Lords Sitting of 14 February 1967

Preamble
The House met at half past two of the clock, The LORD CHANCELLOR on the Woolsack.
Prayers— Read by the Lord Bishop of Chichester

INDIAN DEPORTEES FROM TANZANIA
2.35 p.m.
LORD ALPORT: My Lords, I beg leave to ask the Question which stands in my name on the Order Paper.
[The Question was as follows:
To ask Her Majesty's Government what action they will take with regard to the plight of Indians in East Africa possessing British passports, who are to be deported from Tanzania and have been denied entry to the Republic of India.]
THE PARLIAMENTARY UNDER-SECRETARY OF STATE FOR COMMONWEALTH AFFAIRS (LORD BESWICK): My Lords, I am not aware that the Indian authorities have refused to admit to India any persons of Indian origin who are in possession of British passports. As far as citizens of the United Kingdom and Colonies are concerned, they are not subject to the United Kingdom immigration control unless their citizenship is derived from their connection with a remaining Colony.
LORD ALPORT: My Lords, may I ask the noble Lord whether the High Commissioner in Dar-es-Salaam is in touch with the development of this problem, because all of us who know anything about East Africa realised that the Asian population were most likely to be victimised at some point or other in the development of those territories, and we in this country still have a residual obligation to look after their interests, particularly those who carry British passports?
LORD BESWICK: My Lords, I quite understand what the noble Lord is saying in the latter part of his supplementary question, and the implications of
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what he is saying. This is of course appreciated by Her Majesty's Government, who are at present looking most carefully into the whole question.
LORD SALTOUN: My Lords, may I ask Her Majesty's Government whether they will again look into this question of British passports, with a view to dealing with specially hard cases? The noble Lord, Lord Clifford of Chudleigh, asked a Question on the subject some time ago, and it seems to me that there are considerable cases of hardship in connection with British passports. Could the matter be looked at again?
LORD BESWICK: My Lords, if there are particular cases of hardship I shall, of course, be happy myself to look into them. Perhaps the noble Lord will let me have details of any individual cases that he has in mind. With regard to this area of difficulty—the Indian High Commissioner in Dar-es-Salaam was mentioned—I think I realize to what the noble Lord was referring in the statement which was made by the Indian High Commissioner. But I believe it is relevant to say that the Indian Minister of State, speaking in the Indian House on August 23, 1966, stated that if people were in possession of British passports—and those are the people to whom the noble Lord refers—they do not require permits or visas to enter India and would normally be admitted if they came of their own free will. In the last few days the Government in Delhi has confirmed that position.
LORD BROCKWAY: My Lords, could my noble friend give any indication of the number of Indians who are to be deported from Tanzania? And is it not the case that both the Indian Government and the Government in Tanzania are seeking in every way possible to secure co-operation between the Indian and the African communities in that country?
LORD BESWICK: My Lords, I hope that the position is as indicated by my noble friend; that in fact the Tanzanian and the Indian authorities are cooperating together. I cannot give him the figures for which he asks. For one thing, the question of definition comes into the matter. I am not sure what he means by an "Indian"—whether he means a person born in Tanzania or

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one who has emigrated from India to Tanzania. In any case, I am afraid I cannot give him the figures for which he asks.

FIRE LOSSES
2.42 p.m.
LORD RATHCAVAN: My Lords, I beg leave to ask the Question which stands in my name on the Order Paper.
[The Question was as follows:
To ask Her Majesty's Government what has been the total value of properties destroyed by fire in Great Britain in the years 1963, 1964, 1965 and 1966 respectively; and whether they can say how these figures compare with those of the preceding four years.]
LORD BOWLES: My Lords, the only available statistics are the estimates of annual fire losses published by the British Insurance Association, which before 1962 related only to the United Kingdom. Since that date the estimated fire losses for Great Britain have been as follows—I give the figures to the nearest £1 million: in 1962, £54 million; in 1963, £65 million; in 1964, £76 million; in 1965, £74 million, and in 1966, £80 million.
LORD RATHCAVAN: My Lords, may I ask the noble Lord two supplementary questions? The figures which he has given show quite considerable increases in recent years. Can he give any reason or cause why fire losses now appear to be so much greater than they used to be? Secondly, can he say what action, if any, has been taken by the Government or by local authorities to bring home to the people the danger of fire and to suggest precautions which may be taken against it?
LORD BOWLES: My Lords, in answer to the noble Lord's first supplementary question, I will, with permission, circulate in the OFFICIAL REPORT the number of fires since 1958. While there has been a general upward trend in the number of fires, these figures bear no direct relationship to the increase in estimated fire losses. This is because a small number of fires make a major contribution to fire losses each year. For example, in 1965 less than 1 per cent. of the fires accounted for 62 per cent. of the
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estimated fire losses for that year. The Government view with concern the increase in the estimated fire losses. Several factors have contributed to it, including the growth in population; the larger number of properties; the general increase in the value of property and materials; and the increase in the number and variety of potential sources of fires in industry as a result of the introduction of new and potentially hazardous materials and sources. There is no doubt, however, that most of the fires are caused either by personal carelessness or by ignorance.
In answer to the noble Lord's second supplementary question, as to what action, if any, the Government are taking, publicity is undertaken by Government Departments, lire authorities and insurance interests to make the public more aware of the dangers to life and property caused by fire. This is important, as it is clear that most fires are caused by personal carelessness or ignorance. Publicity is undertaken through the medium of television, the Press and education in schools. These activities are co-ordinated by the Information Sub-Committee of the Joint Fire Prevention Committee of the Central Fire Brigades Advisory Councils for England and Wales and for Scotland. One of the general matters which the recently announced Departmental Committee on the Fire Service will consider is the need for further fire prevention measures.
LORD FARINGDON: My Lords, I wonder whether my noble friend could tell me if it is not a fact that there is throughout the country a severe shortage of fire prevention officers?
LORD BOWLES: My Lords, I am afraid that without notice I cannot answer my noble friend's question; but I will certainly have the matter inquired into and will write to him.
LORD PEDDIE: My Lords, is my noble friend aware of the considerable contribution towards fire prevention that is made by industrial auxiliary fire brigades, operated by private firms? In the light of that evidence, which I am sure will be in my noble friend's possession, may I ask what steps are being taken by Her Majesty's Government to encourage such efforts by private firms within industry
LORD BOWLES: My Lords, it is well known, of course, that a great deal of help on fire protection matters is given to various managements by local fire brigades. I am also certain, from my experience, that a great deal of help is also given by fire advisers in the factories themselves.
Following are the figures referred to:

NUMBER OF FIRES—EXCLUDING CHIMNEYS, GRASS HEATHLAND AND RAILWAY EMBANKMENTS

United Kingdom

Great Britain

1958

80,008

78,920

1959

115,416

113,892

1960

99,960

98,188

1961

114,604

112,990

1962

122,378

120,456

1963

125,732

123,802

1964

148,568

146,478

1965

138,460

136,463

(provisional)

(provisional)

CONSOLIDATED FUND BILL
Read 2a (according to Order): Committee negatived.

GENERAL RATE BILL [H.L.]
2.45 p.m.
Order of the Day for the House to be put into Committee on Re-commitment read.
Moved, That the House do now resolve itself into Committee.—(The Lord Chancellor.)
On Question, Motion agreed to.
House in Committee accordingly.
[The EARL OF LISTOWEL in the Chair.]
THE CHAIRMAN OF COMMITTEES (THE EARL OF LISTOWEL): My Lords, this Bill has been amended by the Joint Committee on Consolidation Bills, and there is a further Amendment to be moved in Committee this afternoon. I shall therefore go through the Bill in the usual way.
Clauses 1 to 115 agreed to.
Clause 116 [Construction of references etc.]:
THE LORD CHANCELLOR (LORD GARDINER): This is a minor drafting Amendment, the object of which is to
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make it clear that Clause 116(8) is concerned with the identification of a geographical area, and not with nomenclature. It has arisen since the matter was before the Joint Committee because somebody with some knowledge in this field wrote to ask which meaning was intended. The wording had been thought to be perfectly clear as it was, but, if there can be any possible doubt about it I feel that the Bill should not leave this House without that doubt being resolved. This Amendment would resolve it. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Upjohn, Chairman of the Committee, has been consulted and in the circumstances approves of the Amendment. I beg to move.
Amendment moved—
Page 93, line 33, after ("to") insert ("an area which is").—(The Lord Chancellor.)
On Question, Amendment agreed to.
Clause 116, as amended, agreed to.
Remaining clauses and Schedules agreed to.
House resumed: Bill reported, with the Amendment.

TEACHERS' SUPERANNUATION BILL [H.L.]
Order of the Day for the Third Reading read.
THE LORD CHANCELLOR: My Lords, I beg to move that this Bill be now read a third time.
Moved, That the Bill be now read 3a.—(The Lord Chancellor.)
On Question, Bill read 3a.
THE LORD CHANCELLOR: My Lords, this also is a Consolidation Bill which has come back from the Consolidation Committee. It consolidates Teachers' Superannuation Acts over the last 41 years. We are, as usual, indebted to the Joint Committee on Consolidation Bills for the work they have done on this Bill. I beg to move that the Bill do now pass.
Moved, That the Bill do now pass.—(The Lord Chancellor.)
On Question, Bill passed, and sent to the Commons.

CRIMINAL LAW BILL [H.L.]
2.50 p.m.
Read 3a (according to Order).
Clause 12 [Commencement, savings and other general provisions]:
THE LORD CHANCELLOR: My Lords, the fiat Amendment which appears in my name is to change a date because, as your Lordships know, the Bill provides for alterations in the procedure of the trial of criminal cases arising out of the abolition of felonies. In criminal cases certainty is essential, and courts will want to know from which date the procedure is to be altered. It has been thought that, on the whole, August 29 is the date when fewer criminal courts are likely to be sitting, and for that purpose it would be a much more convenient date than March 25. Accordingly, I beg to move.
Amendment moved—
Page 7, line 44, leave out ("25th March") and insert ("29th August").—(The Lord Chancellor.)
LORD AIREDALE: My Lords, I would just draw your Lordships' attention to the fact that we are now considering a Marshalled List of two Amendments which I think is identical to the list of two Amendments which was published last week. I should have thought that any member of the public who was induced to part with 5d. to the Stationery Office for this particular Marshalled List might feel that he had been swindled. Since I think it is established practice that one Amendment does not need to be marshalled, perhaps we can, in the interests of economy, go one step further now and say that where two Amendments have already appeared in their correct order in one list those two Amendments need not be subsequently marshalled.
LORD WILLIS: My Lords, I do not know whether it is appropriate for me to come in with this point at this particular moment, but it has occurred to me that we were in Committee on the General Rate Bill and I did not hear the Motion, "That the House do now resume." May I be told whether we are still in Committee?
THE LORD CHANCELLOR: My Lords, the House has resumed, although I think the Motion was not formally put. I do not know that the point which has been raised by the noble Lord, Lord Airedale, is really a matter for me to deal with. I understand that it has always been the practice in your Lordships' House to have a Marshalled List. If there are only two Amendments—one by Lord A and one by Lord B—it is still convenient to have all the Amendments on one piece of paper. The present example of two Amendments in the name of one noble Lord may seem a minimal case, hut, again, it has been found convenient to be able to refer to an Amendment by its number, and to be able to call it by its number. Otherwise there may be some confusion about which Amendment is being discussed. But I will see that the noble Lord's point is given further consideration.
On Question, Amendment agreed to.
Schedule 4 [Repeals (obsolete crimes)]:
THE LORD CHANCELLOR: My Lords, I beg to move Amendment No. 2 standing in my name on the Marshalled List. This Amendment corrects an error by removing the reference to Section 8 of the Statute of Monopolies from the list of repeals in Schedule 4. When that repeal was proposed, it was overlooked that the section had already been repealed by the Administration of Justice Act, 1965, and accordingly we do not want to repeal it again. I am sorry that that had not been noticed before. I beg to move.
Amendment moved—
Page 29, line 45, column 3, leave out ("Section 8.")—(The Lord Chancellor.)
On Question, Amendment agreed to.
THE LORD CHANCELLOR: My Lords, I beg to move that this Bill do now pass. I am sorry to be moving these Motions in your Lordships' House to-day, because it is due to the absence of my noble friend Lord Stonham. But we are all very pleased, I know, to hear that he is getting on so well, and I hope that he will be back with us long before the Criminal Justice Bill arrives in your Lordships' House.
We are indebted to noble Lords on the Committee who made various suggestions

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for the improvement of the Bill, a number of which I was able to accept on the Report stage. I am only sorry that, despite the best endeavours, we were not able to find any really satisfactory alternative for the "arrestable offence". As the noble Lord, Lord Conesford, knows, it was not for lack of trying. There were meetings but none of us, I think, was able to find a really satisfactory alternative. Some may regret the disappearance of such old friends as felony, allocutus and misprision, but this is, I think, a small price to pay for a worthwhile piece of law reform.
I have always very much encouraged our newspapers to criticise our law and our administration of justice, because criticism is good for all of us, and it has been right for a generation to point out that the distinction between felonies and misdemeanours was a complete anomaly which ought to be removed. Now that has been done, after a good deal of work by Lord Justice Sellers and the members of the Criminal Law Revision Committee. This work has been done after their ordinary day's work, and I am sure that we are all grateful to them for it. But I wish that the Press, on such occasions, would sometimes take note of the fact that anomalies are being removed from the law—certainly during the life of this Administration—and that it is the lawyers themselves who have played the originating part. I beg to move that this Bill do now pass.
Moved, That the Bill do now pass.—(The Lord Chancellor.)
LORD BROOKE OF CUMNOR: My Lords, throughout the proceedings on this Bill I have spoken with great diffidence and as little as possible, not myself being a lawyer, and knowing that this is essentially a lawyers' Bill. But I feel happy to-day that it is passing from your Lordships' House, inasmuch as I was the Home Secretary who referred this question of felonies and misdemeanours to the Criminal Law Revision Committee. I should like to join the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor in the tribute which he has paid to Lord Justice Sellers and the members of that Committee. We all feel a debt of gratitude to them for working so hard on a subject which, if I may respectfully say so, they understand
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a great deal better than most of us lay noble Lords. I just wanted to say this, because I should not like it to be thought that this Bill passed from your Lordships' House without a word of appreciation for the preparatory work which the Committee did.
THE LORD CHANCELLOR: My Lords, I am sure that the House will wholly approve what the noble Lord, Lord Brooke of Cumnor, has said in expressing our thanks to the Criminal Law Revision Committee. May I add what I should have said before: that I have it in command from Her Majesty the Queen to acquaint the House that Her Majesty, having been informed of the purport of the Criminal Law Bill, has consented to place Her interest, so far as it is concerned on behalf of the Crown, at the disposal of Parliament fen the purposes of the Bill.
On Question, Bill passed, and sent to the Commons.

LONDON GOVERNMENT BILL
Returned from the Commons with the Amendments disagreed to, with a Reason for such disagreement: the said Amendments and Reason to be printed.
EDUCATION BILL
Read 3a (according to Order), and passed.

WEST INDIES BILL
3.0 p.m.
Order of the Day for the House to be put into Committee read.
Moved, That the House do now resolve itself into Committee.—(Lord Shackleton.)
On Question, Motion agreed to.
House in Committee accordingly.
[The EARL OF LISTOWEL in the Chair.]
THE CHAIRMAN OF COMMITTEES: I have to inform your Lordships that no Amendments have been put down to this Bill. The question therefore is that I report this Bill to the House without amendment.
LORD OGMORE: Before we move away rather rapidly from the Committee stage of this Bill, I should like to mention a matter which I raised on Second Reading and which the noble Lord, Lord Beswick, who is always very helpful to us, promised he would look at. Or, rather, I do not think he actually promised that on Second Reading, but I am sure that in his heart he meant to promise it, even if he did not do so. It concerns the question I raised in regard to the possibility of conflict between Her Majesty's Government, who are responsible for external affairs and defence, and the Government of an Associated State, whichever one it may be, in the field of foreign relations.
Your Lordships may remember that I put the case—it was a rather extreme case, I must admit—of perhaps one of these Associated States (St. Vincent, or any one of the others) wishing to join with Cuba, and there being an immediate conflict, as indeed there would be, between Her Majesty's Government in this country and the Associated State. Cuba is an extreme example, and I mentioned it because it was an extreme example, but there may be other examples less extreme in that area, of non-British territories. The noble Lord, Lord Beswick, rather "shot me down" on this point. He said I had not read some paper or other, to which he referred, and that there was nothing in the point at all. I felt that there was something in the point; and I understand from the noble Lord, Lord Beswick, who has been, as I have said, very helpful and kind, that he is going to say a word on it now.
THE CHAIRMAN OF COMMITTEES: As several noble Lords wish to speak on this Bill, I will go through it in the usual way.
Clause 1 [Status of association with United Kingdom]:
On Question, Whether Clause 1 shall stand part of the Bill?
EARL JELLICOE: I hope that this is the right moment to raise a matter which has come to my attention only recently. Clause 1 deals with the appointed day, and the matter which I wish to raise is certainly one on which I hope that we may receive a satisfactory assurance from Her Majesty's Government well before
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the appointed day. I hope, therefore, that this is the appropriate clause under which I should raise this subject. It concerns the provisions for local government in two of the smaller islands which are linked with St. Kitts—that is, Anguilla and Nevis. Anguilla happens to be some 70 miles from St. Kitts, and it is therefore quite reasonable that there should be, as is found in the Report of the Constitutional Conference for St. Kitts, local government provisions laid down for this other island and for Nevis.
The provisions regarding local self-government for those islands are to be found in paragraphs 14 and 50 of the Report of the St. Kitts/Nevis/Anguilla Constitutional Conference. Paragraph 50 of the Report lays down that:
"The Constitution will provide that there shall be a Council for Nevis and a Council for Anguilla; that the Council for each Island shall be the principal organ of local government for that Island; and that at least two-thirds of all members of each Council shall be elected on the same franchise as members of the House of Assembly"—
that is, the Assembly for St. Kitts as a whole.
There are two major Parties in these three islands. There is the majority Party, which rejoices in the name of the Labour Party and which secured 44 per cent. of the votes at the last election, and there is the minority Party, the People's Action Movement, which secured 39 per cent. of the votes at the last election. The People's Action Movement is, I am assured, despite its name, a non-Communist Party. There are two representatives of the People's Action Movement in this country at the present time. They have been able to come over as a result of money raised at a Party meeting last Saturday because of the grave concern felt in the two smaller islands, Anguilla and Nevis, that the local government provisions of the Constitution will not be honoured on the appointed day, on February 27. It is not for me to say whether or not their fears are justified: all I can do is to report these fears, and I shall be very grateful for any assurance which the noble Lord can give me.
These fears, as I understand the position, are as follows. In the first place, according to my information, they have not been able to secure any assurances at all from the Chief Minister of St. Kitts that the local government provisions are

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being prepared. Indeed, in answer to a letter which one of the representatives of the People's Action Movement addressed to the Chief Minister recently, he was informed that there were no proposals before him at this stage. This, if true, would certainly seem to be curious.
The second Main reason for their disquiet— and this, again, is only my understanding of the position and slightly contradicts the report that no preparations are being made for self-government for these two islands—flows from a meeting of the Executive Council just before Christmas at which a document embodying the proposed arrangements for self-government was discussed. At the end of that document there are to be found the words:
"The Central Government must retain the power to suspend or abolish an Island Council."
If that provision is going to be incorporated in the local government arrangements in fact enacted, it would certainly appear to be contrary to paragraph 14 of the Constitutional Conference Report, which lays down that when the local government constitution is to be amended or abolished the matter should be
"submitted to the electors qualified to vote in elections in Nevis or Anguilla, as the case may be, to the House of Assembly and approved at the referendum by not less than two-thirds of the valid votes cast".
That would seem to be quite a different procedure from the St. Kitts Government retaining the power to suspend or abolish an Island Council. There has been certain disturbance, I understand, connected with all this in the last week or so in Anguilla, directly stemming from disquiet on this issue.
I should therefore like to bring this matter to your Lordships' attention before we pass from this Committee stage, and I should like to ask the Minister who will be replying whether he has any information about the position; if he has any information about the reported disturbances in Anguilla; if he can assure me that the local government provisions provided for or foreseen in paragraph 50 of the Report of the Constitutional Conference will in fact he brought into effect; and if it is his information, too, that they will be in accordance with the provisions of paragraph 14. I hope that the noble Lord, when he replies, will
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be able to give me these assurances. I apologise to your Lordships' Committee for trespassing on your time on this matter. It may appear to be a relatively small point affecting two very small communities, but to me, at least, it seems extremely important that before this legislation is approved, we should be satisfied that it is completely watertight, whatever the size of the communities concerned may be.
3.10 p.m.
LORD BESWICK: I should like to thank the noble Earl, Lord Jellicoe, for the full and fair way in which he has put forward the fears which are undoubtedly held by certain individuals. I entirely agree with him that though we are talking of very few people in a very small part of the world, nevertheless, for these individuals in that part of the world this will be an important matter. The noble Earl has every right, and indeed a duty, to raise the matter in your Lordships' House. At the same time, I hope that he and other noble Lords will appreciate that I am in something of a difficulty myself. The noble Earl is asking for an assurance, not about the good intentions of Her Majesty's Government, but about the possible actions of other people in another part of the world: namely, the Government of one of the communities about to become an Asociated State.
The position at the present time, as I understand it, is that the Government of St. Kitts have every intention of implementing the provisons of the Constitution mentioned in Clause 50 in the Conference Report; indeed, my understanding is that the necessary implementing legislation has already been drafted; that its terms will be published within the next few days, and that in due course it will go before their Parliament in St. Kitts. However, the noble Earl, Lord Jellicoe, has now raised certain other matters, a refinement of this point, arising out of what is set out in Clause 14 of the Conference Report. I must confess to the noble Earl that I have not had an opportunity to check on this particular point, but I will certainly get the information which is necessary before I can give any assurance, and probably I can deal with it at a later stage of the Bill.
EARL JELLICOE: I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Beswick, for his

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careful reply on this point. Clearly, I must leave it at that for the time being. But I would remind noble Lords that, while it is quite true that we are dealing with islands which in a very short space of time will acquire this new status of association, yet at this moment the responsibility is ours, and no one else's. I hope that before we pass on to this stage of association, Her Majesty's Government will assure themselves that the provisions of the Constitutional Conference are going to be honoured, not only in the spirit but also in the letter. I think that the spirit is most important of all in this context.
The noble Lord, Lord Beswick, said that probably before the next stage he would be able to give me further information on the specific point regarding paragraph 14 of the Constitutional Conference Report which I put to him. I hope very much that he can undertake to telegraph forthwith so that we may have the full information on this particular point on Third Reading, before we pass this Bill. I also hope that it will be possible for a Minister of the Commonwealth Office to see the two representatives of the People's Action Movement who have come over to this country. I know that they have come at short notice. I know, too, that they have been seen by an official, but it seems to me, in view of the gravity of their fears, that it is only right they should be seen also by a Minister. I hope that this can be done before this Bill comes to us for Third Reading.
LORD BESWICK: May I say that I am not trying to escape any responsibility in this matter, and I agree that until this Bill becomes law we have a continuing responsibility in these matters. Nevertheless, the fact is that the physical action to implement the constitutional provision mentioned in this clause is required, not from Her Majesty's Government, but from people in another part of the world. We have been assured that they are in process of legislating to the required effect. We have been given assurances to that end. The noble Earl now asks whether this particular legislation incorporates certain words. On that point I cannot at this moment give a definite reply, but I will find out and let the noble Earl know. I certainly
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intend to find out the information before Third Reading.
LORD BROCKWAY: I think that probably I am in order in saying something on this clause. This is the first occasion when, in a British sphere, Colonies have been accepted on the basis of association. Before we pass this Bill I think that we should pay tribute to the Dominion of New Zealand, which set the precedent in this matter. I have been present at Conferences called by the Colonial Office when these problems were discussed, and where the example given by New Zealand over the Cook Islands was generally recognised. I do not feel that we should pass this Bill without paying our tribute to the example which the Dominion Government of New Zealand has set in this respect.
This new principle now being applied to our Colonial Territories, whereby we remain responsible for foreign affairs and defence, but yet at the same time give them the right to self-determination and to become completely independent, is an advance in our treatment of the Colonial Territories, the importance of which should be recognised, and for which we should pass some tribute to the Government of New Zealand which set the new pattern we are now following.
LORD WILLIS: I should like to reinforce the point made by the noble Earl, Lord Jellicoe. There is a very strong feeling about this matter. Since it is a question of the spirit and the letter, as the noble Earl said, is it not possible for the British Government to insist that, before this Bill becomes law, there shall be suitable legislation passed guaranteeing the freedoms that have been outlined in the Agreement which has been made? Otherwise, if this House passes a Bill and the Bill becomes law, we may be in a position in which there is no guarantee that the required legislation will, in fact, contain the words or the necessary legalities that are required. It seems to me that this is a matter on which we ought to insist that the British Government take the strongest possible line for the protection of minorities.
Clause 1 agreed to.
THE CHAIRMAN OF COMMITTEES (THE EARL OF LISTOWEL): The question is that Clauses 2 to 9 stand part of the Bill.
LORD OGMORE: With permission, I should like to speak on Clause 7. The noble Earl the Chairman of Committees has put Clauses 2 to 9 which would block me out, and I want to speak on Clause 7.
LORD BESWICK: If I may, I would say that the noble Lord, Lord Ogmore, raised a matter fully and very properly. I had not replied to him immediately because I thought it more appropriately came on Clause 7.
THE CHAIRMAN OF COMMITTEES: I apologise to your Lordships, but it is a little difficult for me sometimes when I have not had notice that noble Lords wish to speak.
Clauses 2 to 6 agreed to.
Clause 7 [Power of Her Majesty to make laws for associated states]:
On Question, Whether Clause 7 shall stand part of the Bill?
LORD OGMORE: I apologise to the noble Earl the Chairman of Committees for not giving him notice, but owing to "the exigencies of the service" it was not possible for me to do so. I will now, if I may, put the point to the noble Lord, Lord Beswick, which I put earlier on when we thought we should not have a Committee stage at all, and I should like to ask him to be good enough to reply.
LORD BESWICK: The noble Lord asked me on Second Reading whether the Associated States could engage in a customs union or so arrange their tariff affairs that they made an economic arrangement between one island and another. I gave him a reply which, although accurate so far as it went, did not completely cover all the contingencies which he had in mind. I am grateful to the noble Lord for providing me with this opportunity of giving in more detail what the position is in this field.
It is one of those cases where internal matters overlap with external matters. The internal affairs of any Associated State will be entirely a matter for the Government of the Associated State, whereas by the Bill which we are considering external affairs will be a matter for the United Kingdom Government. But there are certain areas which can be for either the one or the other. What I said was perfectly correct, that the actual decision as to whether a matter
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relates to external affairs will be for Her Majesty's Government to determine by certificate. However, the tariff policy of an Associated State should be primarily a matter for that State, though of course it must be conducted in conformity with existing international obligations. I think that the noble Lord had this point in mind. If a local decision to seek a customs union or a free trade area is made, obviously external affairs will be involved, but under the new relationship we shall not in the name of external affairs assume a responsibility for deciding that the Associated States should pursue a policy of entry into a customs union. It is in that sense that I meant that it was entirely a matter for the States themselves, and for that reason that I mentioned as an example the agreement already reached between Antigua, Barbados and Guyana.
As for the question of the United Kingdom deciding by certificate what matters relate to external affairs, we intend that everything should be done by consultation and agreement, and although in the last resort we have the power to legislate where in the opinion of Her Majesty's Government it is necessary to do so in the interests of their responsibility for defence and external affairs, I should not like anyone to think that the giving of a certificate was an automatic matter or that such responsibility as Her Majesty's Government would have in relation to a customs union could be got rid of by means of a certificate. An example would be one of the States contravening GATT. We could not get rid of that international difficulty by issuing a certificate.
I should like to reiterate that while in the Bill it is correct to say that there is no need to mention anything about a customs union because it is not an appropriate matter for legislation, nevertheless if the Government of an Associated State wish to proceed with a customs union or an arrangement of tariff affairs in conjunction with other islands, it would be a matter for them, and the question of a certificate and of interference from us would not arise.
LORD OGMORE: I am grateful to the noble Lord for clarifying the position.
Clause 7 agreed to.
Clauses 8 and 9 agreed to.
Clause 10 [Provisions for terminating status of association]:
On Question, whether Clause 10 shall stand part of the Bill?
EARL JELLICOE: This is a point which I should have mentioned on Second Reading, but your Lordships will recall that we were going rather fast because we were about to listen to Mr. Kosygin. We all hope that this new formula of association will last. I think that it is a happy formula, and I personally hope that it will last. Nevertheless, the drafters of the Bill and those concerned with the constitutional conferences were right to envisage the possibility of termination, because it is that which gives this new system its flexibility, and indeed its ultimate freedom.
I am concerned about one point in Clause 10. Paragraph 23 of the report of the Windward Islands Constitutional Conference says that the Secretary of State undertook not to terminate the association from our side without giving six months' prior notice, without a further conference, and without obtaining the specific approval of Parliament. What worries me about Clause 10 is that there is nothing in it about the six months' prior notice, the further conference, or the specific approval of Parliament being obtained. I should like to ask the noble Lord why these three important safeguards are omitted, especially when on the other side of the coin—that is, possible action taken by the associated islands to terminate the association—detailed provisions are laid down in Schedule 2. It seems to me odd that detailed provisions are laid down for them and not for us. All that is said about termination by the United Kingdom is a brief reference in Clause 10(2).
May I also ask, in parenthesis, a further point, on which I think the noble Lord can give me an assurance? I noted that this procedure was agreed at the Windward Islands Constitutional Conference, and also at the Constitutional Conference for Antigua and St. Kitts, but there is no mention of it in the reports of the Antigua Constitutional Conference. Perhaps that: was merely because it was the first of the series and this matter did not come up. The Minister in another place
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was able to assure the other place that the same procedure would operate for Antigua if necessary, but I should be grateful if the noble Lord would reaffirm that assurance.
LORD BESWICK: I am obliged to the noble Earl, particularly because he was kind enough to give me prior notice that he was going to raise this point. It is true that we gave an assurance to the four Windward territories and St. Kitts that we would not terminate the association without giving six months' notice, and these assurances in their respective cases are embodied in the relevant Conference reports. As the noble Earl invited me to do, I confirm that this assurance also applies to Antigua and that he is right in speculating that the reason why it is not embodied in the Conference report is that it was not raised at that Conference. It did not become an issue, and therefore, naturally, did not appear in the report. Subsequently, Antigua raised this question and they have been assured, both verbally and in writing, that the assurances given to the others apply equally in their case.
The noble Earl also asked me why these assurances are not embodied in the Bill. That is a fair question. I think I may say that had there been any demand that this assurance should be included in the legislative provisions, it would have been included. But there was no insistent demand that it should be embodied. The fact is that the representatives of these various territories—and they included both the Opposition Party and the Government Party of the day—were quite content that there should be given an undertaking in the Conference report (with the exception of Antigua's, whose position I have just explained) which, as the noble Earl knows, was signed by all the parties concerned.
There is possibly another reason why they are not actually embodied in the Bill, and that is that the possibility of termination by the United Kingdom was considered not simply as an act, but as part of a situation which would arise. The assurances were given in a threefold form. First, there was the assurance that six months' notice should be given. Secondly, there was the assurance that in the event of this happening—and I gather that the noble Earl, like myself, hopes

