Dilhorne,

V. Goschen,

V. Simonds,

V. Soulbury,

L. Ailwyn,

L. Airedale,

L. Amulree,

L. Balfour of Burleigh,

L. Bowles,

L. Bridges,

L. Burden,

L. Carrington,

L. Champion,

L. Chorley,

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L. Conesford,

L. Harlech,

L. Hawke,

L. Henderson,

L. Henley,

L. Inchyra,

L. Jessel,

L. Kennet,

L. Lucas of Chilworth,

L. Mancroft,

L. Morton of Henryton,

L. Newton,

L. Ogmore,

L. Rea,

L. Reid,

L. Robertson of Oakridge,

L. Sainsbury,

L. Saltoun,

L. Shackleton,

L. Shepherd,

L. Silkin,

L. Strang,

B. Summerskill,

B. Swanborough,

L. Wade,

L. Wise,

B. Wootton of Abinger.—(The Chairman of Committees.)

On Question, Motion agreed to.
Leave given to the Committee to report from time to time.

REPRESENTATION OF IRISH PEERS
VISCOUNT MASSEREENE AND FERRARD: My Lords, I beg to move the Motion standing in my name on the Order Paper.
Moved, that the Petition of the Earl of Antrim and eleven other Irish Peers, presented on the 15th of December last in the late Parliament, be referred to the Committee for Privileges.—(Viscount Massereene and Ferrard.)
On Question, Motion agreed to.

CONSOLIDATION BILLS
THE LORD CHANCELLOR (LORD GARDINER: My Lords, this is the usual annual Motion that Consolidation Bills be referred to a Joint Committee of both Houses. I beg to move.
Moved to resolve, That it is desirable that, in the present Session, all Consolidation Bills (whether public or private),

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Statute Law Revision Bills and Bills prepared pursuant to the Consolidation of Enactments (Procedure) Act 1949 be referred to a Joint Committee of both Houses of Parliament.—(The Lord Chancellor.)
On Question, Motion agreed to.
Ordered, That a Message be sent to the Commons to communicate this Resolution, and to desire their concurrence.

ADDRESS IN REPLY TO HER MAJESTY'S MOST GRACIOUS SPEECH.
3.19 p.m.
Debate resumed (according to Order) on the Motion moved on Thursday last by Lord Cohen of Brighton—namely, That an humble Address be presented to Her Majesty's as follows:—
"Most Gracious Sovereign—We, Your Majesty's most dutiful and loyal subjects, the Lords Spiritual and Temporal in Parliament assembled, beg leave to thank Your Majesty for the most gracious Speech which Your Majesty has addressed to both Houses of Parliament."
EARL JELLICOE: My Lords, I am never particularly happy when I am about to be launched into a speech, especially in this rather ritualistic debate. I think it is perhaps something of a hangover from the deep unease which I felt on the occasion when I had the honour to move the humble Address. I was, unfortunately, unable to hear the noble Lord, Lord Cohen of Brighton, and the noble Lord, Lord Soper, last Thursday, but I have read their speeches and I have read the tributes rightly paid to those speeches, and I should like to associate myself with those very well merited congratulations.
But my unease also stems from the nature of this debate. The Queen's Speech is inevitably somewhat "bitty", or, as its authors might prefer to term it, selective. For the same reason, my speech this afternoon will be somewhat "bitty" or, as I should prefer to term it, selective. So for the benefit of noble Lords who will be replying, may I say at the outset that the bits which I have selected are those which deal with housing, rating and construction, with education, and with crime and punishment. I
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can assure the noble Lord, Lord Kennet, that I shall not try to bowl him any agricultural googly. By the same token, may I congratulate the noble Lord on his appointment? Those of us who have admired his performances in this House know the humanity, the versatility and the independence of mind which he will bring to bear in his new Ministry—my old Ministry and, indeed, his father's old Ministry. The noble Lord's fertility of mind never fails to astonish me. I know, of course, that he is an authority on the Bomb and on Eros, but only recently. since I swapped jobs with him in Western European Union, did I come to appreciate that he knows almost as much about submarines as I and my noble Leader do—very annoying!
My point of departure this afternoon is, I suspect, common ground to most of us. We are rapidly moving—perhaps under the present Administration a little less rapidly than possible—from a condition where poverty was accepted as the norm, to that in which plenty is within the reach of all, or almost all, the inhabitants of these Islands. Of course, there are still the visible relics, the stigmata, of an earlier, harsher age around us. Yet by and large our problems today increasingly centre, not around quantity, the alleviation of gross material want, but around quality. It should be the search for quality in our physical, our mental, and, yes! in our industrial and economic environments, which should stamp our society to-day.
Yet, my Lords, there is already one great exception to what I have just been saying, and that exception is housing. To-day few of our fellow citizens are hungry, few need be ill-clothed, but many millions still live in homes which are a reproach to our society. Lytton Strachey once reminded us that it was the Elizabethan, Sir John Harington, who one day, suddenly inspired, invented the water closet. Yet those of us who are interested in these matters know that there are still hundreds of thousands of houses in these Islands to-day in this cybernetic age, four centuries since the inventive Sir John, which still lack proper indoor toilet facilities.
The fact that so many of the nation's houses are out of joint with the times is perhaps understandable. The average house lasts, say, a century or so, and the

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great housing building wave hit this country about a century ago, plus or minus. But this situation confronts the Government—any Government in this country—with one of their greatest and most tangible challenges. Few things can contribute more to the greater happiness of a great many of our fellow citizens than the comfort of a good home, especially a home owned by the family which lives in it. So I make no complaint about the priority for housing which that persuasive Minister, and astute propagandist, Mr. Crossman, has managed to win in the Queen's Speech. No less than six of the promised quiverful of Bills bear directly or indirectly on housing. I notice, incidentally, that the subject of water and its possible nationalisation does not figure in the gracious Speech this time. I think it did last time, or the time before that. In my view, any such legislation would be quite irrelevant to the nation's needs, or indeed desires, and I hope that the once-promised Bill has been indefinitely postponed. I hope, too, that the noble Lord, Lord Kennet, when he replies, can confirm that this is the case.
But to revert. I have no complaint about the spate of promised Bills on housing, rating and the like, but I would proffer two comments: first, that they have a curiously familiar look. We have seen them all, at least once or twice, before in the Queen's Speech. My second point is that they are a pretty mixed bunch. I do not suggest that your Lordships should necessarily reject these gift horses of Mr. Crossman, but I do suggest that you would be wise to examine their teeth pretty carefully. For example, there is the Land Commission Bill which will presumably be coming to us. I think I understand—indeed, I think I sympathise with—the motives behind this Bill; at least the avowed ones. But I would remind your Lordships that the method chosen by the Government has been rejected by a weight of independent and authoritative opinion. The establishment of this complex new machinery involves a great waste of time and of money. It is a waste of time, since it will clamp yet another bureaucracy upon these already rather over-regimented Islands. It will duplicate many of the functions of the local authorities and hold up the release of much-needed land. It is a waste of
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money since, for this and other reasons, it will contribute to a rise in land and, thereby, house prices. I believe that the purpose behind this Bill could have been served far better and far more simply by the simple expedient of a moderate development charge.
Then there are the proposals for leasehold reform, and for relief to the domestic ratepayer. The first of these I am sure your Lordships will wish to look at very carefully, and not least, perhaps, its compensation clauses. The second, since most of us are ratepayers, we may be inclined to look at quite kindly in principle. Yet by his own admission Mr. Crossman has made it clear that he regards these measures as merely tinkering with the vexed and rather painful problem of rates until he or someone else can hit upon a brighter and more radical idea. He seems to be hoping—at least as I read it that is what he has intimated—that the Royal Commission on Local Government may be able to produce some bright new rabbit out of its hat: in much the same way as his colleague Mr. Jenkins seems to hope that the Royal Commission will come up with a ready-made plan for reconciling police efficiency with democratic local control. Since so much hope is being placed on this Royal Commission, can the Government tell us what priority they will accord to its work'? When will it report? When, indeed, will its composition be announced?
The other Bill in this group on which I should like to offer a few preliminary comments is that for reorganising Exchequer grants to local authorities. There is no dissent from the need that everything possible should be done to assist local authorities with their most severe housing problems, in particular slum clearance. But just because the problem is so big and so pressing, we need to concentrate our limited resources to the greatest possible extent. This principle would seem to be ignored in the Bill, at any rate as it came before another place in the previous Parliament. No attempt was made in that Bill to require local authorities, as a condition for receiving these increased subsidies, to introduce fair and sensible rent schemes. That is so far as individuals are concerned. So far as places are concerned, no attempt was made to distinguish between local authorities really in need of help, with really big slum clearance

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problems, and those not so in need. There are reports now that some element of discrimination may be introduced before the new Bill is presented. If this is so I should be glad if the noble Lord, Lord Kennet, can tell us so.
In any event, it is quite clear that the noble Lord will have a pretty busy time piloting his shoal of Bills through your Lordships' House. He could save himself—and I believe he could save us—an awful rush at the end of the Session if he could persuade his colleagues in the Ministry and the Government that this House should be allowed the first crack at some at least of these six Bills. I proffer that as a well-meant suggestion.
Important though housing Bills may be, legislation is only part of a Government's housing policy, and perhaps not the most important part. The real heart of it, the criterion on which it should be judged, is the houses built. So far the record of the Government has been, at best, gamma. They fell 20,000 short of the target of 400,000 houses which one of their Ministers announced last summer they would reach. What does this mean? It means hope deferred for some 60,000 or 70,000 people. Worse still, since last mid-summer the figures for house completions, with the exception of one month, have month for month, the current year compared with the year before, been worse this year. February, 1966, was particularly bad—3,000 or so less completions than in February, 1965. We were told on no less an authority than the Daily Express on April 7, that there were 10,000 fewer housing starts in February, 1966, than there were in February, 1965. Incidentally, can the noble Lord confirm whether the Daily Express is right? All this has been accompanied by an inexorable rise in the price of houses. What hope can the noble Lord hold out that, on the one hand, this downward curve in house completions and, on the other, this upward curve in house prices, will be reversed?
If our aim is to raise the quality of our society, then clearly we must apply a very high priority indeed to education. At most of what is said in the Queen's Speech on education one could not possibly cavil. Increasing grants to voluntary schools in England and Wales —cordially agreed. More expansion of
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higher and further education, and more steps to increase the supply of teachers. Again as a statement of intent one can but agree. But these statements read rather oddly when one recalls the drastic halt to university and technical college building, and the deferment of teacher training projects imposed last summer by the Chancellor and accepted last summer by the Minister of Education. I trust the Government realise that there is now more than six months lost ground to be made up here.
Finally, there is that sibylline utterance:
"My Government will promote further progress in the development of comprehensive secondary education."
Well, my Lords, we shall see what we shall see. All I would emphasise now is that we on these Benches are not opposed to the comprehensive system as such. Our approach, to use the now hallowed phrase, is pragmatic. What we are opposed to is a dogmatic and inflexible approach to this matter; an approach which, for the sake of doctrinal purity, would lead to the extermination of good existing schools.
I should like for a moment to break out from the restricting corset of the Speech to put a special plea to the Government about the quality of our physical environment. So much of our postwar development has been second-rate or third-rate. So many of our towns are unnecessarily drab. So much of our poor, abused countryside, still, at its best, the loveliest man-made landscape in the world, seems only too likely to succumb to the pressures being piled upon it. Can we not brighten, can we not freshen up all this? I know that the replanning and redevelopment of our towns and cities, and especially perhaps those in the North, will be a long job. But is there not quite a lot we can do mean-while?
The Government can set the pace. Paris shows something of what can be done here. Every time I visit Paris I am delighted by some fresh and lovely aspect of that city revealed by the hand of the cleaner. What M. Malraux can do, surely Miss Lee, or someone else, can do as well or better; and it is really quite easy for the Government to set an example. They own, for example, almost all of Whitehall. Mr. Geoffrey Rippon

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has shown what can be done with the Banqueting Hall. Could the Government not decide now to clean and face-lift the whole of Whitehall, from Trafalgar Square to Parliament Square? And what about brightening up our cities at night? How seedy Piccadilly looks, for example, at night, compared with the Champs Elysees! Is this odious comparison necessary? I cannot believe that, with a little imagination and perhaps more flexible shopping hours, it need be.
There is so much else crying out to be done. There is the reclamation of dereliction; the slagheaps and pitheads of our outrageous Industrial Revolution. Here again the Government can spur and stimulate action. It could itself begin by tidying up some of the mess the military made in the war, 20 or 25 years ago. It is really absurd that now, 23 years after the Normandy invasion, the country should still be scarred and littered with broken-down Nissen huts. And there is that new litterer, British Railways. I hope that someone can give them a sharp rap over the knuckles for the mess they leave behind when they close railways or abandon country stations.
Then there is the quality of our architecture, both ancient and modern. I confess to being an unashamed preservationist in most respects, and I think that we should do more to preserve the best of our heritage than we are doing to-day. In particular, I hope that the Government will consider some extension of the preservation order principle, to cover not only individual buildings but also groups or, in some cases, whole villages, or parts of our towns and cities. Something like the French system of "zones protégés".
We also need to build much, much better what we build new. Take but one simple example, the rash of small bungalows now spreading through some of our loveliest villages—" in-filling ", as I think, the jargon is. I have no objection to the idea; it is good that more and more people should have a taste of country life. But what I do object to is the dreary little samples we see. Could not the Government encourage planning authorities at least to insist that these bungalows are designed by qualified architects? I know that in this respect I am not calling for
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anything particularly new. I know that much is being done. What I am calling for is a concentration and focusing of effort; a concerted drive by the Government to raise the quality of our physical environment and to tap the effort and enthusiasm of Mr. Brown's regional bodies, the local authorities and, perhaps above all, the voluntary societies and voluntary effort. All this effort needs pulling together, possibly under one Ministry and preferably co-ordinated by one Minister. I know that the noble Lord feels deeply about these matters. I think he might ask for the job while he is about it.
May I meanwhile put two questions in this context to the Government? I believe all Parties like the idea of a Countryside Commission, and all of us agree that it is time to bring the National Parks Act up-to-date. I think, incidentally, that the Party opposite were pledged to do it at a very early date, but so far as I know this is not going to find a place in the current legislative programme. Can the noble Lord tell us what their intentions here are; are they honourable? Secondly, what about the Minister responsible in this field? The Ministry of Land and Natural Resources has proved something of a Cinderella in Whitehall, and it has been, I suspect, pretty well kept in its place by its elder sisters. Are we right in assuming that this Cinderella is never likely to get to the ball?
I wish to conclude on a rather more sombre note. Great advances on the domestic front are within our grasp. Much can be done to raise the quality of life lived in our islands. Yet this advance will be brittle and precarious if we permit the foundations of our society, the whole framework of law and order in these islands, to be sapped. This problem of delinquency and crime is common to all advanced industrial countries or societies, from Los Angeles to Vladivostok. It is seen perhaps at its most acute in the great American cities. One wanders at one's peril at night in the heart of Washington, the capital of the United States. This alienation of large sections of the urban population from society, albeit aggravated in the United States by racial tension, is an awful warning of what could come to pass here if we let crime rip.

