Lords Sitting of 16 February 1967

Preamble
The House met at three of the clock (Prayers having been read earlier at the Judicial Sitting by the Lord Bishop of Chichester):
The LORD CHANCELLOR on the Woolsack.

GRADING OF FRUIT AND VEGETABLES
3.1 p.m.
BARONESS BURTON OF COVENTRY: My Lords, I beg leave to ask the Question which stands in my name on the Order Paper.
[The Question was as follows:
To ask Her Majesty's Government whether they will state the grounds on which it is felt that the grading of fruit and vegetables at the retail end is unnecessary for shoppers.]
THE PARLIAMENTARY SECRETARY, BOARD OF TRADE (LORD WALSTON): My Lords, the present statutory provisions apply to produce sold in bulk by wholesale. An entirely different system would be needed if produce sold in small lots or individually at retail shops were required to be graded, and a far larger staff would, of course, be needed for enforcement. The Government take the view that the first step is to establish grading at the wholesale level. Since the housewife shopping for fresh fruit and vegetables can see what she is buying, and can make her own judgment of quality in relation to price, there is not the same need to introduce grading at the retail level. In effect, the housewife acts as her own grader and inspector.
BARONESS BURTON OF COVENTRY: My Lords, is my noble friend aware that it is most unfortunate for him that he made the statement which he made last week? Is he furthermore aware that, while housewives or anybody else can see produce in the shops or on the stalls, there is certainly no guarantee that the produce they get is what they have seen at the front or on the top of the pile?
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Is he furthermore aware that the only way of dealing with this problem is by grading?
LORD WALSTON: My Lords, I am sorry that I am still unable to satisfy my noble friend on this matter. I shall not repeat the arguments of last week, but I would suggest to her that if at any time she would like to come and talk with me, either publicly or privately, I should be delighted to see whether I can help.
BARONESS BURTON OF COVENTRY: My Lords, is my noble friend aware that of course I should be delighted to accept that invitation? But may I ask him whether, before I come, he would give some thought as to whether it might be possible to include an Amendment in the Agriculture Bill, which will soon be before your Lordships' House, whereby these powers could be extended to the consumer and to the retailer?
LORD WALSTON: My Lords, I shall certainly give some thought to that matter before I have the pleasure of a visit from my noble friend.
EARL FORTESCUE: My Lords, is the Minister aware that, although it may be impossible to inspect all retailers, it might well be made an offence for retailers to exhibit high-grade apples, and to put what is termed in the trade a "jumble pack" in the housewife's bag? Further, would it not be possible to educate the public to the fact that, in the case of many varieties—notably Cox—the small apples have more flavour than the large?
LORD WALSTON: My Lords, I think the public is a great deal more educated than it was. There are still some people who are taken in by things which look good, or even have exciting labels on them, but are not as exciting as the labels make them out to be. But I am quite sure that the public is becoming increasingly aware of that. With regard to the first part of the noble Earl's question, while of course the consumer needs, and is entitled to, a certain amount of protection, I still believe that it is the consumer, the buyer himself, who has the primary responsibility to see that he receives what he thinks he has bought.
LORD DRUMALBYN: My Lords, will not the consumer inevitably become aware