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that it will not arise—not only would there be the notice, but a conference would be held at which the economic and political implications arising could be discussed. It was agreed, again by all parties—and I should hope that it would be agreed by the noble Earl—that an undertaking to hold a conference is probably not best embodied in a piece of legislation; but mention of it is included in the Conference report. Thirdly, there was the undertaking that if Britain terminated the association unilaterally the necessary legislative procedure would come before the British Parliament. If the noble Earl looks at subsection (2) of Clause 10, I think he will find that the provision there covers the third part of the package undertaking.
I might also say, because it is partly relevant, that in the case of Antigua we were also asked for an assurance that our legislative powers in respect of defence and external affairs would not be used in order to amend, suspend or revoke the Constitution of Antigua. That assurance was not only given, but is embodied in the Defence and External Affairs Agreement which will be signed by Her Majesty's Government and by the authorities of Antigua.
I agree with the noble Earl, as no doubt do other noble Lords, that this is a complicated matter. There is a report of the Conference which has, as we accept it, binding effect. There is also a Bill. There is a Constitution which will be put into operation by Order in Council. And in the case of Antigua there will also be this Agreement covering certain matters in connection with defence and external affairs. If the other Associated States want a similar agreement to that which we propose to sign with Antigua, we shall be happy to accede to their request.
EARL JELLICOE: I am grateful to the noble Lord for the full explanation he has given. He paid me the compliment of saying that I had asked a fair question, and I think he has given, so far as it goes, a full and helpful answer. I should be the first to agree with him that it would have been probably inappropriate for a Parliamentary draftsman to try to write into the provisions of Clause 10 the provision relating to a further constitutional conference. I am absolutely with the noble Lord there.
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I am still somewhat puzzled, however, why it was thought necessary to set out the very detailed provisions for termination on one side—and the provisions are detailed, as a glance at Schedule 2 will show—but we have not been prepared to lay similar obligations on ourselves or, at least, to spell out in legislation the important provision of six months' notice. I should have thought that, even given the noble Lord's explanation, this could well have been done. But certainly at this stage I do not wish to press the noble Lord further on the point.
LORD BESWICK: My Lords, may I just say this? I can understand the noble Earl being puzzled about this point. Frankly, I cannot see why it was not put in the Bill. But the demand was not made and therefore it was not met. I hope, however, that nothing he has said will indicate that the assurance we have given is any the less binding because it is not in the legislation.
Clause 10 agreed to.
Remaining clauses and Schedules agreed to.
House resumed: Bill reported without amendment; Report received.

MATRIMONIAL CAUSES BILL [H.L.]
3.36 p.m.
Order of the Day for the Second Reading read.
THE LORD CHANCELLOR: My Lords, I beg to move that this Bill be now read a second time. During the course of the debate on divorce law reform which we had in your Lordships' House in November I referred in some detail to the proposals now set forward in this Bill. They are proposals which have had a long history. The matter was first considered by the Royal Commission on Divorce and Matrimonial Causes, under the chairmanship of Lord Gorell, in 1912. That Commission rejected the suggestion that any divorce cases should be tried in the county courts, though they recommended that nine or ten selected county court judges should be appointed to sit as Commissioners of the High Court. However, nothing was done on that recommendation.

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At the end of the war, when there was a great increase in the number of divorce cases, a Committee was appointed, of which the noble and learned Lord, Lord Denning (then a Judge of the Divorce Division), was Chairman, and some of us proposed to that Committee that undefended cases should be tried in the county courts. One reason at that time—and this was before the days of the Legal Aid and Advice Act—was that there were a great many women who were entitled to a divorce but who simply could not obtain one because, whether or not they could have afforded the cost of a county court case, they certainly could not afford the cost of a High Court case. Nevertheless, that proposal was objected to by the Churches, and the conclusion of that Committee was what I think I have previously described as the usual brilliant English compromise; namely, that undefended cases—and, indeed, some defended ones—should be heard by county court judges dressed up as High Court Judges for the day. This pleased everybody, because the cases were still in the High Court, although use was able to be made of the much greater number of county court judges to try the cases.
The Royal Commission on Marriage and Divorce, which was presided over by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Morton of Henryton, and reported in 1956, thought it unsatisfactory that what was nominally a High Court jurisdiction should be exercised by Commissioners, and they expressed the hope that in due time we should be able to return to a situation in which High Court Judges heard all these cases. But the fact is that for the last twenty years by far the greater number of divorce cases has been disposed of by the county court judges, and, I think, without any dissatisfaction. Last year, out of a total of 38,000 undefended cases, the county court judges tried 34,000. In addition, they tried 894 of what are called the short defended cases—cases which it is anticipated will not last more than three hours. Of course, divorce cases cannot be tried in every town where county court judges sit, but only at what are known as divorce towns, of which there are at present 49 outside London. In London two county court judges every day attend at the Law Courts to try undefended cases.
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I am not the first to suggest that the time has come now to recognise the realities of the situation and give the county court judges in name the jurisdiction which they have in substance exercised for the past twenty years. It was, in fact, suggested by my noble predecessor on the Woolsack. What is proposed is that in future every matrimonial cause should begin in a county court designated by the Lord Chancellor as a divorce county court, or else begin in the Principal Probate Registry in London, which will be treated for this purpose as if it were a divorce county court. This is simply a practical question. If you have 40,000 cases a year, of which 36,000 are undefended, do you start all 40,000 in the High Court and then transfer 36,000 to the county court, or do you start 40,000 in the county court from which you have to transfer only 4,000? The latter is obviously the more practical. It means that if the case is proceeding in London it will be transferred from the county court side (if it is transferred to the High Court) to the High Court side of the Principal Registry, and if it is proceeding in a divorce county court outside London it will be transferred to the nearest district registry of the High Court, which will be in the same building and the same man will be both county court registrar and High Court registrar. When the case comes to be tried, it will, if it is defended, be tried by a High Court Judge and not a county court judge. Of course, a good deal of the detailed administrative arrangements have to be made by rules of court.
Clause 1 requires every matrimonial cause to be begun in a divorce county court, and the intention is that these should be the courts at places at which there is at present a district registry of the High Court with divorce jurisdiction. There are at present 101 registries of this kind at each of which the county court registrar is also the district registrar of the High Court, so that he and his staff will already have expert knowledge of the divorce procedure. There is no intention of giving the new jurisdiction to the county courts at the smaller places where the staff have no experience of the work.
The only county courts where the registrar is not at present a district registrar with divorce experience which may nevertheless become divorce county

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courts, are likely to be some half-dozen courts on the periphery of Greater London at places like Croydon, Kingston or Ilford. There is, of course, no district registry of the High Court at these places because in Greater London all High Court cases have to start in the Strand. But when the county courts are given divorce jurisdiction it may be convenient for litigants and practitioners on the borders of Greater London to be able to start their cases in a few selected county courts, although it does not necessarily follow that the cases will be tried there, because it may be more convenient for them to be tried by a county court judge sitting at a central court. Owing to the absence of any suitable county court in Greater London in which all the undefended cases could be tried, I think it will in fact be necessary for the county court judges to sit at the Law Courts, as they do at present, but they will then be sitting as county court judges and not as Commissioners of the High Court.
Clause 2 of the Bill will give the divorce county courts power in undefended cases to make orders for maintenance, custody of children, and the like. Where the case itself is undefended, the county court will be able to deal with the questions of custody and maintenance even though these may be matters on which the parties are unable to agree. This is in fact what they do now, and have done for the last twenty years, without any dissatisfaction.
It would plainly be very inconvenient to have to send all disputes of this kind to the High Court, but the rules will enable the county court judge to send to the High Court any disputes which appear to him to raise difficult or complicated issues which he thinks it better not to deal with himself. The only forms of ancillary relief which the county court judges will not be able to deal with are the power to make an order for the payment of maintenance out of a deceased person's estate for the benefit of his or her former wife or husband, and the power to vary a maintenance agreement after the death of one of the parties. The power to order the payment of maintenance out of a deceased person's estate is really linked up with the corresponding power of the Chancery Division under
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the Inheritance (Family Provision) Act, and it seems better to confine the county courts to the limited jurisdiction which Parliament conferred on them by the Family Provision Act last year in the case of small estates.
Clause 4 deals with the position of the Principal Probate Registry in which all divorce proceedings in London are at present begun. As I have said, it will in future be possible for cases to continue to be begun in the Registry, which will be treated for this purpose as if it were a divorce county court so far as undefended cases are concerned. The rules to be made under the Bill will make it possible to apply to proceedings in the Principal Probate Registry the usual county court procedure under which process is served by officials of the court and riot by the parties or their solicitors, and this will, I hope, lead to a sensible simplification and cheapening of the procedure.
Clause 7 provides for the setting up of a new rule-making authority, which will make rules of court governing the procedure in all matrimonial causes whether in the High Court or the county court. It will obviously be convenient to have one self-contained set of Matrimonial Causes Rules under which the procedure will be linked with that in the county court so far as undefended cases are concerned, and with the High Court procedure so far as defended cases are concerned.
The Government naturally hope that one important effect of this Bill will be a substantial saving to the Legal Aid Fund. The cost of providing legal aid in civil cases has increased five times in the last seven years and much the greater par: of the cost is attributable to divorce proceedings. The total cost of legal aid was over £5½ million in the year 1965–66, of which over £3¼ million was represented by the cost of divorce. It is surely evident that whatever is possible should be done to reduce these charges which have been mounting steadily in recent years. It is not possible to say with any accuracy what exactly the savings will be, although a figure of £400,000 a year was mentioned by my right honourable friend the Attorney General in another place some time ago. Much, of course, is bound to depend on the extent to which solicitors avail themselves of their right of audience in the county court. I think it would be

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unrealistic to suppose that solicitors will in future conduct the majority of undefended cases themselves, and we shall have to see, accordingly, how it works out. I would rather anticipate that solicitors will do about 25 per cent. of the cases themselves.
One of the ways in which costs could be reduced would be if solicitors were ready to accept fixed costs instead of spending time and money in the preparation of detailed hills of costs which then have to be taxed by a court official. At present taxation is necessary in legal aid cases by virtue of the provisions of the Legal Aid and Advice Act, but under Clause 9 of the Bill it will be possible to make rules dispensing with the need for taxation. The intention is, of course, that a solicitor should continue to have the right to demand taxation if he wishes, but I anticipate that if he receives on taxation no more than he would have been allowed under the scale of fixed costs he will have to pay the cost of the taxation out of his own pocket.
My Lords, like the Criminal Law Bill, this Bill raises no question of Party politics at all. Indeed, he will tell your Lordships if I am wrong, but I think the noble and learned Viscount, Lord Dilhorne, would probably have put similar proposals before the House if his Administration had continued. The only objections of any kind I have heard have come in part from my clerical friends and in part from my barrister friends. So far as my clerical friends are concerned, I have been told what we should all agree that it is very important to uphold the dignity and status of matrimony. I have been told. "After all, divorce cases are now heard in the High Court, and this means, I suppose, by a High Court Judge in a dignified court with the more formal procedure of the High Court, whereas, with your proposals, as I understand, in future divorce cases will be tried by a county court judge in a scruffy kind of court, sandwiched, I suppose, between a running-down case and a hire-purchase case; This would very much lower the whole status of matrimony." indeed, it has been suggested to me that if a marriage can be dissolved in a county court people will rush round committing adultery like anything.
I have been able to reassure them. In the first place, I have pointed out that
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when a person is concerned in a divorce case he or she comes into contact with the law at three points. First of all, there is the office. One goes to the office to have the petition settled initially, and it is the office to which the respondent also has to go. The second point is that before the case is heard disputes may arise. The respondent may say, "I am charged with adultery, but you do not say when or where. I want further particulars". If the petitioner will not give them, the matter goes before a minor judge called s registrar, and that hearing takes place in a court or room called an office. Similarly, the wife may want an order against her husband for a weekly or monthly sum for herself and the children pending the case being heard. This again is heard by the registrar. I am afraid registrars have a great deal of experience of husbands who always make out that their income is less than it is. In London these offices are in Somerset House. Of course, as part of the High Court they are High Court offices, and the registrars are High Court registrars.
There are also offices outside London; and not only an office, but a registrar, who again is a High Court registrar because it is a High Court district registry. But that High Court district registrar is also the local county court registrar, and the High Court office and the county court office are combined. So that at the moment, in relation to undefended cases and a few defended cases also, outside London disputes are in fact heard by men who, of course, are lawyers, and who are not only High Court registrars but county court registrars as well.
Therefore, if the changes provided for in this Bill are carried out, in London one will still be able to go to the High Court district registry in the Strand, which will be treated under the Bill as a county court registry. The disputes will be heard, and one will then be able to go to the Law Courts or to the county court judge for the cases to be tried. Outside London, the man who deals with the cases at present is a High Court registrar, and he will simply do the same thing, the only difference being that he will be wearing his county court hat.
When I told my clerical friend this he was amazed. He said, "I had no idea what goes on at the moment. The only thing I cannot understand is this: if

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what you say is right, and everything is going on as it is now, what changes will the Bill make?" The answer to that is that it is a modest Bill, and the only changes it makes are these. First of all, the county court judge, instead of hearing the case in the black robes of the High Court judge, will wear his own purple robes, and instead of being called "My Lord", which he is not, he will be called "Your Honour", which he is. Secondly, at present the county court judges outside London may sit in any court. If the assize court is free they may sit there; if it is being used as an assize court or as a court of quarter sessions, then they use their own rooms. When it is transferred to the county court judge he will always sit in his own court.
The third difference will be that in Greater London, at points as far removed from Central London as Croydon, Brent-ford, Ilford, and so on, there will be half a-dozen county courts, because if, for instance, the parties, the solicitors and the witnesses all live in Croydon, it seems quite unnecessary to make them go to London. They will still be entitled to deal with the registrar in the Strand and to have their cases tried there if they prefer it. If they do not, it is proposed that there should be half-a-dozen county courts at the periphery which would be made divorce county courts. They would be supplied with registrars from the Divorce Registry, properly trained for the work.
The only two other changes are these. First, solicitors have the right of audience in the county court but not in the High Court, and when the cases are in the county court the parties will no longer be compelled, as they are now, to have a barrister as well as a solicitor for an uncontested divorce case which lasts, on average, about twelve minutes. That brings me to the last point, which is the cost to the taxpayer. As your Lordships may know, I am an enthusiast about legal aid and I do not feel like apologising if it costs money. I know of no other country which has a legal aid system anything like as good as this; but, of course, there must be a cost to the taxpayers.
In 1962, and the years prior to that, the amount which the taxpayer had to
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find each year worked out at about £1 million. The next year it was £2 million, the year after that £3 million, and the year after that £4 million. Last year it was £5 million, and now it is running at something like £5¾ million. About 70 per cent. of this goes on divorce. The reason why such a high proportion goes on divorce is that in Queen's Bench actions, for example, 85 per cent. of the cases are successful, and the costs are then recovered from the other side. The reason why the divorce proportion is so high is because, in undefended cases in particular, so much of it represents the case of a woman who has been deserted by her husband, who may or may not have gone off with somebody else, and she has no money at all.
As your Lordships know, under our legal aid scheme everybody has to pay what he or she can afford and the State only makes up the remainder; but in the case of deserted wives as a rule they simply cannot afford to contribute anything at all, and it is not always easy at the end of the day to get it out of a husband. I have heard many Members of your Lordships' House say that the Government ought to reduce public expenditure. Well, here is one Minister who is humbly doing his bit—I hope with your Lordships'approval—because, while there is nothing wrong with legal aid, we want to save the taxpayer what we can, and this ought to make a sizable contribution.
Finally, with regard to my barrister friend, he goes on about the need to uphold the status and dignity of matrimony, and then he says what a terrible thing it would be if solicitors handled cases in the courts on their own, as one cannot trust a solicitor as one can a barrister. But, of course, I have known him a long time, and I simply say, "Come off it, George! The fear of the Bar is simply that they are going to lose a certain amount of work to the solicitors, and you remember the language you used when there was that demarcation dispute between the shipwrights and the boilermakers". That is really all it is.
I have heard it said that this change might delay the rationalisation of our divorce law. If I thought that, I should not be putting this Bill before your Lordships' House. I am delighted to hear that the gap in views which separated the

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committee appointed by the most reverend Primate and the Law Commission is being narrowed, and I am as much in favour as any Member of your Lordships' House of a real rationalisation of our law. It has long been suggested that to have a Probate, Divorce and Admiralty Division is an extraordinary historical anachronism: that Probate ought to be done by the Chancery Division which construes wills, and that Admiralty ought to be allied to the Commercial Court. We could then have a Family Division of the High Court, and possibly family courts throughout the country.
This is not perhaps the time to consider the composition of these courts. I have always been a good deal in favour of courts which consist of both lawyers and laymen. This choice you give the civil litigant of a jury— "Would you like all The facts found by one lawyer or by 12 laymen?"—is the most extraordinary choice, when you come to think of it. Any sensible man would say "I should not like either; I should like two laymen and one lawyer sitting together and the majority to decide." A family court might well consist of a judge of the status of a county court judge, and either two or four justices of the peace, whose experience in matrimonial affairs it would be a pity to lose. However, I must not pursue that theme now. All I want to say is that I am quite sure that if this Bill is passed into law it will in no way prejudice a real reform of our divorce law, and, if Parliament thinks it right, the constitution of family courts. But it is clear, I think, that we shall not see a Bill in that field this year. I see no real reason why we might not see it next year. I beg to move.
LORD WELLS-PESTELL: My Lords, before the noble and learned Lord concludes, may I be permitted to ask him a question? I have not quite followed his argument about this procedure lessening the cost of divorce. As I understand the situation (I speak as a layman, and therefore may be quite wrong), the cost of an undefended divorce is in the region of £120 to £140, give or take a few pounds. If the action is undertaken by a solicitor, will the cost be very much less to the litigant, bearing in mind that in an undefended divorce case, I understand, the barrister gets very little, and presumably
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what is saved in a barrister's fee may be required by the solicitor for the extra work he has to do? I may be quite wrong, but I wonder if the noble and learned Lord could explain this.
THE LORD CHANCELLOR: Certainly my Lords. One of the consequences of the fact that divorce cases have always remained, technically, in the High Court is not only that the litigants must have a barrister as well as a solicitor but that the lawyers' fees are on the High Court scale. An undefended divorce case is not, however, in any real sense, a High Court case. I appreciate that it does not consist simply of the twelve minutes of the hearing: obviously, solicitors have to take careful statements from clients, and possibly from witnesses, and see whether or not the action is going to be defended, and so on. At the same time, the case is not of the size as the ordinary High Court case. If, therefore, these cases are heard in the county courts, obviously the lawyers will be paid on the county court scale instead of on the High Court scale. The exact scale is in process of being agreed with them, and one might save something, I think, by reason of the fact that if one provides some agreed fixed fee for the average case solicitors are usually prepared to take less because they do not have to draw up bills of costs and attend for taxation and all that.
Moreover, whereas in the High Court you have to serve your own process, in the county court the court serves the process for you. And of course where no counsel has to be employed there will obviously be a substantial saving there. I can only say, on the best estimate I can give, that the saving would appear to be of the order of about £400,000 a year. This is, of course, after discussing what lower fees than the present fees would be paid both with the Bar Council and with the Law Society. Clearly, however, one cannot be exact until one knows what proportion of the cases will in fact be done by solicitors.
Moved, That the Bill be now read 2a.—(The Lord Chancellor.)
4.5 p.m.
VISCOUNT DILHORNE: My Lords, this is for me both an unusual and a slightly embarrassing occasion, for to-day I can say that I agree with all that the

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noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor has said in support of this Bill; and, as your Lordships know, to adapt a phrase which the noble and learned Lord recently used, he is an "awful Socialist". No one, so far as I am aware, has suggested that I have any unfortunate tendencies in that direction, and I hope that my support for this Bill will not give rise to any such inference.
I was very glad to hear the noble and learned Lord say in the course of his speech that the passage of this Bill would in no way delay the rationalisation of our divorce law, and very glad indeed to find that the opposing views are getting closer together. I am sure that that is urgently needed, and I hope very much that the Lord Chancellor's hope that a Bill may be included next Session will be realised. But what has been said by him about that should not let us minimise the importance of this Bill. It may not sound very exciting, but the effect of it will make a considerable difference to a number of people; and I would support it.
There are, as the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor said, some who oppose it; some lawyers whom I know and he knows dislike it intensely, but it is never easy to get agreement among lawyers, even when they belong to the same Party. I think the same can be said about right reverend Prelates, and I am glad to see that that Bench is so fully occupied to-day. It is very rare indeed that they all speak with the same voice. Indeed, the only recent occasion on which I can remember that happening is when all who spoke from that Bench spoke in favour of Lord Arran's Bill.
I suspect that such opposition as there is to this Bill will come from lawyers and the Churches, and I believe that the opposition of the Churches is founded, as the Lord Chancellor has indicated, on a complete misconception of what this Bill does. For, contrary to what appears to be thought in some quarters, this Bill contains no relaxation at all of the existing law relating to divorce. None of the grounds on which a divorce can be obtained is changed in any particular. All the Bill does is to make it possible for the Lord Chancellor to order trial of undefended divorce cases in the county courts. When this power is
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exercised, there will be more courts where such cases can be heard, and that will be for the convenience of litigants. It will be easier for them to get to the court of trial, and only in that sense does the Bill make the obtaining of divorce easier. Objection to this Bill, therefore, must mean that those who are opposed to it do not think it should be made easier to get to the places where the cases will be tried.
The noble and learned Lord referred to the Report of the Commission presided over by Lord Gorell, which reported in 1912. That Commission said that the gravity of divorce and other matrimonial cases, affecting as they do the family life, the status of the parties, the interests of their children and the interests of the State in the moral and social well being of its citizens, makes it desirable to provide, if possible, that even for the poorest persons these cases should be determined by the superior courts of the country. That is to say, of course, the High Court, assisted by the attendance of the Bar. I entirely agree—I am sure we all do—about the gravity of divorce and other matrimonial cases, about the effect on family life, and so on. But it does not follow from that, in my view, that these matters should be dealt with and considered only in the High Court of Justice. After all, do we not know that many matrimonial matters nowadays come within the jurisdiction of the magistrates' courts? I know, too, that the Royal Commission on Divorce in 1956 endorsed this recommendation of the Gorell Commission and said that they considered it of the highest importance that the principle should be maintained that the jurisdiction in divorce is essentially one for the High Court, and it was their view that as many High Court Judges as were required should be appointed to try these cases.
But we surely should not shut our eyes to what has been happening in the last twenty years. As the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor said, during that time the vast majority of undefended divorce cases have in fact been tried by county court judges. They have sat in the High Court as Commissioners; they have sat in the assize court and in county courts in the country, often in the same county court as that in which they have been functioning perhaps the