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This is no Party matter. Yet I cannot but regret that whilst the conflict in Vietnam and the confrontation in Indonesia—or should I say the late confrontation in Indonesia?—get their due mention in the Queen's Speech, not a word is to be found there about the war right here on our doorstep, the war we are not winning, the war against crime.
Your Lordships may have read an article by the Shadow Home Secretary in this week's Sunday Express. I must confess I did not read it on Sunday because, at. the very moment when I was about to, my pug dog, who had had a surfeit of lunch, decided—I had to save my carpet and I sacrificed the Sunday Express by preference. In any event, this is not the moment to go into the details of police reorganisation. All I would say is how cordially I endorse Mr. Hogg's view that we must secure a coherent network of national and regional forces under a Home Secretary with real responsibility to Parliament. The counter-attack of our society against crime and the criminal must be pressed home and the police must be given every encouragement, through better organisation, better equipment and, above all, better evidence of public support and Government backing. I believe this to be quite essential if we are to prosecute this war successfully.
That is one side of the coin. The other is that when the criminal is detected and apprehended we must not strike out blindly in revenge. I found myself in substantial agreement with almost everything said by our new and very able Home Secretary in an interview in this week's Sunday Times (which I was able to read on Sunday).
LORD SHEPHERD: Much more important than the other one!
EARL JELLICOE: Both were important, and both good articles. We shall be discussing penal policy next week. I do not want to go into details now. Nevertheless, I hope the Government will pursue two objectives with absolute determination. The first is to reduce, by every safe and sensible means, the size of our prison population. The second is to see that the residual population of our prisons are trained—above all by
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hard, adequately paid and purposeful work under modern conditions—to re-enter society as useful citizens. In short, I would recommend the intensification of that reforming penal policy to which a long line of Conservative Home Secretaries have contributed. But—and this is the rub—such a policy cannot be pursued, and public support for it will not be maintained, unless our defences against crime and the criminal are strengthened. There is a great opportunity here for the new Home Secretary. He may expect a broad measure of support if he tackles both flanks of this problem with the imagination and, above all, the determination which we expect of him.
May I in this final context put two questions to the noble Lord who sits on the Woolsack? First, can he tell us anything more about the scope of the promised legislation for penal reform? Will it cover the question of short sentences, as suggested by the Home Secretary in that article in the Sunday Times? Many of us have very real doubts whether short prison sentences serve a useful purpose. And will it embrace provisions for the child and the young offender? Again, as the Lord Chancellor well knows, many of us have serious reservations about some of the proposals in the White Paper on The Child, the Family and the Young Offender. Secondly, may I repeat the question my noble friend Lord Derwent put to the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor yesterday? Can the noble Lord assure us that the reports of the Home Secretary's new Advisory Council will be published? May I myself express the hope that a place will be found on this Council for some of the members of the disbanded Royal Commission of my noble friend Lord Amory? They have acquired much knowledge of these matters and it would be a pity, in our view, if their expertise were not fully used.
I have detained your Lordships longer than I intended. I believe, in conclusion, that it is fair to say that there is a wide consensus of opinion in this House, and indeed in the country, about the ends to which our social policies should be directed. There is possibly less wide agreement over means. I trust that in this Parliament the Government will not strain such agreement as exists too hard.
3.50 p.m.
THE PARLIAMENTARY SECRETARY, MINISTRY OF HOUSING AND LOCAL GOVERNMENT (LORD KENNET): My Lords, may I start by thanking the noble Earl for his kind remarks, and by saying also what a personal pleasure it was to me when I learned that I was to be marked by him during this Parliament, at any rate as regards housing and local government matters. I look forward to collaboration, salted with disagreement, and I am sure I already perceive that we are facing in basically the same direction about what needs to be done.
Let me answer quickly one or two points he raised; I hope the rest will be covered in what I have to say later. On the question of nationalisation of water supplies, I think the phrase in the 1966 Election Manifesto was that
"the Government will be pledged to improve the water supply situation by all means, including extension of public ownership where that is necessary."
The whole water problem is very high on the agenda. It is not yet clear what combination of means we propose to adopt to improve it.
The noble Earl asked if there was any truth in the suggestion that the reorganised Exchequer grants for housing are to be so devised as to give priority to towns and districts with bad slum problems. The answer, broadly speaking, is yes. But whether the priority which we wish to give, and which any Government would wish to give, to such towns and districts, can best be achieved by manipulating these grants, or by other means, or by a combination of grants with other means, is something that we will put before Parliament in due course and debate. But that is the general direction which we hope to follow. On the question of the Countryside Commission and the National Parks Act, we still rest in this respect on the White Paper, Leisure and the Countryside, which sets out the broad intention. On the future of the Ministry of Land—
EARL JELLICOE: My Lords, may I just ask the noble Lord this question: Are they not resting a little too leisurely on their Paper in this respect?
LORD KENNET: My Lords, nobody likes to rest leisurely on a paper. I
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would remind the House that the gracious Speech finished with the customary phrase
"Other measures will be laid before you".
The fact that this or that particular piece of legislation was not specifically referred to in the gracious Speech does not by any means signify that it will not be brought in during this Parliament. The question of the future of the Ministry of Land and Natural Resources is very much under consideration at the moment, following up the statements made during the Election campaign. There will be an announcement: I hope it will not be long delayed.
My Lords, I propose in speaking this afternoon to give a general picture of the housing situation and a sort of roundup of some of the legislation connected with it which will be coming our way shortly. The governing fact about housing is that a roof over your head is a necessity. It is much the most expensive necessity in the life of the citizen. Other complicated things to be provided—the mind turns at once to cars, refrigerators and television sets, and so on—are not necessities. We have to behave a little differently when we see people in trouble about paying for such a necessity as their housing, from the way we behave if we see them getting in difficulty about the things which are good to have, which we agree that they should have, but which cannot be squarely described as necessities.
When a Government see this situation regarding housing they have two broad approaches they can take. First of all, they can try to give everybody more money altogether, and trust that this will solve the problem. Such a policy would lead logically in the end to an approach quite close to that of a guaranteed minimum income, and lead to a great increase in the kind of expenditure which at the moment we call National Assistance. This seems to us not to be the preferable way; it is altogether a blunt instrument. It seems to us altogether preferable to continue what has been done by many Governments, to choose a more accurate form of help; that is, to make the houses themselves cheaper. We therefore propose to introduce a packet of legislation which will push money round in different directions, in order to make more houses and to make them more quickly;

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to make it safer, more secure and, above all, to make it cheaper to get them and to live in them.
I will speak in a few moments about the way in which it is proposed to get more houses and to get them more quickly. But the primary commodity for all building is land. The present situation about land values is horribly familiar. The owners of land in certain places can sit back and twiddle their thumbs, while wealth created by other people pours, without any action on their part, into their coffers. In the Middle Ages the robber barons used to descend from their castles on travellers who crossed their land and they said, "This is my land. You must pay up, and that is that." The land barons of 20th century Britain do not say this to travellers; but they do say to those who want to build houses on their land, "This is my land. You must pay up, and that is that."
We therefore propose to reintroduce the Land Commission Bill which fell at the close of the last Parliament. The objectives of the Land Commission are still as they were stated in the White Paper—namely, first, to secure that the right land is available at the right time for the implementation of national, regional and local plans; second, to secure that a substantial part of the development value created by the community returns to the community, and that the burden of the cost of land for essential purposes is reduced. The Land Commission will have a regional organisation as well as a national one. Its national headquarters will be in New-castle-upon-Tyne, and there will be national offices for Scotland and Wales. The Commission will have power to acquire land in two ways: first by agreement, as anybody has power to acquire land, and, secondly, by compulsion. The compulsory powers are to be given to the Commission in two stages. During the first stage they will only have power to buy land compulsorily for four specific purposes: first, to bring land forward for early development; secondly, to develop a piece of land as a whole where that might not be achieved by other means—for example, in the case where the piece of land in question crosses the frontiers of local authorities; thirdly, to acquire land on behalf of a public authority which already has powers of
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compulsory purchase; and, fourthly, to acquire land for disposal on concessionary terms for private housing development.
In the second stage the Commission will be endowed with powers to buy any land compulsorily which it considers suitable for material development, and these terms will be defined in the Bill which will be laid before your Lordships. In both stages the Commission will be subject to planning decisions, like any other developer. Large-scale development is coming to rest very much in the continuation and enlargement of the concept of the new town and the new city. I think that this is the framework within which most can be done towards achieving the good planning which the noble Earl so rightly pressed upon the Government in his speech.
Decisions announced by the Government during 1965–66 foreshadow much enlarged programmes of New Town development. They also will result in the creation of much larger individual towns than those which have been designated in the past. There are seven schemes on which planning and consultation are also proceeding, and between them these schemes will accommodate about 600,000 people. The possibility of a number of other major schemes is in the pipe-line of study at the moment, and we envisage important changes in the application of the New Towns machinery in the case of four major expansion schemes which have already been announced—I refer to Ipswich, Northampton, Peterborough and Warrington. In all these cases the plan is to double the population of an existing sizeable town. In these cases the job of planning and development will be carried out jointly by the existing council, acting in full and equal partnership with a new development corporation.
We are now examining all the procedures involved in this rather complicated plan, in order to see whether we cannot much reduce the period which passes between the time when a broad policy decision is taken to create a new town or greatly to enlarge an old one, and the time when the actual building begins. We hope that large reductions can be made. The cost of building an average house of three bedrooms increased between the Spring of 1961 and the Summer of last

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year from £1,700 to £2,500. During that period the subsidies to local authorities for housebuilding remained at the same rates. We therefore propose to reintroduce the Bill which lapsed at the General Election and which will make it possible for the Exchequer to pay the difference on loan costs incurred by local authorities for housing at any time and the costs the local authorities would have had to pay if the price of money was at that time 4 per cent. Not only is this a direct subsidy but also it will have a direct political and social effect, in that it will stabilise the planning of building programmes for authorities and it will enable them to plan further ahead with a much greater degree of certainty by removing the anxiety they feel at present about fluctuations in loan rates. We consider that this will be of crucial importance in raising the whole standard of planning throughout the country.
That the Building Control Bill will be reintroduced is also included in the Queen's Speech. This is a weapon of broad economic control, to ensure, or to go some way to ensure, that our physical resources are used for what new buildings society as a whole considers most desirable. One could say, to put it in a nutshell, that the purpose of this Bill is to prevent competition between new bingo halls and new housing in brute terms of bricks and mortar. We shall have plenty of opportunity to debate this in detail, but I would point to what the Bill does not cover. It does not cover private housing; it does not cover industrial development; it does not cover work in designated development districts; and it does not cover office building in London and Birmingham because they are already covered by the existing law. It has the effect of extending control which exists for office building in London and Birmingham to the entire country.
LORD BOOTHBY: My Lords, does it cover bingo halls? Because that is important.
LORD KENNET: Yes. It is broadly a new measure of control on a national basis over building for entertainments, for distribution, shops, hotels and offices.
I should like to take this opportunity of giving the House some news on a point about which the noble Earl, Lord Jellicoe, asked, and that is about the
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present rate of building. The total number of houses and flats begun in both public and private sectors in March, 1964, was, in round figures, 32,400; in March, 1965, 34,400; and in March, 1966, 36,600. I shall be the first to admit that although that is an improvement it is an insufficient improvement, and all the efforts of the Government will be bent to raising the rate at which these "starts" are once again increasing. But what is particularly good is the recovery to 36,600 in starts in March, after the bad figures for the bad-weather month of February when there were only 24,700. That is a great improvement, and although much is yet to be done I know the House will be glad to see that the figures have turned upwards, and turned upwards very sharply. We will try to keep them that way.
We feel that a great deal of progress in the field of housing rests on the adoption of techniques of industrialised building, with its obvious advantages of speed and convenience. In 1964, 10·8 per cent. of public sector building was by these industrialised means; in 1965 the figure had increased to 16·5 per cent.; and pro rata in the first two months of this year we have now reached an annual proportion of 21·5 per cent. of public sector building built by industrialised techniques. This is a good increase but it is an haphazard one, and we hope that the measures which the Government announced at the end of last year will prove successful in reaching the Government target of 40 per cent. of public sector by 1970. We also hope that private sector building, with the advice and help the new National Building Agency, will soon begin to come along in the same direction. At present, unfortunately, it is lagging. All these measures are intended to make it easier for the great number of houses and flats we need to be built as quickly and as cheaply as is compatible with good planning, good design and good workmanship.
I turn now to the measures we hope to take which are intended to make it easier for people to acquire the houses or fiats they need, to live in them peacefully and pleasantly once they have acquired them, and to move easily to others when they want to, whether because they are changing their jobs, or because they marry, or have more children, or because their children have grown up and set up

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on their own and they need less space. We are following up the Rent Act, and the House may have noticed the very satisfying figures quoted in the House of Commons on Monday about the first phase of the work of the new rent officers and the rent assessment committees. Many rents on appeal are coming down; many rents on appeal are going up. It is interesting to see the amount of injustice which there was, both ways, before this procedure was set up.
We intend to follow up these provisions, first of all with the new option mortgage scheme which is so much in the news at present. Let us take a typical case. A married man with three children aged 11 to 16, whose only source of income is his own earnings, gets a mortgage over 20 years at 6¾ per cent.—which is the normal sort of figure. What does he pay? If his income is £950 a year he pays £92 10s. annually throughout the 20 years. But tax is not payable on these charges. So if his income is £1,100 a year he pays only £82 during the first year, and his payments rise to about the same figure of £92 at the end. If he is a little wealthier and his income is £1,350, he pays £77 during his first year, rising to a maximum of £91 in the twentieth year. If his income is £2,000 a year he pays only £71 at the beginning of his mortgage.
The effect of the present arrangement is quite conveniently to make mortgages cheaper the richer you are. In the first year a man on £18 per week pays about 8s. a week more for each £1,000 of his mortgage than a man on £40 a week. It seemed to us ridiculous that this should be so, and therefore we are introducing this option mortgage scheme which will permit those taking out mortgages either to continue as they are now with tax relief, or to get their mortgage at 2½ per cent. less than the market rate, subject to a minimum of 4 per cent., with the Government reimbursing the building society for the difference. As the House will know, my right honourable friend is at the moment discussing these possibilities with the building societies. They have put forward a scheme of their own to achieve broadly the same ends, and discussions are proceeding on both the building society scheme and the Government scheme.
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We also propose to tackle the rate problem, because it needs tackling. There is very much against rates; they are not an obvious way to tax people. Why should you pay tax on your bricks and mortar more than anything else that is yours? Moreover, local government expenditure is rising faster than any other, and this is largely the result of the increased cost of education. It is rising considerably faster than either personal or national Government expenditure. Rates do not rise automatically; they are not buoyant like income tax, purchase tax, or most of the other taxes we pay. The only way to get rates to rise is by the specific decision every year of the local government authority to make them rise, and they then send out a note to ratepayers saying, "Sorry, your rates have gone up". This is done yearly, and every time it is done it hurts. You cannot take it in your stride as you can take in your stride a rise in the income tax which you pay. The present situation, as found by the Allen Committee, is that rates account for 2·9 per cent. of the average household income after everything else has been paid on it; 6·2 per cent. of the income of households whose net income is £6 to £10 a week; and 8·2 per cent. of the income of households whose net income is under £6 a week.
Rates are like any fixed or quasi-fixed charge for which there is no tax relief—sharply regressive. Therefore we tried to devise a more equitable and sensible plan for local revenue as a whole. But, as we all know, the entire present structure of local government is based on bricks and mortar rates; they are broadly inextricable. They have grown up that way. For this reason, among others, we plan to set up the Royal Commission on Local Government, to examine the entire fabric and structure of local government in this country. I should like to answer the question of the noble Earl, Lord Jellicoe, on this point. There is no delay in setting up the Royal Commission. Planning for it is going ahead and there will be an announcement in due course about the chairmanship, membership, terms of reference, and possibly, also, about the time scale envisaged for its work, though that I am not sure about.
In the meantime we have to do something on the rate problem. We propose,

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therefore, to make Exchequer grants to local authorities in direct relief of rates paid by the citizen. These grants will roughly halve the increase to be expected by each ratepayer during the next three years, and they will cost the Exchequer £30 million in the first year, £60 million in the second year, and £90 million in the third year. We are not looking beyond three years, because it is more than possible that by that time the Royal Commission will have reported on the entire question of rates and the fabric of local government, taken together.
I turn now to the questions on leasehold enfranchisement, on which I expect this House will have one of its best debates when the Bill comes before it. One million households in England and Wales (this is not really a problem in Scotland) are leaseholders. Probably 400,000 of these are in Wales. The point of this measure is that the owner of a leasehold house, with which he or his predecessors as leaseholders have probably provided themselves, and have certainly improved and maintained, is in moral common sense entitled to keep that house. This carries a consequence that the freeholder, therefore, is not entitled to take it when he takes back the land at the end of the lease, and to turn out the leaseholder.
We therefore propose to introduce a Leasehold Enfranchisement Bill to give leaseholders, subject to certain qualifications about length of tenure, et cetera, the right, either to extend their leases by 50 years, or, what is in effect, the right on first reversion to purchase when the lease falls in at an agreed valuation of the site only, having recourse to the Lands Tribunal if that is necessary. The leaseholder who exercises this right and purchases will have to pay the freeholder for the development value on the site.
This is a difficult measure. It is going to be a real reform. I do not think it can be claimed that it is a new or unexpected measure. The Royal Commission in 1884 considered the idea very thoroughly and only narrowly rejected it. It is interesting to notice that Cardinal Manning was in favour of reform at that time. So it has been hovering as a possibility over this country for 80 years and longer. Of course, it will involve problems which this House will, perhaps, be better placed to solve than any other organ in the country.
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One thinks, first, of the problem of the well-managed estate. What are we going to do about those estates where the freeholder has conducted his affairs admirably, and has kept the estate as a good, going concern? One could think of plenty. But it would be impossible to deny the right of enfranchisement to leaseholders, simply because they happened to live on a well-managed estate. We must therefore find some way of setting up schemes to continue the good management after the enfranchisement. The point is this, my Lords. Is ownership necessary in order to manage something well? I do not think so. It is not only ownership which confers the capacity to manage. If it were so, we should have to maintain that Government itself can be only feudal or autocratic when, as we know, it can be democratic. The Prime Minister and the Lord Privy Seal do not own the people of Britain: they merely govern them, with their consent, by democratic means. We think that it should not be impossible to find means whereby schemes of management can be devised and directed at what were formerly well-managed leasehold estates.
It may be objected that the whole concept of leasehold enfranchisement, however the Bill is drafted, alters contracts knowingly entered into by two parties, or the forbears of two parties—though, in fact, of course, we are almost always talking about the business predecessor, and not so often about the physical for-bear of either party. My Lords, so it does; and if it does so it will not be the first time that this has been done. So, for instance, did the manumission of slaves; so, for instance, did the introduction of death duties. Those who amassed personal fortunes in the 19th century were perfectly sure that they would be able to pass them on to their sons. It so happened that politics did not go that way. We now live happily with death duties.
NOBLE LORDS: No!
LORD KENNET: I would bet that the large majority of people in this country live very happily indeed with death duties.
In conclusion, I wish to say how very much I agree with the noble Earl, Lord Jellicoe, about the importance of getting a nice country to live in. This is what