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of the grades into which produce is graded? Will he then not come to demand particular grades, and will it not be an offence clearly to represent one grade as being a different grade?
LORD WALSTON: My Lords, it would clearly be an offence to misrepresent any article offered for sale. I think the noble Lord is perfectly right that, as the wholesale grading progresses, people—the wholesaler, the retailer and the housewife—will become more conscious of grading, and we shall move a long way towards the result desired by my noble friend.
LORD LEATHERLAND: My Lords, is my noble friend not aware of the fact that most housewives are very shy and diffident creatures, who are usually afraid to complain to a shopkeeper if they are served with an inferior product? Is that not another argument for clearly label ling Grade 1, 2, or 3, as the case may be?
LORD WALSTON: No, my Lords; I am not aware of that fact at all. I think my experience of housewives must be very different from that of my noble friend.
BARONESS SUMMERSKILL: My Lords, while I cannot confirm all that my noble friend has said, are we to gather from the answer of the Minister that the only defence which the housewife has is to enter into an altercation with the tradesman?
LORD WALSTON: My Lords, I am sure that my noble friend would have many other ways of dealing with a problem of this sort if it ever confronted her. In all seriousness, it is always possible for a housewife to complain if she feels that she is not getting in the package the commodity which she has selected. She can insist on having that put right; she can remove her custom elsewhere, and she has a variety of courses open to her.
LORD POPPLEWELL: My Lords, is my noble friend aware that imported fruit is graded? Therefore, why should not our own food be graded? Surely, this seems common sense. Is my noble friend further aware that the Answer he has given is creating very great dissatisfaction indeed among those concerned with trying to establish a better purity of goods for our people here at home?
LORD WALSTON: My Lords, I do not wish to weary your Lordships by going over the ground which I went over in answer to an earlier Question on this subject last week. But I would remind your Lordships that these present grading regulations which are being introduced are designed to cover the wholesale aspect of the problem with the object of improving the quality of home produce, so that it can compete better with imported produce. As a result of that, I am quite certain that the housewife will benefit, as indeed my noble friend asserts, and quite rightly asserts, she has benefited from the grading of imported produce.
LORD BROCKET: My Lords, may I ask whether the rule of caveat emptor still applies in this case?

FARM SUBSIDIES
3.8 p.m.
EARL FERRERS: My Lords, I beg leave to ask the Question which stands in my name on the Order Paper.
[The Question was as follows:
To ask Her Majesty's Government to state the number of different subsidies and grants which are available to farmers who farm either as tenants or as owner-occupiers.]
LORD WALSTON: My Lords, twelve commodities qualify for guaranteed prices. They consist of those listed in the First Schedule to the Agriculture Act 1957, together with sugar beet. In addition, individual tenants or owner-occupiers may benefit from sixteen direct farming grants and subsidies, while four other grants are payable to assist farmers' co-operatives and other organisations benefiting farmers. The main grants and subsidies are listed in Appendix V of the White Paper published after the 1966 Price Review.
EARL FERRERS: My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord for his reply. Would he agree that the administration of these grants is becoming annually more complex, and would he give an assurance that everything possible will be done to see that their administration is kept as simple as possible?
LORD WALSTON: My Lords, I would not entirely agree with the noble Earl

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that they are becoming yearly more complex. But I certainly assure him that everything will be done, and is being done at present, to keep their administration, both from the Civil Service point of view and from the farmers' point of view, as simple as possible.