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day before as a county court judge. As the noble and learned Lord has said, the only difference has been that they have worn different robes and been addressed on one occasion as "My Lord" and on the other occasion,as "Your Honour".
I believe that the way in which the county court judges have tried these cases when sitting as Commissioners is in no respect inferior to the way in which they have been tried by High Court Judges. Indeed, I do not know how the administration of justice could have been carried on without the assistance of the county court judges, and I think a great debt is due to them, which we should acknowledge, for undertaking this additional burden of work. I have seen it suggested that because in fact they have dismissed a lower percentage of undefended divorce cases than have High Court Judges it is to be inferred that they do not try them as well. I think this is a fallacious conclusion, for it may well he that a lower percentage of cases that ought to have been dismissed came before the county court judges. In these cases there never is what we lawyers call a lis—the judge never hears the other side of the story because the cases are undefended. And the fact that there is, or would be, no lis was, if I recall aright, one of the objections advanced against the proposals which had the blessing of the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury in the pamphlet Putting Asunder. Yet divorce judges have been and are deciding thousands of cases where there is no list of any kind.
In the light of experience, I see no reason at all to conclude that in future it will be easier to get a divorce in an undefended case before a county court judge than it has been to get one before a county court judge sitting as a Commissioner. I know the view has been expressed that trial in the county court of these cases will diminish the view people take as to the sanctity of marriage. A Committee presided over by my noble and learned friend Lord Denning, who I see is going to speak later, reported after the war in these words:
"If there is a careful and dignified proceeding such as obtains in the High Court for the undoing of a marriage, then, quite unconsciously, the people will have a much more respectful view of the marriage tie and of the marriage status than they would if
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divorce were effected informally in an inferior court."
With the greatest respect to my noble and learned friend, I must say that I regard that statement as almost a classic non sequitur. I do not believe that the place in which the parties to a marriage which has broken up go to get the marriage terminated has, or can have, the least effect on the sanctity of the marriage vow. I do not believe it is any inducement to married people to observe their marriage vows to know that a divorce can be obtained only in the High Court. The passage which I have quoted from the Report assumes that a hearing in the county court will be informal and less careful and dignified than a hearing in the High Court. I do not think that any such assumption is warranted. After all, it is the county court judges now who try the majority of these cases, and I see no reason to suppose that when they try them in the county courts they will try them less carefully, with less dignity and less formally than they do now.
I noted that the Lord Chancellor referred to these cases being sandwiched in the county court between a running-down case and a hire-purchase case, or perhaps between a judgment summons and the hearing of a rent restriction case. I hope that when he comes to reply the Lord Chancellor will make it clear that in the rules that he is acquiring the power to make he will secure that these cases are heard together, and at a different time from any other type of case, because I think it important that in the exercise of this jurisdiction the county court judge should put aside either a whole day or half a day separately for dealing with cases of this sort. They ought not to be intermingled with his ordinary list. If that is so—and I suspect that the Lord Chancellor will give that assurance—then a great deal of the fears held quite sincerely by a number of people will be diminished.
Another reason why I have been in favour of these proposals is on the grounds of finance. The Lord Chancellor referred to that, and during my time on the Woolsack I was worried about the increasing expenditure on legal aid. I think I am one of the only people now remaining in Parliament who sat on the Rushcliffe Committee which devised the system of legal aid which is now being

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operated, and, like the noble and learned Lord, I have always been keen on it. But I was anxious about the rise that was taking place—I think the Lord Chancellor said it had multiplied five times in seven years. Divorce accounts for 70 per cent. of that, and I believe that something like 80 per cent. of that 70 per cent. goes on undefended divorce. It is also true to say that the average cost is something like £120—it may be more. Over recent years there has been a great increase in the average cost of an undefended divorce case. It has always puzzled me why that should be so, but it is the fact.
One reason—it is only one reason—why I am in favour of making this change is that I think it will lessen the financial cost of such proceedings. It will lessen the burden which will fall on the Legal Aid Fund by something like £400,000 a year, which is not a small sum, and, what is more—I do not think the noble and learned Lord referred to this, although I am sure he will not disagree—it will lessen the burden of costs on the unassisted litigant. I do not think that that is by any means unimportant. Of course, the contents of this Bill are a blow to those members of the Bar whose practice included the conduct of such cases. It is true that they may not be employed so frequently, but certainly I feel that they will continue to be employed in a considerable number of cases. Though, naturally, I regret that any member of the Bar should be adversely affected, I think it is clearly in the public interest that these changes should be made.
My only regret is that the introduction of this Bill should have been so long delayed. I do not know the reason for that. The noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor in his book Law Reform—Now advocated this change and said it was one which should be made. He has held his high office since 1964 and it is only now, three years later, that the Bill comes before us. I should be grateful if he could tell us why there has been this delay. At first sight, it hardly seems to be an example of dynamic, purposive government. I have long been in favour of these changes. Indeed, as the noble Lord indicated, had things gone differently in 1964, I myself had hoped to introduce such a Bill—and, may I say, sooner.
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I would have gone a little farther than this Bill goes. At present, county court judges sitting as Commissioners are trying the short defended cases, and are trying them satisfactorily. I would have made it possible for them to continue to try that category of case in the county courts. However, I do not quarrel with the Lord Chancellor on this matter and do not intend to move an Amendment about it, for I think there is something to be said for seeing how this plan goes before one adds a further burden to that which is already carried by those who sit in the county courts.
I end by saying that I hope there will be no Division on this Bill, for if there is I shall be embarrassed by having to go into the same Lobby as the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor, and that, I think, will be a unique experience. If I have to do so, I cannot promise that it will ever be repeated. I hope that none of your Lordships will put me in that embarrassing position by dividing on this Bill.
4.23 p.m.
THE LORD BISHOP OF EXETER: My Lords, whether one regards this as an important Bill or as a relatively small one, a mere tidying, administrative Bill, as the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor has suggested, depends on whether or not one thinks that one of its inevitable consequences must be a cheapening of the value which society places on the institution of marriage—a further step towards the complete acceptability of the notion of divorce; a further step towards its becoming a quite unimportant, almost normal, event, though an unhappy one, in anybody's life. But all this is a matter of opinion. There can be no evidence as to what would be the result of this Bill, and each of us is entitled to his opinion.
It is perfectly reasonable to hold that the content of the marriage law and its administration are almost wholly irrelevant to the question of whether marriages, and how many marriages, will break down. It is quite reasonable to hold that if a marriage is going to break down, it will break down whatever the law is and however, it is administrated. On the other hand, it is also reasonable to hold that if divorce is made easy, if it becomes more frequent, then it enters more easily and more frequently into the minds of

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those whose marriages are under strain, and they are more ready to see in divorce the only solution of their troubles. Either point of view of reasonable.
It would appear that the Gorell Commission in 1912, and the Morton Commission in 1956, took the view that it was a mattter of immense importance whether divorce cases were heard in the High Court or in the county court. Their opinion, it seems to me, holds the field at the moment, and it is for the proponents of this Bill to throw them out of the field. I do not think that so far in the course of this debate they have succeeded in doing so. In a way, it is true that the Bill will not bring into existence any very striking changes in administration. I imagine that the ordinary layman getting a divorce probably would not know that the law had been changed. On the other hand, of course, great publicity would be given to the fact that divorces no longer have to be heard in the High Court, and I should have thought that in the long run that would be likely to have an adverse effect on society.
The Bill has the further defect that it stresses, underlines, reinforces, the distinction drawn between defended and undefended cases, with the corollary that the ordinary man thinks that an undefended case is something which is not quite so important and does not matter quite so much as a defended case. It also, I think, carries with it the suggestion that an undefended case is easier to try, and therefore can safely be left to the county court judge; whereas a defended case may be extremely difficult and must therefore be reserved for the higher expertise of the High Court. I myself should have thought that in fact it was far more difficult to arrive at the truth in an undefended case than in a defended case. It must be extremely difficult for the judge hearing an undefended case to spot the phoney one. Though there are comparatively few undefended cases which are in fact dismissed by the county court judge, sitting as a High Court Judge under the present province, it is the quasi-automatic result of the undefended divorce cases as they are now heard which is to me, one of the gravest criticisms of the present system. And I fear that this Bill will make matters worse.
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My main objection to the Bill has been completely removed by the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor. My objection was that some of us had been very disappointed that since this Administration took office we have heard nothing, or almost nothing, about the creation of a comprehensive family service, with comprehensive family courts on a regional basis—something along the lines proposed by the Committee which was presided over by the noble Earl, Lord Longford. It has been a great disappointment to many of us that so far we have heard nothing of this, and I had thought that we were being offered this Bill as a wretched substitute for the more radical reforms which are gravely needed. I was therefore greatly reassured by the speech of the noble and learned Lord in which he has virtually—I was going to say that he had virtually promised us, but he has given us some reason to hope, that a radical Bill may be brought in during the next Session. This is indeed good news. But I cannot help wondering, if that is indeed the case and if this radical reform is to be introduced next year, whether it is really necessary to have this very minor reform introduced this year, with a certain amount of controversy and a certain amount of depreciation in the general opinion held in the country about marriage.
As your Lordships will have observed, I am not desperately opposed to this Bill. I do not think that it will make an enormous amount of difference, but I cannot see that it is necessary. I cannot see that it will do any real good, except by way of saving money. But if those who consider that one of the consequences of this Bill will be a depreciation in the value set on marriage, and consequently a greater number of divorces, are right, this Bill will prove a very expensive way indeed of saving money, because there is a proportion between the number of divorces, the number of broken homes, the number of delinquent children, and the number of children in need of care and protection. If this one view turns out to be right, then the saving in expenditure brought about by this Bill will prove in the end to be very expensive. I think that, on the whole, the Bill is unnecessary; it will probably do little harm and will do almost no good, but I do not propose to ask the House to divide on it.
4.33 p.m.
LORD SILKIN: My Lords, the concluding words of the right reverend Prelate have become fairly familiar to me in recent debates. It is a sort of formula which is adopted by the Opposition on all occasions when they cannot really oppose the principle of a Bill. They do not want to support it, and so they criticise it in a variety of ways. The right reverend Prelate thinks that the Bill will in some way affect the sanctity of marriage. Does he not realise that by the time these divorce cases come before the courts the marriages have already broken down beyond repair? Sometimes, as in the case of desertion, the parties have lived apart for a great many years. Sometimes, as in the case where a petition is on the ground of cruelty, very great hardship and suffering has been inflicted upon the innocent party and, obviously, the marriage has broken down already. How, therefore, the manner in which the marriage is finally determined can effect the concept of the sanctity of marriage is beyond my conception.
I think that in these days it is appropriate that a Bill of this kind should be introduced in this House. Over the years this House has been gradually—and I am not suggesting since the advent of the present Government—gaining a reputation for progressive legislation in this kind of sphere. The noble and learned Viscount made rather mocking reference to a certain Bill, but in fact it has been a very popular Bill, and one which has been generally accepted. I might also make reference to another Bill with which I was primarily concerned. That, again, has had very general acceptance. I think it is to the credit of this House that Bills of this kind should emanate from here and work their way to another place.
I would also refer the right reverend Prelate to the fact that in the last 10 years the number of divorces, under the present system of divorce procedure, has increased by 50 per cent., and that explains, at least partly, the increase in costs. Last year I think there were something like 40,000 petitions for divorce. The remedy, if one wants a remedy to ensure the sanctity of marriage, must come much earlier than the day of the hearing of a divorce petition. Action must be taken years before the
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divorce petition is heard to induce a greater conception of sanctity of marriage, and I hope that that will be done. But a great many factors must be taken into account to secure this.
The noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor referred to legal aid in connection with divorce, and it is a fact that over 80 per cent. of divorce cases are aided to a certain extent out of public funds. I think there is a good deal of exaggeration as to the extent to which they are aided. Nearly every petitioner is asked to make a contribution towards the cost of the petition, and a great many pay the whole cost, although they may pay it over a period of time. The normal cost was somewhat reduced by the fact that the members of my profession—and they are the only ones—accept only 80 per cent. of their legitimate fees and make a sacrifice of 20 per cent. To that extent, a legally-aided petitioner is able to get a divorce at a reduced charge.
I suppose that this is one of the very few Bills which have been introduced over a long period where it is actually stated on the face of the Bill that it will reduce public expenditure. The noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor has referred to a sum of £400,000 a year. I would prophesy that the saving will be substantially more. I should not like to challenge the statement as to the number of solicitors who will appear in person on these petitions at the expense of counsel, nor do I think that that is where the greatest saving will come. I think savings will be found in other directions, such as those to which the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor referred. Moreover, there will be a saving to the petitioners themeslves. At present they must get to the court wherever it may be. Sometimes they have to stay overnight at the place of hearing, and it is very often a considerable burden on them to have to do this. To be able to get their petitions heard at greater convenience, and within reasonable distance of their homes, must mean a very great saving.
I do not think I can add very much to what the noble and learned Viscount, Lord Dilhorne, said about the Bill. He found himself in the uncomfortable position of agreeing with the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor. I find myself equally uncomfortable in agreeing

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with him. We have had so many conflicts in the past, particularly on the Bill to which I have just referred, the Abortion Bill, that I wonder whether, after all, I am right when I agree with what the noble and learned Viscount has said. I wish he had gone a little further, and I wish the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor had gone further. The principle of trying these cases in the county court having been accepted, I can see no reason why it should not apply to defended cases of a simple type. The total number of defended cases is only about 1 in 15 of the total number of petitions which are filed, 14 out of 15 being undefended. Only 1 in 15 is a defended case; and even among the defended cases a good many of the defences are merely formal and the cases are not seriously contested when they come to court.
As the Lord Chancellor will know, in the case of a defended divorce petition there are pleadings. The petitioner sets out his case in full, the respondent sets out her case and copies of documents are exchanged; and by the time the pleadings are closed each side knows exactly the kind of case which the other is going to put up. I see no reason why, at that stage, the pleadings should not come before the registrar of a court for him to decide whether the case is of such magnitude as to make it necessary to go to the High Court, or whether it is a simple defended case which can be disposed of in an hour or two, or even three, and dealt with in the county court.
While I would not press that this should come about at once, I am very sorry that the form in which the Bill has been drafted makes it impossible to carry this out, even at a later stage, if it should be found desirable to do so. I hope that in Committee the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor will not resist an Amendment which would make it possible, at any rate in cases such as those I have described, for the simpler forms of defended divorce cases, also, to be heard in the county courts.
There is one matter which I should like to ask the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor to explain when he comes to reply. I am not very clear as to the meaning of Clause 1(1), in which there has to be a double designation. One has to designate a court as a divorce county court and one has also to desig-
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nate it as a court of trial. Why should there be this double designation, and what is the point of it? It may be merely a matter of drafting, but I found it somewhat puzzling.
Another matter is one about which the Law Society has been very much concerned with successive Lord Chancellors. I dare say the noble and learned Viscount, Lord Dilhorne, has heard about it, and possibly his predecessors did also; and it will be most applicable in cases of divorce. The county courts at which these cases will be tried are often at a distance from the office of the solicitor who is conducting the case, and it may be convenient for him to appoint an agent to deal with the case—an agent who is actually practising in the town in which the county court is situated. I have not come across an instance myself, but apparently this is not possible. The judges do not recognise an agent appearing, either as an advocate or even to instruct counsel. On the face of it, that seems an unreasonable restriction. I have not given the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor notice of this point, and therefore I do not expect him to give me a reply to-day unless he knows that situation and can do so, but I should be grateful if he would look into it. I will gladly supply him with more information if he should so desire.
Having said that, I should like to welcome this Bill cordially. I think it is a very important and far-reaching Bill. I would quarrel with only one word which the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor used. He called it a "modest" Bill. I think it is not a modest Bill; it is a far-reaching Bill, and I wish it every possible speedy success.
4.46 p.m.
LORD PEARCE: My Lords, may I venture, with diffidence, to put forward the view of one who was for a few years a divorce Judge, who has tried many undefended cases, who has tried many defended cases and who was a member of the Royal Commission on Divorce? That Commission inquired very deeply into the matter which is now before your Lordships' House. Over three years it heard vast amounts of written and oral evidence. It worked very hard; and this was one of the matters it had to consider. It was not a Commission of lawyers.

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They were people—men and women—from England and Scotland, chosen by Mr. Chuter Ede as a very wise cross-section, though, in addition, they had from England and Scotland a judge, a barrister and a solicitor. After considering the evidence, they expressed the view which your Lordships have heard read: that it was a principle of the highest importance that divorce should be confined to the High Court. They said that in this connection, and in another connection, in dealing with relief in magistrates' courts, they said it again.
Of course, to those who think that divorce should be available to all who want it—those who hold what some people cynically refer to as the "postage-stamp view", that if you want a divorce you should have it purveyed to you when you want it—the language in which the Commission talk is wholly meaningless. And to those who think that divorce should be a matter of the individual wish of the parties, again this Bill must seem a matter of common sense and obviously a step in the right direction. But the Royal Commission did not take that view, and one will rarely find anybody who has tried divorce cases who does take that view. There was no reflection on the county courts in the recommendation of the Royal Commission. The county court judges are excellent, and have done splendid work. The way in which they do the work is not the point of the criticism at all.
The point of the view taken by the Royal Commission was this. Every country—do not take this country alone, but any country you like—has it stop court, whether it be called the Supreme Court, the High Court or any of the various other names that have been given them. In the last century every country has had its secondary courts—courts which can deal with matters which are not of sufficient weight and importance for the top or the High Courts—and those courts are given facilities for dealing with smaller matters, and for dealing with them expeditiously. If a country thinks that a matter is of primary importance, of real national primary importance, it is inconceivable that this or any other country will give it to its secondary court. It is entirely irrelevant to say whether the secondary court can handle it well. If
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they are as good as our county court judges are—and they are very good—of course they can handle it well. But they are not the High Court.
If you think, as many people do think, that divorce is a matter of national importance and that it is important to stress its importance in the eyes of everybody; if you think that from broken homes comes so many ills of which we constantly hear—delinquency, crime, vice, unhappiness—then surely the logic is that divorce is a matter which ought to be dealt with in the High Court. That is the reasoning which lies behind the Gorell Commission, the Denning Committee, and the Royal Commission under Lord Morton of Henryton, and it is quite useless to give sophisticated reasons why a second court can try a matter well and adequately and why it is more convenient to go there. I mean "sophisticated" reasons, not in the sense that the reasons are not perfectly genuine, but in the sense that to the eye of the man-in-the-street they simply carry no meaning; and that was the view of the Royal Commissions of the man-in-the-street. It will make divorce seem a bigger thing if it is tried in the High Court. It will make marriage seem a more important matter.
In dealing with divorce you are beset by this simple overall problem. A humane society must give relief in various circumstances to people who find themselves intolerably saddled with a marriage which has broken down. As soon as you give relief to someone who is genuinely suffering, twenty other people come forward who have nothing but minor aches and pains. A judge may know quite well that, with these people, if only they would try a little, and be a little more tolerant, they could easily overcome their difficulties. The problem is to distinguish between the two types of case. If you give some prestige to a thing and show that you think it of national importance, you are doing something to buttress up those people who will try genuinely to cure their little aches and pains: you are doing something to make divorce less likely. That is a view which I suggest is tenable; and it is the view of those Royal Commissions. As has already been said, the saving, which may be as great as is suggested (it has been prophesied that it will be more, and if prophecy be in order, I would prophesy that it will

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be less), is not really the deciding factor. Because when we think of the millions of pounds spent on combating delinquency, on dealing with crime, on educating people and on welfare in general, that is a very small matter compared to those.
My Lords, the final point with which you are faced when you decide about this Bill is: Do you think that divorce is a very, very important matter? Secondly, do you think it is of any help in propping up marriage, in discouraging divorce, that it should be dealt with by the highest court in the land? If your answer is, No, then the argument does not appeal to you; but if you think it is true, or if you think that it may be true, then, my Lords, it is a grave step to relegate divorce to the county courts.
4.54 p.m.
BARONESS SUMMERSKILL: My Lords, I am tempted to intervene in this debate because, like the noble and learned Lord who has just spoken, I feel the great importance of this Bill as a measure which is designed to deal with some of the social problems in our society. Indeed, the Bill has tremendous social implications. I listened to the moving speech of the noble and learned Lord, and I feel as deeply as he does about these people. But I must say to him that I cannot see how the picture of a county court or the High Court will deter any individual from committing a matrimonial offence. That is the essence of the problem—will it deter a man from hitting his wife? Will it deter a man or a woman from committing adultery? I should like to think that what the noble and learned has said is correct, and that there was some way of deterring husbands and wives from misbehaving. I cannot, however, and I also have had tremendous experience of how people behave. I cannot believe for one moment that the type of court will act as a deterrent.
When I first read the Bill I realised, of course, that any adverse criticism would come either from the Church or the Bar. I recall that when we debated divorce a year or two ago on the Church Report, Putting Asunder, the Gorell Commission was quoted at length, and that strong objection was expressed to any suggestion of transferring the divorce jurisdiction to the county courts. It must
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be remembered that the Gorell Commission reported in 1912, when the number of divorce cases was comparatively small, and mounting divorce lists did not present a serious social problem. Also, in 1912 a woman did not possess the right to obtain a divorce from her husband on the ground of his adultery alone. That, again, must have reduced the numbers considerably. In my opinion, it is therefore quite unrealistic to relate the recommendations of the Gorell Commission to the matrimonial problems of to-day.
My Lords, I think that there is little new in this Bill. I agree with my noble and learned friend who sits on the Woolsack that this is a very modest measure, and I am astonished that the right reverend Prelate, the Bishop of Exeter, has revealed such ignorance of what is happening in the country to-day. For nearly twenty years county court judges have been trying the vast majority of undefended cases. This is not a new proposition. In 1966, for example, there were 11,800 undefended divorce cases heard in London, and 26,689 in the Provinces. Of these, nearly 90 per cent. were heard by county court judges sitting as Special Commissioners. In London the county court judges take it in turns to sit approximately once a fortnight at the Royal Courts of Justice for the hearing of undefended cases; and in the Provinces they sit at 149 divorce towns, of which 29 are Assize towns. This, my Lords, has been going on for twenty years.
I understand—and I have made a number of inquirie—that there have been no complaints about the way in which the work has been done; and despite the considerable volume of business it has been dealt with in a manner not lacking dignity. Nevertheless, as my noble and learned friend who sits on the Woolsack has said, I cannot believe that when a county court judge sits in a black gown instead of his purple robe, and is addressed as "my Lord", instead of "your Honour", he undergoes a change of personality. He is the same professional man, with the same background, the same training, and the same courtesy that we know judges possess.
When it comes to the Bar and their reactions to this, I feel it is a little hard on the solicitors for it to be noised abroad that they may not be competent to conduct undefended divorce cases; for I

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am informed that in many cases a barrister is briefed only to appear at the hearing of the case, and that the rest of the proceedings are conducted entirely by a solicitor. I presume that in the legal profession, as in other professions, there are individuals lacking in integrity. We read in the papers that there are some of those in my profession. But they are not confined to one section of a profession. Of course, many solicitors who do not undertake advocacy will continue to brief counsel, and therefore this point is not likely to arise. Barristers with whom I have discussed this think that it will be still common for solicitors to ask barristers to conduct these cases.
Although the Bar may be a little embarrassed to mention financial considerations, and may regard the provisions of this Bill as an unwarranted encroachment on their preserves, I hope that young barristers will accept this change in their fortunes philosophically, having regard to the pressing need for this transference of functions. I hope also that they will remember that barristers have benefited considerably from the legal aid scheme, which has afforded them a security never enjoyed by many of their predecessors. When contemplating this change designed to meet a specific social problem, I hope that they will regard it as another great change such as the legislation which gave legal aid to the poor, although this time barristers will be asked to endure happily a diminution of their income.
I said that the Bill has social implications. I believe that the objections of the Church and the Bar pale into insignificance beside the all-important social implications of this measure, of the provision of a means whereby we can deal effectively with a large number of divorce cases which involve thousands of men and women. For the most part these people have endured years of unhappiness and mental torment, and after long consideration and consultation with their families and friends, perhaps with marriage consultants, they have finally decided to end their marriages. I believe that to prolong the waiting period unnecessarily is not only inhuman but can amount to a denial of justice. Consequently, the provisions of this Bill will make an important con-
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tribution, not only to our jurisdiction, but also to the pressing social demands of the community.
5.3 p.m.
LORD MESTON: My Lords, I am desirous of opposing this Bill. So far as the county courts are concerned, I have no doubt that the learned county court judges are very able and distinguished people, and I am not going to say anything derogatory about the county courts. But there is no doubt at all that the High Court and the High Court Judges enjoy a unique status, dignity and prestige throughout the whole country. We should be very proud of them. Business is business, and we cannot run it on the basis of sentiment, but if we are going to have no sentiment in this country we might just as well give ourselves numbers and not names and be regarded as mere pawns in the game. There should be sentiment about matrimony, which is a very serious matter, and the break up of matrimony is an equally serious matter. Therefore I say, without any hesitation, that the highest court in the land—namely, the High Court—should deal with judgments relating to the break-up of matrimony. There are ancillary matters, such as the maintenance of the spouse and the children, the custody and care of the children and access to them. In my humble submission, the High Court is the most suitable tribunal to deal with these matters, as they deal with them to-day most satisfactorily.
The question of expense is undoubtedly important. I am Scottish, and every time a Bill is introduced I think that we should talk about the expense of it. I am glad that this point has been raised. I wonder whether in practice there is going to be any material saving of expense. I speak under correction, but I understand that county court costs are going to be materially increased in the near future. Then what is the objection to the Government—perhaps I may say the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor—meeting the two branches of the legal profession in London and saying to them that the cost of these undefended cases have to be reduced or else something serious will happen? I am sure that both branches of the profession would support the noble and learned Lord in cutting down expenses.