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we are trying to do in all this. All the time one is coming to grips with new problems which turn up, which may have been neglected as many of them have been. But let us keep this on a non-Party basis. We are beginning to give special attention now to the question which is coming to be described by the catch-phrase or headline phrase of, "Historic Towns and their Centres". We shall be trying, so far as we can, to devise means of treating historic towns as a whole, for development purposes. We shall try to get away from the simple process of saying, "All right, develop as you like, but just do not pull that house down, because it is pretty", but will try to move towards the concept of preserving whole areas, and seeing that new buildings really fit with old buildings and really co-exist with them.
I think this is the kind of thing which the noble Earl, Lord Jellicoe, was speaking about. I fully share the noble Earl's admiration for what has been done in Paris, washing the face of Paris—the whole operation which is usually connected with the name of M. Malraux. I fully share his determination that the closure of railway lines, and the withdrawal of the Defence Department from certain sites, should not be permitted to leave outstanding eyesores and patches of decay and weeds and horrors of all sorts. These are problems which are increasing from year to year, and the Government, as responsive as ever to new situations, are therefore giving increased attention to their solution from year to year. I have no doubt that, within the life of this Parliament, there will be concrete measures to lay before your Lord ships; and I have no doubt, too, that the final shape of the measures will benefit by debates in this House. It is the overall aim of the Ministries concerned with housing and development to keep pace with the growing and shifting population, to see that man-made structures on our soil, and the spaces between them, are efficient to live in and work in, are pleasant to look at, and are enough.
4.19 p.m.
BARONESS STOCKS: My Lords, as a very inexperienced Member of your Lordships' House, I must confess that it was with considerable trepidation that I nerved myself to burst into speech on so
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early an occasion in your Lordships' deliberations. However, I have always tried to live up to the principle of, "Do not speak if you have nothing to say, but if you have something to say, say it ". One sentence in the gracious Speech from the Throne, accompanied very soon by an exchange of question and answer in another place, caused me to think that I had something to say, though I may be wrong. Indeed, my precipitancy, I am afraid, has resulted in a rather ill-prepared oration.
The sentence in the gracious Speech which set me going is:
"My Government will continue to develop the health and welfare services and will pay special attention to the development of the family doctor service."
Your Lordships may have noted that in another place on Tuesday last the Prime Minister was asked whether he had received the Report of the Kindersley Committee on Doctors' and Dentists' Remuneration, and, if so, what he intended to do about it. His reply was that he had received it, that it would receive urgent study and careful consideration, and that he would make a statement in the very near future. My Lords, he doubtless will; but it will be a difficult statement, because it will have to be made in the light of the Government's incomes and prices policy, and it is, I think, common knowledge that the Kindersley Report will recommend something like a 15 per cent. increase in the salaries of medical practitioners, and I presume that is not going to fit in with the lower percentages envisaged by the administration of the incomes and prices policy. That is the Government's dilemma. But, personally, I hope that it will be solved in what might perhaps be described as a pragmatic manner—not necessarily too logically, if that is what "pragmatism" means, which I am not at all certain.
I want, therefore, with this hanging over us, to call attention to one or two defects in our National Health Service which can I think be remedied in the near future, and to one which perhaps cannot be remedied in the near future, if at all. But, as I am going to mention defects, may I begin by saying that I believe that our National Health Service is the best in the world; that it is perhaps the most imaginative and comprehensive Welfare Service ever introduced

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into this country at one fell swoop; and that it has, unlike many of our welfare services, brought considerable benefit to the professional classes, who in other respects have not, I think, benefited proportionately from the amenities of an acquisitive society and a Welfare State.
I believe that our National Health Service has contributed very materially to the enormous improvement during the last ten years of the nation's health, especially that of the mothers and children, who unfortunately were not beneficiaries under the Lloyd George sick insurance Act. It may, in so doing, have contributed to the population problem of this country, but I understand that the Minister of Health has it in mind to expand the Service in certain directions to deal with that side of the matter. The other thing that I think one has to note about our National Health Service is, on balance, the good will and public spirit with which it was received by the medical profession in 1946, in view of the fact that it laid very heavy burdens upon them without, perhaps, certainly so far as the general practitioners were concerned, compensatory remunerative benefits.
My qualification to speak at all on this subject (I am not, of course, a qualified medical practitioner, and some Members of this House are) is that I was brought up in a medical household, in a medical family. My father was a general practitioner in West London, and I lived, so to speak, in a medical climate and saw life very much from the point of view of those who were engaged in medicine. But I have had a more recent experience than that, because for the last fifteen years I have served as a member of the London Executive Council, which, as your Lordships know, is one of those bodies which are responsible for the administration of the general practitioner side of the National Health Service.
Those two experiences afford rather an interesting contrast. There was my father's practice, entirely fee-paying, at a time when that kind of medical attention was enjoyed, I think it is fair to say, by only that small section of the population who could afford to pay for it. It was not enjoyed by very large sections of the population, who relied on charitably endowed hospitals, on out-
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patients' departments and on the kind of "sixpenny doctors" so well portrayed in Bernard Shaw's The Doctor's Dilemma. Your Lordships will remember the doctor who made an immense fortune out of that, as one might call it, "bottle and surgery" practice. My father was never overworked. He was nominally on duty 24 hours a day and he dealt with his own night calls, but he had plenty of leisure. If he wanted to go away for a short holiday or have a free day or weekend, he would arrange with a fellow practitioner of his own choosing to stand in for him; and he, in turn, would stand in for other doctors on similar occasions.
He was, on the whole, rather tied; and, of course, if he went to a theatre he had to leave the number of his seat in order that he could be called out of it, in the event of an infant coming suddenly and unexpectedly into the world. But he earned, I should say, fairly easily, and with a good deal of leisure, an income which was comparable to that of a schoolmaster or civil servant, and which enabled my mother to live like a schoolmaster's wife or a civil servant's wife, with full domestic service—a parlour-maid to answer the doorbell and take messages, a nurse for her children, cook, housemaid and so on. That was the sort of life that a general practitioner at that time enjoyed.
Compare that, my Lords, with the life of a general practitioner to-day under the National Health Service. His leisure is nil. Unless he makes other arrangements (which I am going to consider in a minute), he is on duty 24 hours a day—and that really is duty. His surgery is crowded. My father's surgery consisted of a consulting room. Most of his patients were visited in their own homes. I remember that one or two people used to sit in the family dining-room, where, if they were kept waiting, they were able to read either Punch or the Navy List, which my father regarded as adequate literature for any educated person. But it was a very different atmosphere from that in the surgery of a general practitioner anywhere in the country, I think, to-day. His wife is receptionist, cook, housekeeper, child-minder—everything. Of course, in that position she is not dissimilar from the wife of a schoolmaster, university teacher

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or civil servant, none of whom can afford that style of domestic service. But the whole of life is quite different, and cannot, I think, be otherwise.
Those of your Lordships who are as old as I am will have suffered at times from what one might call "the disillusions of youth". There was a time, when I was a student at the School of Economics—a King Fabian—when I believed that if an industry or service was nationalised or municipalised those who worked in it, seeing that they were no longer working for a private employer but for the common good, would feel quite differently about their work. Yes, my Lords, I really believed that. Compare the kind of medical service which I saw my father render to his patients—all of whom were friends of the family; their friends were our friends—with the sort of service, or what you may call the lack of service, rendered to the rest of the population at that time. I used to believe—I believed it for quite a long time—that with a universalised National Health Service you could extend to the whole population the kind of service, the kind of family relationship, the kind of doctor-patient relationship, that was enjoyed by my father's patients. That I believed; but I no longer believe it.
I do not think it can be done. Why? Well, for quite a number of reasons. In the first place we have brought within the ambit of general medical practice a large number of patients who are not accustomed to the standard of the old fee-payers. They are apt to feel that they can order the doctor about. Doctors, professional men with professional standards, do not like being ordered about. Some instances I have actually seen and some I have heard described. A patient will take the view, "If I want you to come round to see my Dennis, and to tell me whether he can go to the cinema or not, then you have to come at once. You are paid to serve me, and as an insured person I have already paid for your services in my contributions." That is not the fact, as we know, because the National Health Service is not part of the National Insurance Service, but it is widely believed by many patients that it is. They adopt this attitude towards doctors. They say, "I've paid for it, and now it's time I got something out of it." The doctors
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do not like that; and I do not blame them.
There is another kind of patient, not necessarily an exacting patient at all, who, if anything, is rather a humble patient whose standard of medical service derives from the days when you went to a surgery, got a bottle of medicine, and that was all. Such patients do not expect very good service, and in many cases do not get very good service. So we have to deal with a quality of certain patients, numbers of whom exist in the large towns all over the country, and it will be a long time before they are educated either to treat the doctor as he should be treated or to demand the standard of service which doctors should give.
But, of course, there is another difficulty. That is housing. This was the matter touched upon by the noble Earl, Lord Jellicoe, in his opening speech. We are in the middle of a housing shortage, and in crowded areas doctors find it extremely difficult to secure premises not only for residences, but, in many cases, for surgeries; and as a member of the. London Executive Council concerned with the appointment of National Health Service doctors to vacancies, I know that many vacancies continue to remain unfilled because doctors are unable to obtain suitable premises. At the other end of the social scale, in such places as the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, property values have soared to such a height that it is almost impossible for any practitioner on an income that can be earned under the National Health Service to afford the kind of premises he needs to carry on his work. So that is a problem.
However, the great problem is the problem of heavy case loads. According to the National Health Act, a doctor may pile up a list of 3,500 patients. If he takes an assistant he can add 2,000. I am not suggesting that all those 3,500 patients plus 2,000 need his services at any one time, or indeed in the course of any one year, because it is pretty certain that on every doctor's list there is a hard-core of patients who for years on end never require the doctor's services at all. If the National Health Service had been started at the beginning of my life, I should have been an asset for many years to whichever doctor had taken me on

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his list. But, of course, the size of this hard-core varies from area to area. In areas where there are a large number of families, in new estates where there are many children, all liable to have infectious diseases, the hard-core is relatively small. In areas such as Central London, where there are a large number of students, secretaries and young people living in lodgings and hostels, the hardcore would be much greater, because such people do not, and certainly should not, absorb much of the time of the doctors.
But, whatever the hard-core is, those case loads are much too big—so big that a good doctor cannot give his patients the kind of service which he wishes to give them, services up to the professional standards to which he is accustomed. At the same time, it is possible for a bad doctor to make quite a considerable income with quite a considerable degree of leisure. All he has to do is to settle in an area where the standard of medical attention and services is of what may be called the "surgery and bottle" type, pile up the biggest list possible—and, in fact, this is done—engage an assistant, go off to a nice salubrious country suburb to live, and obtain relief for night calls, office hours, weekends and all the rest, by paying a deputising service to provide medical attention for his patients.
That brings me to a very interesting and recent development in the National Health Service which I think was never contemplated by its framers. That is the contracting-out by National Health doctors in contract with the executive councils to commercial services which undertake to supply deputising doctors. It is not, of course, illegal. A principal in contract with the National Health Service is responsible for any mistakes that the deputising doctor may make. It is perfectly legal and, in some cases, it is perfectly reasonable for him to use as his deputy another doctor, who has to be a fully-qualified doctor but he is not in contract with the National Health Service. That system of contracting-out under the National Health Service grew up very gradually and rather mysteriously. It started with the organisation of the Emergency Call Service, which was a properly constituted business company, in London in 1955. But the London Executive Council did not know of its existence until there was a slight slip-up
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in communications between a deputising doctor and a principal doctor which was brought to the notice of the Council.
The way in which the deputising service works is, briefly, this. The agency acquires a headquarters with a telephone switchboard, engages a panel of what may be called roving doctors, all of whom must be properly qualified, and they are set up with cars and radio apparatus which enables them to receive calls to go here and there in a particular area to any patient who wants emergency treatment. Meanwhile, the National Health doctor can contract with the deputising service to take his calls (his telephone is switched through) and to provide him with a deputy doctor to attend his patients at such times as he wishes to be free. Of course, one can understand the almost immediate popularity of that form of service. It spread very rapidly indeed in London. I believe it is spreading also in other large towns—in Manchester, in Birmingham, in Liverpool, in Sheffield.
In London it has become so popular—and, indeed, one may say so necessary—that more than 50 per cent. of the National Health doctors in the London area use deputising services, contracting-out in this way, for week-ends or night calls, holidays, or whatever it may be.
At a later stage (I forget the date; I think it was 1963) the Ministry of Health became cognisant of the development of these services and brought them under some control, but in fact a very shadowy control, of the London executive councils. The new order was that the London executive councils were to take cognisance of such agencies as existed in their areas to satisfy themselves that they were run in a reputable manner and that the roving doctors employed by them were reasonably well qualified. The general practitioners in the Service were required to notify the executive councils to what extent they wished to use the deputising services, because it was thought possible—and indeed it was possible—that they might be over-used, and that the contracting out played too large a part in the life of the general practitioner in the Service. So at the moment there is a certain measure of control. It is exercised in London, and I have no doubt that it is exercised in those other

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areas with executive councils where this particular form of contracting out occurs.
It has its disadvantages, and one of them was indicated in the Report on the Family Doctor Service two years ago from the Committee over which Doctor Annis Gillie presided, and which is known as the Gillie Report. It contained a number of proposed measures for lightening the burdens of doctors, and one reference to the growth of the deputising services, which was that while recognising their usefulness
"the weakness of this system is the deputy's lack of knowledge of the patient."
That may be so, but it is also true that the services of roving doctors are generally welcomed by patients whose attitude is, "If I want a doctor in an emergency, it does not matter whether it is my doctor so long as I get one at the right time." And, indeed, that is what happens.
Now, my Lords, here we are with our overburdened case loads; our growing system of contracting out of the Service; inadequate leisure for doctors, and much else which makes medical practice under the Health Service unattractive. What can we do about it? The obvious thing to do about it is to have more doctors, and I understand that Her Majesty's Government are taking steps to ensure the expansion of medical schools and the institution of new medical schools. But that will take seven years; it is not an immediate remedy. The more immediate remedy, of course, is to improve the conditions under which doctors now work, in order that fewer of them may be tempted to accept positions in the Commonwealth, or even in foreign countries, which may seem to be to their advantage. By the way, one ought to pay tribute to the Commonwealth doctors, and indeed Continental doctors, who are now helping to staff our medical service. Without them we should hardly have a medical service at all.
To obtain more doctors means, of course, more pay. I think we should do something about housing, and also that it should be a duty of a local housing authority to see that, where necessary, premises are made available both for surgeries and as residences for doctors. A great many local authorities are doing that now in connection with development
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schemes and new towns, but not all, and this needs to go a great deal further.
I think it would be advantageous to bring the whole machinery of the commercial deputising services right into the Ministry of Health, as it were to nationalise them, to ensure that the deputy doctors, the roving doctors, are in fact themselves in contract with the National Health Service and responsible for what they may do. Indeed, a proposal to that effect was put forward two years ago by the first and largest of the London deputising services, the Emergency Call Service, in a Memorandum, a copy of which I have in my possession. Whether the Ministry of Health are cognisant of it or have considered it I do not know, but I should urgently suggest that the Memorandum be considered, because I think it would remedy some of the defects which arise from less responsible forms of contracting out.
There needs to be much more education of the patient in regard to the treatment of the doctor. It could be done. To some extent it is being done, but it could be done with much greater intensity through schools, women's institutes, institutes of adult education, clubs and all the rest of it. Probably the solution for much of what I have been describing is a growth of group practices. That would diminish the need for deputising agencies. Where there is a group practice there can be a rota which enables members of the group to secure the leisure, the holidays and the other things which one would wish them to have.
It is also possible that we shall need to produce some form of attraction which will induce medical practitioners to settle more readily in what they regard as unattractive areas. Large areas in this country are grossly under-doctored because doctors do not want to live there: still more, their wives do not wish to live there. There are certain areas of the country where the caseload is much larger than the average. I can give your Lordships some figures which, I fear, are two years old, but they are probably fairly accurate for the present time. The maximum number of patients which a doctor may have on his list is 3,500. The average list for the country as a whole is well below that figure; it is in the neighbourhood of 2,326. But this is