WEST INDIES BILL
3.10 p.m.
Order of the Day for the Third Reading read.
THE PARLIAMENTARY UNDER-SECRETARY OF STATE FOR COMMONWEALTH AFFAIRS (LORD BESWICK): My Lords, I beg to move that this Bill be now read a third time.
Moved, That the Bill be now read 3a.—(Lord Beswick.)
On Question, Bill read 3a.
EARL JELLICOE: I am sorry to interrupt, but I thought the noble Lord was going to make a statement.
LORD BESWICK: That will be on the next Motion, "That the Bill do now pass". My Lords, I beg to move that this Bill do now pass. At the Committee stage of this Bill the noble Earl, Lord Jellicoe, asked me whether I could give him some further information about the provisions for implementing the Conference Report which decided the Constitution for the Associated State of St. Kitts. I am grateful to the noble Earl for giving me the opportunity of going deeply into the matter which he raised and for enabling me to get the latest information. I hope I can now satisfy him and, indeed, those other noble Lords who raised the problem in this House, as well as the delegation from St. Kitts which has seen the noble Earl and other Members of your Lordships' House.
The position is as follows. The noble Earl called attention to the provision in paragraph 50 of the Conference Report that there should be a Council for Nevis and a Council for Anguilla, and also to the additional provisions in paragraph 14 of the Conference Report about the procedure to he followed in the event of any alteration in the Constitution regarding these local government provisions. The noble Earl asked—and, indeed, my noble friend Lord Willis demanded—that we
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should make absolutely certain that these provisions were written into the Constitution. That assurance I can now give. The Constitution which has been drafted, which will come into force by Order in Council, faithfully and fully meets the provisions of both paragraph 50 and paragraph 14.
The noble Earl then referred at the Committee stage to a Bill which was being discussed by the Central Government of St. Kitts and which will establish the local Councils required under the Constitution. This Bill is being drafted in St. Kitts, by the Executive Council there, along guidelines put forward by an expert from the Ministry of Overseas Development; and, naturally, that official has every reason for ensuring that the Bill will be in accordance with the Constitution. Any suggestion that anything is being done to try to frustrate the requirements of the Constitution is, I am sure the noble Earl will agree, quite contrary to any motive which the local government expert from the Ministry of Overseas Development is likely to have. I hope, therefore, that the noble Earl will be able to put out of his mind any fear that there is any kind of underhand move afoot.
The noble Earl's fears rested upon certain words, which he read out at the Committee stage, which he had been told were in a document discussed by the Executive Council of St. Kitts just before Christmas, and which referred to the power of the Central Government "to suspend or abolish an Island Council". Actually, the words he read out do not accurately reflect the intentions of a reference which there will be in the legislation now being drafted in St. Kitts. In that Bill there is reference to powers which will remain with the Central Government to dissolve a Council which persistently defaults in carrying out its statutory duties. I hope that the noble Earl, who has been subjected to a certain amount of cross-fire, will appreciate the importance of this provision. If, unhappily, the occasion should arise when it is necessary for the Central Government to dissolve a Council, the Bill as now drafted makes provision for elections to be held within three months of any such dissolution. This power to dissolve a Council on these grounds is, I am told, common form in comparable legislation in other territories in that area,

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notably St. Lucia, St. Vincent and Barbados, and there are similar powers in other parts of the world. Even in this country, I think the noble Earl will agree, there is power for the Central Government to take action to ensure that any local authority fulfils the functions for which it was elected.
I was also asked by the noble Earl whether the two gentlemen to whom he referred could be seen by a Minister from the Commonwealth Office. I am glad to say that provision was made for a meeting to be held with the Minister of State, and that that meeting has taken place. I beg to move.
Moved, That the Bill do now pass.—(Lord Beswick.)
EARL JELLICOE: My Lords, I made it clear on Second Reading, speaking from this Bench, that the Opposition supported this Bill. We welcomed the new principle of association which is incorporated in it; and we also felt that the fact that agreement had been reached, in some cases not without difficulty, reflected a very great measure of credit upon everyone concerned, both in the Caribbean and here. I do not in any way depart from that general endorsement of the Bill. I made no apology at Committee stage for raising the not unimportant point with which the noble Lord has just dealt, and I make no apology for coming back to it now, very briefly, because while it is true that this matter concerns only local government in these two islands, the full attendance in your Lordships' House this afternoon shows that matters of local government can excite a certain amount of passionate feeling. It is also true that it concerns only two relatively small communities, but I know that the noble Lord agrees with me that size is not the criterion here. We still hold the ultimate constitutional responsibility in relation to these islands, and it is very important that, before they attain the new status of association, everybody should be persuaded that effect will be given to the agreed constitutional arrangements. I am grateful to the noble Lord for the statement which he has just made, and, through him, I should also like to express gratitude to the Minister of State at the Commonwealth Office for seeing the two gentlemen, the representatives of the People's Action Movement.
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There are two matters, however, which still concern me. The first is the degree of actual disturbance in these communities at the present time. I have before me a cable addressed to Dr. Herbert, the President of the People's Action Movement, from the secretary of the People's Action Movement in St. Kitts, which reads as follows:
"Defence force called out on the 14th of February. Round the clock guard on all Government property at St. Kitts. Marines and local police landed Anguilla 4 a.m. 15th July from H.M.S. Salisbury. More arrests made. Anguilla celebrations cancelled. Will notify of further developments."
I am not informed about developments in Anguilla, but as a vessel of the Royal Navy has been employed in the last 24 hours in an operation there, the noble Lord will presumably have the information and will be able to let us know the position there.
It would appear, at least on the face of it, that there is considerable concern in these two communities at the present time. I hope and trust that what the noble Lord has just said by way of reassurance will go at least some way to reassure them, but I think he would make reassurance doubly sure if he could confirm to me here and now that he is utterly satisfied that the arrangements concerning the dissolution of a council, to which he referred in his speech just now, are in his view completely compatible with both the spirit and the letter of the agreed Report, and in particular with paragraphs 14 and 50, to which we referred at the Committee stage.
I do not know whether the noble Lord can give us further information regarding the actual state of security in these three communities at the present time, and also further assurances. If he is not able to do that, I should have thought that there might be a case for postponing for a short period of time the actual passing to the state of association, as was contemplated in not dissimilar circumstances with regard to St. Vincents. Happily, agreement has now been reached in St. Vincents, and I should have thought that, with the good will of all concerned, if the provisions for local government are still arousing concern, agreement could be reached speedily between the two main parties in the island. I should be grateful for any further assurance the noble Lord can give me on this point, which