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I believe that this question can be tackled and matters so arranged that the expense of the present system need not be any greater than the expense under the proposed system.
It is not for a person in .a humble position such as mine to talk about appointing new Judges, but why not appoint two High Court Judges to deal with undefended divorce cases alone? I do not know what the state of their mentality would be after a year, but that is neither here nor there. A Judge sits from 10.30 to 4.30 and with an hour's adjournment—that is, five hours a day. Mathematically and theoretically speaking, he ought to be able to do 20 undefended cases in five hours. Therefore in a week he could do 100, and in the course of a working year two Judges could do about 8,000 cases. That is a mathematical way of looking at the problem and also an economic way. It means that we might save just as much as by spreading divorce cases all over the country in county courts, having new buildings, new offices, new administration and new rules of court—though why they cannot learn the present ones I do not know.
I think it is a mistake to say that the present system in the High Court cannot be made less expensive. So far as travel is concerned, the parties and witnesses will not spend any more money in coming to London or any other big town than in going to the county courts in the country. What is more, the work of the county court judges is increasing and is likely to go on increasing. Their jurisdiction has been enlarged and is likely to be enlarged again. Every form of legislation—landlord and tenant and so forth—is growing every day and likely to find its way to the county courts. The Bill has been criticised by other noble Lords who are far more qualified to speak on this subject than I am. I may be alone, but I have in my pocket the names of 9,000 people who would oppose it but who unfortunately have no vote. I only say, with the greatest respect to the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor, that I am opposed to this Bill.
5.10 p.m.
THE EARL OF MANSFIELD: My Lords, despite all the clarity with which the noble and learned Lord on the Woolsack introduced this measure, I remain
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totally unconvinced that it is either timeous or in itself desirable. Nor have we had any real explanation why the recommendations of the last Royal Commission should be thus ignored. As the noble and learned Lord has hinted, there may be a further measure connected with matrimony in the comparatively near future. Surely it would have been better not to treat the Bill before us to-day as a matter of urgency but to keep it and try to work out some form of consolidation which would put the admittedly unsatisfactory matrimonial laws of this country somewhat more into order.
I do not think very much has been said this afternoon about the fact that Commissioners sitting as High Court Judges were supposed to be, when they were first introduced, a mere temporary measure to get rid of the backlog of divorces caused by the war. It was never intended to be permanent. It has been suggested that the county court judges have done the job equally well as the High Court Judges; but, while no one would in any way seek to denigrate the quality of the county court judges, I am not sure that that claim can be altogether substantiated. I know there are a number of barristers who hold the view that county court judges are not all as well qualified to try even these undefended divorces as are the High Court Judges.
I have been supplied with certain figures for the year 1964, and I am told that in other years the proportion is usually not dissimilar. In that year, the High Court Judges heard 649 cases of divorce, of which they rejected 6; that is to say, one in a little over 100. The county court judges heard 8,759 cases, of which they rejected 12; that is to say, one in 730. I think that this can be taken as showing fairly conclusively that some, at least, of the county court judges do not inquire quite as carefully into the bona fides of the petitioners as do the High Court Judges. My several friends who take part in divorce work on occasion assure me that if a barrister is to do his work properly in an undefended divorce he has to do a great deal of homework upon it, and there are many of the Judges who are extremely, and quite rightly, insistent upon being assured that the facts are as they are set out.
Unfortunately it is a commonplace that there is more perjury in divorce cases than in any other kind of case; and

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everyone knows that quite a high proportion of these cases are collusive. That is, unfortunately, something which it is difficult to avoid. But I submit that the number of collusive divorces that will succeed, and the number which will be brought to the courts, is likely to be increased rather than decreased by this proposal, and that it might lead to a lowering of the standard of investigation made into them.
As has already been said by other speakers, to transfer this important question from a High Court to an inferior court seems to be a remarkable way of dealing with the problem. Are we then to anticipate legislation whereby those offences hitherto known as felonies are to be transferred to the jurisdiction of quarter sessions in England and of the sheriff substitute in Scotland? I can hardly imagine it. But that is really what is being done in the present case. I submit that what was necessary at the end of a war, though even then undesirable, is not something which we should make a permanent part of our legislation.
Finally, the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor spoke with complacent approval of the way in which the Government might save some £400,000 by the introduction of this measure. That struck me as being rather an odd assurance on the part of a member of a Government which is raising taxation by something like £400 million and more. Is it really worth saving a problematical £400,000 for the sake of lowering the status of matrimony and of transferring from the High Court to a lower court these important questions which would be much better settled by a High Court Judge? Surely, as I said before, it would have been better to keep this measure until it could have been consolidated with other measures, rather than to bring these measures forward piecemeal.
5.15 p.m.
LORD DENNING: My Lords, I am sorry that I was unable, owing to my judicial duties, to be here at the opening of this debate, but I was very glad that I was able to be in time to hear my noble and learned friend Lord Pearce addressing your Lordships (I believe for the first time) with his accustomed eloquence. I should like to congratulate him on his moving speech.
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It is now over twenty years since I had the privilege of being the Chairman of the Committee which considered the great increase in divorces after the war. Divorce cases were then running at over 60,000 a year. We had not the Judges or the courts to deal with them. Then this Committee sat, as a matter of urgency, to make recommendations. One of the recommendations we made was that to meet this situation the county court judges should sit as High Court Judges—and let me emphasise that—to do the work at that time. We had all the usual arguments. But having considered not only the Gorell Report of 1912, but a vast amount of new evidence, we recommended that county court judges should sit as High Court Judges, and do the work as High Court Judges, for this reason: that the dignity, calm and lack of haste, and the careful inquiry, is far more available in a High Court procedure than in the necessarily speedy procedure of the county courts. And we added:
"They should have power to try both undefended and defended cases. If they were to be restricted to undefended cases, it would mean that they would be regarded as courts of inferior jurisdiction, which in our opinion is undesirable."
This Bill, my Lords, perpetuates that undesirable distinction. There will be the county courts of this country for the undefended divorce cases; the High Court will be the court for the defended cases. What a want of appreciation of real values! The undefended cases are equally important, and sometimes more important than the defended cases. On the issues depend the future of the children, matrimonial maintenance and property. It is an entire reversal of those valuations that we shall have.
Let me add this. I sit in the Court of Appeal where we have appeals from the county court judges who sit as Commissioners. At the present time, we have an opportunity of considering those proceedings. There is the shorthand writer, who has taken it down, and we can see word for word what has been said. We can, and do, correct decisions where divorces have been wrongfully refused; and, as sometimes happens, where children have been wrongfully bastardised and proved illegitimate. This new system which is proposed means that in the county courts there will in many instances be no counsel to present the case, and there will be no shorthand writer to take

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a note which we in the Court of Appeal can consider. The inevitable pressure will be such that the county court judge will be unable to take a note, and, indeed, will feel almost inclined automatically to grant a divorce in every case because there is no machinery for appeal.
No one, I hope, would suggest that at the moment the work is being badly done or, with respect to the noble Baroness, that there has been any delay. The sole objective, as I can see it, of this Bill is to save expense, because the Legal Aid Fund is finding it hard to meet the cost of all the divorces. My Lords, if you have a shorthand writer there, that is going to run up the cost. For myself, I very much doubt whether this anticipated saving will take place. Solicitors are so busy that they will not themselves have time to go into the county court, unless the fees are raised much more, and they will go on instructing counsel just as before. This saving is dubious in the extreme, and that is the only benefit which, so far as I can see, this proposal will effect.
When, twenty years ago, we made that recommendation, I said to myself, "In twenty years' time I hope that we shall have family courts". Twenty years have come and gone. We do not have them yet. But the procedure is plain. We should not have, for instance, this distinction between defended and undefended cases. I would have a judge, with a lay justice or two, sitting; and in every case, if need be, having not only the one party present but the other party too. There are the two parties present when they get married: both ought to come when they are divorced. As it is, the innocent party has to go to all the cost, and all the embarrassment, of turning up in court for a few minutes, while the guilty party just rubs his or her hands and says nothing. Both ought to be heard, not only on this question of divorce; far more at the time on the question of the future of the children, and on the question of maintenance and the matrimonial home and the hundred-and-one things that are involved. It ought not to be just a formal running through, with the really important matters dealt with later.
That is why I would say that we should consider the provisions which have been outlined by the most reverend Primate's
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Committee in Putting Asunder—and this, I may add, has been indicated by Mr. Justice Scarman, Chairman of the Law Reform Commission, on these very lines. We should have regional courts presided over by a High Court judge or a county court judge, with lay justices or assessors, and with the help of a probation or welfare officer. We should have both parties coming before them on the day, and the matter should be dealt with more on a social than on a legal aspect. In case points of law arise, there should be a High Court which is supreme above them for appeals. That is what should be done. This Bill, I am afraid, is just a measure for saving expense. It will be worse than that if it perpetuates a bad system and does not lead the way to a new and better system.
5.24 p.m.
THE LORD CHANCELLOR: My Lords, this has been an interesting discussion, and I find very little to reply to because the arguments of those who differ from the Bill are based on an assumption which they are quite entitled to hold. The noble Earl, Lord Mansfield, will no doubt agree that the figures which he gave to the House were taken from a document which has been circulated to a number of noble Lords by the Secretary of the Divorce Bar Association; and, of course, they have an axe to grind. Apart from those figures, I was interested in the fact that nobody has opposed the Bill who is not either a cleric or a lawyer.
The noble and learned Lord, Lord Denning, through no fault of his, had not heard me say how anxious I was personally to see our divorce law rationalised and the establishment of real family courts. I said that this Bill would do nothing to prejudice that, but it was quite obvious we should have no such Bill this year. I hoped, however, that it might be possible next year or the year after. I did not suggest it would be a Government Bill; it might very well be a Private Member's Bill. But divorce law reform is in the air; everybody is thinking about it. Our thoughts, I think, have been much clarified by the Report from the most reverend Primate's Committee, and also the Report from the Law Commissioners. It is in social fields of this kind that this House, in particular, has already started

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measures for reform, and no one hopes more than I do that this will proceed.
The only argument to the contrary is the general view that this Bill will lower the status of matrimony, if undefended divorce cases, which are in truth tried now in the country court, were admitted to be tried in the county court. Some misconceptions have arisen. The noble Lord, Lord Meston, said that the county court judges were going to be very busy. But there will not be more divorce if this Bill is passed; there will be less, because it is intended gradually to get them to stop trying any of the defended cases. The Government take the view that if there is a dispute between citizens which will determine right or status, it is right that it should be tried by a High Court Judge. At the present time in London the county court judges deal only with undefended cases; it is the High Court Judges who deal with the defended cases. It is at the moment hypocrisy to pretend that undefended cases are being dealt with in the High Court. They are not being dealt with in the High Court; they are being dealt with by the county court judges, and in most cases actually in the county courts. All this Bill does is to remove a piece of hypocrisy and substitute reality.
I yield to no Member of your Lordships' House in my view that the family is the unit on which the whole of our civilisation depends, and that it is important to uphold the status of matrimony. But what I really cannot believe is that people will either commit a matrimonial offence who otherwise would not, or have a divorce who otherwise would not, because an undefended divorce case is heard in a court which their means can afford. But I quite recognise the sincerity of the views of those who think otherwise, particularly of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Denning, and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Pearce. If to-day we were in a situation in which all divorce cases were heard in the High Court by High Court Judges, then I should have thought there would be much more force in the argument, "If we suddenly make a complete change, may this not lead to some degree of lessening of respect or regard in some way or other on the part of married people for the sanctity of marriage?" But, from that point of view, this
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Bill does not really change anything. It only recognises what to-day in fact happens.
At the end of the day, while I feel as strongly as anybody about the sanctity of marriage, I cannot believe as a matter of reality that there are any people in the country who are going to commit a matrimonial offence because undefended divorce cases are heard in a court which their means can afford, or, having committed a matrimonial offence—or if the partner has committed a matrimonial offence—are going to have a divorce, when they would not if cases were heard only in the High Court. That has been the primary question at issue.
On matters of detail, may I assure the noble and learned Lord, Lord Denning, that there will be, shorthand-writers present. There are shorthand-writers present now, and there will go on being shorthand-writers present, at least until, as I hope in due time, we have mechanical recording in all courts. I can assure the noble and learned Viscount, Lord Dilhorne, that, as now, no cases other than divorce will be taken on any half-day, or, I think, day on which divorce cases are being taken. The question of agency, raised by the noble Lord, Lord Silkin, I will consider. I have already discussed it with the Law Society and I see difficulty about altering the rules to apply to divorce cases only. In conclusion, I ought to say that I have, of course, consulted the President of the Probate, Divorce and Admiralty Division in relation to the Bill, and he raises no objection to it.
On Question, Bill read 2a, and committed to a Committee of the Whole House.

OVERSEAS STUDENTS' FEES
5.31 p.m.
LORD GLADWYN LORD GLADWYN rose to ask Her Majesty's Government whether, on reflection, they will now reconsider the advice given by the Minister of Education on December 21 last to the University Grants Commission and to local education authorities, that overseas students' fees should be raised to the levels given in the Statement referred to. The noble Lord said: My Lords, in asking Her Majesty's Government the Question which stands in my name on the Order

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Paper, and in order to save perhaps a little time in the debate which will follow, !and in which such a gratifying number of your Lordships have put down your names to speak, I think I ought to start by rehearsing briefly a few facts which, as I understand it (and the Government will correct me if I am wrong), are not disputed.
There are about 71,000 overseas students in this country of whom rather over half, that is to say, about 39,000, are in institutions which are not affected by the proposed increase in fees. They are people who, as I understand it, are studying law, nursing or accountancy, or something which does not affect us this evening. About 32,000 remain who are affected, and many of them seriously affected, by these fees. These are divided fairly equally between the universities and full-time and sandwich courses in further education. Rather less than a quarter of them, that is to say, about 7,000, come from the so-called "rich" countries, such as the United States of America, Western Europe, the old Commonwealth countries, Scandinavia, and so on. The remaining 24,000-odd are from the so-called developing countries; for a large part, of course, those African States which, until fairly recently, formed part of the British Empire and even now form part of the Commonwealth.
That is one division. Another division to which I think I should draw your Lordships' attention, in order to make the position clearer, is that of the 7,000-odd who come from the so-called "rich" countries, about 2,200 are undergraduates in our universities. 2,700 are postgraduates, 600 are in advanced courses in technical colleges, and 1,100 are in non-advanced courses in technical colleges. Of the 24,000—in fact, I believe some statistics say 25,000, but one cannot be absolutely sure—who come from the less developed countries, about 6,000 are undergraduates, 5,500 are post-graduates, 5,200 are at advanced technical colleges, and no less than 9,000 are on non-advanced technical courses. So that of the students from the non-developing countries a much greater proportion are, so to speak, in a lower category of education than the ones from the richer countries, and of course this is only to be expected.
The fees which all these students have so far been paying—that is to say, the
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32,000— average about £70 a year for a university course and about £50 a year for a course at a technical college, although at the technical colleges the fees vary considerably. It is now proposed that these fees should be stepped-up to £250 a year for students at universities and those at technical colleges in advanced courses, and to £150 a year for those in technical colleges who are taking courses at other levels. It is estimated by the Department of Education and Science that on the important, but, I suggest, scarcely tenable assumption that there will be approximately the same number of overseas students in this country after the increases as there are now, an increased income of some £5 million per annum will accrue to the universities and the technical colleges, which of course will have their own income from the University Grants Committee or the local educational authorities correspondingly diminished.
To these increases in fees there are certain exceptions, and I think reference was made to them the other day by the noble Lord, Lord Chalfont, in replying to the debate in this House on World Population. In the first place, all students on British Government or British Council grants will, I think I am right in saying, have their higher fees paid by the British Government out of an increase in overseas aid funds. In the second place, no student who has already embarked on a course will have to pay more than a £50 increase in the annual fee. In the third place, a fund will be established to reimburse the Governments of the developing countries for the £50 which they will have to pay in respect of students whom they are financing, and who have already embarked on courses. Those are the exceptions and they are, naturally, welcome as such.
Of the 32,000 overseas students, it is estimated that about 15 per cent. come under the first exception, that is to say, that their grants will continue; another 30 per cent. or so are those who are here on grants made by their own Governments, though whether the grants will be renewed in future, when they have to cover large increases in fees, remains to be seen. Be that as it may—and this is the real point which we are considering this evening—over half of the 32.000 (in point of fact, I believe about 17,000) are students who, to the extent that they do

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not have means of their own (and this is the case with the vast majority of them and particularly, of course, those coming from the developing countries) will have to pay up to £200 a year more for their education in this country. I think those are facts which are indisputable.
As explained by the Government, the general case for this rather drastic increase in fees seems to be as follows—and in stating it I hope I shall be completely objective. If I am not, then no doubt the noble Lord who is to reply will correct me. But I shall try to be as objective as I can in stating their case as I have learned it from the Press. First, even when raised, the fees will cover only about one-third of the average cost of the courses. The remaining two-thirds will thus remain a subsidy from British public funds.
Secondly, the total amount of this concealed subsidy (for such it is) is likely to be something of the order of £18 million a year in 1967–68, which is now, the Government feel, too great a burden for the British taxpayer and ratepayers to bear. Thirdly, if the increased fees result at least in stabilising the present position and in a diminution of the concealed subsidy by about £5 million, this will be in the general interest and should not be too hard on the students, many of whom, it is thought, could well afford it.
Fourthly, the number of overseas students has been increasing and is now rather over one-third more than it was in 1959. Fifthly, there is therefore what is always referred to as "an open-ended commitment" of considerable proportions, and it is wrong that the British taxpayer or ratepayer should be asked to foot this bill at a moment when there is admittedly very great need for teachers, school buildings, nursery schools, technical schools, Plowden improvements and so on; in other words, a very great need for carrying out the whole new educational policy of the Government. Sixthly, in any case—this, I think I am correct in saying, is the position of the Government—the percentage of overseas students to the total student population is much higher in the United Kingdom than in most of the developed countries, the richer countries, and there is no reason why at least some of the students should not make more use of the existing facili-
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ties in their own countries, and thus cease to enjoy cheaper education in this country than they would have elsewhere.
Now all this appears on the face of it, perhaps, to have a certain justification, unless one examines the situation a little more fully and perhaps from a rather broader point of view. So let me take, if I may, the arguments apparently advanced by the Government seriatim. It is true, no doubt, that even the increased fees which are now proposed would represent only some 30 to 40 per cent. of the cost of the courses. It is difficult to say exactly how much they represent, because it is difficult to say what the cost of the courses, technical and other, is. But let us assume that the increased fees would cover only some 30 to 40 per cent. of the cost to the taxpayer of these courses. The whole of the education programme of this country, is, of course, subsidised by the State, or, rather, by the British taxpayer, and the overseas students, most of whom, after all, come from the Commonwealth, constitute only about 11 per cent, of it: that is to say, 11 per cent. of those engaged in higher education in this country are from overseas, and largely from the Commonwealth.
In his admirable Report on Higher Education in 1963 the noble Lord, Lord Robbins (whom I am glad to see in his place; and I believe that he is to intervene later), recommended that the general level of fees for all students in this country, whether British or from overseas, should be raised so as to cover at least 20 per cent. of the cost of the courses. The Government, as I understand it, have rejected this proposal on the ground that to do that would be, as it were, robbing Peter to pay Paul. But at least if this proposal were adopted it would not result in any discrimination as regards overseas students.
The noble Lord, Lord Robbins, continued in his Report to the effect that he strongly favoured some inter-mixture of home and overseas students in British institutions of higher education, and though this inter-mixture as he saw it did result in a concealed subsidy over which the nation admittedly had no control, he did not suggest that any higher fee should be charged to overseas students than to other students. In fact he was

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strongly against this. He further stated, and here I quote:
"The presence here in institutions of higher education of students from abroad is widely regarded as valuable, and rightly so. In our judgment it fosters a sense of international community on both sides which encourages a valuable give and take. The communications to which it gives rise are not without their diplomatic and economic advantages, and where students from developing countries are concerned it provides a helpful contribution to their countries' advances. We should greatly regret a dwindling in the number of overseas students."
Yet this is what the effect of the Government's action will, as I think, certainly be.
At least 55 per cent. of the overseas students in universities and technical colleges are what is called "unsponsored," and though some of these may have some private means—and a very few of them may, indeed, be rich—the vast majority have little or no private means. It is their families, presumably, who have to produce the £500 or £600 a year which is the minimum required for their physical upkeep in this country. If. in addition, they have to pay another £200 or so per annum they simply will not for the most part, I think, come to this country for their education; and I cannot see how this simple point can be seriously disputed. The total amount of the concealed subsidy, as it is called, to overseas students, say the Government, is now something in the order of £18 million a year. But owing to the fact that the new fees, as we know, will cover only one-third of the economic cost, it is estimated that the total savings to the country, or to the British taxpayer, in any one year will be only £5 million or so. But this depends, of course, on the maintenance at the present level on the number of overseas students which, as we have seen, will inevitably, as I think, at any rate be fairly heavily reduced. In practice, for this, and indeed for other reasons that I need not enumerate here, most of the experts seem to think that the saving is more likely to be something in the order of £3 million a year.
But against this, and again from the purely economic point of view, surely we have to face the fact that, as I have said, all students who come here have to spend a minimum of £500 or £600 a year in this country. If, therefore, you get a reduction out of 16,000-odd or 17,000-odd
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students of a half, more than 8,000, as you very likely will, you will clearly lose an invisible export of something of the order of £4 million a year.
THE LORD PRIVY SEAL (THE EARL OF LONGFORD): My Lords, it has taken me a long time before I replied. Is the noble Lord seriously saying that he thinks there will be a reduction of nearly half the overseas students? I can hardly believe my ears.
LORD GLADWYN: No, my Lords; the noble Earl should not believe his ears. I am saying that 16,000 or 17,000 students are sponsored and they are particularly affected, the poorer ones. With these heavily increased fees you might quite likely in the next year or two find that about 8,000 of them will fail to come. It is certainly a small proportion of the total number, 71,000; but I do suggest that it is possible, and likely, that by next year, or the year after that, the number will be diminished by about 8,000. If that is so, there will be clearly a diminution in our invisible exports of £4 million a year. That of course will unfavourably affect our famous balance of payments. Apart from any other consideration, this would not seem on the whole, and from the purely economic point of view, to be a very remunerative deal; and if it is not economic, what exactly is the point of it?
In addition to that, on the economic side always there is the thought that we may well over the years be losing many thousands—I have suggested 8,000; but even 2,000 or 3,000 would be bad enough—of potential trade missionaries who, if they are happy in this country, will exercise a very important influence in their own countries in favour of importing British goods in the various spheres in which they specialise. So we shall probably, in addition, be sacrificing an unknown but substantial sum in the way of British exports. Again, on the face of it, this would seem to be at least short-sighted. Generally speaking, the whole economic effect of these measures would, I suggest, be wholly deplorable.
I come to the next point, the allegation that the number of overseas students has been increasing during recent years. My Lords, of course it has. That is true—though I think I am right in saying that the curve has been recently flattening out,

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and over the last year may well have flattened out altogether. But this increase since 1959 must surely be judged against the recent enormous increase in those who as a result are profiting from higher education in this country generally. If, as the noble Lord, Lord Robbins said, it was a good thing to have a certain proportion of overseas students in 1963, it surely is right that this proportion should at least be maintained in 1968. Generally speaking, I think we ought not to grudge but should welcome the arrival in our centres of learning of intelligent and, for the most part, enthusiastic young men and women from abroad. It is a compliment to us that they want to come at all. Moreover, we must remember that the great majority, in order to pursue a course, have to have an adequate knowledge of English and quite high educational qualifications. This in itself is a serious limiting factor. So why proceed against them further? I cannot see that it makes any sense.
As for the so-called "open-ended commitment", which is said to be carried at the expense of our own urgent needs, well, one can see the force of this argument to some extent. But if you must limit foreign students for this reason, why not go in for the solution suggested by the noble Lord. Lord Robbins, and increase fees all round to an agreed but limited extent? That would mean that, instead of paying £70 for a university course, as they do now, they would pay something of the order of £130 to £150. This, more particularly I suppose owing to the progress of inflation in recent years, might be thought to be acceptable by some, and I would not deny it: although even an increase of this order would, in the nature of things, probably result in a drop in the numbers of desirable students. Therefore, if this solution were adopted, I would suggest that it might well be accompanied by some provision for a special fund for assisting worthy students who are really in necessitous circumstances.
As for the claim that we have a higher proportion of overseas students here than do the majority of developed and richer countries, and that, anyhow, we charge students less than they do, I have been into the figures so far as I can. They are rather complicated, and difficult to obtain, but I must suggest that this claim is simply not in accordance with the
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facts. Apart from Switzerland, which has 30 per cent. of overseas students in her universities, our 11·4 per cent. compares with France, which apparently has 10 per cent., and Germany, which has 7·2 per cent. So there is no enormous difference here. As for the cost, no less than eight developed or richer countries charge lower fees than we do, and at least two underdeveloped countries do so as well. As I understand it (I may be wrong), France charges only a nominal sum in fees in respect of overseas students at her universities. As I say, this is the limit of my present researches, though perhaps I could do better if I had more time.
Why, in any case, we should want to diminish the numbers of students coming from Common Market countries at a moment when we are moving heaven and earth to get into it, I find quite difficult to understand. Were the Foreign Office consulted on this point? Perhaps the noble Earl would like to tell us that. Anyhow, there are, for instance, many more British students in France who are enjoying courses of higher education—incidentally, as I say, at quite nominal fees—than there are French students in this country. It is an illusion, I suggest, to imagine that students from European countries, and indeed from America, are necessarily rich because their Governments are richer than those of the underdeveloped countries. Many of them have no private means at all. Surely we ought to welcome them with open arms, if only because here especially there is room for a cross-fertilisation of ideas and for the elimination of what might be called inward-looking and provincial tendencies to which we are so drawn.
I am approaching the end of my remarks, but here, I suggest, lies the fundamental objection to the altogether regrettable action which the Government have taken. It is, I fear, symptomatic of the way in which many people in this country are turning their backs on the outside world and longing to be an isolated and highly directed "tight little island". The old Imperial tradition that led us into the generous Commonwealth conception has gone sour, and we are now, it seems, chiefly concerned with our own standard of living and the production, through the great new comprehensive schools, of large numbers of highly provincial technicians and teachers. The

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idea that we may have something to impart to the outside world, some message, forward-looking and democratic, to communicate for the guidance of young people all over the world, seems to have vanished. We are getting into a sort of provincial rut, and if we pursue this line we may well end up where Spain ended up after the loss of her Empire.
As your Lordships know, I have for many years asserted that the best way for us to avoid such a fate is to join the European Economic Community. If we did that, not a mere trickle but tens of thousands of British students would be likely to go to European universities, and thousands would come to our universities from across the Channel. This, after all, when you think of it, has been one of the few concrete but good results of the Franco-German Treaty. So I would earnestly beg the Government to reconsider the action which has aroused such just resentment and indignation, not only in academic circles but throughout the country as a whole, and not least in the Confederation of British Industry.
In his admirable letter to the Financial Times of February 7, which some of your Lordships may have seen, Mr. Peter Tennant expressed himself as follows:
"The strength of our balance of payments in the years to come will depend more and more on the sale overseas of sophisticated capital goods and know-how. The education and training in this country of our future customers overseas is an important investment in our own prosperity so as to ensure that they are familiar with the latest developments in our science-based industries, new processes, standards, specifications and engineering practice. British firms have for many years taken in foreign apprentices, students, postgraduate students, qualified engineers, teachers and professors either on their own schemes of a general nature, those specifically connected with the fulfilment of contracts overseas, or in contributing to the C.B.I. scholarship scheme for post-graduate engineers."
"They have also given generously to the universities in this country, not only for our own students, but also for the benefit of those foreigners who will now he deterred. We can be proud of what has been achieved by industry and Government, the British Council and the Ministry of Overseas Development. But we are aware that we are as a country by no means meeting the demand, nor do we think we are matching up to the performance of the United States, France, Gemany or Russia, to mention only four of many countries which are involved in this investment in the future. It is felt that far too little is known of the many dispersed efforts which exist in this country or how they compare
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in size and quality with the efforts of other countries. It seems to many that the action in cutting back aid to foreign students in our universities has been taken without knowledge of the facts, and no action, civil or military, should ever be taken without a proper collection and appraisal of intelligence".
Though Mr. Tennant was dealing with only one part of the subject which I am raising to-night, I feel I can hardly do better than that.
I would therefore end with a renewal of my plea that if the fees have to be raised—and I agree they very well might—at least the method of doing so indicated by Lord Robbins should be adopted, together, perhaps with some rational system of relief, which is also recommended by him, for those overseas students who would otherwise not be able to make use of the great facilities which Great Britain is still able to afford. The continuing "concealed subsidy" would thus be recognised for what it is; namely, a small but highly desirable and effective form of "aid" which happily has no adverse effect on our balance of payments. I know that it is difficult for any Government to admit that they have made a mistake, but I have some faint hope that the present Administration, which, after all, contains many of our most intelligent and civilised citizens such as the Leader of the House, may on reflection, after hearing the views of the many Peers who have far greater experience in this matter than I have, at least bring themselves to make some qualified confession of at any rate partial error.
6.3 p.m.
LORD MURRAY OF NEWHAVEN: My Lords, I should like to support the eloquent and well-argued plea of the noble Lord, Lord Gladwyn, for reconsideration of this extraordinary decision. I do so on three grounds. First, I think that the instrument which the Government have chosen is an extremely clumsy one. If there have to be economies in educational expenditure, then the Government are using a singularly blunt instrument for what should be a very intricate and selective operation.
Are we certain to whom this applies? So far as I know, there is no clear definition of what is an "overseas student", and surely this is a prerequisite for such a directive if we are to avoid hardship and achieve a satisfactory