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an average, and 26 per cent. of patients are on the lists of doctors with over 3,000 patients where they cannot, I believe, get really adequate attention.
In what doctors regard as unattractive areas the percentage of patients on these swollen lists is very much larger. In St. Helen's, which I think is the largest, or it was two years ago, 68 per cent. of the patients were on lists of more than 3,000 patients. Many years ago one of my daughters, when very young, returned from an undigested history lesson with the assertion that Napoleon, having been defeated at the "Battle of Waterlily", had been "exiled to St. Helen's". Certain medical practitioners would, I think, regard that as ungenerous treatment of a noble foe. I have mentioned the possible remedies, but the major remedy, I think, will be the increase in pay which is doubtless embodied in the Kindersley Report; though it may not be the whole remedy.
There is just one defect which I will, in conclusion, draw to the attention of your Lordships', and which I think cannot be remedied, at any rate in the near future. It is the existence of mixed practices. Of course, it is perfectly legal for a doctor in contract with the National Health Service to take private patients, fee-paying patients, in addition to his National Health patients, so long as he does not put their names on his list; and many doctors do that, especially in areas with fairly well-to-do populations. I have always thought that that was a dangerous thing, and that it might lead to discriminatory treatment.
No one would challenge the right of a doctor to continue in private practice if he does not wish to serve under the National Health Service. No one, I think, would challenge the right of a patient who chooses to spend his money on getting what he believes to be more leisurely, and perhaps more punctual, service from a doctor whom he is prepared to pay. But when there is a mixed practice, I think that the danger of discrimination may arise. Although in many cases of mixed practice it does not arise, because the doctor does not fall into that temptation, there are cases where the doctor will tend to turn his National Health patients over either to his assistant or his junior partner in order to have more time for his private patients. I think it is a waning evil, because on the whole the
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older age groups tend to perpetuate private practice and the younger age groups, specially young families, go straight into the National Health Service. So it might not last.
But may I remind your Lordships that at an earlier stage in to-day's proceedings some of your Lordships may have be-seeched the Almighty not to lead you into temptation? If so, I think it confers an obligation on your Lordships not to support social policies and administrative arrangements which would lead other people into temptation—and I think mixed practices do, although the temptation is not always responded to.
I wonder whether it would be in order for me to conclude my remarks by extending my good wishes and encouragement to the Minister in another place, who will very soon have to face and deal with the implications of the Kindersley Report. More power to him, especially as he will be operating under the sombre, or—shall I say?—menacing shadow of his own Government's prices and incomes policy!
4.52 p.m.
LORD CROOK: My Lords, I count myself fortunate that I follow the noble Lady and therefore have the opportunity of extending to her the congratulations of your Lordships on her maiden speech. Some of us knew the noble Lady before she came to this House, and many more know her valuable work—and all of us welcome the acquisition which the House has had. I am sure that all noble Lords will hope that in future we shall have many opportunities of listening to her thoughtful speeches, well packed with information.
The paragraph of the gracious Speech to which I refer is that immediately before the paragraph to which the noble Lady referred. It reads:
"My Ministers will complete further stages of their major reviews of social security. While continuing to ensure to pensioners and other beneficiaries a fair share of the country's rising living standards, they will seek further means of dealing with the poverty that still exists. Legislation will be introduced to create a Ministry of Social Security and to replace National Assistance by a new system of non-contributory benefits."
For me to be able to refer to this paragraph represents another milestone in my political life. The last one was my maiden

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speech in your Lordships' House eighteen years ago in support of the Labour Government's National Assistance Bill of 1948. I chose that debate for my maiden speech because I started my working life in the office of the now defunct Board of Guardians, an experience that started during the First World War and led me at the end of the war to join the Labour Party. The war had shown me the necessity of all-in insurance and the abolition of the Poor Law.
The 1948 Bill was the last of a series abolishing the Poor Law of Elizabeth I, but we knew then that there was still much more to be done. It was for that reason that in 1955 the Labour Party included in its Election Manifesto a pledge of further reforms and of the establishment of a new Ministry of Social Security. And at last, some eleven years afterwards, the election of the present Government permits the redemption of that pledge. My only surprise is that this was included in the gracious Speech at such an early date, so soon after 1964, because clearly a comprehensive review of all pensions still needs to be made. I am sure we all congratulate the Government that, within a few weeks of coming into office in 1964 and in spite of economic difficulties, they were able to raise the rates of National Insurance, industrial benefits and National Assistance, so that, for instance, a married couple who had been receiving £5 9s. found themselves thereafter in receipt of £6 10s. a week. The continuance of the review resulted in the introduction of wage-related short-term benefits, which will commence later this year and which were before your Lordships' House some few months ago. By these, additions to flat rate benefits for sickness, unemployment, industrial injury or as widow's allowances, will be made payable to all earning between £9 and £30 a week.
Now the paragraph in the gracious Speech to which I have referred fore-shadows a Bill, which I, for one, welcome, to combine the work of the Ministry of Pensions and National Insurance and the work of the National Assistance Board, a Ministry which will get rid of the sharp distinction between benefits related to contributions and non-contributory benefits. At last there will be a procedure for retired people which will be more flexible, and no longer will
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there be differentiation. The elderly persons who are to receive both National Insurance benefit and the new benefit will have their payments made in one book, so it will no longer be true that those who are poor but proud will have to display differential evidence of their circumstances before their fellow citizens by having to produce two books.
Such a system will be more generally acceptable than the present one, but I realise that there remains much to be done in the review which the Government indicate they are undertaking. The future general structure of all pensions clearly needs to be examined, and, as I see it, not the least of the problems is the relationship between State pensions and occupational pensions. Since the end of last year there has been a growing tendency on the part of good employers to provide some kind of superannuation for their workers. The last figure I saw estimated that some 12 million people were currently members of such schemes. Clearly these schemes will need to be examined in relation to the declared desire of the Government to produce an income-related pension of something like half-pay on retirement for a person with average earnings. Some of these schemes are provided by insurance companies. Some are contributory and some non-contributory. Some give early benefits and some are slow to mature.
More important, perhaps, than any of these factors is that some have transfer values and some have not. In these days when flexibility of employment is a vital thing, to firms, to their workers and to the country, transfer from job to job will obviously become of increasing importance. Any scheme of pension which pins men and women to one given employer is of little value. I suggest, therefore, that the transfer value arrangements which exist already in certain fields of employment need to be extended. The Civil Service, the local government service and national boards all have arrangements whereby transfer values on actuarial bases are arranged for persons leaving or entering their services. What now applies in those fields should, I think, be applied elsewhere. Clearly it will not be easy for anybody. It will call for good sense on the part of employers and unions as well as the Government. Workers have welcomed the redundancy payments. They probably must be supplemented, or

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even replaced, as necessary, by the transfer value superannuation benefits to which I have referred. All this will take time, but I think the review on which the Government are to embark is essential if we are to get this job right for the years ahead.
Nor must we forget the reference in the paragraph to poverty. A smaller group, yet perhaps a greater problem, is the family, sometimes completely forgotten to-day—the low-income family. In these cases, for no reason for which the worker can be blamed, the father is employed in a low-income job, and his total income, even with family allowances, still produces for the household total budget less than the amount that would be received under the present National Assistance Board scales. What is more, because he pays no income tax, being so lowly paid, he in turn qualifies for none of the benefits of relief which income tax can afford.
A reference to those matters brings me by natural course to the subject of retirement; and here I venture to remind your Lordships of a debate that I tried to initiate some few months ago on the work of the Pre-retirement Association. I know that a number of your Lordships have been further interested in this matter, and, indeed, like most of us, educated in the matter by the B.B.C. Television programmes, weekly over the first three months of this year, with the co-operation of this Association. What I want to suggest, therefore, is that in this situation, where our population is ever ageing, it may be that we need a new outlook. I would dare to say, although I know it will be unpopular in certain circles, that there should be reconsideration of the compulsory early retirement age in some walks of life. I know, as everyone who has dealt with large organisations must know, of the ever-present problem of the promotion of personnel within an organisation. The retention of men and women beyond the normal retiring age, as it is termed, inevitably poses the question of restriction of promotion opportunities, and the only hope for the well-qualified person for promotion inside the organisation is the departure of the seniors on retirement. I would not desire for the sake of the workers concerned, nor for the sake of the good and efficient administration of
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industries and firms, to advocate here and now any policy which precluded an adequate career value, but I believe that we must face the facts. The new factor of the longevity of the population means that many who are capable of efficient further service of some kind or another find themselves pensioned off at an automatic age and feel that there is no future hope of work—indeed, some of them feel that there is no future hope for them at all.
Not all of them, of course, want to go on working after the normal retiring age, and I do not suggest that any change should be made in the opportunity of enjoying their retirement, to which they look forward. Some are quite happy merely to use the bit of garden they have to potter around, and others to give of good social service in the community, and they do retire from normal work. But there are many others, these days, who still feel young when made to go at sixty and who see a very dreary time ahead of them. They have not adjusted themselves either to the factor of retirement or to the new budgetary condition which has come into the home when they have retired. Because they are not prepared either for this cut in income or this new daily routine lack which comes to them, they become anxiety cases. They want work, and they want a little more to do. All this occurs at a time when we are crying out in this country for more manpower.
All I am posing as a question is whether it is really beyond our wits to try to solve some of these problems by marrying those two factors together. Those who desire a well-earned rest should be prepared for it, and those who are capable of work, and want it, ought, I suggest, to be able to have it. In this valuable review of pension retirement problems involved in the paragraph of the gracious Speech to which I have referred, it might well be that this could be a further idea for some examination. I beg leave to support the Motion for the humble Address.
5.7 p.m.
LORD ANNAN: My Lords, may I begin by joining in the congratulations to the noble Baroness, Lady Stocks, on her admirable maiden speech? The great experience which she brings to this House

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on questions of social policy is matched by her distinction of mind, and I am sure that all of us who heard her this afternoon hope that she will be willing to speak many times in the future, because if her willingness is there, the House will benefit enormously from her speeches.
I am sorry that the noble Earl, Lord Jellicoe, has had to go. I know he has been suffering from back trouble and has had a pain-killing injection which by this time may be wearing off. I mention this, because I want to take up one or two points in the noble Earl's speech. I was extremely glad to hear the noble Earl give from his side of the House such a warm endorsement to comprehensive schools. This is perfectly comprehensible, because comprehensive schools have been started by many Conservative boroughs in the country, notably Croydon and Leicestershire. It is welcome indeed if this is now becoming no longer a matter of political contention.
I say that because the present system, whereby children are divided at 11-plus into sheep and goats, not only is unfair but distorts primary education; and, more than that, is inefficient. It is unfair because in one area there will be five times as many children securing places in grammar schools as there are in another area. It is impossible to take account of fluctuations in the birthrate, so where one brother may get into a grammar school, another brother, a little later, does not, because in the meantime, the birthrate has gone up and there are not enough places. It distorts education in the primary schools because it forces streaming at the early age of six or seven thereby convincing some children at that age that they will be failures for the rest of their lives; and it produces in the primary schools that horrible process of "bashing" for the 11-plus, which begins at nine or ten, when children are trained to do intelligence tests.
It is inefficient because, when it comes to the crunch, a quarter of those who are selected for grammar schools do not get to "A" level standard, and of the two-thirds who fail at 11-plus, when they are transferred to the grammar school they do better than those who are actually in the grammar school. But the real trouble is that in our system only one in
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fifty children is, in fact, transferred from the secondary modern to the grammar school. I am proud to say that in my own college I have a Fellow who failed the 11-plus and has since had a distinguished career as an historian and also, now, as one of the leading experts in the country on boarding education. He tells me, for example, of his friends in his secondary modern school, six of whom were just as able as he was, but whose parents thought at that time that they ought to get out and earn money, and they are now on the floor of the shop, working at Dagenham. In these days we cannot afford that high wastage of talent. That is why I think the comprehensive system is such an admirable one.
The comprehensive system is attacked, and I was slightly disturbed to note that the noble Earl, Lord Jellicoe, went on to talk about a kind of "doctrinal purity" which had obsessed the Government in their policy on this matter. I do not quite understand what he means by "doctrinal purity". because if the present system is as I have described it, if it is inefficient, unfair and distorts education in the primary schools, then surely the sooner it can be abolished, the better.
I should have liked to ask the noble Earl whether he was in favour of "1066". I do not refer to the event, 900 years ago in history, whereby a rude transfer of Government occurred which led, twenty years later, to the setting up of a Land Commission, which published its report, not in a White Paper, of course, but in Domesday Book. The noble Lord, Lord Kennet, referred to land barons and the necessity of keeping them in their place. That was what Domesday Book was meant to do. I refer not to that event in history, but to the circular which dealt with the extension of comprehensive education in new towns and rural areas, and laid down that in those areas no further secondary modern or grammar schools should be built. If that circular is accepted as a reasonable piece of administrative procedure, it seems to me it follows that one should not be too disturbed about the gradual change (for it must be gradual) that will take place in our schools as a whole in their structure, because it is not really sense to say that we are entirely in favour of comprehensive education but that wherever we have a very good

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grammar school it must be kept as it is at present.
The reason, of course, that we cannot have both systems running simultaneously is that if, in an area, there is a good grammar school and a comprehensive school is also set up there, the comprehensive school simply becomes another name for a secondary modern school. That is why it is important to emphasise that in universities, which might be expected to be places which would put tremendous importance on the preservation of the grammar school system, there are many people who believe that in fact the comprehensive system is not merely a fairer system but is also more efficient.
LORD NEWTON: My Lords, may I ask the noble Lord a question? Arising out of what he said with regard to the impossibility of having both comprehensive and selective schools together, would he say that it would be impossible to have both types in London, for instance?
LORD ANNAN: Presumably the noble Lord means comprehensives and secondary moderns and grammar schools running together. I think it is inevitable that this will go on, simply because of the state of school buildings, but I very much hope that everywhere in the country we shall in future years move towards a comprehensive system.
There are two difficulties which dog our education in schools. One of these is segregation, and here I should like to hark back to a debate which took place in your Lordships' House in February last when the noble Viscount, Lord Eccles, introduced the Motion on the future of the public schools and direct grant schools. In that debate a very notable contribution was made by the noble Lord, Lord James of Rusholme, who of course brought a great wealth of experience from his time as headmaster of an immensely distinguished direct grant school. Yet to hear him speak one would have thought that that great school and other direct grant schools pullulated with large numbers of children from the working class, the skilled workers or even the unskilled workers. In fact, if one looks at these figures for the direct grant schools one sees that they present a class pattern very like that in the public
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schools. The national percentage of children of the professional classes is 4 per cent.: in public schools and direct grant schools, the figure is something between 32 and 27 per cent. The difference between the public and the direct grant schools is very little. For the intermediate classes, which in the community number 15 per cent., the figure in public and direct grant schools is something between 50 and 60 per cent. In the skilled working class, here the direct grant schools have a slight edge on the public schools: and the figure is about 7 per cent. for the public schools, compared to 14 per cent., at most, for the direct grant schools. But if we come to the semi-skilled or unskilled members of the community, which total 21 and 9 per cent, respectively in the national community, here one sees that their children have very little chance, not only of going to a public school but of going even to a direct grant school.
We must surely try to move towards abolishing this kind of segregation. We shall never completely abolish it. Comprehensives will not abolish it; comprehensives will not solve this problem, which will remain with us for many years, and one knows perfectly well that neighbourhood schools—that is to say, schools in particular neighbourhoods—will have a better reputation than schools in other neighbourhoods. There will be choice by neighbourhood, just as to-day there is choice by cheque book or choice by meritocratic entry through the 11-plus. This will happen for some time, because it will take long to replace school buildings, owing to the many years of neglect of school buildings, particularly primary schools, by Tory and Liberal Governments since the beginning of this century.
I believe that one of the things that comprehensives will do is to alleviate to some extent that division, which I think is a most unfortunate one and must inevitably occur when 70 per cent. of the children go to secondary modern schools and the other 30 per cent. to grammar schools or to independent or direct grant schools. The emphasis which the Government are at the moment putting on comprehensive education does make us think of children as belonging to a single nation and not two.

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The other point to which I want to allude is Lord Jellicoe's admirable disquisition, at the end of his speech, about the importance of taking problems of delinquency extremely seriously.
THE MINISTER WITHOUT PORTFOLIO (LORD CHAMPION): My Lords, the noble Lord is now about to embark upon another part of his speech, and I wonder whether this might be a suitable moment for the House to adjourn during pleasure until fifteen minutes after the termination of the meeting which is to be held in the Royal Gallery and is to be addressed by U Thant.
House adjourned during pleasure.
House resumed.