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seems to be arousing a good deal of concern and passion and, perhaps, causing disturbances in the islands.
LORD WILLIS: My Lords, before the noble Lord replies, I should like to add my thanks to those already expressed for the statement made by the Minister, and for the fact that the Minister of State did see the representatives from the People's Action Movement. I accept the assurances given to-day. I think they are adequate, although I should like strongly to support the further questions raised by the noble Earl, Lord Jellicoe.
LORD BESWICK: So far as an assurance is concerned, I can give categorically, without any qualification, the assurance asked for. The Constitution, as drafted, will fulfil the agreement reached at the conference between the United Kingdom Government on the one hand, and representatives of the islands on the other. There is no doubt at all about that. So far as the Bill is concerned, to the best of my knowledge and belief, and on the best advice I can secure, that is in accordance with the Constitution. If, on the other hand, it so happened that the Government of St. Kitts attempted to pass legislation contrary to the Constitution it would, of course, be quite proper to challenge that legislation in the court. I make that point as an additional safeguard. I have no reason at all to believe that the Bill as drafted does contravene the Constitution.
EARL JELLICOE: My Lords, may I interrupt the noble Lord? Would there be an appeal to the Privy Council in that case?
LORD BESWICK: Yes, my Lords. I dealt, following the question of the noble Lord, Lord Ogmore, with the fact that there is a Supreme Court, which is accepted as common to the Associated States, and that there is right of appeal to the Privy Council. The noble Earl also asked about the local situation, particularly the disturbances about which he has received a report. There is a great deal of excitement there. They have had elections;
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they are about to move forward to this new status and this new Constitution. There is a certain amount of argument as to whether the last election settled the issues satisfactorily. I can see a number of noble Lords in this House, some who formerly, having fought an election and having won or lost that election, afterwards felt that the vote might have gone another way if only something else had happened. As I understand the situation on this island—and it is the same in St. Vincent—the result was a narrow one; and the losing side would like to have the opportunity of another "go", thinking that another election might yield a different result. There has been an election, fairly held, which elected the Government. There is no reason why that Government should not now go forward to Independence Day, and to the assumption of the new powers under the new Constitution.
I was asked a question about the position of Her Majesty's ship. It is true that a ship went there; but the latest information I have was that there was no reason at all for any personnel to be landed from that ship. Their presence was not required. I would add another point, and I say it entirely without any offence to the noble Earl. I understand that the success which the two petitioners had when the matter was last raised in this House gave them a certain amount of moral support, and on the basis of that they stimulated the activity of their followers in Anguilla. I hope that both the noble Earl and my noble friend Lord Willis are satisfied with the assurance I have given to-day; that the petitioners, too, feel that what is being done is in accordance with the Constitution; that they will, from now on, co-operate in ensuring that Independence Day is a happy day; and that the people can, after independence, have an election at the proper time, which will be in 1968.