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administration of policy. It is by no means clear what is an "overseas student". Does it, for example, include the 4,000 overseas students who are now taking their G.C.E. and who, under present arrangements, after three years are entitled to qualify for local education authority grants for further and higher education? Does it include the children of British civil servants or British personnel overseas, Service officers, experts, and so on, who are serving their country overseas, and whose children may well, unless the term is clearly defined, be classified as "overseas students".
The noble Lord, Lord Gladwyn, has given very cogent answers to the various reasons put forward by the Government for introducing this new policy. I should like to emphasise one of these reasons. It has been argued by the Government that the need for overseas students to study in this country has been lessened as facilities have increased in their own land. This may be true of some, but not all, first degree courses, but it is certainly not true of post-graduate education, for which about half the overseas students in the universities come to this country. Nor is it true, as has already been mentioned, of much of the technical college training, based on sandwich courses, in which periods of training in industry are just as important as training and education in the classroom.
Few of the industries in the underdeveloped countries have yet reached a stage where they can give what industry in this country is so well qualified to provide, and what is essential to the future economic development of these underdeveloped countries. There may be good reasons for discouraging a relatively few overseas students, but not for the indiscriminate action adopted in the present proposals. This decision on policy and the blanket nature of proposals for carrying it out are bound to give rise to injustice, bitterness and hardship, which I imagine will not be alleviated by any ad hoc arrangement for building up a hardship fund in this country.
My second ground for objection is the element of discrimination which, I venture to say, is both deplorable and shortsighted. It has been suggested that justification for this discrimination can
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be found in the Robbins Report. That is manifestly untrue, and I am prepared to leave it to Lord Robbins, who is to speak later, to disclaim any intention in that direction by his Committee. It has also been claimed to be justified by the Report of the Select Committee on Estimates. I think that, equally, is a misinterpretation of what they said.
One must sympathise with the Department of Education and Science, which has been put in a position of having to save up to £5 million a year at the expense of overseas students, many of whom are ill able to afford it. On the other hand, they might have considered a general rise in fees. That, I believe, would not have been discriminatory. They say, however, that they were unwilling or unable in present circumstances, to pass on the burden to local education authorities. The Department's own proposal to adjust Exchequer grants to local authorities to meet the consequences of higher fees in the transition period suggests that there were abnormal means available to meet an abnormal situation if they wished to employ them.
But more important in my opinion, however, is that this particular economy in expenditure should not have fallen solely, or even primarily, on the Department of Education and Science. As the noble Lord, Lord Gladwyn, pointed out, the education and training of overseas students in this country can and should be regarded as possibly the most direct and most economic means of granting overseas aid. It is of direct importance as a matter of industrial and commercial investment in education. In this context, an economy of £5 million, in the face of our annual expenditure on overseas aid which now extends to far beyond £200 million per year seems to be niggling. Even the £18 million mentioned by the Secretary of State as a total subsidy still would seem to be a modest investment.
Other countries regard the provision of education to overseas students as an investment, and I would cite one instance from a recent event. The School of Medicine in Nigeria admitted its limited annual intake of 30 students, and there was still a large number of qualified applicants left over. Germany stepped in and took 20 of them en bloc to give them a free medical education. This was not merely philanthropy; it was also

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sound, good business. I have also ascertained that in fact very few other countries in the world discriminate in fee charges against overseas students. I can find very little evidence of higher fees being charged to overseas students.
Taking, first, Europe, no distinction between fees charged to home and overseas students is made by universities in Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy and Switzerland. In France, where, as has been pointed out, so many of our students go, only two private technical institutions concerned with textiles charge higher fees to foreigners. Only in Austria is there any general discrimination. In the Scandinavian countries—those models of democracy—the levels of fees, if any, do not distinguish between home and foreign students.
In the Commonwealth countries, similarly, only one Canadian university among 30 charges differential fees. In Australia, the figure is only two among 13. There are, however, three universities in the Commonwealth which do charge discriminating fees: Ceylon, Malawi and Nanyang, in Singapore. But these are all in developing countries which can ill-afford to do otherwise. Thus the Commonwealth picture is overwhelmingly one of non-discrimination. Coming to the United States, one finds the same picture. There is no distinction in the State universities between foreign students and American students from other States. In the private American institutions, there is no discrimination whatsoever. Among other countries, I can find only four where fees to foreign students are higher than to home students: Eire, Ethiopia, Sudan and Japan—and even in these the fees for overseas students tend to be lower than in this country.
I should like to emphasise, from my experience overseas, that I believe that it is not merely the higher fees that will cause resentment and discourage overseas students, but the very implication that these students are less welcome here than they were. But this discrimination, as I have said, is not only objectionable in principle: it is also short-sighted. We are, I believe, deliberately reducing an inflow of good scholars from developed countries, such as the older Commonwealth
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countries and Europe, who offset to some extent the brain-drain of which we are at present complaining.
I happen to be Chairman of the Board of Management of the Royal Commission for the 1851 Exhibition which has for over seventy years awarded post-graduate research scholarships in science to Commonwealth students, as well as to home students. The quality of these is indicated in the fact that, of just over 1,000 appointed since 1891, of whom about half were overseas students, 109 have become Fellows of the Royal Society, two have become its Presidents and eight have become Nobel Laureates. The overseas students among them have achieved a fair proportion of these successes.
The Government's new proposal, if accepted by the universities, will certainly mean a reduction in these awards because the Commission has a fixed income, and the additional expenditure will be about £6,500 on an annual expenditure of £30,000. We are bound to reduce the number. Nor can it be assumed that these high-quality students will come to this country under other auspices. There is clear evidence—and I have found it myself in the Commonwealth countries—that it is the prestige of the 1851 scholarship which attracts them here, and tips the balance against their going elsewhere—to the United States, for instance.
I should like to give your Lordships one more example, if you will bear with me. The advantage of attracting high-calibre students from overseas can be seen in the staffing of one of the best chemistry departments in this country, known nationally and internationally. Of its total full-time staff of 29, 12 come from overseas, and they came in the first instance as overseas post-graduate students. Finally, as Director of the Lever-hulme Trust, I have on my desk at present a number of applications from university institutions in this country asking for funds to support scholarships, to enable them to promote the interchange of advanced students with European universities. It is surely inconsistent to claim, on the one hand, that this country might serve as the spearhead of scientific and technological development in Europe, if at the same time we are taking the unparalleled step of discouraging European advanced students coming here.

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For a comparatively wealthy country, with a long tradition of liberality in matters of education and the spread of learning, of encouragement of international trade and commerce, and of constructive overseas aid, the Government's recent decision seems to me to be sadly out of pattern. Overseas it will certainly appear narrow-minded at a time when the Government claim—and I believe with justification—to be international and inter-racial in their attitudes and actions.
My Lords, my third objection to the present proposal is that it seems to me to further the tendency for academic interchange to become concentrated in Government-sponsored schemes. The noble Lord, Lord Gladwyn, has referred to the fact that the British Government have agreed to increase the funds at the disposal of its agencies, such as the British Council and the Ministry of Overseas Development. Overseas Governments will be in a position to do the same, so far as their means allow. But it is the student who comes on his own earnings or his family's limited means, or who is sponsored by non-governmental organisations, who will be hit; and the majority of overseas students, as many as two-thirds of those in the universities, are in these categories. I would ask your Lordships: Do we, in the world of today, in which ideological and political considerations appear to be growing in importance and in influence, want to encourage this trend? I believe that we should stimulate greater not less freedom of interchange and thought. It is for these reasons that I should like to support the noble Lord, Lord Gladwyn, in his plea for a reconsideration of this increase.
6.18 p.m.
LORD ABERDARE: My Lords, in the powerful list of speakers to-day there seems to be an unusually large gap between the first 18 names on the list and that of the noble Earl the Leader of the House, who is to reply to this debate. I have a horrible feeling that he may find that he is somewhat isolated in this debate, and that the preceding speakers are likely to be somewhat critical of the Government's action taken on December 21 last. I hope for his sake that he may find an ally among them. Perhaps the noble Lord, Lord Mitchison, will be
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good enough to say a kind word for the Government—but I see that even he shakes his head.
But, certainly, this proposal of the Government has excited a great deal of anxiety and doubt throughout the country, a feeling which will be reflected in this House this evening. There are speakers on the List from all quarters of the House, and I feel sure that there will be a great deal of serious questioning about the Government's policy in this matter. This is reflecting a great deal of anxiety in the country at large. Letters have been written to the Press, there have been demonstrations of students, there have been pronouncements by senior university staff; and only yesterday there was a unanimous resolution in the Church Assembly. My colleagues on these Benches share the great anxiety that has been so eloquently expressed already by the noble Lord, Lord Gladwyn, and by the noble Lord, Lord Murray of Newhaven.
Furthermore, we think it is regrettable that so serious a statement was issued without, evidently, any adequate prior consultation. The Committee of Vice Chancellors of Universities was not consulted, nor were the local education authorities, nor were any of the other multifarious bodies which deal with overseas students. We are at this moment witnessing a serious decline in British influence overseas.
THE EARL OF LONGFORD: My Lords, may I interrupt the noble Lord on one point—because I am afraid that by the time I come to speak it will probably be past midnight. There was consultation with the British Council and with the University Grants Committee. It would not be right to say that there was no consultation.
LORD ABERDARE: I am very happy to hear that, although I still think that the Committee of Vice-Chancellors would have been grateful if they had been consulted. But at this moment, when British influence is on the decline, when so many of our former dependent territories are becoming independent and when we are cutting down our military commitments overseas, we should surely he doing everything we can to strengthen the voice of Britain if we believe that we have something valuable to say. Yet

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what has happened recently is that we have seen reductions in the British Council's activities, reductions in the B.B.C.'s overseas broadcasts and a limit of £50 placed on foreign travel; the Minister of Overseas Development is no longer in the Cabinet; and now, most serious of all, we have this discrimination against overseas students.
I agree with the noble Lords who have already spoken that the receiving of these overseas students into our universities and technical colleges is one of the best investments we can make for the future. Moreover, as I think the noble Lord, Lord Murray of Newhaven, implied, it is a method of overseas aid which is completely under our control, in that the money is spent in this country and, we may be sure, can be used to the best effect and most economically. As well as engendering a great deal of good will at the present, it is a hidden export for the future. It must surely make the task of our overseas salesmen that much easier in the future if a number of people have had some advantage in the way of higher education in this country. The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of London used a telling phrase yesterday in the Church Assembly when he spoke of the Government's measures as "a tariff on educational exports".
We are fully aware of the rising cost of education and we would willingly support any sensible economies, but I do not think that the present measure is either a sensible or a real economy. In fact, it may cause considerable harm in dissauding many future students from coming to this country. The noble Lord, Lord Gladwyn, gave us some of the figures; and it is important to realise that of the total number of overseas students at universities, less than half are supported by a scholarship grant or fellowship. Even with the present fee of approximately £70 per annum, there are cases of hardship, as every Vice Chancellor knows and as is also apparent to all those who are working in this field on a charitable basis.
Only this afternoon I came across two small trusts, the Council for Aid to African Students and the Zebra Trust, both of whom are trying to help students who are now unable to raise the necessary fees for studies here. Undoubtedly many students who are not supported
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either by British Government funds or by overseas Government funds will not be able to raise this extra £50 fee and will discontinue their studies. What a terrible advertisement for us when they return to their homeland, and what a frightful prelude to the Fourth Commonwealth Educational Conference in Nigeria this year!
Many universities and technical colleges are feeling that they are being forced by this Government action to break faith with their overseas students. Some of them have already promised places at the previous fee to those students who are working for their "A" levels, and they have already sent out their prospectuses for the next academic year. Many of the less advanced countries send their students over to this country because they have not got sufficiently good sixth-form arrangements of their own, in order to study for "A" levels and for subsequent study at British universities. These countries have set aside money to provide the fees for these students, which fees, if they are increased, they may now well be in no position to find.
But what, also, of those who are not supported by Government grants? What of the private students, who form two-thirds of the total? Do we really want to dissuade them from coming here? Among them are young men and young women who have shown enterprise and initiative in saving up and paying their fares to this country and whose very qualities will probably mean that in time to come they will occupy positions of influence and importance in their own countries. If we put these fees up, may they not well choose to go elsewhere in the future, and may we not find that they will obtain their higher education in Germany, in America or in Eastern Europe? It has obviously been apparent to our own students that this is not a very encouraging step. They must realise the importance to themselves of coming into contact in our universities with others from overseas; and although it may be true that the total number of overseas students is rising, certainly the proportion is falling. And what will be the position if other countries take reprisals? I am sure we shall certainly regret it very much if this action were to lead to similar action elsewhere, and if

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the whole free interchange of students between one country and another were to be affected.
THE EARL OF LONGFORD: My Lords, may I ask the noble Lord one question, as he is speaking, I am sure, very carefully for the Opposition? Is he objecting to raising the fees at all? Fees have been raised in the past, and I am sure that in any event they would have been raised to some extent very shortly. There are doubtless a number of arguments as to whether the fees are to be raised too far, or in the right circumstances; but is the noble Lord saying that the fees should not be raised at all, and is he not going to set any limit to the amount of total subsidy?
LORD ABERDARE: No, my Lords, I am complaining about the discrimination against overseas students. I think there would be a much better case for proposals such as those which we have already heard from the noble Lord, Lord Robbins. I think this is a much more sensible way of setting about things. I am complaining of the fact that overseas students are having to pay more than is charged to the normal British student, and I fear that this will dissuade a number of students who come here on their own means from coming here in the future.
In conclusion, I should like to put two questions to the Government and to make three possible suggestions for the future. First of all, I would ask how the saving of £5 million in a full year is arrived at. Is it on the assumption that the same number of students will come as have been coming recently to this country? Or does it take into account what I fear: that there may be a fall-off in the number who can afford to come? Secondly, I am interested to know—although it may not be possible for the noble Earl to give me an answer this evening—what the position will be in specialist schools like the School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine or the School of African and Oriental Studies, which exist mainly for overseas students. If places are not taken up by these overseas students, what will happen?—because there will be no British students available to take them up.
My Lords, I would make three possible suggestions for the future. In the first
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place, I understand that the Committee of Vice Chancellors have requested that a delegation might be received by the Prime Minister; and I hope that due consideration will be given to that request. After all, it was only a few months ago at the 20th anniversary of UNESCO that the Prime Minister said:
"We have done our best not to reduce our aid to developing countries and we have expanded, wherever possible, the assistance our schools and universities and Colleges of Further Education give to students from those countries."
Secondly, would the Government consider giving some emergency help to present students and to those who are in this country with assured places at universities conditional on their passing their "A" Levels? Would they give some emergency help to these students—through, say, a hardship fund established perhaps through the British Council—which could avoid the terrible plight of those students who may have to break off their studies and return home? Thirdly, in the long term, would they have a close look at this matter again in the light of this debate and, although the cost may be very heavy in terms of educational funds, see whether, in terms of overseas aid, some help could not be given so that we may continue to receive gratefully and willingly the maximum number of overseas students of which we are capable?
6.33 p.m.
LORD FULTON: My Lords, I must begin by asking for the indulgence of the House in addressing your Lordships for the first time. I hope to conform to the proprieties of these occasions by being both brief and, to the best of my ability, in a matter which has stirred a great deal of feeling, non-controversial. In the former aim I am assisted by the knowledge that there are many noble Lords speaking to-day who will examine the various aspects of the matter with a knowledge that I could not myself hope to match; and in the latter, by confining my remarks to the general question of why the universities have registered such alarm at the proposal to raise the fees of overseas students. I speak not only as one with some responsibility for a university in the United Kingdom, but as the Chairman, for the past three years, of the Inter-University Council for Higher Education Overseas, a body representative of all

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the home universities which, where appropriate, advises the Government of the day on overseas education, and which also promotes a close association between our universities and those in the former colonial territories.
My Lords, the universities asked for an increase in the fees of all students, irrespective of domicile. Accordingly, they cannot, and do not, complain at the mere fact of a rise in fees. They are, I think, deeply concerned at the very sharp increase to three and a half times the present figure which is proposed to be applied only to those from overseas. Arrangements of a quite elaborate kind now proposed to cushion the effect on a large number of those who will be subject to the increases, have left the universities still uneasy and, indeed, alarmed. Why? First of all, as your Lordships have heard, they have always been extremely sensitive on behalf of the free-lance student or the student financed by private or charitable sponsors. It is on this class of overseas student that the increases in fees will bear in all their severity. These are generally people of high academic quality; if they are post-graduates they are individually vouched for by overseas academics and carefully scrutinised before being accepted. It would be a matter of profound regret to the universities if the proposals now being debated were to result in a serious reduction in the number of private students; even if their places were taken by others officially sponsored.
There are other, deeper reasons for unease. Many members of universities, senior as well as junior, see this issue as one of aid to the developing countries. In this, of course, they are right. Let me invite your Lordships to look on two contrasting pictures, one of 1946 and one of 1967. In 1946, in the whole of our colonial and former colonial territories there were only two small university institutions, one in Hong Kong and one in Malta. There was also a small though distinguished college, affiliated to the University of Durham, Fourah Bay College in Sierra Leone. To-day, in Africa alone—and I am, of course, speaking only of our former colonial territories—there are some twenty universities or university colleges, and in South-East Asia, the Far East and the Caribbean, at least another ten. These have been
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largely built with British capital and staffed by the universities of this country at a time when they were trebling their own numbers.
As a result, undergraduate education is becoming available to increasing numbers of young people in their own countries. To-day, accordingly, there is less need to offer undergraduate places here except for particular subjects and for particular territories, where there are no university institutions so far. What still desperately needs to be done is to provide in our universities here post-graduate opportunities to build up African and Asian staffs for African and Asian universities, and to provide the developing countries with post-graduates trained here until their own post-graduate schools are able to take over the task. To have any setback to this programme would be to suffer a reverse in a noble enterprise of which history undoubtedly will speak well.
But there is more in this than aid to developing countries. We are the gainers, too, from the present overseas students in our universities. The universities of the West know from centuries of experience that they stand or fall by being open institutions. I was once head of an institution which, when I first knew it, was almost wholly composed of students from the immediate neighbourhood. It is very different to-day. But in those earlier days, when a special programme under the Colombo Plan brought in succession to this country groups of some 25 students from South-East Asia for a short intensive course in the social sciences, the institution was transformed for everybody—and most of all for the local students.
I have spoken of the association built up between the Inter-University Council of the United Kingdom universities and new universities in the developing countries for which we were once responsible. They have followed us, willingly followed us, in the example we set of admitting students from other countries to our universities on the same terms as our own. The battle of the open university is never won; it is constantly being fought, over and over again, as the tides of tribalism, nationalism and racialism threaten to engulf infant universities before they have found their strength and maturity. We in the universities of

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this country believe that our own institutions of higher education are richer in the measure that they are diversified. A student body should be a meeting ground for those of as many different backgrounds and as many different experiences as possible. There is no age like that of 18 to 23 or 24; no environment like that of university studies in which to meet other challenges, other attitudes, other convictions and other philosophies. The unversities, I think, wish to have an assurance that obstacles will not be created which will reduce the free flow of ideas between those in different countries of the world in whose hands the future lies.
6.41 p.m.
LORD ANNAN: My Lords, I am extremely fortunate this evening in being able to rise immediately after the noble Lord, Lord Fulton, has delivered his maiden speech. I am sure that, on behalf of all, your Lordships would wish me to congratulate him most sincerely on a distinguished speech; a speech which had exactly that mark of distinction which we associate with him in his capacity as the first Vice Chancellor of, if I may so put it, the first of the new universities really to get off the ground and which now is so far off the ground that it is already in the first rank of the universities in this country. Our sadness in realising that he will retire from his Vice Chancellorship at the end of this academic year is, I hone, mitigated a little by the expectation that he will be able to be heard a great deal more often in your Lordships' House.
I came this evening to your Lordships' House direct from a meeting of the Professorial Board at University College, London. I was there left in no doubt whatsoever as to the feeling in academic circles about this measure. There is very strong feeling on this issue of discrimination. There is a feeling among students who have in them a very strong streak of idealism with regard to the developing countries. The feelings of academic staff have been admirably described by the noble Lord, Lord Fulton. We must understand that this has nicked a sensitive nerve in the universities, and I do not think anyone should be under any illusion that the issue of discrimination is felt very
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deeply. I will not elaborate further; quite enough has been said already on that matter.
The other thing which is also exercising all our minds is the issue of hardship; how, in fact, we are going to meet cases of hardship (and there will be many, I think) among those students who are already in our midst. Those who are to come, if this measure is to go through, will, of course, have had full warning of what their rate of fees will be. But if fees are raised for those who are here, even by as little as £50, it will mean a very great deal to someone who has come from West Africa supported by contributions from his tribe; or to those who come from India supported by offerings from families and relatives; and to those, indeed, who come from countries in Europe which are not among the richer countries, and where, very often, great sacrifices have been made to enable a student to come here. I think we should bear these points in mind. It is a little astonishing, as was said, I think, by the noble Lord, Lord Murray of Newhaven, for us to find ourselves in this matter in parity with the countries of Eire, Ethiopia and Sudan.
My Lords, on those two issues I should like to make three requests. The first is that if it is impossible to alter this measure, will the Government as soon as possible give an indication of the date at which the Secretary of State hopes that he will raise the fees all round to home students? I think that this feeling about the issue of discrimination would be allayed if such an indication could be given. The second is, would it he possible for help to be given through the Department of Education and Science to set up a fund to meet cases of hardship? I hope it will be possible for such a fund to be, as it were, administered by the universities themselves, rather than to set up an impersonal organisation to which appeals had to be made. Surely the universities can be trusted—I do not think this is too much to ask—that they should examine cases of hardship and then be able to call on a fund to meet those cases. I hope this could be done, as I say, by a special fund, and not for the universities to be asked to do this at their own cost. All universities are at this moment experiencing what has been

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a very cold winter indeed—that is to say, a winter which has produced the first indication of the look of the next quinquennium. It is a very frigid experience indeed, when one reads the papers and sees exactly how sparingly the universities are inevitably being treated at the moment. So if a fund could be set up which was not financed by the universities but by the Department, this would do a great deal to allay discontent.
Finally, my Lords, may I emphasise the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, with special reference to the University of London, which has a very high proportion of overseas students because of the facilities in the capital city, particularly of libraries, the Public Record Office and other specialist organisations? The noble Lord, Lord Aberdare—I thought very properly—drew our attention to two of these institutions, the School of Oriental African Studies and the School of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene. If some special provision could be made for these two instutions—and any others, I hasten to say, which fall into this category—it would be greatly appreciated.
Having said that, and made these requests, may I also put some points on the other side of the case? I think there has been a lack of feeling and understanding in universities about how this issue of discrimination came about. First of all, surely we must recognise that it was impossible in the present freeze for the Government to put up the fees of home students, because had they done so, inevitably part of the cost would have fallen on the local authorities; and local authorities had been ordered to keep their own costs down. Hence, with the whole philosophy of the freeze, it would have been a difficult undertaking, indeed almost impossible. The second point is this. There was, I think, a lack of understanding in the universities about the actual issue of raising fees. There is some confusion, and the noble Earl, the Leader of the House, in a question to the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, gave point to this by asking whether the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, was against the raising of fees at all. There are some people in universities who believe that fees should not be raised at all. Yet the Committee of Vice Chancellors is on record in 1965 as having been in favour of agreeing to
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a rise of £150 for all students; though of course with the reservation that cases of hardship from the developing countries should be met. So I do not think that there can be any case made out for no rise in fees at all.
Thirdly, there is the question of cost. Here it seems to me that if one is to be dispassionate one must have some sympathy with the problem which the Government face. The noble Lord, Lord Gladwyn, said that the proportion of students from overseas should not be allowed to fall. I wonder whether that is right. If the noble Lord means the number as it was before the great expansion of our universities took place, I am sure we would be in total agreement, but when the number of university students has doubled, is it reasonable to say that the proportion of overseas students must be the same?
It is the escalation of the cost of aid to overseas students which has drawn the attention of the Government to this as something which might have to be curbed. And when I say "curbed", I do not mean diminished to nothing, but slightly reduced: or rather that the way in which the graph is moving at present should be changed. Where is the end to come? There must be some check on this matter. Individual universities are used to admitting overseas students largely on their merits. They pick the best of those who apply. Sometimes they admit students on compassionate grounds, because they come from developing countries and need the courses which the university in question can offer. But when universities do this, they have been slow to realise that inevitably in the end a quota would have to be set for the number of students who are accepted from overseas. It seems to me that the universities cannot have it both ways. They cannot say that they are against any kind of major increase in fees, and at the same time say that they are against any kind of limitation on the student number.
There were warnings on this question of fees. The Robbins Report warned that this was something that was in the air. The Select Committee again drew attention to this question of fees. If I may be critical of my colleagues, perhaps the Committee of Vice Chancellors were a little slow to realise that this was going to be one of the major points

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on which universities would be asked to make economies. It is true that in 1965 they put their case for a rise in fees to the U.G.C., yet they have been slow to realise the feeling in the Department about the escalation of the number of overseas students coming to the universities. However, I believe that the Committee are rapidly gearing themselves to being more on the ball in all these matters. For example, they have set up committees to discuss how academic buildings can be used more profitably, and under what conditions more students could be induced to live at home. Obviously, these are two matters which will come up in the next five years and it is wise for the Committee to have their own views prepared.
In the protests to The Times I was slightly saddened to see no letter suggesting any alternative cut which might be made. This would have been a difficult operation. It could be suggested, of course, that the universities should accept a 2½ per cent. reduction across the board, which would undoubtedly reduce their efficiency, but would produce the figure of £5 million which the Secretary of State had been told he must obtain. I think that there was a reluctance to understand that one cannot always get away without economies being imposed simply because one belongs to a highly privileged section of the community.
Here, of course, the question arises: why should there have been a cut at all? One of the reasons is that inevitably ways have to be found to diminish the cost of higher education, because they are rising so exceedingly sharply. To give one example, the cost of providing scientific equipment, which becomes so rapidly obsolescent, is causing grave anxiety to the universities, for it is essential that some of this equipment be bought if we are to maintain our position in the world of research. Another reason why there must be a cut is the economic crisis which struck this country in the middle of the summer. This imposed the situation with which anyone connected with the Government is familiar. A Minister brings his Estimates before the Cabinet, but before he does that, he has to go to the Treasury, who tell him that if he wants an increase in expenditure, that can be obtained only by a cut in another direction.
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Why was there an increase in the costs of the Department of Education? The answer to that question is simple. This winter the Plowden Report was published. I am sad that no one in your Lordships' House has put down a Motion drawing attention to that Report.
THE EARL OF LONGFORD: My Lords, I must remove that undeserved slander on the House. There is a Motion down on the Order Paper.
LORD ANNAN: My Lords, I apologise to the House and to the noble Earl. I read my Paper too quickly coming down to the House. May I say this on the Plowden Report? It suggested that there is an enormous need for expenditure on our primary schools, and because of years of neglect the sums required are astronomical. The £5 million which will be obtained by the increase in the fees of overseas students is obviously nowhere near the sum required; but it could do something to meet what the Plowden Report singled out as something which could be done quickly: the setting up of a crash programme for the slum schools—the ghetto schools.
This is a point which I would bring to the attention of noble Lords who are particularly concerned about the developing countries. We have two kinds of people who come from the developing countries: those who come for a time as students and those who emigrate and then live in bad conditions in our great cities. In these bad conditions they have bad schools, schools staffed often by a handful of devoted teachers, a handful because other teachers are not willing to go there to teach children, many of whom cannot speak English. This creates what is known as ghetto conditions.
Can something be done for the education of these children from developing countries? Since we are talking to-day about discrimination, can we do anything about the discrimination against them? If I have to choose between subsidising overseas students from the developing countries and subsidising a crash programme to do something about these schools I hesitate, as someone connected with the universities, to say what action should betaken. But I do not hesitate long. I think that the school programme has the priority. We are always being told that politics is a matter