ADDRESS IN REPLY TO HER MAJESTY'S MOST GRACIOUS SPEECH
6.35 p.m.
Debate resumed.
LORD ANNAN: My Lords, I was referring to the problem of delinquency which the noble Earl, Lord Jellicoe, raised, and it is an extremely important point. There are many causes of child delinquency, but one of them may well be the fact that under our present system of education, with the streaming of children in the secondary modern schools, so many of them feel from an early age that they are rejected by society. This is one of the things which I hope can also be changed in our educational system.
If I may refer to this business of dividing the clever children, who go of course to the grammar schools, from the not so clever, I approach this from the point of view of someone who was myself at a public school and governor of two public schools. I believe that the public schools have something to give to the State educational system. It is simply this: that, as everyone who goes to a public school knows, there is to be found there an extraordinary mixture of talent, not only very clever boys but also some really very stupid boys. And this is admirable for both, because the not so intellectually
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able ones are given targets to aim for; they are made aware of the fact that the intellect is in some way important, and that there are academic standards which have some value in life. At the same time, the clever children are made to realise that not all the prizes necessarily go to those who are clever at their sums. They realise that there are qualities which people have, of adaptability, of character, of leadership, and some of the clever ones are persuaded that perhaps these are important in life. So the clever and the not so clever gain from each other.
I think it would be very false indeed to pretend that a public school is in any way a comprehensive school. Indeed, when some Members of your Lordships' House said this they were head magisterially rebuked in The Times by Mr. Robert Birley, who pointed out that the public school is a very different place indeed from a comprehensive school. Nevertheless, I think there is an analogy to be drawn: that although a public school has its own standard of entrance, the common entrance examination, this wide disparity of talent has a good effect on both kinds of child in the school. This is one of the things that the comprehensive school aims to achieve. It is very difficult to achieve in many areas but it does aim to do this, and I think this is one of the reasons why children in public schools feel, in a sense, less rejected, if they are not so clever, because it is perfectly well realised that in fact both types of child have a great deal to add to the community.
There is one last question that I want to ask here, and that is on the sixth-form education in the country. It is a point to which the noble Lord, Lord Snow, has often referred in public and in our debates. I refer to the deplorable fact that, owing to specialisation in the sixth form, boys and girls who opt for an arts subject are not to be instructed in mathematics after the age of 15½. This seems to me one of the really disastrous things in our school organisation at the moment. It is disastrous because, whatever you are going to do in later life, you probably need some mathematical techniques—and I use that term in the most humble sense, probably only the humblest kind of statistical techniques.
Indeed, I think it would be greatly advantageous if we had in our sixth

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forms courses of mathematics for non-mathematicians, and these should be courses structured not for people who are mathematicians but for people like myself who are abysmally ignorant of this subject, to give the kind of person who has no mathematical ability some interest in seeing what different techniques can do. At one public school, of which, owing to being Provost of King's, I have the honour to be, ex officio, Senior Fellow, Eton, they have, I believe, recently installed a computer.
The possibilities for the use of a computer in instruction in mathematics for the non-mathematical are enormous. You can take cricket averages, racing form, and all sorts of things that make a real appeal to boys without mathematical ability, and they will see the point of these techniques. If you can use this kind of instruction to stop this terrible division in our sixth forms between those who are innumerate (to use the phrase of the Crowther Report) and those who are illiterate, in the sense that they are doing so much science and mathematics that they never have any time for arts subjects, it will be of inestimable value. I wonder whether we could have any information as to whether the Committee on the curriculum, set up under Sir John Maude, in the Department for Education and Science, has made any progress on this particular point.
LORD BOOTHBY: My Lords, perhaps I may interrupt the noble Lord for one moment. He has mentioned Eton. I was at that school and I should just like to inform the noble Lord that I never felt anything but rejected during the whole time I was there. He says you do not feel rejected at a public school. You do. I was rejected for four years, and I have never got over it.
LORD ANNAN: I cannot, of course, question the noble Lord's factual analysis of his career at Eton. I can only say that his deduction that he has never been able to get over it is palpably wrong.
Let me leave this question of education and turn to my second point, that of road safety, which is mentioned in the gracious Speech, where it is stated that a measure will be laid before us designed to promote greater safety on the roads. I presume that this refers to a Bill which has been
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much bruited about, and which will contain the suggestion that a breathalyser should be used, of which I am entirely in favour in regard to the roads, though not necessarily for use in this House. Nevertheless, by itself, I think that it is only one move towards greater safety on the roads.
I wonder whether I might draw attention to something which has been much discussed in the Press recently, namely, the promotion of greater safety in the manufacture of cars. This matter arose recently in acute form in the United States, where a Mr. Ralph Nader wrote a book which showed that insufficient attention was being paid by the manufacturers of cars—by General Motors, Ford, and other great firms—to manufacturing cars with obvious safety devices. The hook was published. General Motors were then unwise enough to put private detectives on the author's trail in order to detract from his character, if they could; and when that was impossible and they were exposed for so doing, the President of General Motors had to apologise to Congress.
This gives some indication of the way in which car manufacturers are unwilling to pay attention to things which undoubtedly can lead them into great expense, and which possibly might make their cars less saleable. I do not believe that any such nefarious activities would ever be indulged in by manufacturers of cars in this country. Nevertheless, is it not possible that in this Bill there might be provisions which would, for instance, increase the number of requirements essential by law in the manufacture of a car? The simplest example I can give is the introduction of safety belts or safety seats. The Road Research Laboratory has, for example, shown that there has been a 15 per cent. reduction in accidents with all cars which were fitted with safety belts; that only 20 per cent. of cars have these and that in only 8 per cent. of those cars which are fitted with safety belts do the people who drive them or sit in them regularly wear them. Nevertheless, if this figure of a 15 per cent. reduction in road accidents is effected, surely this is one of the things which ought to be made compulsory in all cars. The reduction in deaths through fitting safety belts is enormous: it is 70 per cent. There is a reduction in serious

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injuries of 65 per cent. and in slight injuries of 33 per cent.
Of course, we need more than this. We need safety seats which are bolted to the floor. We need more research into the kind of ways in which these safety measures could be introduced. You may say: Yes, if they are compulsory to fit. But should they be compulsory to wear? No; that would be going much too far. You cannot compel ordinary passengers to wear safety belts if they are provided. But, if they are provided, it might well be that insurance companies, when asked to pay claims for damages resulting from injuries in a road accident, would take into account the fact that, although a car had been fitted with safety belts which were compulsorily fitted, nevertheless the occupants of the car had not in fact fastened those safety belts. If this kind of sancion were imposed I think it would lead to a great increase in readiness to take measures to improve road safety. There are all sorts of other measures which might be introduced in the manufacture of cars, such as the collapsible steering column, so that in a head-on collision the steering column would not immediately puncture the chest of the driver and result in death.
These are simple indications of the kind of approach that one might hope to see in legislation which is introduced to promote road safety. Here, I feel that the new Minister of Transport, with her dynamic personality and vitality, may well produce a greater sense of urgency in that Ministry, which has not always been noted for its sense of urgency. I think it has always been a Ministry which has been too prone to say, "We must wait for three to five years to see the results of this research." The research has certainly not all been done, although a good deal of it has been completed. One would like to see some speedy measures taken to deal with the situation, which we have all now come so much to accept, the regular increase of deaths on the roads—so much so, that we now hardly pay sufficient attention to it.
My last point is on the mention in the gracious Speech of the introduction of legislation relating to the reform of Criminal and of Civil Law. The Criminal Law is particularly the one to which I want to allude. Here again, I feel myself
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much in agreement with the noble Earl, Lord Jellicoe, when he said that this business of the prevention of crime was of the utmost importance, and that he did not see as a solution of this problem the introduction of violent penal measures. Indeed, the whole tenor of his speech was entirely, in my own way of thinking, that penal reform should be in the sense of trying to re-educate the prisoner rather than trying to inflict punitive measures upon him. Nevertheless, this is a problem which ultimately is one of helping the police. We are to-day in a difficulty because to some extent the public have lost confidence, or at any rate the confidence they once had, in the police forces. This has had the effect of lowering the morale of the police. How can we improve this situation? Paradoxically, it may seem, one suggestion for an improvement of the position is that the Police Federation should agree that any complaints launched by a member of the public who feels he has a complaint against a police officer should not be heard, as they are at present, by chief constables or by the Commissioner of Police, but should be judged by some lay body. If this were done it seems to me that there would be very good grounds indeed for the reverse side of the coin: that is to say, of legislation being enacted to help the police in the conduct of their proceedings against the criminal classes.
One does not have to stress the extra-ordinary ability of the modern criminal—how well organised he is, how he plans his operations with the precision of a Montgomery at the Battle of Alamein. The police in this country are to some extent handicapped by our procedures in criminal law. This is a subject on which I am incompetent to speak, and I do not wish to make various half-baked suggestions which any lawyer would know were unreasonable. However, might I ask whether consideration is being given by the Government to reforming criminal procedure, particularly in regard to committal procedure in magistrates' courts? At this moment the natural process is that a criminal who is accused of a crime appears in a magistrates' court, where a process very like that which takes place at the Assize is put into effect. If it is found that a prima facie case exists against the criminal he is committed to the Assizes.

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To many people to-day this seems, if I may so put it, to be a waste of time, in that the time would be far better spent in trying, under the Continental system of an examining magistrate, to find out more about the facts of the case.
That is only an instance, but I wish to be frank about this. In making reforms of this kind one would have to be prepared to do away with certain liberties of the subject which for generations have been this country's great pride. Nevertheless, it seems to be not beyond the bounds of possibility that procedures might be devised which would be different in the case of those members of the public who belong to the criminal classes from those applying to members of the public who have never been convicted of an offence. If that is not possible, then one should distinguish between certain kinds of crime which are clearly of great danger to the fabric of our society, as the noble Earl, Lord Jellicoe, pointed out. and those kinds of crime which many of us are capable of committing, although technically they may be misdemeanours, such as parking in the wrong place. I wonder whether the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor could talk to us about this particular point later.
6.55 p.m.
LORD WELLS-PESTELL: My Lords, before I come to my speech, I wonder whether your Lordships will allow me to make a brief personal statement? I am aware that it is the custom in your Lordships' House that people who take part in a debate should remain until the end of that debate, but circumstances have arisen which make it impossible for me to do so. Therefore I beg your Lordships' indulgence that I may be excused if I leave before the end of the debate. In doing so, I should like to apologise to the succeeding speakers, particularly the noble Lord, Lord Newton, who is the last speaker but one, and to the noble and learned Lord on the Woolsack. This is the first time I have had to ask your Lordships' indulgence in this way.
Your Lordships will recall that in the gracious Speech reference was made to the intention of the Government to
"…complete further stages of their major review of social security."
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In the same paragraph it added that legislation would be introduced
"to replace National Assistance by a new system of non-contributory benefits."
Nowhere in the field of social work will this intention be more welcome than to those who are working for and on behalf of the elderly people or, for that matter, to the old people themselves. It may not be appreciated that to-day we have about 6 million old-age pensioners in this country, about one-fifth of whom have to apply for National Assistance in order to keep themselves either on or above the subsistence level. It has been stated that there are about another 1 million old-age pensioners who are entitled to National Assistance and who need it but who, for a particular reason, decline to apply. Investigation has shown that, in the main, their refusal to apply is due to a feeling that they are asking for charity. Many of the old folk are much too proud, mistakenly, I feel, to ask for what is, after all, their right. It has been stated that there are something like 1 million old-age pensioners in that situation. To these proud old people the replacement of National Assistance by a system of non-contributory benefits is, I suggest, vitaÎ.
I am prepared to say that over the years we have been indecently slow to match our social policy with the needs of the elderly, with the result that we have subjected elderly people to a good deal of misery and humiliation. Fortunately, they may be only a minority, but they are a minority in great need and with very special material wants in respect of cash, housing, hospital and home services. I fully appreciate and realise the efforts made by the last Government—and may I say that by "the last Government" I mean the last Labour Government—and I recognise that millions of people are now beginning to enjoy the benefits which the Government introduced at a time of financial stringency, which included a very substantial increase in the old age pension rate—the largest single increase, I believe, since 1946. Having said that, I am not unmindful of the problems, particularly the financial problems, facing this Government or, for that matter, those which would have faced any Government. But whatever our commitments may be, the condition of people, particularly those less fortunately placed in the

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community, must always be our first consideration. If the present trends continue, by the end of the next fifteen years—that is by 1981—we shall have nearly 7½ million people over the age of 65, and we shall have nearly 8 million people of 65 and over in the next 35 years.
If we are to continue old-age pension rates at their present level, this will cost us something like £400 million more by 1980. But I think we have got to face the fact that they probably cannot be left at that level; that they must be increased. This means a far greater sum than an extra £400 million a year, and it means that many of us who are more favourably placed have to recognise that it is, perhaps, a privilege to pay larger National Insurance contributions. Not only will their needs be greater from a cash point of view, but they will be correspondingly greater in respect of health and welfare and housing.
I think the time is now when we should plan for the needs of old-age pensioners in fifteen years' time. Those concerned with the problem of the aged have already estimated that about 50,000 one-bedroomed dwellings need to be built every year by local authorities for the benefit of aged people, and this is only one requirement. In the future we shall have to accept a far greater responsibility for the health, wealth and happiness of our growing number of old people. This does not mean merely more collaboration between the official and the voluntary agencies, which, let us be quite frank about it, are already doing a first-class job. I believe that it means bringing in the community as a whole, and encouraging and making possible a lead by families and friends and neighbours. I see no reason why families should not, say, adopt an aged person, in the same way that the Children Act has only been made workable because a large number of people in the community have been prepared to foster homeless children. I hope that the Government—and I want to say this with all the force I can—will find it possible to end the unpopular and humiliating system of National Assistance at the earliest possible moment.
I have referred to the plight of the aged, but before I sit down I hope your Lordships will permit me to draw atten-
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tion to the problem of one family group within the community. It may not be generally recognised by the community that, in spite of full employment, higher wages and a rising standard of living, the family where the husband and wife are under the age of 35 years and have young children is, with the exception of the old-age pensioners, the worst hit financially in our society. They are in a very precarious and serious financial position. For this particular family group there is constant strain, anxiety and worry, probably more so than in any other family group within our society.
Having said that, I must confess that I am not clear in my own mind how this particular family group could be helped financially. Taxation on traditional lines seems to have accomplished little in bringing about genuine redistribution of wealth. The noble Earl, Lord Jellicoe, touched on affluency and poverty within our present society, but I wonder how many people realise that about one-tenth of our people live in poverty. That makes it incumbent upon the Government—any Government, for that matter—to take steps to realise the concept of our minimum guaranteed income in the shortest possible time. It is for this reason that I am glad the Government are going ahead with their major review of social policy.
A moment or two ago I said that I am not clear in my own mind how we can deal with the family group to which I have referred. But I should like to suggest, for the consideration of the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Minister of Pensions, the replacement of tax reliefs for children by higher family allowances, or a modification of them. I understand that tax reliefs for children cost about £500 million, as against £150 million for family allowances. Halving tax reliefs for children would, I believe, provide sufficient money to raise family allowances to about three times their present level; or, in other words, enable family allowances of between 25s. and 30s. per week to be paid for each child after the first. I am informed that this has been done for some years in Denmark and Sweden, and done very successfully.
Finally, I want to congratulate the Government on their determination to forge ahead with their plans to review social security, and to abolish National

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Assistance as we know it. I hope, as I said earlier, that they will give this intention a real measure of priority.
7.7 p.m.
LORD MITCHISON: My Lords, after that concise and most interesting speech, I will do my best to be brief. However, I should like, if I may, to thank the noble Lord, Lord Carrington, for some very kind words which he spoke about me the other day. I did not deserve them—one usually does not. But, if I may take the language of the March Hare, even if it is a month late it was the best butter, and none the worse for being salted with a little Attic salt.
I welcome the gracious Speech, particularly for one reason. I think that, unlike a good many previous gracious Speeches from both Parties, it shows that the problems which we have to face to-day, inside as well as outside this country, hang much more closely together than in the past we supposed. It seems to me that to consider housing without industry, transport without housing, education without any of them, is becoming more and more glaringly impossible, and the Government which realise that the most fully will deserve the praise which I feel they will get.
Having said that, I want, if I may, to pick two small holes in the gracious Speech. The first is, as any hole should be, one of omission. We promised at the General Election that legislation would be introduced to safeguard measures approved by the House of Commons from frustration, delay or defeat in the House of Lords, and I feel sure that noble Lords opposite will continue to wish us, as they always do, to carry out our Election promises. I think that that particular one should be implemented rather soon, but it is not mentioned in the Queen's Speech. I appreciate that there are many other things to be done, and it is not for me to decide on a matter of this sort. But one may have one's views; and when I look back to the last occasion when there was a really serious clash between the two Houses, I feel that measures of this sort should be taken early rather than late in this Parliament.
That, of course, was the Iron and Steel Nationalisation Bill, which was introduced in 1949 and a vital Amendment to which was moved and carried in this House on
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June 29 on a Motion from the Opposition Front Bench. People sometimes forget that this House did not reject the whole of the Iron and Steel Nationalisation Bill. It was this vital Amendment, affecting the date of the operation of the Bill, that led to the clash of the two Houses. Without going into a rather complicated history, the net result of this was that the vesting date, which was originally intended to be May 1, 1950, before a General Election which was then pending, was ultimately postponed till February 15, 1951, after the General Election had resulted in the return for a second time of a Labour Government, but with a very much smaller majority.
My Lords, what then happened was that the opposition of the industry—which, I think I can fairly say, had been voiced throughout—and the delay that this House had been able to impose were sufficient to prevent the Bill from getting thoroughly into operation until the following General Election (the technical part of it did, of course, but I am talking about the practical part of it now) and when the Conservatives came back to power the Bill was repealed. I cannot think that this House should ever be in a position to do that—and I call your Lordships' attention to the fact that it was done, not by the refusal of a Second Reading, but by an Amendment originating here.
My Lords, it seems to me that, if this is to be done, the words I have quoted from the Election address are about right in content. I do not want to blow up this place in any way. On the contrary, I think the debates we have had in the last few days are a very good instance of how useful this place can be as a deliberative Assembly. It has other uses, too. I am not, for instance, talking about Private Bills for the moment, but they are one case. On the other hand, I think we must accept the principle that, in a Parliamentary democracy in the middle of the 20th century, where there is an elected Chamber and a non-elected Chamber, once it appears clear, on any legislative or similar matter, that there is a difference of opinion between the two, the elected Chamber must prevail. I rather doubt whether many of your Lordships would really dispute that, and I hope I am right in saying that we are at any rate coming increasingly to realise that.