CONSOLIDATED FUND BILL
Read 3a (according to Order) and passed.

LONDON GOVERNMENT BILL
3.25 p.m.
Order of the Day read for the Consideration of Commons Reason for disagreeing to the Lords Amendments.
LORD SHEPHERD: My Lords, I beg to move that the Commons Reason for disagreeing to the Lords Amendments be now considered. It may be for the convenience of the House if I move this Motion formally so that the main discussion may take place on the next Motion which I propose to move, That this House doth not insist on the Amendments to which the Commons have disagreed. When I come to that I think it would be for the convenience of the House if I were to cover all the Amendments.
Moved, That the Commons Reason for disagreeing to the Lords Amendments be now considered.—(Lord Shepherd.)
On Question, Motion agreed to.

COMMONS REASON FOR DISAGREEING TOTHE LORDS AMENDMENTS
[The references are to Bill (147) as first printed for the Lords. The Commons Reason is printed in italics]

LORDS AMENDMENTS
[Nos. 1–8]
Clause 1, page 1, line 7, leave out ("1967 and")
Clause 1, page 1, line 8, leave out ("1968") and insert ("1971")
Clause 1, page 1, line 9, leave out ("1968") and insert ("1971")
Clause 1, page 1, line 11, leave out from ("1963") to end of line 12 and insert ("after the words 'three years' there shall be inserted the words 'except as hereafter provided in this subsection', and after '1967'there shall be inserted the words 'in the year 1971' ")
Clause 1, page 1, line 13, leave out subsection (2).
Clause 1, page 1, line 20, leave out ("1967")
Clause 1, page 1, line 22, leave out ("1968")
Clause 1, page 1, line 24, leave out subsection (4).
The Commons disagreed to these Amendments for the following Reason:
Because they would result in an undesirable delay in providing for the holding in different years of .separate elections to the Greater London Council and to the London borough councils
LORD SHEPHERD: My Lords, with the leave of the House, I beg to move that this House doth not insist on Amend-
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ments Nos. 1 to 8 to which the Commons have disagreed. This is not the first occasion on which we have had to consider a Commons Message in regard to Amendments that this House has passed. When the other place have been able to accept our Amendments, we have taken note of that with satisfaction in most cases; when they have rejected them we have assumed an air of resignation, though regret. I think this is due to the fact that over very many years, certainly longer than I can remember, your Lordships' House has accepted the proposition that the will of the elected Chamber should prevail—although there are some noble Lords opposite who believe there is some qualification or proviso to this general rule. In any case, those who take that view recognise that where there is a qualification or proviso it should apply only on a very major national issue. This Bill, like its predecessor, the London Government Act 1963, has proved a fairly controversial one. Although it has not taken as much time as the 1963 Act, it has engendered a great deal of heat; but I think those who participated in the debates on Committee stage and Second Reading rather enjoyed themselves.
My Lords, I have been conscious during the past few days that there have been outside pressures on your Lordships' House that seek to persuade you, or your Lordships' House, to depart from previous practices. It is easy for those outside to put pen to paper and to make recommendations. We in this House are conscious not only of what we are called upon to do but also of the need to take into account the role which we have to play and the role which we should like to adopt in the years to come. I was therefore very happy and content when I heard this morning on the radio what was attributed to the noble Lord, Lord Carrington: that he intended to advise his colleagues not to vote to-day. My Lords, I hope that will be the case because I do not believe that there is a great deal that divides us.
SEVERAL NOBLE LORDS: Oh!
LORD SHEPHERD: No, my Lords; noble Lords must not jump too quickly to what I now intend to say. They are in some strength on the Benches opposite this afternoon but they should wait patiently. I do not believe that there is