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of priorities. Here I respectfully suggest that if we have to surrender this particular matter of overseas students, then the savings should be applied in this particular way.
7.0 p.m.
THE LORD BISHOP OF CHICHESTER: My Lords, I was warned just now that if I spoke from the Bench in which I was sitting I should be speaking from a Government Bench. While I sympathise with the noble Earl the Leader of the House in the apparent isolation to which he has referred, I cannot support him on this particular issue. Nevertheless, I am glad that the noble Lord, Lord Annan, who has just sat down, while making clear his own repudiation of the decision that has been taken, also recognised some of the difficulties under which this Government—as, indeed, would any Government—labour. Some of the criticisms that have been levelled against the decision, more vociferous outside this House and more moderated inside it, perhaps, do not take into account the duty of a Government at this juncture of time to scrutinise carefully all forms of spending, and in particular the mounting bills for education, especially in the field of further and higher education, and to recognise the difficulty, to which a great deal of thought and study was given in the Report which bears the name of, and was presided over by the noble Lord who will follow me in this debate, the noble Lord, Lord Robbins, about the open-ended nature of our subsidy towards overseas students.
It is also true to say that there is a vast number of people, and perhaps the bulk of the people in this country, who have no idea how much we subsidise all further and higher education, and how much is our contribution towards overseas students. Certainly a Government have to bear that in mind. In other words, it would be necessary for any Government to consider this issue and to take some steps about it, and I think that none of us would wish to deny this. It is the manner in which it has been done; and I should have thought the whole crowd of criticism which has been raised in protest would have convinced the Government that they have been unwise in the particular form which their decision has taken.
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Some of the criticism has been rather of an emotional character. But the fact that so much has come from leaders engaged in education in this country, and experts in their own field, as has already been expressed in our debate so far, should convince the Government that the real obstacles are of a much greater nature than the kind of emotional appeal that has sometimes been issued. It is not for me to attempt to deal with some of the educational features with which so many others of your Lordships will deal. Indeed, I am uneasily sandwiched between a number of speakers of high academic distinction, and I will leave this to them. I should like to say, however, with what great interest I listened to the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Fulton, the Vice Chancellor of our University of Sussex, speaking not only from his wide experience but from that wealth of experience in the development of university life in most parts of the world. I am sure we all hope that there will be many occasions in future when he will address us from his wisdom and experience.
But there are other people and other bodies who have expressed their concern about this matter, quite apart from academic institutions. Perhaps I may quote a resolution which was passed yesterday in the Assembly of the Church of England and which has been sent to the Minister. It states that it would:
"welcome the reconsideration of the Government's advice to universities and colleges that the fees charged to many overseas students shall be greatly increased regardless of their circumstances, and an inquiry into the finance available and the alternative educational facilities open to such students in their own countries before a final Government decision is made."
It may be asked why a Church body should claim to have any particular interest in this issue. But the churches in this land have shared in the expansion of this country and its reaching out into so many parts of the world. They have very often preceded that expansion. They have been pioneers in much of the education. They know the kind of basis upon which a healthy community life in a new country can be built. They are sensitive, through their contacts on the spot, of the relations between many of those countries and this land. And may I add that they are very jealous of the good name and the place of this country in the present unfolding situation of our

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world. It is a situation in which hunger for education is one of the significant matters. It is, therefore, a situation in which this country, above all, ought to consider its own fullest possible contribution. If, in fact, a curtailment of our contribution was needed on financial grounds, no doubt we should have to accept it. But the financial gain on this particular step, as the noble Lord, to whom we are all grateful for posing this Question, has already pointed out, is likely to be very small, and much less, it may be, than the actual figure of £5 million, which itself is not very considerable in the whole field.
It may be that the consideration is not finance. I believe the Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Overseas Development has expressed the hope that many more students will now go to their own universities or places of education in their own countries; and perhaps this is part of the objective.
THE EARL OF LONGFORD: My Lords, may I clear up that point? The reasons for this step are financial.
THE LORD BISHOP OF CHICHESTER: I am grateful to the noble Earl, the Leader of the House. I was referring to a quotation of what the Parliamentary Secretary had Certainly any deliberate curtailment of possible students to this country would be of concern not only to academic institutions, but to a wide section of public opinion. Our concern would be what it may signify in terms of Britain's own position and role in the world. Coming with the suddenness that this decision has, it seems to us somewhat illiberal. It suggests a drawing back from our commitments to a world where international exchange and association is on the increase. We should recognise that our role in this world must not be so much in terms of power, as it was in the past, or our own exact place at the conference table; our influence ultimately in our world will stem from what we have to give to it and what we are willing to do for it.
One of our chief contributions must be our own long investment in all the knowledge, skill and culture which is embraced in the word "education". It is especially our contribution now to the poorer and
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developing countries. This has been recognised by our former aid. Surely where that aid is most wanted is not in things, but in the equipping of persons who themselves may be able to exercise their responsibilities in their own country more effectively. It is, of course, invisible aid. Perhaps it should be made more visible. But it is wrong to think of this purely in terms of part of an education bill at home. I find it surprising when I recall how, from the Government Bench in a debate not long ago on overseas aid and development, a strong statement was made that we would not fall short on our commitments to the overseas world, that this particular point and the aspect which it presents to the world of a cutting down in some way of what we are giving to them has been overlooked.
I suppose we should be concerned, too—and this again has constantly been referred to—in terms of what one might call the justice of the present decision. Perhaps "justice" is not quite the right word, since our obligation to provide for overseas students is certainly not an official duty; but I mean justice in the sense, as has been fully recognised, that the effect of this decision is discriminatory. We cannot get away from the fact that it will hit the poorer countries and, more particularly still, those students—the very great bulk of them—who come to this land without any sponsorship from their own Government or ours. I know that this is not the intention of the step and it is hound up to some extent with administrative convenience, if not necessity.
It is an accident, too, that it may seem to the developing countries, to whom we shall be to some extent restricting our aid in this respect, to be not only discrimination but even racial discrimination. This is not the intention; but an act must be judged in the end not by its intention but by its actual results. I do not believe it will be any good saying to a young man in Botswana or Lesotho (to take the latest independent States) that this step is really aimed at the comparatively affluent young student from New York or Toronto. He is already far too sensitive about anything that suggests discrimination to accept this argument. He will say that this does not help him to believe what Britain wishes to do for him. Again, I think this step

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is a little out of character for a Government who have in many ways, in legislation and otherwise, tried to make a stand about anything that savours of discrimination. I regret that this point seems to have been overlooked or disregarded in the decision.
I must briefly refer, as others have, to the question of actual hardship at present. There are, we are told, a large number—how large we do not know—of students in this land who are sub-standard in ability, who have come here chancing their arm educationally and maybe to some extent are a drag on or an embarrassment to our own resources. If the Minister had them in mind, then, as the noble Lord who has just spoken quite rightly said, this is a very poor way of dealing with it. To penalise the bright as well as the less bright in the same action is not the right way to cut down on the kind of students one might wish to discourage. We are not thinking—at least, I am not—primarily of the students from the better placed, richer countries, though they have an argument in their favour. I am not thinking only of the sponsored students from developing countries. I must think especially of that very large number of students of one kind or another who are not sponsored. Some of them come with the help of voluntary trusts which are trying to assist in a pecuniary way student life to spread itself and take the opportunity it cannot get at home.
Missionary societies were quoted by the noble Lord, Lord Gladwyn. I know one such society in England, of our own Church, which in its budget for next year has put down, out of money contributed yearly from private sources, between £4,000 and £5,000 for bursaries for students coming to this country. Well, they will pay for fewer students, unless indeed we can persuade more people to give more money for this purpose. I know of one comparatively small impecunious religious community which has planned and paid for two men to come from Bantustan for higher education in this country, with a view, after a year or two, to their going back to teach in their own land. This kind of example could be multiplied in a great number of ways. Unless there is some aid, it will mean simply a cutting down of the opportunities for such students to come here.
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Of course, a great many of them, perhaps the larger bulk, have come through the contributions which have been made by their own homes—their families and communities—and there are many people working in university and technical college life who would testify to the sacrifices which have been involved and the fact that this decision will be quite shattering to some of them, especially those who have come to qualify for university or further education courses and have not yet done so. Many of them are the kind of people we want to help. They are people who will go back and serve their community or their church in ways in which they will never be able to do otherwise. And it may be that they will serve us in the process, for I think the old phrase is true educationally:
"Cast thy bread upon the waters and it will return after many days."
Is there no way in which this process of what would seem to be restriction or increasing hardship can be alleviated? Hopes have been expressed, though not very buoyant hopes, that this Government might be prepared in some way to reconsider their decision. I believe it was a great Parliamentary figure, Oliver Cromwell, speaking in another place, who besought the Members to believe that they might be mistaken. It may be that the wrong kind of official advice has been given in view of all the circumstances. But if it is not possible fully to reconsider the decision, are there not steps, some of which have been mentioned, which could alleviate this situation?
In the first place, could the Government look again at the dating of this proposal? It starts in its new form and with its fullest weight for those who come here at the end of this year. Most of them, I presume, have already made their plans. Others have come over in preparation, in good faith that they will be able to work their way through the course. Some postponement of the date would itself be some alleviation to them, and I should have thought that, without any great loss of face, something of this kind might be achieved.
Beyond this, it is quite clear that some kind of fund must be provided—a development fund, I would call it, since it is in line with our major development fund—to meet the needs of students, not merely now but in the future. It is sim-

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ply not enough for them to be assured, or for us to be assured, that the Minister or someone else will consider cases of need if they are brought to him. You cannot conduct educational planning on this basis. There should surely be a fund which has for its administration not merely officials from the Treasury or the Ministry but a body representative of those who are conducting education in this country and who know the pressures and possibilities of selection. They would, I hope, consider not merely those who are sponsored by Governments but also those who are sponsored by other bodies. It should be possible to find some way of selecting students on a basis of both need and ability which would remove from us the charge either that we are receiving those who are unable to benefit from education or that we are contributing too much to those who do not need that contribution. I hope that the Government will undertake to set up such a body, as well as such a fund, which would consider both the kind of scale on which overseas students can be admitted and the kind of way in which they can be aided, and, therefore, the kind of way in which this decision, if it must rest, can be alleviated.
7.20 p.m.
LORD ROBBINS: My Lords, I cannot resist the privilege which I enjoy because of my position on the list of speakers to add my voice to the voices of the noble Lord, Lord Annan, and the right reverend Prelate who has just spoken, in welcoming the noble Lord, Lord Fulton, to your Lordships' House. The noble Lord and I are one time colleagues, and I can assure your Lordships that in all sorts of ways he will bring to this House and to our debates a quite special authority on a wide variety of subjects.
My reasons for taking part in this debate are twofold. First, I disagree profoundly with the policy under discussion; and, second, in the course of earlier talk about it there have been references to the recommendations of the Committee of which I was Chairman, and I fear that some of these may be apt to mislead. Fortunately, having regard to the masterly speeches which have already been made, especially by the noble Lord, Lord Gladwyn, and the noble Lord, Lord Murray of Newhaven, I can be brief. I hope that this will not bring
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false comfort to the noble Earl the Leader of the House. May I make it clear that, unlike some critics of the Government, I am not at all opposed to the principle of raising fees, as such? Indeed, I am very much in favour of it. Before the war the fee income of the universities was in the neighbourhood of one-third of their total revenue. Now it is probably nearer 10 per cent. I do not think this increased dependence on direct grants is altogether a healthy state of affairs. I think it is desirable that it should be ended, and the right way to do this is to put up fees.
I think we should remember, too, that if fees remain stationary, as they have tended to do since the war, while prices and other costs rise, their real value in terms of general purchasing power is continually diminishing. Surely it is an unsatisfactory state of affairs that this should be happening, not as a positive act of policy but as a by-product, so to speak, of the process of inflation. It is unhelpful when we are thinking of the allocation of real resources. Nor, I venture to say, is it conducive to a suitable frame of mind on the part of those who benefit by it—the students who are all too apt to take this side of things for granted and not to realise what they are getting.
I submit that it is no valid objection to the policy of raising fees to say that since the greater number of fees charged to native students are in fact paid by local authorities, an increase in fees would put a greater burden on the rates. The noble Lord, Lord Annan, seemed to suffer from some apprehensions in this respect, but when this matter was discussed before the Committee on Higher Education, the Treasury representatives assured us that if the policy was thought desirable on general grounds there need be no insurmountable difficulty in adjusting the subsidies to the local authorities concerned. And since, other things being equal—I repeat, other things being equal—an increase of fee income to the institutions of higher education would mean a lesser need for direct grants, no increase of the burden on the general taxpayer need result.
There is no doubt, my Lords, that what I am urging is a serious and practical

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policy. It was not the members of the Committee on Higher Education, it was the representatives of Her Majesty's Treasury who wrote that
"from the point of view of public finance, it may be regarded as sounder to subsidise the students than to subsidise the institutions".
And it was the same high authorities who made it clear that if we favoured the policy we should not be deterred from recommending it by the thought of administrative difficulties.
Perhaps your Lordships will bear with me, since the noble Lord, Lord Annan, has spoken of this matter, if I read from the published evidence given by the Treasury to the Committee to which I have made allusion. Mr. Clarke (now Sir Richard Clarke), at that time a high official of the Treasury, said this:
"If policy required an increase in fees, and more of the cost was therefore to be borne as it were in the first instance by the local authority, the general grant could be adjusted and this expenditure incorporated in the general grant to give a fair distribution over local authorities. The general grant formula could if necessary be changed to give weight to this, and the general grant could be so rearranged that the burden on the ratepayer would be much the same."
He went on:
"I was putting forward the hypothesis that the general grant could be changed. But if that was not equitable, a special percentage grant could be arranged. I would emphasise that the crucial question here seems to be whether it is desirable on general policy grounds to raise fees. The question of distribution between central and local government and the arrangements for operating the mechanism would not present insuperable obstacles."
LORD ANNAN: My Lords, would the noble Lord agree that it would take several months of negotiation between local authorities, the Treasury and the Department for such a policy to emerge? It is, I think, a question of time, and that may have been the reason why it was impossible to do it.
LORD ROBBINS: My Lords, I completely agree with the noble Lord, but I deplore the fact that this thought should only just have occurred to the authorities concerned. They have had it before them for some three years.
I now come to the position of overseas students. I was chairman of the managing committee of one of the largest graduate schools in the Commonwealth for over 25 years, and some of my hap-
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piest personal relationships have been with graduates from overseas. I am proud of what we do for overseas students, and I am not at all unmindful of the indirect benefits which flow to us, both from their presence here and from the loyalties which many of them take back to their own countries. But I cannot see that it is sensible to assume as a moral principle that we should never increase the charges, however much the costs increase. Nor, frankly, do I see the point in providing all and sundry with a heavily subsidised training without any means test whatever. If we wish to give overseas aid to education—and I think it is a very good thing—let it be done overtly, in part at least, by a system of grants, not in a way for which we receive no credit. Yet I have heard it argued—not this evening in your Lordships' House, I hasten to say—that we should refrain from any increase in fees all round just because of the extra burden on this section. That seems to me to be absurd.
In short, my Lords, so far from being opposed to a general increase in fees, I think the arguments for some increase are very powerful. I see no reason to retract the recommendation of the Committee on Higher Education that fees should be raised so as to make fee income at least 20 per cent. of institutional revenue. I personally, indeed, should like to see the increase go much further. Why, then, am I opposed to the policy under discussion to-night? I am opposed to it because it is blatantly discriminatory. It is a sort of financial apartheid. It is a policy which charges the overseas student a different fee just because he is from overseas. It introduces into the world of higher education a distinction which is quite alien to the spirit in which higher education should take place.
THE EARL OF LONGFORD: My Lords, may I interrupt the noble Lord? Surely he would agree that at the present time there is an effective discrimination. The vast majority of the students in fact are financed by local authorities, and the others have to pay the fees. The discrimination is there: it is not being introduced by this Government.
LORD ROBBINS: With respect, my Lords, I will come to just that argument. For the moment let me say that I have not consulted the other members of the

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Committee on Higher Education, but I am fairly sure that had such a proposal been submitted while we were sitting, we should have rejected it without hesitation, as I am sure it would have been rejected by most of the Vice Chancellors and Principals if they had been given the chance to comment. Our proposal was for an increase in fees all round, and we went out of our way to recommend that to mitigate any hardship to the poorer overseas students there should be set up a fund to provide bursaries for such cases. But to increase fees to overseas students only is a policy which lay right outside our philosophy.
What possible defence can there be for what I may describe (without wishing to give offence) as such a ham-handed policy? How comes it that a Government which professes attachment to high educational ideals and international understanding has done something which must certainly make our name stink in the nostrils of educationists the world over? We do not know how it happened. From the way it happened it might almost seem as if a few millions of economies were needed from the Department of Education and Science and that this must have seemed an easy way of getting them; so that without overmuch reflection or consultation on the wider implications of the policy it was forthwith adopted. I have always contended that that Department had too much on its plate, and I am confirmed in this view by what has happened.
But the fundamental question—and here I come to the question which has been posed to me by the noble Earl, the Leader of the House—is: How can this policy be defended? What can be the official reply to the fundamental objections to discrimination in this field? I have racked my brains for an answer, and the only one I can find is one in which I have been anticipated to some extent by the noble Earl the Leader of the House; namely, that the subsidy which we give to most of our own students is in itself discriminatory; that a subsidy can be regarded in technical economic jargon as a negative price, so that one can say that there is already discrimination of a sort. So what is the fuss about? That seemed to me, as I
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was meditating upon it last night, quite a good brief for a Minister.
But, my Lords, it will not do. It is formalism gone quite crazy. There really is a substantial difference between making the foreigner pay a different price, just because he is a foreigner, and providing a subsidy to native students who are thought to be needy, especially if at the same time the advice be taken to provide also some subsidy to needy students from abroad. And I confess I find it difficult to understand—again I hope that I speak without offence—the (dare I say it?) spiritual myopia which cannot see the psychological asymmetry between the two policies. The one is something which is surely to be expected of an enlightened and humane Government; the other is in fact, and certainly will be taken as being, an exhibition of xenophobia, the very last thing I should have expected from this Minister and this Government.
For those reasons, my Lords, I sincerely hope that, even at this late hour, the policy will be reconsidered. If, instead, the policy were to be adopted of a non-discriminatory increase, with the appropriate internal modifications of central and local grants, and a fund for the provision of overseas bursaries for an appropriate number of deserving students, the Government would get all the advantages it hopes from the present scheme, in the shape of financial economies, and much more beside, and it would avoid the almost universal opprobrium which persistence with the scheme will involve.
7.35 p.m.
LORD TAYLOR: My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Robbins, said he would be short—I shall try to be even shorter. I have always been very proud of the fact that the National Health Service is nondiscriminatory. I have regretted the element of discrimination which exists, as my noble friend the Leader of the House pointed out, in our fees for universities. I was always rather pleased that the Labour Party Committee on Higher Education over which I presided, and on which the present Minister of Education and Science sat, recommended the abolition of fees for all students, both home and overseas. We knew that we should not get everything we asked for in that report. We got most of it, because we asked for almost exactly the

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same things as the noble Lord, Lord Robbins, recommended a few months later. We got them all out of Conservative Governments.
One thing about which we were quite sure was that there should be no discrimination against overseas students and, furthermore, contrary to the views of my noble friend Lord Annan, that there should be a continuing percentage of overseas students maintained at the level at which we were then maintaining it. I remember very well fighting with the noble Earl, Lord Dundee, on this very issue, when we thought that the noble Lord, Lord Murray of Newhaven, in his capacity on the University Grants Committee, was going back on the promise which we had extracted from the Government that there would be no reduction in the percentage of overseas students in our universities which, of course, is a temptation which comes to all Governments at times of financial crisis.
THE EARL OF LONGFORD: My Lords, I may have misunderstood my noble friend, because he appeared to be saying that he and Lord Robbins came to much the same conclusion. If I understood my noble friend aright, he wanted to abolish all fees, and Lord Robbins wanted to raise them much higher. So there was a total contrast.
LORD TAYLOR: My Lords, there was a contrast on one issue. There was agreement on 54 others, which I think is satisfactory.
THE EARL OF LONGFORD: It is the one issue we are talking about.
LORD TAYLOR: That is a perfectly legitimate point of difference, if I may say so, because it applies to so very few people in practice. It applies only to those who do not have their fees paid for them by the State, and that is the defect of the present fee situation. When I was a member of the governing body of a medical school, the only people who in fact paid fees were the sons of doctors, because they were the only people who were rich enough among the incoming medical students to justify the full payment of the fee at the time. Therefore, it was the policy of the board of the medical school to try to keep down fees for reasons of professional solidarity until directed by the Government to raise them.
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The noble Lord, Lord Robbins, was quite right when he said that the policy about fees has not been thought out at all—it has just happened. I am very glad that my noble friend the Leader of the House has told us the reason for the decision. He said that the reason is financial. He said that, I think, in an intervention in the speech of the right reverend Prelate. That is an absolutely honest and straightforward statement, and I suspect it is a completely wrong statement, because the noble Lord, Lord Murray of Newhaven, was explaining the situation that will obtain. He is, I understand, Director of the 1851 Exhibition Commonwealth Fellowships, and they have £x thousand per annum to award. If the fees are increased two-and-a-half times, it simply means that £x thousand per annum will go round a smaller number, that is, two-and-a-half times fewer students from overseas.
I am Vice Chancellor elect of a Commonwealth university, and in a few months I shall have at my disposal a sum of money wisely invested by Lord Rothermere in this country for the benefit of the students from my university. There are twelve post-graduate students from the University of Newfoundland studying in this country at Oxford and Cambridge and London, and if the fees are raised from £70 to £250 it simply means that we shall have to cut the number of students from twelve to four or five. That is all it is. The Government will not get any more money coming into the universities.
This is a situation which, I am told by my colleagues in the Association of Commonwealth Universities, applies in virtually every Commonwealth university in the old Commonwealth countries. The Vice Chancellors and the Senate have available a sum of money for sending their best postgraduate students to this country. There is the same sort of strigency with every university everywhere, apart from the exceptional American universities. They cannot increase this sum. They will simply have to send fewer of their best students. What a stupid thing to do! If there is no financial gain in it there is no point in it at all; and I honestly think that there is no financial gain in the idea. I think it is just a mistake. As the noble Lord, Lord Robbins, indicated more politely, I think it is a botched idea, a

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muddled idea, which has not been thought through. I cannot see that there is any financial benefit to be obtained.
But what a tragedy it will be for the country! It might well be that among the postgraduate students excluded from Australia will be the next Lord Florey. They will get the credit of him in Australia, or he will go to America—and serve us right! Among the postgraduate students excluded from New Zealand may well be the next Lord Rutherford, or the next Professor Porritt, who, having been professor of surgery at St. Mary's Hospital and President of the Royal College of Surgeons, is now going back to New Zealand as Governor-General. He is just the sort of person who might not have come in the top five; he might have been, No. 7 or No. 8. I must not go into his academic equipment. He is a great man, far greater than I am. But what a folly! What a thing to do!
THE EARL OF LONGFORD: My Lords, I am sorry to keep interrupting, but many noble Lords will, I am sure, have gone by the time I come to try to explain the Government's argument. The noble Lord seriously tells us that he does not see that there can be any financial gain. On the face of it there must be. We are going to reduce the subsidy to many thousands of students. That must, on the face of it, represent a financial gain.
LORD TAYLOR: My Lords, I am sorry to disagree with my noble friend. I am glad that he has raised this point. I will explain it again. The situation is that the numbers of students will be correspondingly reduced, because most of this money is coming from overseas universities which are subsidising their students to come to Oxford and Cambridge and London. Even in developed countries these students are not rich: they earn their money to go to university in the first place. There will be an actual reducation in the number of students who are coming.
The noble Lord, Lord Gladwyn, was quite right in pointing out the large number of students who are coming on their own resources, marginally. It is a marginal operation for them. I remember so well meeting a Nigerian student in
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Moscow and saying, "What on earth are you doing here?" He said, "Well, I am here, not because I want to study engineering in Moscow, but because it so happens that the University of Moscow not only gives me free education but pays me a small salary on which I can just live." He, in fact, has just completed his engineering education in Moscow. He kept up with me. He was a fine chap. That was the reason he went there. He did not go to the Patrice Lumumba University; he had no money at home. He went to the ordinary University of Moscow. What a sensible policy on the part of the Russians! But what a silly thing for us not to continue to do as we have done!
I entirely agree with the noble Lord, Lord Robbins, that if we are going to do anything we ought to increase all fees, even though it is complicated. I must say that I remember so well that there was one occasion during the life of the last Government when I said to myself, "They are 'souped': they have had it." That was the point at which the entire academic profession made it absolutely clear to this House that this could not go on. It was from that moment that the last Government went downhill steadily. We must not have this happen now. I beg of my noble friend to take back to his colleagues the message from this House, that this is a most unwise and unhappy decision, and that it is not wrong to reverse your opinions when you make a mistake. Every doctor makes mistakes. Every politician does, too, sometimes. But you jolly well learn from them; and the sooner one reverses them the better.
7.47 p.m.
LORD SHERFIELD: My Lords, my reason for intervening in this debate is that I have the honour to be the chairman of the governing body of Imperial College, which has a high percentage, perhaps one of the highest percentages, of overseas students among the institutions of higher education in this country. They number nearly one-quarter of the student body, 850 out of some 3,100. Of these 450 are continuing and 400 are freshmen. About half are studying for higher degrees, 100 are supported by the British Government and agencies,200 by foreign Governments,

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300 by other bodies and 250 are self-supporting. It is anticipated—this, of course, must largely be a matter of conjecture—that as a result of the fee increases there are likely to be declines in the numbers of the last three categories of students after the increase of fees has gone into effect.
The noble Lord, Lord Fulton, in his admirable maiden speech, laid special stress on this last category, the students who have come here under their own steam. Any decline in these numbers would be a serious loss to the college which we should greatly regret. We should feel particularly the absence of these overseas students, especially post-graduates, coming from European countries and the United States, and indeed many other countries. These make a real contribution to the college and are a valuable asset. Many of them are now liable to go elsewhere. It has been alleged in this matter that students from developed countries and the U.S.A. can afford to pay the increased fees. But this seems to me to be pure assertion; I have seen no evidence for it. The principal disadvantage for us, therefore, is the loss of talented students, but there are other disadvantages of a lesser kind with which I will not worry your Lordships.
On the main issue, I need add little to what other noble Lords have said, but I find myself much in agreement with most of them, especially the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Gladwyn, about the long-range advantage of young overseas students acquiring a knowledge and understanding of British technology. I agree with those who consider that there is the strong case for putting up tuition fees for all students to British universities. It was recommended in the Report of the noble Lord, Lord Robbins. It has been repeatedly urged since, and nothing has been done. If fees were put up all round there would be no valid cause for complaint on the overseas student front, and presumably an all-round increase could be at a lesser sum. The reasons given against such an increase have been effectively dealt with by the noble Lord, Lord Robbins, and I need not pursue them further.
There is also a strong case for devising a system of loans to students. We were told in this House at the end of 1965 that this would be studied, but I have
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myself seen no sign of any result. All we have is a measure, clumsily introduced, which overtly discriminates against the foreign student. It seems to me to be bad policy and worse psychology. We are told that the reason is financial. I am not quite sure what the financial savings are. The noble Lord, Lord Beswick, informed the House on January 19 that they would be £2½ million in a full year. To-day we have heard a figure of £5 million.
THE EARL OF LONGFORD: My Lords, may I intervene to clarify the matter? My noble friend was not referring to the total of all students. I think I am right in saying that he was dealing with university students only, but certainly not with all students.
LORD SHERFIELD: Thank you. It was not at all clear. The noble Lord, Lord Taylor, said that there would be no saving at all. I assume that the noble Earl who is to reply will ultimately be able to demolish his arguments, and, if he can, as a former Treasury official I must admit that even£2½ million, and certainly £5 million, is no trifling sum. But I suggest that the bad effect of this measure is out of all proportion to the financial savings involved and that in looking for an economy the Government have picked a bad horse. The Secretary of State has, I believe, been reported as saying that he is sticking to his decision, come what may. Here I add my entreaties to those of many other noble Lords. Is it really too late to hold up this measure, for example until fees can be increased all round? I believe it would be quite reassuring to many—and here I echo sentiments expressed by the noble Lord, Lord Gladwyn—if every once in a while the Government would listen to representations and modify a decision.
7.53 p.m.
LORD RITCHIE-CALDER: My Lords, I have to declare an interest because I am a Professor of International Relations in the University of Edinburgh—I repeat of "international relations"—a university which, for 400 years, has never closed its doors by financial discrimination against any student. Yesterday in the University of Edinburgh was Meal Monday, and in the tradition of the University that was the day when the poorest student, the ploughman's son, went back to his

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croft to get the oatmeal for his next term's porridge. That was the spirit, which we have maintained. We have never discriminated, and certainly never against foreign students. The peripatetic student since 1583 and onwards did a sort of gypsy trek of Padua, Bologna, the Sorbonne, Leiden, Edinburgh. There haw, been wandering students for 400 years against whom we have never discriminated.
In our university to-day, 900 out of 8,000 students are from overseas. I assure the Leader of the House that he will find that very few universities have been in a position to estimate what in fact an overseas student is, for it is hard to define. We have been unable to determine what proportion of the whole the overseas students represent, certainly in regard to the unsponsored students. But of those 900 students, 600 will have to meet the increased fees.
This decision is a great embarrassment to everybody in the universities at the moment, and great indignation has been engendered. Between now and the beginning of the next term a great many students, even if they are not directly suffering this hardship, will have to withdraw or will not be reinforced in the universities from home. The suggestion is that somehow we are going to encourage them to go to universities in their own countries. I have spent a great deal of my life travelling around and I have seen the development of universities in the developing countries. I know the struggle they are having, not only to create universities but to staff them.
I should like to ask the Leader of the House how one creates the training and the education in those universities to accept and reinforce the student undergraduates in their own universities if one is not training and teaching the people who are going to train and teach them. The only places at which they can be trained and taught are in the centres of higher learning in this country or elsewhere. I assure you that if it is not this country it will be elsewhere. There again, I suggest we are making a serious mistake. Let us make no mistake about it, in the present situation we are discouraging the students from coming here and we are losing them. Whatever hardship machinery one creates, we are at this
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moment losing our present students, who are now dithering about whether to go home. We are losing our future students because at the moment there is no way in which they can judge what will happen beyond this term.
I ask your Lordships to consider the people who are training for G.C.E. and who expect to be accepted in our universities—people for whom no institution at home can provide. And I wonder whether anybody has considered the position of the unsponsored student. I am not referring to the Government-sponsored student who will possibly get a£50 rebate via the bookkeeping system between the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Overseas Development; I am referring to people who have no cover at all, but who are financed by their tribes, like the Ibo villagers who come from Nigeria to our universities, or those who are sent by their churches—in this way Julius Nyerere came to us in Edinburgh in this way Bill Moyers (President Johnson's late special assistant), came to Edinburgh from Texas. In these situations there is no way in which the students can be reinforced from home, nor any way in which they can anticipate continuing here. The hardship is not merely a question of what is going to happen. We are wrecking the confidence of students who are now in this term moving into their examination period. We are disturbing the whole equilibrium of the university.
I should like to follow my noble friend Lord Taylor, and assure the Front Bench that if ever there was a situation which has produced complete and absolute solidarity in the whole academic world of the universities, it is this. There has been complete unanimity on this matter between the Courts—and I have a member of our Court here in Lord Balerno£senators, the professors and the entire student representative body. This is one case in which the students are absolutely and completely identified with their colleagues in other spheres. We have, in Edinburgh, as I say, a particular interest in this question because we have over the years encouraged overseas students, particularly those from the Colonies, and from a quick breakdown of the figures I see that we have had students from every country in the world.