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I will not argue it at any length now, but, starting from that, I think we should then look at our procedure and our functions in the light of accepting our own virtues as a deliberative Chamber, but also accepting the proposition that I have just made. Certain things seem to me to follow which would abbreviate considerably the time taken here and, incidentally—and this is really the most important point—abbreviate the time of the House of Commons. It is, after all, very precious nowadays, under any Government, for any Party to have time in the House of Commons, and we ought to be very careful to see that it is not wasted. Therefore, once a Bill came forward here, I would treat it as the Finance Bill is treated at the present time in relation to the substance of the Bill, and I would not allow this House to reject it with any effect. I would not allow a defeat of a Bill on a Second Reading. That is at present the procedure as regards Finance Bills under the first Section of the Parliament Act, 1911, both as regards the Bill itself and as regards Amendments.
However, as to Amendments, I would not go so far as one does in regard to Finance Bills, and I think there are good reasons for that. I would have Amendments here, and, having had them, I would send them back to another place and allow them to lie on the Table for a certain amount of time, thus giving another place the opportunity of picking up, discussing and, if it so wished, adopting some of those Amendments. There are obvious reasons for this in one perfectly clear case, that is, where the Amendments are those which have been promised at the last moment in another place and which are introduced here. It would be nonsensical to invent some form of procedure which prevented that use being made of this place.
There remain two other matters. One is the question of Administrative Orders. I was profoundly shocked, when I was sitting below, by a Division being taken in this House on one particular Order. It was an Order about local government in the West Midlands. It had involved inquiries and costs over a period of about five years. It had been produced as the result of those inquiries, and with the agreement of the Housing Minister, first of the Conservative Party and then
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of the Labour Party; and yet the House divided against it. It was not the Front Bench, my Lords: it was a number of noble Lords who felt impelled to do this because of their interest in county council affairs.
LORD NEWTON: I am very grateful to the noble Lord for giving way. He will remember that in fact I supported him on that occasion. But does the noble Lord not agree that, although it did not happen, it would have been perfectly competent for another place to have divided against the Order, as your Lordships did in this House? I do not see that this is a valid criticism of this House as against the other place.
LORD MITCHISON: Of course. I am sorry I did not make myself clear. The whole point is that the other place had already approved the Order. In spite of that, and in spite of the length and complexity of these inquiries, an appreciable number of noble Lords divided against it on what were really local government grounds. They were interested in the fortunes of county councils, and so on. I entirely agree with the noble Lord—indeed, I said so—that the Front Bench had nothing to do with it. But, my Lords, the Duke of Plaza Toro is occasionally a little in evidence in this House; he is occasionally leading his regiment from behind. The only doubt I feel is whether he finds it less exciting—I am not sure he does not find it more exciting.
My Lords, I was reading a very interesting academic work about the deliberations of this place for some years past, and I discovered from that work the existence of a body of independent Unionist Peers corresponding roughly, I think, to our old friends the 1922 Committee in the Commons. But discipline here seems to be much more lax. Perhaps it is right that it should be; but one must accept the fact that if the two Front Benches are agreed on the reasonableness of something or other, it does not necessarily follow that there will not be a Division about it. While I recognise that it is occasionally the case that people have a Division only because they know they will lose it, and would be horrified if they won it, that is rather an unsound foundation, I think, for arranging the functions of this House. Therefore, taking the lines I indicated, there is one

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other matter I should mention. It is a minor matter. I do not want to go into it in detail, because there happens to be something on the Order Paper which affects it. I think we ought to be careful in this House how we take up matters which are really the province of a Member of another place in relation to his constituency. We shall have to consider that particularly carefully, I think, if the Ombudsman proposals ever reach fruition as, for my part. I rather hope they will.
Having said that, I repeat again that I have met the greatest kindness in this House. I hope I should not be too influenced by that. I have also been very sincerely impressed by the value of the discussions we have in our deliberative capacity. What I think we must realise is that as a Legislative Chamber we are sadly out of date, and had better get reform fairly quickly. The noble Lord, Lord Carrington, spoke about the "studied moderation" with which the Opposition had acted in certain respects. I value that, but it is not a good basis for carrying on a reasonable debate about legislation. You do not want one side behaving all the time with "studied moderation".
We must accept the fact that there is at the moment, and is likely to be, a built-in Tory majority in this House and that the relations between this place and another place necessarily vary according to what is the elected Government. I repeat that there is no room for having the Sword of Damocles hanging here among the stained glass and armoury. It is not a good thing to hang over people if they are to do the job properly. In my view, there is a real function for this House to perform, and it could be in the best interests of the House itself, and of the country, and of the three political Parties, if the matter were tackled seriously and soon. It will have to be a case for legislation. It involves the relations between the two Houses, and could not be done otherwise.
My Lords, the second point was a smaller one. I have been reading some of these gracious Speeches. The language is very peculiar; and it is getting no better. But I was not the only person to notice the silliest sentence in the gracious Speech. It is wedged in between a reference to higher education and
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another one about our cultural heritage. What it says is:
"The development of science will be continued."
This is a Speech which is supposed to be about pending legislation. As a prophecy that statement is no doubt fairly safe; but as a statement of policy or of legislation it is so vague as to be utterly meaningless. I entreat the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor, who takes a great interest in proper drafting, as he explained to us the other day, to tell us just what that sentence was intended to mean, what it means and how on earth it got there in that form—because it is rather disgraceful.
This is not a mere question of language. I remember an extremely eloquent speech, which I felt certain was fully meant and felt, made by my right honourable friend the Prime Minister at Scarborough in 1963: I think it was at the Labour Party Conference. It swung the delegates at the Conference; it caught their imagination. It made solid trade unionists suddenly look at things in a slightly different light—and to effect that is sometimes no easy task. It inspired people there—particularly, I think, the younger ones—and the great theme of the speech was the possibilities of science in a modern society and a modern world, and the advantages that could be brought by those discoveries to the community as a whole. I should have liked to see in the gracious Speech something of that sort, and in some less cryptic form than the sentence I have read out. As I understand my own Party, I think the intention is still fully there, and I do not for one moment agree with the gibes at the Ministry of Technocracy—
THE EARL OF LONGFORD: The Ministry of Technology.
LORD MITCHISON: There is a difference.
THE EARL OF LONGFORD: What is it?
LORD MITCHISON: My Lords, that is all I have to say on those two points. If I may I will skim through one other matter. It is really rather strange, because the gracious Speech has not been knitted together properly. Your Lordships will see that Scotland is included in the part about Department of Economic

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Affairs because there is a reference to Great Britain there. When it comes to Scotland itself—which, I suppose, is the responsibility of the Scottish Office—they have gone all rural. This is rather odd for the Scottish Office under a Labour Government.
Your Lordships will find, again, that transport has fallen rather short of words. There is something about road safety—about which we had a good speech just now—but I should have thought that the main job in regard to transport was the integration (to use a rather hackneyed term) of road and rail transport. That remains unmentioned. However, the words "Other measures" can cover a lot and time is getting late. I have tried to convey to your Lordships' House as best I could the respect I felt for it as an institution, even if I thought that at the moment it was tempted to bite off a little more than it could chew.
7.25 p.m.
LORD FERRIER: My Lords, as the first speaker on this side of the House to follow the maiden speech of the noble Baroness, Lady Stocks, I join in the congratulations which have been offered her from all parts of the House. I should also like to say how glad I was to hear, in the flesh, so to speak, the voice which I have so often welcomed on the radio; and I hope we shall hear that voice again.
I was tempted to cross swords with the noble Lord who has just sat down but I refrain from doing so, not because I am afraid to—and I disagree with practically all he said and, indeed, I somewhat resented the implications of some remarks—but because, with respect, the reform of the Parliamentary system did not form part of the gracious Speech which we are discussing. So I will turn to the paragraph about Scotland which he mentioned. Prickly as the Scots are reputed to be, I personally did not notice any insult there. Indeed, I welcomed the reference to the reorganisation of arrangements for Scottish water supply. But as, of course—for reasons I need not go into—the problem is not so complex in Scotland as it is in England and Wales, I need not go into it.
As to the reference to "the conservation of the Scottish countryside', it will
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be interesting to see what the Government actually have in mind. At the moment I would refer to two important general matters in respect of the countryside about which there is very strong feeling—litter and noise. Can the drive against litter be stepped up? In Scotland, as elsewhere, road users are possibly the worst offenders, but many beauty spots are spoiled by tipping and by dumping. May we have more propaganda and perhaps more prosecutions, especially over tipping and dumping? Curiously enough, only to-day I have been with a visitor from Australia who enthused about the Scottish countryside but did mention this offence of tipping and dumping at places of beauty. It is, of course, easy to say, "Why are there not more notices?" or, "Why are there not more bins at lay-bys?" It is possible to put bins in lay-bys, but people do not use them, or perhaps the wind blows the papers out of them. County councils have to pay to have the bins cleared, and perhaps they cannot afford to do so. But there are places where no bins are provided, and I think that more bins should be provided.
Above all, I feel that it is worth while encouraging a sense of appreciation of the importance of cleanliness in the countryside. Visitors from some countries such as Switzerland are greatly offended by the presence of litter, and it is essential, especially now that tourism is such an important invisible asset, that litter should not be allowed to be a blot on the countryside. I was greatly interested in the, speech of the noble Lord, Lord Kennet, and his reference to the determination of the Government to preserve the character of places of beauty, both urban and rural. Perhaps the noble Lord will convince his right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Scotland. I am sure that what he has said links up with the paragraph in the gracious Speech to which I refer.
As for noise, are we not getting too complacent about it? Perhaps we are benumbed by the noise of the motor vehicle. Generally it is lower-powered vehicles, or those which are poorly maintained, that make the most noise. The rumble and roar of traffic streaming through the quiet countryside is bad enough, but when it is overlaid by the hideous crackling of exhausts it is too

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much to bear, and I feel that it constitutes a further desecration of the countryside which ought to be controlled. I say, "Ought to be controlled." Again, that sounds easy; but perhaps further efforts at control might be made. It is a matter on which the Secretary of State might well keep an eye, or lend an ear. Coaches and buses seldom offend.
One welcomes the drive that is now being made in vehicle safety provisions relating to the condition of vehicles. This will help to ensure that vehicles are kept in proper trim. If I may digress (because this applies to Scotland as well as to various other places), I think your Lordships will agree that aircraft which are flying too low, noisy sports cars and motor cycles are an absolute scourge. Perhaps this applies more in London than in the countryside.
As there is a reference in the gracious Speech to road safety, it is fair to assume that the Government intend to reintroduce the Bill relating to road safety which has a Second Reading in another place. Is it too late to arrange that the new Bill will not include a clause about random spot checks being made on the roads with the device which we accept under the name of the breathalyser? The clear indication that the Ministry is approaching the whole problem of road safety scientifically is most welcome, but I am one who is not persuaded that the scientific examination of accident causation will show that the sacrifices demanded by spot checks with a breathalyser are justified—at least, not yet. I will not catalogue the objections, which have been fully aired both in this Chamber and in another place, but there is one point which, so far as T know, has not been mentioned before. It is that spot check proposals, in addition to increasing friction between motorists and police, may also embroil the police with publicans, and the relationship between them is, in any case, tricky.
My Lords, in referring to the question of the police duties my mind goes back to what was said by the noble Earl, Lord Jellicoe, in his peroration regarding the containment of crime: the fact that one war which is not being won is the war against crime and that one of the weapons we are denied is an adequate police force. I urge the Government to bear in mind that already the police are
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grossly over-burdened in respect of their duties relating to motorists, and the dubious advantages of this proposal might not be off-set. To my mind, it constitutes an interference with the liberty of the subject. I do not suggest for one moment that the pressure against drunken driving should be relaxed, but I do say that there is a workable middle course, namely, that breath tests should be made automatically when police have to attend an accident, no matter how trivial. The question of spot checks might be kept in abeyance, at least until the effectiveness of the instrument and the legal processes which will develop from the earlier prosecutions are established.
Further, my Lords—I have said this before in your Lordships' House—scientific analysis may well show that there are matters more causative of serious accidents than drunken driving. I had occasion only the day before yesterday to find that the victims of the last six fatal road accidents in the area in which I live were as follows: one lorry driver who must have gone to sleep; one child riding a borrowed bicycle who shot out into the road in front of a car; one "drunk" who walked into the side of a car and was killed; one eighty-year-old partially blind person running to a bus across the traffic; one "drunk" who was being given a lift by a lorry driver and chose to open the door of the cab and step out into the night while the vehicle was travelling at 40 m.p.h., and one deranged patient in hospital who, early one morning, came out and threw himself in front of a bus. There were six fatal accidents, two of which involved drink, but none involved a drunken driver. Of course, this is not a scientific way to approach the matter, but I thought your Lordships might be inter-interested in this little catalogue of accidents which happened near where I live only last month. As I said before, there are things more causative of accidents than drink and driving.
The testing of goods vehicles is a first-rate arrangement which, presumably, will be given effect to, and the announcement yesterday about the action to be taken aganist tired drivers is a step in the right direction. This relates to what I say: that there are other causes which may be more serious in relation to accidents than drink and driving. The question of the

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eyesight of drivers and the need for tests has been mentioned in this Chamber at Question Time, and there is the possibility of accidents caused by the use of smooth tyres, particularly on the front wheels of light vehicles; the absence of safety belts; faulty rear lights and stop lights, and reflectors which are obscured. Above all there is the possibility of accidents which may be caused by the careless halting of vehicles, or by parking vehicles on bends and so on.
In regard to the taking of action against tired drivers, it is well to remember the advantage of carrying a load on Friday and the week-end overtime which follows, and the possible malfeasance which can stern from that. There might be more flexibility about the hours during which driving is permitted. This might help to overcome the tragic cause of so many fatal accidents which occur when truck drivers go to sleep. I say, hunt and ban the drunken driver and give magistrates and juries a yardstick without a peradventure. That is a point which the noble and learned Lord, the Lord Chancellor, made during the debate on the last gracious Speech: the importance of having a yardstick to measure the amount of drink that has been taken and what it constitutes. Do not let us forget, in our reforming passion, that there may be other sins, malfeasances and misfeasances, more dreadful in terms of their ultimate effect and perhaps more easily contained.
As to co-ordination of research into road accidents, I would ask whether co-ordination is going ahead fast enough. It is welcome to see that the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents and the motor manufacturers and designers have got together this very week to have a conference on the matter. Should there possibly be a larger co-ordinating authority? For instance, are the findings of the Institute of Automobile Accident Assessors brought into the purview of this research?
Before I sit down, I am tempted to refer to something which the noble Lord, Lord Soper, said in the brilliantly delivered speech with which he seconded the Motion before the House. He referred to the hope, which we all have, that the world will be spared from annihilation by atomic explosion, a disaster which will only happen of deliberate intent. But
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there is one explosion of which the chain reaction has already begun and it approaches with relentless menace. I refer to the population explosion, a disaster which will happen if it is not deliberately prevented. When the noble Lord, Lord Soper, asked what would it profit us if we fulfilled the ambitions of a Commonwealth or Welfare State and were blown to pieces by hydrogen bombs, my thoughts turned into a parallel line. Are we sufficiently conscious of this threatening problem of the population explosion? Perhaps your Lordships will wish some day soon to debate this matter again, as we did a year or two ago. Meanwhile, let us continue to bear in mind this menace, which threatens to overwhelm many of the earnest plans for the future which are contained in the gracious Speech. I beg to support the Motion for an humble Address.
7.43 p.m.
VISCOUNT MASSEREENE AND FERRARD: My Lords, I also should like to add my congratulations to the noble Baroness, Lady Stocks, on her very good maiden speech on the medical profession. Regarding doctors, I have always thought that we should adopt the system that used to exist in China, that when one became ill one stopped paying the doctor.
I intend to cross swords for a moment with the noble Lord, Lord Mitchison. I understood him to say that the House of Lords had been responsible for the Labour Government not carrying out some of their Election promises. To make such a statement is really very mischievous. If there are any promises the last Government did not carry out it is entirely their own fault. I do not want to fight the Election all over again—I made enough speeches in it—but I would remind noble Lords of one or two things. For instance, the Prime Minister said in 1964, before the Election, that he did not think that any increase in taxation would be necessary for his programme. Taxation has increased by over £900 million. We must also remember Mr. George Brown's unfortunate statement regarding low interest rates. During the period of the last Labour Government we have had the longest period of high interest rates in the whole history of this country. So do not let the noble Lord say that the House of Lords has prevented the Labour