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In these circumstances, what this decision amounts to, and must amount to, can be nothing but absolute discrimination. At one protest meeting in Edinburgh a Nigerian student got up and provided a salutary example. He said, referring to a number of his fellow students from overseas: "He, and others, has to-night in his pocket a blank cheque for millions of pounds, because he and those other students are going back to be a Minister, a director of irrigation, a man who is going to be ordering, a man who is going to teach people to do the ordering." This I believe to be the situation. It is so extremely shortsighted. With deference, I ask the Leader of the House to do his arithmetic, because I am afraid that none of us in the universities is convinced that the Minister of Education has done his arithmetic. We do not believe that there is going to be recoupal of this amount—and I agree with my noble friend Lord Taylor—because the students are not going to come, and if they are not coming they are not paying.
THE EARL OF LONGFORD: My Lords, may I ask one question? Does the noble Lord really mean that we lose money every time a student does not come? We may lose spiritual values, but does the noble Lord say that we lose money?
LORD RITCHIE-CALDER: My Lords, if a student does not come you are not recovering. The University of Edinburgh, for example, are not recovering in the increased charges the comparative increase which you are not charging to your own students.
THE EARL OF LONGFORD: My Lords, since the noble Lord has accused the Minister of being ignorant of elementary mathematics, may I very humbly suggest that the noble Lord is ignorant of elementary logic?
LORD RITCHIE-CALDER: I am sorry, my Lords. There must be some weakness somewhere in our accountancy.
THE EARL OF LONGFORD: There is.
LORD RITCHIE-CALDER: if we are going to recover £2,500,000 or £5 million or whatever it may be from the incoming students and the students do not come, how will you recover anything? Would the noble Earl tell me?
THE EARL OF LONGFORD: My Lords, to put it very simply, you do not have to recover it if you do not spend it first.
LORD RITCHIE-CALDER: My Lords, I come from a country where we say, "When the kale pot is on the hob, what is an extra plate?" We are spending the money on the universities and the places, but I assure your Lordships that the places which would have been occupied by overseas students will not be occupied in the coming terms, because we shall not even be replacing them by our own students.
THE EARL OF LONGFORD: My Lords, the noble Lord is incorrigible, but I hope he will still be here when I reply.
LORD RITCHIE-CALDER: I will.
8.2 p.m.
THE EARL OF PERTH: My Lords, I am not going to intervene on that particular argument, except to say that whether or not there is a saving in money there is certainly a loss of foreign exchange. I understand that the Government are very anxious about our present foreign exchange position, so from that angle the argument is unanswerable, and the proposal is unwise. Having said that, as a taxpayer I think all your Lordships would rejoice if the Government could find ways of saving £5 million in a full year and £2 million this year.
Before I would accept this relief to the taxpayers, I should like to ask two questions. First, is the proposal in our long-term interest and, secondly, is it fair and just? All noble Lords who have spoken to-night have brought out very clearly that it is certainly not in our long-term interest. A great number of overseas students go back home and do great things in the political or commercial worlds, which later accrue to our advantage. Nowadays this is of particular importance for us, when our great Colonial Civil Service is no longer operating in those territories. The people who have been students here are just those who will keep our interests going, but in some way or other we intend to damage that relationship.
My other question was whether it is fair and just. I will not talk on the question of discrimination; many of your Lordships have hammered that home hard

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enough. I am worried, as so many other noble Lords have been worried, about those who are working here already, and about the hardship that will come to them, particularly the unsponsored private students, who represent about half the number. Your Lordships may say, "Well, they are going to be hurt only to the tune of £50 a year". But £50 a year is a 70 per cent. increase in the charges to them, and that is very serious. I know that in some degree the Government themselves have recognised this fact, in that they have said that they want to help those who are sponsored by this Government, or those who are sponsored by Governments overseas. But why discriminate? Why not help the unsponsored ones at the same time?
There is one point of detail about which I am very worried, and that is the question of the safeguards for students who have already embarked on courses. Will those safeguards apply to the students who at this moment are doing "A" level courses, and who have been told that if they succeed in passing they will in due course have a university career, because if they do not I should like to ask what will happen to them. They will 20 through the rest of the course, and then subsequently be asked to pay £250 a year at the university, which they cannot do, so that in a sense they are here entirely under false pretences. I only hope that this detailed point will be taken into account.
I very much hope that the Government will withdraw altogether the circular of December 21. What a Christmas present it must have been for many of the students to hear about! If the Government find that they cannot withdraw the circular, then we must go back to the suggestion in the Robbins Report of a fund to help those who are working here at the present time. I have seen a memorandum put to the Minister by a group of bodies who are very interested in overseas students, headed by the Africa Educational Trust, in which they suggest that the figure for that fund should be £1 million. I hope that the Government will consider that suggestion, and if they will not support it, I would appeal to the students and say to them, "Do not strike, but draw up your own fund. Try to raise £2 a head among you." That would pro-
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vide £500,000, and I am quite sure that with all their experience of schemes like the Oxfam Fund they would be able to raise a similar amount from others of their friends. I am sure there is not one of your Lordships who has spoken to-night, who would not willingly subscribe if appealed to. That fund would be a testimony to the bad faith of a Government, to the unfairness of a Government's action. It would be a testimony from all of the students, and it would not be forgotten in future days at elections or otherwise.
I do not like threats, and I would appeal to the Government to yield altogether. But if they cannot do that, I would ask them to postpone action for another year so that they may have a chance of working things out on a more proper and a fairer basis, taking particularly into account the problems of the students who are here at the present time. That would cost them only £2 million— and not even that if they would agree to set up a fund to take care of those who are here at the present time. So one is asking for something which is very small but of tremendous importance to the students who are here, to the whose of the academic world, and to all of those countries overseas who look to this country for help in educational matters.
8.8 p.m.
LORD MITCHISON: My Lords, if anything could persuade me that this particular measure was right, it would be the general condemnation which it has received from every noble Lord who has spoken. I respect, I admire and I much like my noble Leader, and I like to see an Irishman not just facing the world as Athanasius did, but drawing out his shillelagh, and obviously drawing it out to face the House of Lords as it is at present. Let us take another metaphor. My noble Leader had a shillelagh in hand to cope with a whole hornets' nest of vanishing Vice Chancellors. There is not one left, I think.
LORD TAYLOR: Yes, there is: just one.
LORD MITCHISON: The noble Lord is the only one.
THE EARL OF LONGFORD: A Vice Chancellor-elect.
LORD MITCHISON: I do not know what a hornet-elect can be, but a hornet.

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This is a serious matter, and I am not going to talk about the detail of it in any way. It amounts at the moment to what a plain man, and particularly a plain overseas student, will certainly regard as discrimination. It may be that, to balance it, something or other is going to be done later which will affect other students, but for the moment there it is.
There is another trouble about it. This scheme will not prevent an influx of students from some prosperous part of America or from one of the old Dominions. It may change the character of the influx, but there will be enough people from those places able to afford to come and anxious to afford to come. The people it is going to hit are the poor people from poor countries, especially from poor countries. In other cases the country itself may be able to help, but some of these countries are miserably and wretchedly poor. I stood up here some time ago to say to your Lordships that I thought we had never enfranchised a poorer country than Botswana. We left it, in a five-year drought, without a water supply, after decades of occupation. I am not on anything but its poverty to-day. When you are dealing with that kind of country, you just will not get students from it. You will, of course, get those who can be supported within the very limited resources of the country itself, or those who manage to get support in some other way; but there will be those shut out, and they will be the very poorest.
My Lords, I am Socialist enough to say that quite often the very poorest are the very wisest. They learn out of suffering. From the ranks of the humbler people in this country we have had some very distinguished men indeed. The Ernie Bevins, it may be, or the others from overseas countries (the many others; the Keir Hardies, in fact) will be the people who will be shut out from coming here. What is going to happen? There will be fewer of them from the very poor countries, but they will naturally seek to go elsewhere. One noble Lord mentioned going to Russia. I always keep a few Communists hidden under the desk here just to bring them out and show them to your Lordships—very frightening people! But taking the matter seriously, as one must, I ask; Is it altogether wise to drive so many people
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to other countries purely on the grounds that they can afford, somehow or another, to go there but cannot afford to come here? I believe in this country, and so, with the usual and proper reservations of any Irishman, does, I am sure, my noble Leader. We have something to offer—a very great deal to offer—in our educational system. I think it badly needs looking at from time to time, and it has had it lately, but I should be sorry to see any general reduction in the education expenses which we ask the taxpayer to carry. I think they are, to use an old-fashioned phrase, the best investment that one can make.
That being the position, what would one ask the Government to do? It is possible to think up ingenious ways of making the same sort of financial gain in another way without, for instance, introducing the element of discrimination. It is too late for this. This particular measure has been introduced. It has had great publicity, not only in this country but in other countries. I humbly suggest to my noble friend that at this moment, public opinion being what it is, the sensible thing to do—I am not going to say "the brave thing to do": I do not believe in this nonsense about political bravery—and the right thing to do, is simply to withdraw this particular measure. What follows after it is another matter. It is in the form of advice to the universities. Let it be just withdrawn. It is sometimes wise and sometimes right to admit a mistake. It is not an enormous mistake. It is a very serious one; but, if the reasons behind it are financial, the amounts involved are comparatively small. I earnestly hope, therefore, that it is going to be withdrawn.
I make my last appeal—because it is an appeal—to the Government from a slightly different angle. I have been a loyal, perhaps an over-loyal, member of the Labour Party for very many years. I am getting on in age. So are many other noble Lords here. I simply say this: I cannot believe that we are fulfilling our duty to the world at large if we let this comparatively small thing go through in its present form. I cannot believe that. It seems to me that we have a responsibility towards the emergent countries, a responsibility towards other

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countries which one cannot describe, perhaps, either as emergent or as emerged, and a general responsibility to the world. I do not want to see the channels of learning and teaching clogged by financial difficulties. I think we must open them and keep them open at all costs.
What we are considering to-day is, in another form, the same sort of problem that arises out of what is sometimes called the brain-drain. I entirely agreed with my noble friend Lord Taylor when, in a discussion on the brain-drain the other day, he said he did not mind it a bit; he wanted learning and teaching to flow freely over the world. That, I believe, is the real and fundamental answer to the question we are asking ourselves to-day, and it is for that reason that I would reject alternatives which say, "We will raise the money out of education in some other form".
The right thing to do is to drop this measure and leave it at that; and if, afterwards, the Government find they have got to do something else, then they should do it. We are told that we cannot afford it. One is always told this. We are told that it is a question of money, and that money is not real. It is. It is a medium of exchange; and what we are dealing with to-day is a certain amount of goods and services which we ought to make available to other countries in the world. Do not let us get mesmerised about this. We are asked, in fact, to lower our own standards by an infinitesimal amount in order to help to bring up the standards of other parts of the world. I simply say: what is wrong with that? Look around in this city; look at some of the poor countries in the world. Surely it is our duty not to do anything that will make that gap, already too wide, already widening, even wider? I hope that the Government will reconsider this measure, and will drop it.
8.19 p.m.
LORD FERRIER: My Lords, I rise to support the noble Lord, Lord Gladwyn, in his appeal to the Government in this matter, and I do so as Chairman of the Edinburgh Christian Council for Overseas Students. I have been able to put aside two speeches this evening, one before the last three speeches and another one now, because so many of the points
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that have been made are points which at this stage I wish only to reinforce.
First of all, I agree very strongly with the noble Lord, Lord Murray of Newhaven—the vanishing Vice Chancellor—in what he said. I am not so disposed to set such enormous store by the fear of discrimination being felt by these overseas students, though what the noble Lord, Lord Ritchie-Calder, said was certainly very moving. But I believe that great importance must be laid, as the noble Lord, Lord Murray of Newhaven, said, on the idealism of the student and on the frightful blow this has meant to him, not only in terms of his financial anxieties—and many of the poor students, such as those to whom the noble Lord, Lord Mitchison, referred, have suffered a grievous blow in this matter—but also to his amour propre, especially the student who comes from one of the emerging nations.
The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Chichester touched on this most poignantly. He begged the Government to introduce at least some postponement of this measure. I should like to go as far as the noble Lord, Lord Mitchison, has gone and to say, "Withdraw it altogether"—although that may not be so popular advice to the Government, coming from this side of the House, as it may have been, if popular at all, coming from behind them. But surely, as the noble Earl, Lord Perth, has said, the students already here should be allowed to finish their studies to the end. And when I say "to the end" I turn to the famous Statement of December 21 and draw attention to one particular phrase at the end of section 4:
"…which extended to the next academic year will be limited to £50 a year till the end of their present course."
What is meant by "course"? Here I want to reinforce what the noble Earl, Lord Perth said: that if this means that a student studying for his "Highers" is going to be deemed to have reached the end of his course when he comes to take up a place available to him in the university, it is not £50 but £250 that goes on. If that is what is meant, surely at least the students already here, whether they be in universities or preparing for the university, should be allowed to finish their course on its present terms, on the terms on which they came, if only because any other solution on the basis of

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subsidising the poor people who are paying their own fees, or are having their fees paid for them by their families, means the introduction of a small measure of means test which is, of course, anathema to the Socialists.
My Lords, I make no reference to the question of postgraduate studies to which other noble Lords have referred. I have some figures here—with most of which I will not weary your Lordships, because the noble Lord, Lord Ritchie-Calder has given them—for the University of Edinburgh. The noble Lord said that there are some 900 students, of whom some 600 are affected in this way, being privately financed students, who are going to suffer and who are already suffering this bitter blow to their amour propre and to their future, both financial and otherwise. Noble Lords will realise that it is not a question of sacrificing another year or two of studies; it is a question of sacrificing the whole of youth, the whole period of development for which great sacrifice has been made and which might well have been spent in another country.
I have a letter from our Secretary in Edinburgh. He gave me some figures from the Napier Technical College and he said that there are students affected in that way there
"who intend completing at Advanced Higher Levels at either the end of this or of next academic year. The number is 46. There are a further 9 students at Skerry's College."
He went on to say:
"The Vice-Principal of Skerry's tells me that one of his students has calculated that it would have been cheaper for him to go to the United States for his student career than to have begun here, under these new circumstances."
I give these details only to reinforce what was said by so many noble Lords.
I would urge the Government to study what was said last week in the debate on world population in terms of the spreading of knowledge and understanding in more ways than one. I said then:
"Today's students will be the leaders of the 'eighties, and the best possible ambassadors of a doctrine of modern life and of planned parenthood."—[OFFICIAL REPORT. 9/2/67, col. 1511.]
I see that the noble Lord, Lord Murray of Newhaven, has resumed his seat. I must apologise for hinting that he might have set off for another place. I am glad
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to see him, because I agree with what he said.
The noble Lord, Lord Taylor, made the interesting suggestion that what is happening now is evidence that the Government are on their way out. Much as I hope that this is the case, I must say that, knowing what Socialists imagine Tories to be—and I am not sure that the noble Lord, Lord Mitchison, is not rather of this opinion—they must think this measure might well have come from a Tory Government, which, of course, it never would.
LORD MITCHISON: The prevalent sin of the Tories is doing nothing; writing no letters; doing nothing!
LORD FERRIER: As I said when I began, I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Mitchison, that the right thing to do is to withdraw the whole of this. But if that is not possible (though I hope it may be), I urge that the proposals should not apply, in any circumstances, to any students being financed by their own families or their own means who have already started their courses in this country, no matter what stage in those courses they may have reached.
8.27 p.m.
LORD REAY: My Lords, if I may, I should like to have a closer look at the financial considerations which the Government claim have imposed the necessity of this decision upon them. The Government claim, in the first place, that this measure will effect a full-year net saving of £5 million. There is no question here of foreign exchange; this is purely a matter of additional revenue which will be raised on the internal current account. This is based on an assumption that the number of students will not decline from the present level; and I would support those speakers who have urged the extreme unlikelihood of this.
There is a stronger point to raise in argument against the assumption of the Government. This is that it ignores the fact that foreign students, except in cases where they are in receipt of British Government grants, are very much cheaper to educate than British students. The reason is that foreign students, except in as mall number of cases where they are sponsored by the British Government, receive no grants at the universities.

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British students, in virtually all cases, receive local authority grants. The figure must be about 90 per cent. in the case of the universities. In other words, for each foreign student deterred from coming to this country as a result of this decision—and the Government are assuming (at least, they look as though they are assuming) that some will be deterred in so far as the assumption of the saving is based on a belief that there will be no further net increase in the income of foreign students—if the place of that foreign student be taken by a British student, the result will be an additional charge on public funds of an amount equal to the grants which the students will receive. It needs only a deterrence of some 5,000 foreign students who might otherwise have come here, and their replacement by British students, to offset more or less (assuming a grant of some £500 per head) half of the supposed saving of £5 million. What it clearly cannot be in the long term is a saving, unless it results in the replacement of those who do not come with a class that pays a higher fee.
I turn to the question of foreign exchange, where it seems to me the thinking has been even odder. Each foreign student actually brings foreign exchange here. In each case he figures as on the credit side of our balance-of-payments sheet. It follows, therefore, that this is a form of aid which I think must be unique, in that it is a form which actually earns us foreign exchange. In other words, the effect of this decision of the Government will result in the debit of our balance-of-payments account. It is not a cut in foreign expenditure at all; it is precisely the reverse. One might ask, is it cheaper to send out to foreign countries teachers and technicians with their families, who must be supported and who are direct charge on the balance of payments account—as the Ministry of Overseas Development are currently doing—or to bring the peoples from these foreign countries here to be trained, who will return as teachers and experts themselves at no cost to us in terms of foreign exchange?
Finally, there is, the argument which has already been referred to, of the longer-term commercial use that the education of foreign students in this country un-
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doubtedly is to us. Quite apart from the fact that a great number of students will leave this country with a greater knowledge of our institutions, many will have developed more precise affinities with the institutions of this country. They will have a knowledge of our industries, our technical products and our technical language, and a familiarity with the range of our more important skills. They will return home to become diplomats, or to be in charge of Government contracts; or they may be directors in private firms which place contracts abroad. Or they may become Ministers in foreign Governments.
I submit that it is not for sentimental reasons alone that the French have placed such emphasis on disseminating their culture abroad, and it is in this narrow field of financial considerations, and simple commercial effectiveness, that I think we are far behind the United States, Germany, France or Russia. Yet undoubtedly the consequence of this measure will be that we shall fall yet further behind. I think, therefore, that, from whatever angle we look at it, the financial justification for this measure is nonsense. I leave it to your Lordships to say whether you believe that the Government do not see this, or whether you tend to question the integrity of the claim that they put forward to justify this measure.
Some emphasis has been put on the increase that has occurred in recent years in the foreign student population. This increase, of course, has been very much smaller than that of British students, with the result that the proportion of foreign students to British students has dropped. I would accept the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Annan, that this is not something in itself to which to object. Secondly, however, the rate of increase of foreign students into this country has been declining. If we take the average of the last two years, for university students and technical college students it will be found that, compared with the average of the previous two years, the reduction is roughly half.
It has been claimed that the rich from abroad are being subsidised. Apart from the fact, to which my noble friend Lord Gladwyn referred, that foreign students who come from rich countries are not

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necessarily rich themselves (if they were, I wonder why we should bother to provide our own local authority grants), three times as many come from countries which have been classified by the O.E.C.D. as developing countries as come from countries classified as developed. Here we should look at some of the figures. If you look at the figures of those from the Commonwealth who are studying in British universities, you find that in 1965–66 there were some 9,000. Of these, 4,400 came from five countries—India, Pakistan, Nigeria, Kenya and Ghana. From Australia and Canada there were only 1,100.
If one takes the technical colleges the picture is even more revealing. From the Commonwealth there came to this country 11,000. Of these, 5,900 came from those same five developing countries. From Australia and Canada there came only 110. It is on the poor countries, obviously, that this extra cost will impose the harshest burden, for it is on people from those countries that the margins for being able to afford an extra amount of money are bound to be smaller. This applies principally in countries like Nigeria, where it is traditional for a family to save together in order to send the brightest boy to be educated in this country. For those people this extra burden may well be insupportable; and, as I think the noble Lord, Lord Murray of Newhaven, said, it is just this class of student, the foreign, unsponsored student, that our universities would be most loth to lose. But they will certainly be the hardest hit.
My Lords, there is another reason why they may be discouraged which is worth mentioning, in so far as it applies to foreign Government-sponsored students as much as to the privately financed students. It is the question of foreign exchange. All students coming to this country from abroad will have to get permission from their Governments to spend, or to receive, the additional amount of foreign exchange required to be spent on education. In all cases the Governments will have to provide it, in the case of sponsored students, or give permission for it, in the case of un-sponsored students. Many of these countries have far more difficult and exacting foreign exchange problems than we have, and I think it would be extremely un-
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likely, if there were a substantial number of cases, that this foreign exchange would be made available by the Governments of the countries concerned. One thing is clear: that a sure way to increase the proportion of rich students from abroad studying in this country is to adopt this measure. It has been suggested that the universities might remit this charge. I wonder. I should like to ask the Government, how many universities they consider will do this.
I think that possibly the worse claim that has been made, or hinted at, is that this country is particularly generous in its treatment of foreign students. In absolute terms this is factually untrue. At the present moment £70 is charged per annum for a foreign student in this country. Germany charges a maximum of £60 per annum for each foreign student. The Netherlands, and the State Universities of Japan charge a maximum of £25; Italy charges a maximum of £17; France charges a maximum of £10. The U.S.S.R., the U.A.R., Denmark and Norway charge nothing at all. It is the reverse of the truth, also, that we educate a great many more of the students from other countries than they educate of ours. The French Embassy say that the figure for British students studying in France (they say that if it is incorrect, it is on the low side) is 2,800. The figure of French students studying here at universities and technical colleges is only 300.
It might be thought that, at a time when we are stretching for the Common Market, and when Europe, and France in particular, is doubtful whether our hearts are actually in the project of joining Europe, we could do better than positively to discourage this interchange. It is not surprising that the French and the Italian Press, as I know to be the case, have commented on this decision and have speculated on the possibility of their countries' retaliating. This decision will make education in this country a relatively less attractive financial proposition to foreign students. Other things being equal, they will tend to choose education which is cheaper in the other countries that I have mentioned. Already in a number of these countries the proportionate increase in foreign students has been much larger than in this country. In Italy, for example over

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the three years 1961 to 1964 there has been a 64 per cent. increase.
It is overtly discriminatory, as destructive as much for its evident intent of being discriminatory as for its effect in being so. As the noble Lord, Lord Murray of Newhaven, said, unquestionably it is an "implication that we are less welcome than we were." Do we want to be virtually alone in the world, developed and developing, as a country that discriminates between foreign students and our own students? I maintain that this is a decision against all international academic principles of equality. It is a decision that has run into almost "universal opprobrium", to use the phrase of the noble Lord, Lord Robbins, and not insignificantly into a great deal of protest from British students. I consider that this is a measure which is outrageous on the part of a Government that claims to be the Government of a country that is liberal and civilised, that claims to have an interest in improving the poor and unstable countries of the world, that claims to see our future as European and that claims to have an interest in other countries' interest in us.
8.42 p.m.
LORD BALERNO: My Lords, we must all be grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Gladwyn, for initiating this debate and for making such a close analysis of the problem. There is one point he put forward which was further brought out by the noble Lords, Lord Murray of Newhaven, and Lord Robbins, and which I want to emphasise, because I think it is the root cause of the whole present trouble. The cost of living and inflation have been operating in recent years, but the increase in university fees has been relatively insubstantial. This goes back over a series of Governments and the academics themselves cannot be free from blame for not appreciating it. We are as much to blame as Governments and civil servants are. Excuses can be made, but the time at which action should have been taken was at the time of the report of Sir Colin Anderson on grants to students. At that time university fees should have been raised to a realistic level.
The universities then would have reduced their dependence somewhat upon
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direct university grants. The figure given by the noble Lord, Lord Robbins, is significant and I venture to repeat it. In 1939, 30 per cent. of university income came from fees. This has been reduced to 7 per cent. This is a significant comparison indeed. I would direct your Lordships' attention to a Paper which has recently been written by the Master of Pembroke, Oxford, upon the universities and the State. I am not going to quote at length, but in one part where he pleads for the consideration of loans to students, either in addition to or instead of grants, Mr. MacCallum says:
"The rewards of a university education are now so great, other sources of power and esteem being so much less, it is social justice that they pay for it, if not now, then by some long-term repayment, such as some other countries impose."
I think this is the time for the consideration of this proposition, and I am slightly surprised that the point was not made by either the noble Lord, Lord Gladwyn, or the noble Lord, Lord Reay.
The country which has perhaps done more than any other in loans for university students is the United States of America. A great part of the assistance given to students is in the form of loans. I have here the United States Budget which has just been sent to Congress and which shows that the total Federal aid for college and graduate students, both in direct grant and in servicing of loans, is being trebled in three years, going up from 418 million dollars to 1,127 million dollars in 1968. Individual grants are going up from the equivalent of £150 a year per student to something like £180. It is significant that at this time the United States should be extending aid given to students. At the same time as the Federal Government is doing this, so are certain of the State Governments.
I should like to support what my colleague—I was going to say "my noble friend", and though sitting on the opposite side I think that I could say that—Lord Ritchie-Calder has said of the Edinburgh students, 40 per cent. of whom come from overseas, 600 being unsponsored—a point which was made also by my noble friend Lord Ferrier. To that batch, I should like to add an interesting batch of 100 to 150 overseas students who come, and have been coming for many years, from Norway to what is now

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the Heriot Watt University. This has been a long-standing academic connection. It is more than 1,000 years since the Kingdom of Scotland was at war with Norway and over those 1,000 years we have maintained these ties. This action is just going to insert a bit of unnecessary friction. Of these Norwegian students who come to study in Edinburgh, a large proportion do not return to Norway for their future life. They seek employment elsewhere, and a number of them are supplementing the technological work which has to be done in industry in this country. To a certain extent they are balancing the brain drain which is going out.
It seems to me a great pity that it is on this point of fees that the clash is coming between the State and the universities. A lot of people have said that as the universities became more and more dependent upon the State there would eventually be a clash between the State and the universities. It seems to me that this is not a point on which we should be clashing, and there ought not to be a major dispute here. I should like to say to the Government that they should be extremely careful on this.
The biggest university in the world, the University of California, has just been thrown into considerable confusion through the State imposing certain edicts, certain dicta, regarding fees: so much so that it was found necessary to remove the head of the University at exceedingly short notice. The repercussions of that will be going on for some time and will be much greater than appeared at the time that the State interfered. I think that the noble Lord, Lord Annan, hit the nail on the head when he described the action of the Government as hitting a very sensitive nerve.
8.51 p.m.
LORD BROCKWAY: My Lords, my name does not appear on the list of speakers circulated to-day, although I did give notice of my desire to take part in the debate. Perhaps the House will permit me to speak, as I had the good fortune three weeks ago to be the first of your Lordships who raised this issue here. I propose to make only one point, and to make one plea. There has been some dispute as to whether the increased charges for overseas students will lead
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to a limitation of their number. I think that undoubtedly it will, in the first instance; but whether it will in the long run is a matter of doubt. However, I would put this argument to the Leader of the House: whether it reduces the number of students or not, it will change the composition and character of the students who come to this country.
One recognises at once that there are overseas students whose parents can well afford to pay for their university education here. One finds, particularly at Oxford and Cambridge, sons of princely houses, of sheiks, of chiefs in Africa and of native businessmen; those sons from privileged houses will still be able to come to our universities. But the House will forgive me if I have much more in mind the kind of family of which the noble Lord, Lord Reay, spoke a few minutes ago. I am thinking at this moment of a family in Nigeria. Its members are living in a condition which is just above subsistence level, but the parents save and pool their resources to enable at least one of the children—obviously they would like more to do so—to come to a university in this country. I am distressed that a Government which calls itself Socialist should be introducing a measure under which those who will suffer most are the poorest. Those of us who know such families as I have described know that their passion for education is almost a religion. They desire nothing more in the world except the opportunity of education for their children. To be limiting the very small opportunities that they have now to give their children that chance is something which I am very sorry indeed to find a Government of my Party introducing.
I want to look at this problem from the other side of the picture. I have many friends who are students from Asian and African countries. I know of their struggle. I know how they have difficulty, particularly in London, of meeting the high rents which are charged for their often wretched lodgings. Again, I put it to the Leader of the House (and I hope he will listen to me on this point), that just as this measure will affect the homes of the people in Nigeria who are the poorest, so it will do most harm to the students in this country who are the poorest—they who have a struggle to

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meet, even at the present charges, the cost of living here. I appeal to the Socialist conscience of the Leader of the House to think of that consideration.
The plea that I make to the Leader of the House is this. He must have been deeply impressed by this debate to-day. I can imagine that there might have been a time when he would have said that he was not very deeply impressed by an overwhelming opinion expressed in this House. He cannot say that about the debate to-day. The extraordinary thing about this debate has been the absolute unanimity of expression of those from our universities, as it is the unanimous expression in the universities themselves. From all sides of this House Members have pleaded for the withdrawal of this measure, not in any partisan, sectarian, or Party spirit, but because in every part of the House we believe that it is something of which our country should be ashamed, and of which a Socialist Government particularly should be ashamed. My plea to the noble Earl is to take the message of this debate to his colleagues; to acknowledge the mistake that has been made—it is a big thing to acknowledge mistakes when they have been made, but it is not something of which one should be ashamed—and seek to solve this problem in a bigger and better way.
8.59 p.m.
THE EARL OF LONGFORD: My Lords, I am very glad that the noble Lord, Lord Brockway, intervened and struck a note which must certainly meet with a response in any humanitarian person, whether he be Socialist like myself, or whatever his political or, indeed, religious allegiance may be. I hope that before I close—and that will not be for a long, long time yet—I might, I say only "might", bring him a small scrap of consolation. I cannot say more. But I hope I would say just a little something that might ease some of his very understandable anxieties. But as I say, that will be a long time from now.
My Lords, I think we are all—I know we are all—deeply grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Gladwyn, for opening this debate. He strove hard to be dispassionate. When a noble Lord starts
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by saying that he intends to be dispassionate or objective, I usually fear the worst—I know that he is going to make a particularly nasty kind of Party speech. But that was not at all the case with the noble Lord. I felt that he had studied the Government point of view and looked at the facts, and I congratulate him on the total result—which does not mean I agree with him. I have a long statement, as the House will realise, setting out the Government's point of view, which I think is what would be expected, and showing the Government's case which has not yet been deployed fully in either House.
However, before coming to this statement, may I make just one or two general comments, if only for the benefit of noble Lords who fall by the wayside; in other words, for those who leave the House before I reach the end? To take up one attractive, but I think rather erroneous, point made by the noble Lord, Lord Ritchie-Calder, he announced that Edinburgh University had been open to all students for hundreds of years—I think he said 400 years. He probably has not studied the history—
LORD RITCHIE-CALDER: My Lords, I said "without financial discrimination".
THE EARL OF LONGFORD: Without financial discrimination—just religious discrimination? I do not honestly feel that Edinburgh comes off any better from the noble Lord's explanation, although I enjoyed his speech very greatly.
My Lords, there was this curious argument that the Treasury did not even know their own business; that, apart from being hard-hearted and unaware of the finer values, they did not even know whether they were liable to make or to lose money out of this decision. If the noble Lord cannot understand that they would save money, whether it is £5 million, or at any rate several million pounds, under this plan, I will not pursue the matter. I am afraid it is too late at night for me to set it out again. But I think it is obvious there would be some saving, whatever the exact figure.
I would say that the note struck most often, as it was struck in response to an intervention of mine by the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, was this insistence that

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there must be no discrimination, and that the plan of the Government was discriminatory. He said himself (if I understood him aright), in speaking for the Opposition, that the Opposition were not averse to raising fees in principle. That has been said by various noble Lords, though not all. I think there might be said to be two schools of thought on that issue. I think there was a preponderance of those who dealt with the question in favour of raising fees, but they said it must be done in a non-discriminatory way. I will come to that in more detail later. But I would say what I ventured to place before the noble Lord, Lord Robbins, which point he anticipated when preparing his own remarks. I arrived at it without an undue amount of official assistance. It struck me that the point was there. I arrived at the point to some extent, at least, through the workings of my own mind—that is, that discrimination exists already. We have the reality of discrimination, and the question is whether we now add the appearance. That is really one of the main issues: Are we going to add the appearance of discrimination, so that anybody who has not gone into the question perhaps as closely as he should describes it as discriminatory, when he does not realise that it was discriminatory before? That was part of the argument addressed to us by the right reverend Prelate. He said that we were drawing back from a commitment. Then he slightly qualified that— I am speaking subject to his correction—and said that we appeared to be drawing back. I was wondering whether noble Lords were denouncing what we were doing, or what we seemed to be doing.
What we seem to be doing can become important. I do not want to turn it aside, but it is not the same thing as a discriminatory act. An act which is understood to be discriminatory is not the same as a new act of discrimination. Here I must say a word of protest. I do not say that I have been quiet all the afternoon and evening, but I must say a word of protest to my old chief and dear friend Lord Robbins. He used such violent language. I do not remember what he said last time about the Secretary of State, Mr. Crosland, but the last time we had a university debate I think he accused him of apartheid. I think the noble Lord denounced him very savagely that time, and now again he
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comes up with these very strong words like "spiritual apartheid."
LORD ROBBINS: My Lords, I said "financial apartheid". The adjective was "financial". I referred to "spiritual myopia".
THE EARL OF LONGFORD: My Lords, whenever I am talking about a spiritual issue someone introduces finance, and vice versa. But last time the noble Lord was very severe. I apologise for mishearing the word, but at any rate there was this reference to apartheid.
If we are really serious—and I am sure we are being serious—this will be widely misunderstood throughout Asia and Africa. By his sort of ecstasy of denunciation, though well understood and appreciated here and among his friends, the noble Lord does nothing to help in Asia and Africa. I would say, with great respect, that he has done a real disservice to the very cause he has at heart; and if it does go out all over the world that this is a policy of discrimination, quite a few of your Lordships will have contributed to that very end this evening. I hope that one or two noble Lords will wonder whether there might not be a grain of truth in what I am placing before them now.
Let us just see whether we are drawing in our skirts or drawing away from our commitments. Are we showing ourselves less ready to help our less fortunate brethren? Take the assistance given to the overseas students. This has gone up. It has gone up very rapidly in recent years. It has gone up during the last four years from £10 million to £18 million. If we go a little wider and take overseas aid, excluding the figures I have just given, excluding the subsidy to the education of overseas students, the figure has gone up from £170 million to £205 million, an increase of over 20 per cent. Within that figure—and I am speaking to the right reverend Prelate particularly but, of course, to the whole House—excluding all subsidy to overseas students, the figure for assistance given to education overseas has gone up from £10·3 million in 1961–62 to £17·6 million in 1965–66. That is an increase of over 70 per cent. So within the figure of overseas aid in the last four years—and this is not in any way a Party point because it is a process which has gone

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on throughout the period—the emphasis on education has been markedly increased. So when noble Lords speak as if we had suddenly turned our hearts and minds against educating our less well placed fellow men, they should look at the figures and they would recognise that their conclusion is quite false.
That is a general prelude. It would be absolutely wrong to assume that we are shutting the door to foreign students. I would say, clearly, so that it goes on record and possibly goes out along with other more violent remarks, that we welcome overseas students as warmly as ever, and in view of possible misunderstandings I hope they will realise that we welcome them still more warmly than ever. If it would do any good I would say that twice, and ring a bell, as our former Leader used to do when he had something he wanted to emphasise. So I hope there is no doubt about the welcome to students from overseas.
No one can say exactly what the effect on the numbers will be. I thought my noble friend Lord Brockway put it quite temperately, but the calculations, which at any rate I respect, suggest that there will not be any marked reduction, and we are not aiming to produce a marked reduction. That must be plain. If there were a slight reduction that would not be a part of the policy, as I understand it.
LORD ROBBINS: My Lords, may I ask the noble Earl a question? Supposing I were the proprietor of a theatre and I decided that all those noble Lords whose antecedents were on the opposite side of the Irish Sea were to pay an entrance fee twice or three times as high as they paid before, no difference being made to those noble Lords whose antecedents came from this side of the Irish Sea, and I coupled with that change of policy the assurance that I welcomed them just as much as before, would the noble Earl find that altogether convincing?
THE EARL OF LONGFORD: My Lords, if the noble Lord wants to know what happens to Irish Peers he will perhaps recall that they have been pointedly excluded from this House, in spite of repeated endeavours to be allowed into it. That is a matter of recent history. The noble Lord is implying that these overseas students will suffer in some way as com-
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pared with their brethren here. They will pay more, that is perfectly true, but whether we put up the fees of the students at home or do not put them up would make no difference at all, unless we were ready to place some special burden on the British taxpayer which we are not asking him to shoulder at the present time.
May I come to the noble Lord's own line of argument, because I deal with it in my remarks. I will not go into some of the background, because it was set out so clearly by the noble Lord, Lord Gladwyn. I will go along as fast as I can, but for the sake of the record, bearing in mind that some people may read this as a connected speech, I must remind the House that the fees for future higher education students from overseas should be taken as £250—that is, £180 more than the present university average of £70 but the impact of this proposal will be cushioned, as the noble Lord, Lord Gladwyn, reminded us (and he will forgive me, I am sure, if I put it on record again) in three ways: first, the increase for all students already embarked on a course should be limited to £50, at any rate for that course; secondly, students already on courses who are sponsored by the Governments of developing countries will be relieved, out of a special fund, of the £50 increase; thirdly, where the British Government sponsor a student, additional aid funds will be provided to meet all fee increases. This applies to future as well as present students. Those points were set out by the noble Lord, Lord Gladwyn.
The context in which this decision was reached is important, and I hope noble Lords will realise that we are talking now in the financial context. When one says that, one does not mean that one ignores all the humanitarian or social considerations, but one does explain why a trend is being modified. We were faced last autumn with the need to make economies in the financial year 1967 and it became necessary to examine the size and nature of the concealed subsidy to overseas students represented by the low fees which obtain both in universities and in further education institutions. The fees at present represent rather less than 10 per cent. of the cost of the higher education provided. All this is common ground, but if I seem to be misstating or blurring

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the facts there are experts all round to correct me.
I think no one would dispute my next statement, certainly not the noble Lord, Lord Robbins, who has examined it with unsurpassed or unequalled skill. The structure of higher education finance in this country is complex; I think we can agree about: that, and it certainly makes comparisons with other countries misleading. So far as the universities are concerned, their main income is derived direct from the Exchequer. Fees income averages at present about 8 per cent. of total university expenditure. So it is a very peculiar set up, whether one likes it or not. In the great majority of cases the full-time students have their fees paid from public funds, the main exception being those students from overseas who do not qualify for student grants in this country. In England and Wales the student grants come mainly from the local education authorities, and therefore are a charge on the rates, and from the research councils. In Scotland they come direct from the Exchequer.
In recent years suggestions have been made in influential circles for an increase in the proportion of universities' income to be derived from fees, say up to 20 per cent. The Robbins Committee made a recommendation of that kind, and the noble Lord has set out very clearly this afternoon how he would tackle these problems. He would like to see an all-round increase in fees coupled with the proposal that the impact of increased fees on necessitous foreign students should be reduced by a special fund to help with the higher fees they are called upon to pay. That was the Robbins Committee proposal, but it was a proposal, I venture to say to my noble friend Lord Taylor, sharply in contrast with the proposal of the Taylor Committee, in that respect at least.
In examining the financial implications of the concealed subsidy to overseas students, the Government had to take into a count this great, and, I think most of us would say, very welcome, expansion in higher education in recent years, fostered so brilliantly by the noble Lord, Lord Robbins, and this has been, broadly at least, reflected in the increasing numbers of overseas students. The increase in numbers in overseas students for this four-year period 1961–62 to 1965–66 has
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been about 25 per cent. The cost in money terms—in other words the concealed subsidy, after allowing for fees—of the higher education of these students rose from £10·1 million to £18 million in 1965–66, an increase of about 80 per cent. If this trend were to continue the Government estimate that the concealed subsidy would rise by a further £2 million in 1967–68 to £20 million, and at the beginning of the next decade it would rise to £25 million. These were the calculations available to the Government.
The Government have no desire to see a large reduction in this form of aid or in the undoubted value which the universities derive from the presence of overseas students. I think somebody, perhaps more than one speaker, pointed out that it is not just a benefit that we are conferring on these students; we benefit enormously from them. As one of the few speakers in this House, about the only one, who has belonged in his academic life to the "P.B.I."—in other words been a college tutor for many years and nothing better—standing among all these professors and Vice Chancellors, one who has belonged to the rank-and-file and done the donkey work. I quite agree. I hope one has always benefited, on that level at least—I do not know about the stratosphere—from the presence of these students.
This has confronted the Government with a decision, and they have taken that decision in a certain way and taken it with reluctance. No one can suppose that I come down to the House joyous and pleasantly excited. I could hardly remain in that condition all afternoon in the light of the discussion. I am sure that no one would suppose that this was a sort of proud day in my annals, when I was able to announce the increase in the fees of overseas students. But these decisions in Government, as we all know, are often unpleasant, and sometimes they have to be faced, as here. The effect of the Government proposals, including those for cushioning the impact on overseas students which I mentioned, the three forms of cushion, will be to hold down the concealed subsidy for the time being to its present level at £18 million. Indeed this figure of £250 was not arbitrarily chosen: it was fixed with this object in view. No one can tell exactly how it will work out in these financial calculations.

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That is the scheme behind it: that we would keep the subsidy at £18 million, bearing in mind that it had risen 80 per cent. in the last four years and that there is no intention of cutting this subsidy. That is not the plan at all.
LORD GLADWYN: My Lords, would the noble Earl permit one question? Did the Government, in their calculations, ever try to get out an estimate of the amount of saving that would result if Lord Robbins's plan had been adopted?
TILE EARL OF LONGFORD: Well, my Lords, I am coming to that kind of suggestion. If I am asked, "did they?", I honestly do not know. I should be surprised if they had not. But I do not know, because by the time this discussion reached Ministers outside the Department that was not an issue. I think it extremely likely that that kind of calculation was made, but I cannot give an assurance. I would point out that this increase of fees is not an unparalleled event. A review would in any case have taken place this year with the beginning of the new quinquennium. At the last review fees were increased by 25 per cent. So I hope that noble Lords will not talk as though this was the first time we have ever dared to lay our hands on these particular fees. Corresponding increases of about 75 per cent., raising the average fee to £125, would have been necessary in 1967 if the percentage of university expenditure covered by fees income in fact were to be restored to 10 per cent. I do not say that that would again have been a binding requirement, but obviously something quite substantial was bound to happen on this occasion.
I turn from the implications for Government and Government expenditure in the proposed increase to the impact on the students themselves. A number of important factors must be borne in mind. Most of them, I think, will be within the consciousness of the House by now, but I think I must set them out. First of all, we ask: Who are the students, and where do they come from? I did not follow everything the noble Lord, Lord Gladwyn, said as he went on his way, but he seemed to me to be analysing it quite accurately.
One major source of misunderstanding relates to the expression "overseas
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students", which gives rise to accusations of discrimination. But this expression in no way relates to racial, national, or foreign birth or origin. So that there is no racial discrimination; there is no question of colour coming in. I think one speaker implied that colour came in by some side route, but I must say that I could not follow that particular argument. This expression "overseas students" applies solely to those students who have come into higher education in this country after less than three years' residence here. Those university students with more than three years' residence before beginning their course are nearly all eligible for awards which extend to fees.
One of the main criticisms of the Government's decision, which has been reiterated by a number of noble Lords, is that we are deliberately discriminating against overseas students. Since that word has been used in more ways than one this afternoon, but always with a great deal of passion, I think it just worth clearing our minds of this before we part for the night. The fact is, as I ventured to lay before the noble Lord, Lord Robbins, that our existing system of financing higher education—with the fees of home-based students already met for the most part from public funds—in practice makes any form of fee, or increased fee, for higher education for overseas students a form of discrimination. It may not look like it, because the reality is concealed by the peculiar financial arrangement, but that is in fact the situation to-day.
I repeat my earlier point: discrimination already exists, and this, if you like, adds the appearance, or clarifies the actual fact. But when I say that it already exists, I do not mean that there is some immorality about the present situation. It is just a fact that we consider that we have a duty to pay for our own students, and we do not consider—I am sure this is true of almost every country in the world—that we have the same duty to pay for overseas students who have gained admittance to our universities. That is a form of discrimination. Charity begins at home but it is, I am afraid, something which one would find in every country in the world to-day.

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All the proposals for fee increases, such as those put forward by the Robbins Committee or the noble Lord to-day, are in practice discriminatory in the same way. If in fact one of our British students found his fees increased, but then by the same post received his grant, he would not be any the worse off. It would be simply a way, if you like, of bluffing the overseas student into feeling that he was still on the same footing as the home student, which he would not be any more than he is to-day. It would really be a fake; it would be a form of extreme window-dressing. It is a possible method, but on the whole our method is rather more candid and exposes the realities of the situation rather more clearly.
The formal appearance of discrimination could have been avoided by charging a fee in respect of home students which was then in almost every case reimbursed. This would be the Robbins plan, to which quite a number of noble Lords, including the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, were strongly inclined. Then the noble Lord, Lord Annan—and although I cannot be said to have found a supporter in the House to-day, I think Lord Annan came nearer to filling that requirement than anybody else—pointed out that this would have thrown a severe burden on the rates and could even have interfered with the implementation of some vital points in the Plowden Report. The truth is that if you were to do it in that way, if you were going to place heavier burdens on the rates in order to finance the students in their higher fees, you would then either have seen a considerable increase in the rates, or the Government would have had to come forward with some fairly widespread reform of the finances of local government. The Government, weighing up all those issues, came to the conclusion that more harm would come to the community by procedures of that kind than by the method actually adopted.
LORD ROBBINS: My Lords, may I ask the noble Earl—
THE EARL OF LONGFORD: May I just finish this piece? The Government rejected this solution primarily because it would have thrown additional charges on local taxation at a moment when it is Government policy to avoid adding to
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the rate burden. That is the short and simple reason why the plan—if you like, the logical plan—of Lord Robbins has not been adopted.
LORD ROBBINS: I was going to ask whether what the noble Earl has said implies that it is now thought that the advice given by high Treasury officials to the Committee on Higher Education was erroneous?
THE EARL OF LONGFORD: I am not going to comment on that without being allowed to study the evidence of the high Treasury officials, which I can hardly do standing at this Box. It is not the invariable custom in this House—although we have not the noble Lord, Lord Booth by, with us at the moment—to accept the voice of Treasury officials as the voice of God, and I am not prepared to do so on this occasion. I should be glad to study any views they may have put forward.
LORD ROBBINS: With deep respect, I did not represent the voice of Sir Thomas Pad more and Sir Richard Clarke as having that particular origin.
THE EARL OF LONGFORD: I will make sure that the last comment of the noble Lord is laid before those eminent gentlemen with proper emphasis. It cannot be said that there is a general principle in higher education against differential fees for overseas students. Such fees have been applied for many years in the colleges of education, and they apply also in many American State universities. We were taken on a tour of the world—I think it was by the noble Lord, Lord Murray of Newhaven—who was rather scathing about countries where there were any differential fees. Finally we had one noble Lord—he shall be nameless, because I was very upset by it—who announced, in a tone of great contempt, that this was the kind of thing that was done in Ireland.
I will not pursue that line of controversy any further. It is certainly argued that the underdeveloped countries benefit from the educational aid offered by our low fees. We must accept that absolutely, and I am coming, I hope, at the end to offer a little bit of consolation to the noble Lord, Lord Brockway, and other noble Lords. But we do contend that even if that be true—as it is—the

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measure of this help should be regulated and identified, and I do not think the noble Lord, Lord Robbins, disagrees with that. I think he would be quite happy to see the amount of subsidy laid bare before the world, rather than concealed as at present. So I hope that noble Lords will feel that there is at least a strong argument for trying to regulate this subsidy, and for not allowing it to go on open-ended as has been the case up till now.
I am not going to spend long at this time of night on the procedure adopted, but I intervened to point out that there was consultation through the Government's own machinery with the British Council and the University Grants Committee. I gather that the Government would not have taken this decision (I am speaking now rather carefully and from what has been supplied to me) if the University Grants Committee, as their economic advisers, had dissented in principle from the proposition that the position of overseas students required attention from the point of view of fees. That, of course, was a fairly careful assurance from the U.G.C. I do not want to rest too much on it, but I should like noble Lords to realise that there was genuine consultation, and if there had not been this amount of acquiescence the Government, I am informed, would not have proceeded. Overseas Governments were informed at the earliest possible moment.
One is bound to ask then: What will be the impact on overseas students of the proposed increase? First, I should point out, as I think has been said elsewhere, that there is no question of the Government's insisting that the fees they intend to assume for planning purposes should be charged by institutions in every case. Waivers in cases of hardship are always possible, and the noble Lord, Lord Ritchie-Calder, and other academic leaders are, I am sure, aware that the universities, if they wish, can waive or reduce the fees.
But taking the proposals, which I mentioned at the beginning, for cushioning the increase, these will relieve nearly 30 per cent. of the students in universities at present of the fees increase. Of the remainder (that is to say, about 22,000: the ones who will not be cushioned),
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about 16,000 are estimated to be from developing countries and the Secretary of State has already made it clear that the Government are very willing to receive any evidence of hardship likely to arise as it affects this group. I am speaking here in the spirit of what was said by the noble Lord, Lord Brockway.
I am now in a position to-night to go a little further. I should not like noble Lords who have taken part in this memorable debate to feel that the Government were sending them away altogether empty. My right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Education and Science is answering a Written Question this afternoon, of which I would ask leave to pass on the gist to your Lordships:
"The Government have taken careful note of the representations made to them on this subject, but remain of the opinion that the amount of public subsidy for overseas students must be brought under control."
I am using words which will be used by the Secretary of State to-night He goes on:
"But as I have made clear on several occasions the Government appreciate that fee increases of this order may cause hardship in some cases, particularly where students already in this country are supported by their families."
My Lords, what I am saying now is new, and not part of the earlier remarks about cushioning. The Government therefore intend to set up a fund to enable grants to be made towards the increase in fees in cases where hardship can reasonably be claimed. This will be additional to the arrangements already announced for helping students financed by Her Majesty's Government and Governments of developing countries. It is too soon to give details of these arrangements which will be the subject of further consultations, but the aim will be to ensure that those overseas students already here will not be prevented from completing their courses because they are unable to pay the increased fees. The longer-term situation, especially as it affects developing countries, will be kept under review by the Departments concerned.
My Lords, that is the end of the substance of the reply by the Secretary of State to a Question elsewhere. I hope it will bring some small encouragement to those noble Lords who, in this House to-day, have shown such profound,

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genuine and well-informed anxiety about a vast number of our fellow human beings, now and in times to come, and also about our manifest duty to do all that we can to help to educate them. I am sure we are all most grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Gladwyn, for initiating this debate.
LORD FERRIER: My Lords, before the noble Earl sits down, I hesitate to question him but I was one of those inclined to play down this question of discrimination. In regard to the reply he has just read, there was a point I made when the noble Earl was not in the Chamber. At the end of Clause 4 of a Written Answer on December 21 it says:
"…the increase in the fee assumed for those already embarked on courses which extend to the next academic year will be limited to £50 a year to the end of their present course."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, Commons, Vol. 738 (No. 708) col. 377; 21/12/66.]
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Does that apply to students who have come to this country to sit for a Higher Certificate, and to take up a place which is then open to them at a university? Does the end of that preliminary course mean the end of a course, or not? If it does, that means the increase is not £50 but £250. Is that what is covered by this fund?
THE EARL OF LONGFORD: I would rather not add to this statement. It will no doubt be widely discussed, and clearly we are at the beginning of some fairly prolonged discussions as regards its precise scope. I would rather write to the noble Lord, or discuss it with him, and not attempt to answer him in detail this evening.
House adjourned at twenty-two minutes before ten o'clock.