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Government from carrying out its Election promises.
LORD MITCHISON: My Lords, I think that this contentious, fascinating exposition really comes from a misunderstanding. What I did was to attribute to noble Lords opposite a wish that the Government would always carry out their Election promises, in particular their promise to introduce some reforms in this place.
VISCOUNT MASSEREENE AND FERRARD: My Lords, the noble Lord also gave us to understand that this House was able to overrule another place. He knows perfectly well that this House can do no such thing. I would point out to the noble Lord that the majority in the last Government was only four, sometimes three, and that more of the electorate voted Conservative than Socialist, even though we had a Socialist Government. This House had every right, if it did not agree with something, to delay it slightly, until the electorate could have another chance.
I promise your Lordships that I shall speak briefly. I think that the gracious Speech is uninspiring. Its confident statements overlook the economic conditions of this country. However, I am not going to talk about economic conditions, because we talked about them on the first day. The noble Lord, Lord Cohen of Brighton, in his excellent speech in moving the Address, compared the Roman Empire with the former British Empire and said that the Roman Empire was founded on force. This is partially true, because force is always required to uphold the law. Roman law was of inestimable value to the world, and is of course the basis of our law. But what the noble Lord did not say was why the Roman Empire fell. It fell because of free bread and circuses.
The gracious Speech says:
"My Ministers will complete further stages of the major review of social security… they will seek further means of dealing with the poverty that still exists."
On this point, the noble Lord, Lord Wells-Pestell, said that one-tenth of the population of this country were stricken by poverty. We all know, if only from having read Dickens, what poverty was like in this country in the nineteenth century and for some at the turn of this century. But what is poverty to-day?
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How are we to define poverty? For instance, is poverty subsistence level? And is subsistence level the standard accepted by the National Assistance Board? If so, one person in every seven in this country, and not one in every ten, is suffering from poverty. Of these people, 3 million are in households headed by men in full-time jobs.
We now have the position in this country where National Assistance scales have reached such a high level since the 1948 Regulations (the actual increase is eleven times) that many workers find themselves better off with National Assistance than when working. This is a very dangerous position for the moral fibre of this country, because if subsistence level is the standard accepted by the National Assistance Board for assistance, then hundreds of thousands of workers, particularly in agriculture, are poverty-stricken, even though they are in full employment. But this is absurd, because the majority of them have cars and T.V. sets. Is poverty now to mean that you can have only one car, and that you cannot go to Spain for your holidays?
The gracious Speech says (and I am extremely pleased to read this) that a new Ministry of Social Security is to be created, and that National Assistance is to be replaced by a new system of non-contributory benefits. This is an excellent thing. The first task of this new Ministry of Social Security must be to define what is poverty, because if you allow thousands of able-bodied young men—and I know several of them—to enjoy a life of leisure on a standard of material prosperity comparable to that of the lower-paid workers, such as some of those in agriculture, then it is extremely upsetting for those lower-paid workers.
There is no doubt that National Assistance, as at present organised, is in utter chaos. Several extremely conscientious working people who have come to me have been quite upset by reports of men (and they know some of them) who have not worked for years, and who are receiving £12, £15 or even £20 a week from National Assistance. Only the other day an unemployed man and his wife were convicted of stealing. The man had been unemployed for three years, and was drawing from the National

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Assistance £17 a week. When conscientious workers in this country—and thank Heaven! they are in the majority—read this sort of thing, it is infuriating and most disheartening for them.
I am not attacking the Welfare State. The trouble is, as I think the noble Lord, Lord Wells-Pestell, said, that we have hundreds of thousands of old people, widows and widowers particularly, who are too proud to apply for National Assistance. Then we have the infirm and the unfortunate, and, also, particularly, children who come from bad homes. These are the people we want to help. I believe that this whole system of family allowances is wrong. If you have irresponsible parents, possibly a drunken father, there is no guarantee that the family allowance goes to the child. I hope that in the new Ministry of Social Security it will some-how be possible to arrange (I suppose there would have to be a good many more inspectors) that there is no impoverishment among children owing to their having irresponsible parents. I feel that family allowances, through the inspectors, should somehow be given in kind. I am all against increasing the Civil Service, but in this case I feel that there is probably good reason for doing so.
I told your Lordships that I would be brief, and I am afraid that I have not been. However, I feel strongly about this. I employ some agricultural workers, and other workers, who frequently point out these things to me, and they are most upset by them. We have travelled a long way since the days of the old Poor Law principle, that if you will not work, you cannot eat. On the whole, it was a good principle.
THE EARL OF LONGFORD: Oh, no.
VISCOUNT MASSEREENE AND FERRARD: I do not mean that if you cannot work owing to misfortune you should not eat—of course you must eat. But if you cannot work owing to drunkenness or atrocious behaviour, then I do feel that—well, perhaps you ought to eat, but I do not think you ought to eat too much. I will not continue speaking, but I should just like to support my noble friend Lord Jellicoe on what he said about crime. I hope that we can really go all out to combat crime. The few
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police officers to whom I have spoken seem to be unhappy about the criminal law. They appear to think, rightly or wrongly, that the law is on the side of the criminal and in order to convict a burglar one has almost to see him taking the stuff and certainly one has to find it on him. I am sure the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor will set the wheels in motion so to revise the criminal law that it will put new heart into the police.
8.1 p.m.
LORD NEWTON: My Lords, we, at any rate, have been working this afternoon and I hope we shall all be able to eat before very long. I should like to join other noble Lords in offering my congratulations to the noble Baroness, Lady Stocks, on her most interesting and deeply informative speech. Naturally it was most welcome to me that she chose as her subject the National Health Service. Having heard her speak, I think we can all be quite certain that we are fortunate in having the noble Baroness now numbered among us. I would congratulate too the noble Lord, Lord Kennet, on his appointment and also on his maiden speech this afternoon from the Front Bench, a speech which, if I may say so, was exceptionally full of information. I shall certainly read it with great care, not only to-morrow but I expect also on future occasions. I agree with what my noble friend Lord Jellicoe said—namely, that the noble Lord, Lord Kennet, is likely to be pretty busy in this Session, and I dare say that before very long we shall be doing battle. However, I wish the noble Lord, Lord Kennet, success—success, that is, of course, of a strictly personal kind.
At this moment I would only refer to one thing which he said. Whether or not most people find it easy to live and die happily with death duties, I, for my part, do not find it easy to take rises in income tax in my stride, which I think was one of the things the noble Lord said most people do.
LORD KENNET: My Lords, may I just put a gloss on that. I meant that if one's income went up the income tax also went up. Of course we all hate rises in the rate of income tax.
LORD NEWTON: My Lords, I was just going to say that unfortunately

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income tax does not only go up when one's income has already gone up.
As the noble Lord, Lord Mitchison, has spoken in this debate, and as he is here at the moment, I should like to take the opportunity of telling your Lordships that, for my part, I enjoyed the verbal duels which he and I had in the last Parliament. In the course of his speech he expressed the view that the activities of another place should not be frustrated by what we do here. I hope the noble Lord did not feel frustrated by anything for which I was responsible in the last Parliament. No doubt he and I will continue to have verbal duels, but perhaps I may be permitted to add that I am sorry our future confrontations will have to take place at a greater range.
As to the content of Lord Mitchison's speech, he will not expect me to express complete agreement with his views about reform of your Lordships' House. He knows, of course, although he did not mention this, that even as the law stands at the moment the elected Chamber does get its way in the end, although obviously not as quickly as the noble Lord, Lord Mitchison, would like it to do. At this time of night I am not going to follow the noble Lord on the subject of reform of this House in the terms in which he defined the word "reform", but he has tempted me to offer one or two brief observations about a related subject—namely, the modernisation of Parliament. This was not mentioned in the gracious Speech, but I noticed it was given pride of place by the Prime Minister when he spoke in another place last Thursday in the debate on the Address. It would be interesting, I think, to hear whether Her Majesty's Government, like my noble friend Lord Alport, have it in mind to modernise your Lordships' House.
From the Prime Minister's speech it was evident that he was thinking really about another place. So I would just put this suggestion to the noble Earl the Leader of the House: that it might be beneficial all round if he were to tell the Prime Minister something about what happens in your Lordships' House, because it seems to me that we are very modern—not to say, "with it"—in our attitude, for instance, to contemporary social questions, such as capital punishment, homosexuality, abortion and so on.
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I am not making comparisons with another place; I am just talking about your Lordships' House. And it seems to me also that in this House we transact our business with considerable efficiency. We do not have repetitious speeches, we do not have dilatory Motions, we do not have dilatory Amendments to Bills—not on the whole. (I still recall, of course, our proceedings on the London Government Bill, but that was some time ago.)
Why is this? I suppose one reason is that we do not mind, or at least we do not mind too much, if our speeches are not reported in the Press, and usually they are not, but I think the main reason is the forbidding nature of our flexible procedure here. Any noble Lord who is a nuisance can be effectively stopped very quickly.
LORD CHAMPION: How?
LORD NEWTON: By a noble Lord getting up and moving that the noble Lord be no longer heard. This has happened, but not in my time in the House.
THE LORD PRIVY SEAL (THE EARL OF LONGFORD): My Lords, while I agree that that can be done, and I have in fact seen it done, under very distressing circumstances, once in the last twenty years, I do not think it is an effective remedy. While I am Leader of the House I shall always hope to avoid having recourse to that, in any circumstances. I cannot give an absolute commitment, but I do not feel it is a remedy.
LORD NEWTON: My Lords, I quite accept what the noble Earl has said and I do not wish to provoke him. I thought I was being helpful. I should have thought that if we had a noble Lord who was a nuisance he could be effectively stopped if your Lordships' House as a whole so wished.
In the last three days we have had a pretty exhaustive debate on the contents of the gracious Speech as a whole, and we have discussed many aspects of what I may call home policy. In fact I think virtually every noble Lord who has spoken has, for most of the time, addressed us on a subject which has not been mentioned before, at any rate to any considerable extent. So I feel that in so far as I can be of any service to your Lordships at all, probably the best service I

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can render is to be as brief as I can, and I will certainly try to be so, mainly for three reasons: first, the time; secondly, because we had from my noble friend Lord Jellicoe a most admirable and comprehensive speech, in which he covered most of the perhaps most important Home Affairs matters mentioned in the gracious Speech; and, thirdly, because most of the references in the gracious Speech to Home Affairs are by now rather stale. In fact, many sentences seem to have been virtually lifted out of the gracious Speech of 1964, the words having been put in a different order.
There are, of course, omissions from this gracious Speech. One is the absence of any reference to the proposals for an Ombudsman, about whom the noble Lord, Lord Mitchison said a few words. It would be very interesting to know from the noble and learned Lord on the Woolsack why there is no reference in this gracious Speech to the Ombudsman. In the gracious Speech of 1964 there was an oblique reference to the Ombudsman, and he received specific mention in the gracious Speech of November, 1965. I should be grateful if the noble and learned Lord could tell me why, if the Ombudsman was urgent last November, he is no longer urgent five months later. I must confess I was never particularly enthusiastic about the idea of an Ombudsman. I never really thought that he was necessary, or that if we had him, or her, he, or she, would achieve very much. Moreover, I also had at the back of my mind the suspicion (I hope it was not an unworthy one) that the reason why the Party opposite proposed the institution of Ombudsman was, partly at any rate, that they wanted to allay the fears of those people in this country whose memories are long enough to recall the bureaucratic conditions that obtained between 1945 and 1951.
There is another omission, a small one but significant, from the gracious Speech; and that is a reference to action for dealing with the radio "pirates". Since Mr. Wedgwood Benn has been Postmaster General he has made all sorts of stern promises about dealing with radio "pirates", but we have not had any action, and now we have not even any more promises, stern or otherwise. I feel slightly strongly about this matter, be-
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cause when, in the summer of 1964, the "pirate" question first came before the public attention I was subjected, because I was the spokesman for the Post Office in your Lordships' House, to considerable bullying on this matter by noble Lords opposite and by some of my noble friends.
It fell to me to announce what the policy of the then Government was, and it was this: that they were waiting for the ratification of the Western European Convention on Pirate Broadcasting which was due to be completed shortly, and then legislation would be introduced. Privately, of course, I had, as I still have, considerable sympathy for the "pirates." There is always something romantic about the idea of piracy. Moreover, the prospect of the monolithic and monopolistic B.B.C. having its leg pulled and its listeners stolen by "three men in a boat" certainly had considerable attraction for me. Nevertheless, it was my duty to state what the Government policy was. What happened after that? A few months later, we had the General Election, the Labour Party were returned to power, and in January, 1965, the European Convention was ratified. Since then nothing has happened. Perhaps the noble and learned Lord could tell us what the Government propose to do about this matter, bearing in mind, as we all do, that the longer action is delayed the more unpopular any such action, if it ever comes, will be.
There is another, I hope not significant, omission from the gracious Speech. This is in connection with housing. There is a great deal in the Speech concerning matters relating to housing but there is no sentence comparable with that in the gracious Speech of 1964. This was that:
"My Government will pursue a vigorous housing policy directed to producing more houses of better quality."
We know what happened. My noble friend Lord Jellicoe told us this afternoon that the Conservative target of 400,000 was badly missed last year. So I conclude that it was wrong to have "a vigorous housing policy": it was the wrong sort of policy, and it might be better now to have a policy which is perhaps dynamic or purposeful or even gritty—at any rate a housing policy that is not "vigorous". I listened with some attention to what the noble Lord, Lord Kennet said, and having listened to his speech I personally have hopes that we are now going to

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have a housing policy which will deliver the goods, even if it is described as "vigorous".
LORD KENNET: Perhaps I may tell the noble Lord that the failure to repeat the same phrase this year does not mean that in fact we plan a feeble housing policy, directed to getting fewer and worse houses. I hope to put the noble Lord's mind at rest.
LORD NEWTON: I am much obliged and I hope consoled.
Before I leave housing, we are promised in the gracious Speech a new system of Exchequer subsidies for local authority housing, and I think that was one of the matters mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Kennet, this afternoon and also by my noble friend Lord Jellicoe. I should like to express the hope that this new system, when we get it, will require authorities to charge economic rents when the tenants can obviously afford them. That is essential if we are ever to have enough rented accommodation in this country. And it seems to me that this requirement is even more important since it is evidently the view of the Government that the future contribution of what I might call the private sector may now be written off as virtually insignificant.
I firmly believe—and I argued the point at some length on the Second Reading of the Rent Bill—that the two principal causes of the chronic shortage of houses to rent are first, years of rent control, because rent control is a form of subsidy; and, secondly, years of indiscriminate subsidisation of council houses. I recognise that in the year 1966 it is probably much too late, in the private sector, to subsidise the tenant rather than the house, but this seems to me to make it all the more necessary to try to do this—subsidise the tenant rather than the house—in the public sector, that is to say, in the sector of local authority housing, if we are ever to have enough rented accommodation in this country.
One of the things that strikes one most in the gracious Speech is that the reference to the National Health Service is perhaps miniscule. I should very much like to know what has happened to the long-term Hospital Plan which was published in January, 1962, and which I had the privi-
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lege of introducing to your Lordships' House on February 14, 1962, when it was warmly welcomed by every noble Lord who spoke, except one; and as she is not here now I will not allude further to that. But one of the first things which the present Minister of Health did on taking office was to announce that no annual revision of the Plan would be published in April, 1965, and that he and the Regional Boards were going to review the whole of the plan and announce the result at the end of last year, 1965. So far as I know, we have not yet had the result of that review; and it would be interesting to know when we are going to get it.
We are promised reform of the Criminal and Civil Law. The noble and learned Lord has already, I think, published three Bills which have obtained their First Reading. I should like to mention quickly one reform of the law which I think is most necessary—I refer to the reform of the procedure for the enforcement of maintenance orders. Anyone who sits from time to time in a magistrates' court will be familiar with the sort of case where you have a man divorced from his first wife and probably with two children, separated from the second wife, who perhaps also has two or three children, living with a third woman who may also have children. There are probably maintenance orders against the man in relation to both wives and all the former children, and he is hopelessly in arrears. What on earth are you to do? You can send him to prison. Nobody wants to do that. In fact, what the courts often do is to wipe out most of the arrears. This is not right. We know perfectly well that the wives in question are probably obtaining, through National Assistance or from some other source, the income which they ought to be getting from their former husband. I do not think that is right.
So I should like to offer two practical suggestions which may go some way towards dealing with this matter. The first is that the attachment of the man's earnings should not be made dependent upon his agreement—in other words, it should be possible for a court to attach a man's earnings without asking whether he agrees. The second suggestion is that there should be much more efficient machinery for ensuring that when a man whose earnings have been attached leaves

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his employment and obtains other employment, automatically the new employer continues to operate the attachment of earnings so that the man does not escape by this means.
I should like to end with just a few words about education, largely in view of some of the things that the noble Lord, Lord Annan, said. First of all, I am as glad as my noble friend Lord Jellicoe that there are to be increased grants for the voluntary schools. The noble Lord, Lord Annan, said that he wondered what my noble friend Lord Jellicoe would have said about Circular 1066 if he had said anything about it, which he did not. I personally am sorry that the Government propose to force the pace of comprehensive reorganisation. I do not think anybody in this House can accuse me of being unsympathetic towards comprehensive reorganisation: indeed, I think that i am probably more sympathetic than many of my Party. But I do not think there is any need to force the pace, because local education authorities, of all political complexions and of none, are already pushing ahead quite quickly on their own account, without any prodding from the Secretary of State. But, quite apart from that, it seems to me that the Secretary of State is proposing to force the pace in a way that is absolutely wrong.
I always feared that something like this circular would be produced. What the circular says, in effect, is that in the future no major secondary building scheme will be included in the programme unless it demonstrably contributes to some form of secondary re-organisation. I was frightened that this would happen. That is why, within a few weeks of the General Election of 1964, I asked the noble Lord, Lord Bowden, who was then the Minister of State, to give an assurance that the major building programme would not be used as a stick with which to beat the local education authorities into going comprehensive. He did not give that assurance. In fact, the noble Earl the Leader of the House, who has now gone, was sitting beside him at the time and told him not to. What the noble Lord, Lord Bowden, did was to make a good many reassuring observations about no one desiring to interfere at all with the
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independence of local education authorities. Eighteen months later they have done so.
I am one of the comparatively few Members of your Lordships' House who have ever been in charge of the school building programme, so perhaps I may quickly tell your Lordships why I think this circular is wrong. What happens every year is that the Government agree on the total sum of money that may be spent on school building programmes for one year, two years or sometimes two and a half years' ahead, and then the education authorities submit their proposals for the programme. They in fact submit more than they know can ever be included. That is quite natural. The Minister responsible has to decide which ones go in. The priorities before him are limited, and there cannot really be much argument about them. Obviously, the first one is to have new buildings in places where, if there were not new buildings, the children would not go to school at all. The next obvious one is replacing the most obsolete, old-fashioned and inconvenient buildings, sometimes with a bias in one year towards primary education, or possibly to the provision of new science blocks in secondary schools.
What is going to happen as a result of the introduction by the Secretary of State of a new factor? This is what is going to happen. Many urgent rebuilding schemes will not be submitted at all by the education authorities, because they cannot even pretend that they will contribute towards secondary reorganisation. That will be jolly bad luck on the teachers in those schools and on the children whom they teach, who may well have to go on putting up with the old buildings for far too long.
Alternatively, the education authorities will inflate this particular scheme, make it more expensive, so that they can say, "This will eventually contribute to a form of reorganisation". What will happen then? One of two things will happen: either the Minister or the Department will say, "We cannot accept this scheme, because it does not make sense", so the improvements will not be made; alternatively, it will be accepted and put into the programme, and, because it is more expensive than it need otherwise be, other

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equally important new building or replacement schemes will be crowded out, if the total sum is not to be exceeded, and that is not fair either. That is why, although not on ideological grounds, I think that this circular is quite wrong.
LORD ANNAN: My Lords, I entirely appreciate the extremely good points which the noble Lord has been making. But how does one effect change of any kind when buildings and principles are involved? This is a difficult problem. If you are really trying to change the national system you are bound to run into difficulties of this kind, and, without in any way impugning what the noble Lord pointed out were the difficulties in this case, I think that one must have the principle in mind and try, with all humility possible, to drive towards those objectives which are necessary.
LORD NEWTON: My Lords, I could not agree more with the noble Lord; but when you get a conflict between principles and building, my answer is that it depends how essential it is that the principle should be implemented quickly and how badly the buildings are required. I do not think anybody who knows of this problem will dispute that there are many school buildings which ought to be replaced as quickly as possible. I do not doubt that buildings should come first.
I apologise for having been longer than I meant to be. I think I was interrupted three times. In conclusion, may I say that the gracious Speech contains many promises, and some are rather stale; but in so far as those promises are sensible, we shall do our best to encourage the Government to implement them, and in so far as they are foolish promises we shall not hesitate to expose them for what they are.
8.30 p.m.
THE LORD CHANCELLOR (LORD GARDINER): My Lords, during the course of the debate we have had the pleasure of hearing a maiden speech from the noble Baroness, Lady Stocks. Many of us are greatly indebted to her in the past through hearing her on the radio. Therefore, it is an additional pleasure to us now to have her here with us in person. What she said, if I may say so, com-
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mended itself in all parts of your Lordships' House, and I am sure that we shall look forward to hearing from her again.
Today is the one day in the year or in the Session when your Lordships consider the legislative programme which is contained in the gracious Speech and which is to be put before Parliament. Today we are dealing in particular with Home Affairs. Home Affairs, as your Lordships know, is extremely wide. It covers agriculture, fisheries and food; aviation; education; voluntary schools, primary, comprehensive, secondary; higher education, further education; health; Home Office, crime and punishment, and everything from Northern Ireland to London taxicabs; land and natural resources, the Land Commission, leasehold reform; pensions and national insurance; power, coal, gas, electricity, oil, atomic development; steel, public building and works; Scottish Office; technology; transport, roadways, railways—all perhaps exceptionally important at this time, or exceptionally crowded at this time, by reason of the additional length of this particular Session.
Being a Member of your Lordships' House has, of course, certain privileges, but plainly it also carries responsibility, including I suppose the responsibility to warn the country if it appears that the Government are about to do something foolish. There are now 1,020 Members of your Lordships' House, but the extraordinary thing is that on this very wide subject today, this major part of the gracious Speech, the combined efforts of the Conservative and Liberal Party Whips have been able to beat up only four members to say one single word or utter a criticism of any kind of this Speech which is going to take more than the length of a normal Session. The Whips, I have no doubt, have a difficult time, but they certainly do not seem to have been very successful on this particular occasion. I think I am right in saying that about the earliest known Whip is that which was referred to by Pepys on December 8, 1666. What Pepys said then was this:
"Up unto the office where we sat all the morning and at noon home to dinner and there find Mr. Pearce and his wife and Betty, a pretty girl, who in this course at table told me the great proviso passed the House of Parliament yesterday, which makes the King

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and Court mad, the King having given order to my Lord Chamberlain to send to the play-houses and bawdy houses to bid all the Parliament men that were there to go to the Parliament presently. This is true, it seems, but it was carried against the Court by 30 or 40 voices."
Of course conditions to-day are quite different. There are fewer playhouses now.
The noble Earl, Lord Jellicoe, spoke a couple of sentences about housing and about education and land and natural resources. They were, however, all replied to by my noble friend Lord Kennet. Lord Jellicoe then asked me two questions, one of which was whether the forth-coming Criminal Justice Bill will deal with children and young offenders and short sentences. The answer is, I think, that there certainly will not be any major changes in that field in the Bill. We are in fact discussing this matter on Tuesday next in the debate on the adult offender, which is to be introduced by the noble Lord, Lord Royle.
The second question the noble Earl asked me was whether the annual reports of the new Advisory Council are going to be published. There will not be annual reports, but no decision has yet been arrived at as to whether or not the reports will be published. Then he asked whether advantage would be taken of the experience of the members of the Royal Commission. Again the answer is that the membership of the new Advisory Council has not yet been decided. The whole of the evidence which has been given before the Royal Commission will be published and available to everybody, including of course the Advisory Council. The suggestion that if some of the members of the former Royal Commission were appointed to the new Advisory Council they would already have had a good deal of experience in this field is, I am sure, a fact which will in any case be in the mind of my right honourable friend the Home Secretary.
I have already commented on what the noble Baroness, Lady Stocks, said. We all have a high opinion of family doctors. We appreciate their difficulties and, as she said, the question of the implementation of the Kindersley Report will obviously be one of some difficulty to the Government for the very reason she gave.
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My noble friend Lord Crook and my noble friend Lord Wells-Pestell both expressed gratitude for what the Government had done in a field in which they have both had so very much experience—namely, in that of social welfare. The Government are grateful for that appreciation of what they have done and of what they seek to do. They will bear well in mind what my noble friend Lord Crook said as to retiring age, and what Lord Wells-Pestell said as to the problems of the future. I myself have no doubt that the substitution of non-contributory benefits for National Assistance, particularly the payment on one book, and the steps the Government propose to take to look for those who hitherto have been too proud to claim National Assistance although entitled to do so, will do a very great deal in this field.
Then the noble Lord, Lord Annan, raised several points. First of all, may I say how much I appreciated his exposition, from his knowledge and experience, of the case for comprehensive schools. We on the Government side of the House needed no education, but I am hopeful that if there remain any elsewhere in the House who had not previously been convinced of the case for comprehensive education they will now be. He then raised the question of specialisation in sixth forms. This, of course, is a matter of some difficulty. It is one which is very much in the mind of the Schools Council which is actively studying possible ways of planning the work of the sixth forms in a way which would enable pupils to be given a broader education. The noble Lord knows that the task is a difficult one because conflicting interests are involved, and because it is difficult to make progress unless wide agreement is achieved among schools and universities.
I am told that the Council will shortly publish a discussion of a possible new pattern of sixth-form studies. One of the purposes of this is to combat undue specialisation in the sixth form. It is hoped that this paper will be widely discussed in educational circles, and that as a result of it considerable steps will be made in the direction which the noble Lord desires. I suppose that one of the difficulties of competition for places and scholarships at universities, is that it tends to lead to university entrants wanting to

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be as far advanced as possible in a particular subject.
Then the noble Lord asked whether impending legislation on road safety will also include regulations covering the taking of safety measures by manufacturers when designing cars. I think I have really to split this matter into two. So far as goods vehicles are concerned, the coming legislation will certainly make safety provisions for them, including testing stations, and will carry a great deal further than it has ever been carried before the pursuit of safety in vehicles of that kind.
So far as passenger vehicles are concerned, there are already, of course, Construction and Use Regulations, and all vehicles in use in the country have to conform to those Regulations, which are made under the Road Traffic Acts. They lay down basic safety requirements with which the vehicles have to comply, and the Government are satisfied that the manufacturers do produce cars which comply with the regulations without having to be tested. These Construction and Use Regulations are constantly being reviewed and brought up to date; for example, on brakes and lighting. I am not able at the moment, I am afraid, to tell your Lordships what the position is about safety belts, though I believe them to be under consideration. Then the noble Lord asked whether complaints against the police could not go to some independent body. That is a view which I am on record as having expressed myself, but it will, of course, be a matter for my right honourable friend the Home Secretary.
The noble Lord also asked whether the Home Secretary envisages revision of criminal law procedure, whereby the committal procedure might be abolished or modified. The answer is that this matter is under consideration. That may sound rather unreal, but it is not. My right honourable friend the Home Secretary and my right honourable friend the Attorney General, and I myself, are all concerned at the undoubted waste of time which does occur on committal proceedings in indictable offences. It would not, I think, be regarded as right to remove altogether from an accused the rights which he now has, if he continues to want them.
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One difficulty, of course, is that a great many witnesses are called in whom the accused is not interested at all, and I do not myself understand why it is impossible to make an admission in a criminal case. As your Lordships may know, no admission is ever possible in a criminal case. There may be a case in which there has been a break-in at a jeweller's shop and jewellery left for repair by many people has been stolen. The accused may not be disputing that the break-in took place: perhaps his case is that he had nothing whatever to do with it; that he was at home at the time, with several friends whom he can call to prove it. But under our present law it is still necessary to call people from all over England to say, "Yes, that is my watch", and "Yes, that is my ring". But there is no cross-examination, and the accused could not care less.
We have to consider, particularly where an accused person is represented by a lawyer, whether he should not be able to make an admission if he so desires. So far as committal proceedings are otherwise concerned, Eire is in the middle of passing a Bill the effect of which is that everybody affected is asked whether or not he wants this committal procedure. He can say, "Do not bother about it"; or "Yes, I want the whole thing"; or "I want to cross-examine those two witnesses, but I am not interested in anything else". It may be that we shall arrive at some solution along these lines.
I had better say very little, I think, about what my noble friend, Lord Mitchison said on reforming this House. All I can say is that the facts to which he referred with regard to previous steel legislation are still in the minds of Her Majesty's Government; that the passage in the Manifesto was not put in by mistake. That is, I think, as far as it would be wise for me to go at the present time.
The noble Lord, Lord Ferrier, inquired about litter in Scotland. I did not know that Scotsmen ever threw anything away at all.
LORD FERRIER: Only the wrappers.
THE LORD CHANCELLOR: Perhaps it is the Sassenachs coming up as tourists. But all Governments find the

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questions of litter and noise equally difficult in both countries. It is partly a matter of enforcement, and with the present shortage of police officers it may be that their services are better used in other directions. But I will certainly convey to the Secretary of State for Scotland the observations which the noble Lord has made, and I am quite sure that, coming from the noble Lord, they will all receive the most careful consideration.
So far as random tests are concerned, these are at the moment under further consideration by my right honourable friend the Minister of Transport, in conjunction with the motoring organisations. One has certainly to take into account—as I know my right honourable friend the Home Secretary and my other right honourable friend will do—the additional burdens which this proposal, if carried too far, would place upon the police.
The noble Viscount, Lord Massereene and Ferrard, gave us what I think was part of his Election speech. We can well understand why he was called upon to make it so often, and how popular it must have been. I think his statement about Mr. Wilson is, perhaps, not quite accurate, because I believe he will find that the observation made by Mr. Wilson about increased taxation was expressly said to be made over the normal life of a Parliament. Then the noble Viscount discussed what poverty meant, or what my noble friend Lord Wells-Pestell, in particular, meant by it; but as my noble friend had gone and I could not ask him, we do not know. I assume, however, that he meant having that quantity of food which the doctors and dieticians tell us is necessary to keep reasonable health; that there is poverty where that is not so, and that it is not so at the moment for a large number of old people and, I am afraid, a certain number of children, where the father is either not in work or not earning much, and where there are a large number of children in one family.
Then, finally, the noble Viscount expressed the view that the criminal law was too favourable to the accused. There is something to be said for this view and I think it is a question which requires consideration, although Parliament, rightly no doubt, has always been extremely jealous of those freedoms which have been gained
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in this respect. Too many obviously guilty people are being acquitted. On the other hand, that is still better than that innocent people should be convicted. It is a question of holding the balance. We are now getting a type of case in the Central Criminal Court where eleven jurors take one view and one another. There has on occasions been some evidence of attempts at bribery. There is a possible case for suggesting that, instead of the law requiring a unanimous verdict of twelve, a verdict of eleven out of twelve should be sufficient.
Then the noble Lord, Lord Newton, in briskly closing the debate, completely stumped me on one point, and that is in regard to radio pirates. I am afraid I am not an authority on radio pirates. I do not know what the answer is, but I will make inquiries and let him know. I do not propose to follow him again on the matter of education, because, if I may say so, we have already had the highly informative and admirable speech from the noble Lord, Lord Annan. So far as the Ombudsman is concerned, the noble Lord, Lord Newton, appears to miss him. So do I. But it must not be assumed that because he is not in the gracious Speech he will not be taken this Session. He may very well be one of the "other measures" which will be laid before the House. I hope very much that that may prove to be the case. Then, on housing, in view of the speech already made by my noble friend Lord Kennet, I do not think I need add anything.
Finally, the noble Lord, Lord Newton, asked about maintenance order enforcement, and suggested, first of all, the compulsory attachment of wages, and, secondly, an early notification of change of employment. At the moment a man does not have to notify anybody if he changes his employers, and there are, I am afraid, cases where this is deliberately done in order to avoid the attachment of wages. These are difficult questions, and it is because they are difficult questions that, some months ago now, I appointed a Committee, the Chairman of which is Mr. Justice Payne, to go into the whole question of enforcing orders, of whether committal orders are necessary and of the attachment of wages; and a good deal of evidence, I am glad to note, has been given to that Committee by outside

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bodies. For example, they are considering whether there should be a national enforcement service separate from the courts, how far committals should continue to exist and how far we can extend the attachment of wages.
It is significant, I think, that one of the few countries in which crime has decreased is Denmark, and perhaps one of the outstanding features of the Danish system is the far greater use of fines and the far smaller use of imprisonment. Then, as far as the fines are concerned, they are all paid out of the attachment of wages—and the fines are often very substantial. It may take a man two or three years to pay off his fine; but I am told that they have very few cases in which they actually have to send these people to prison. It is all done out of the attachment of wages; and I should have thought that if a man had stolen something, it would be felt by the ordinary person to be just that he should have to pay its value back.
This Committee, the Payne Committee, is considering the whole question of the compulsory attachment of wages. I have not read the evidence given before the Committee and know only what I myself have seen in the papers, but I would say that one of the difficulties in the way of the adoption of the attachment of wages as a common-sense and practical method was thought at one time to be the opposition of the trade unions to it; but from what I have read about their evidence given before the Payne Com-
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mittee, the trade unions appear to be taking rather a different view, and that may very much change the practical effect of what can be done.
My Lords, the hour is late. I end as I began. The debate on this most important part of the gracious Speech, relating to all these different aspects of Government life, has been one opportunity for the members of the Opposition, whether of the Conservative Party or of the Liberal Party, to protest against anything in this contemplated legislation which they do not like or think is inimical to the welfare of the country. It just shows how astonishingly popular everything which the Government are proposing must be, when only four members of the combined Opposition can be found to produce any sort of criticism at all; and whilst, naturally, I have listened with great interest to everything they have said, the points which have been taken are, after all, fairly small points. My Lords, I will now put to the House the Question which is before you.
On Question, Motion agreed to, nemine dissentiente: the said Address to be presented to Her Majesty by the Lords with White Staves.

EXETER CORPORATION BILL [H.L.]
Reported, with Amendments.
House adjourned at five minutes before nine o'clock.