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a great deal that divides us on this issue. Certainly in 1963 we had a fundamental clash between the two Front Benches, the two Parties, as to the best way of conducting the local government elections in London. Noble Lords opposite took the view that in the long term it would be better for the Greater London Council elections and the London borough elections to be held on one day. That was the view of the Royal Commission. But there were many, including my noble friend the late Lord Morrison of Lambeth (who perhaps knew more about London and its people than anyone else in your Lordships' House) who took the contrary view.
As the House will remember, we divided on Report to seek to do what we are trying to do in this Bill: that is, to provide that the elections for the Greater London Council and for the Councils of the London boroughs should be taken in separate years. I explained on Second Reading and in Committee the problems arising from these elections. There is the size of the boroughs and the very different issues involved. I thought that there was general agreement that what we sought to devise was a method by which the issues would not be blurred and the London electorate would have a proper basis, a proper method and opportunity to have elections, so that their views could be represented properly on the Greater London Council and on the councils of the London boroughs.
The Conservative Party now accepts—and this is why there is little that divides us—that combined elections would not be in the public interest or in the interests of the London electorate. Noble Lords opposite have gone even further. By their Amendments to the Bill they accept that to hold the Greater London Council elections in April, and the borough elections in May, would be contrary to public interest and the interests of the electorate in London. That is why there is so little that divides us. What really divides us to-day is the principle whether, if something is contrary to the public interest, you should set it right as quickly as possible. None of us underestimates the importance of these elections and the need for them to be conducted properly and for the issues to be clearly understood, so that the whole campaign may be fought properly. Therefore, if it is
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the right principle that they should not be conducted within 30 days of each other, as would have been the case in 1967 but for this Bill, surely we are correct in saying that if we can put this matter in order and can see that these elections are conducted in the proper atmosphere, with the issues clearly understood, we should do so.
My Lords, the Government, who are responsible for this legislation, have received representations, most proper representations, from the Greater London Council and the London boroughs. I do not know whether I convinced the noble Lord, Lord Brooke of Cumnor—I am sorry if I did not, but I tried to convince the noble Lord—that my right honourable friend the Home Secretary has exercised his responsibilities properly; that he has not in any way responded to narrow political interests in arriving at this decision but has taken a very considerable time in making up his mind. I am convinced that what we have proposed to Parliament and what the House of Commons, by its vote (not only on Second Reading, Committee stage and Third Reading in another place, but on the Amendments moved in your Lordships' House), has taken note of, is right and in the interest of London. Your Lordships' House having given an opportunity to another place to take account of what you think of the situation, and having performed your duty, I invite you to be content to agree not to insist on your Amendments. My Lords, I beg to move.
Moved, That this House doth not insist on its Amendments Nos. 1 to 8 to which the Commons have disagreed.—(Lord Shepherd.)
3.37 p.m.
LORD CARRINGTON: My Lords, I rise, not in the main to speak on the merits of this Amendment but primarily to say a few words about the position of your Lordships' House and the course which I would advise those noble Lords who sit on these Benches to follow. In recent weeks and months there have been a number of issues on which your Lordships have felt very strongly—Rhodesia and Torbay, to name but two—and it is inevitable in a House where, though Party and Party discipline is much less rigid, great issues of principle

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divide us. This would occasion no difficulty if the Party balance in your Lordships' House reflected that in another place. Indeed, for those of us who are Conservatives it would be a great deal easier in many ways, since we could then vote according to our inclinations, our strongly held opinions and, in some cases, our consciences; and there would be no constitutional significance in our actions other than to put on record our opinions and our feelings.
It is often said that the Conservative majority in the House of Lords is a great handicap to any Labour Government and is grossly unfair. My Lords, I believe the truth to be the exact opposite. It is highly convenient to the Labour Party and the Government. If anything goes wrong, your Lordships can be used as the whipping boys. The composition of your Lordships' House can be held up to ridicule and, however good the merits of the issue on which conflict may take place, they can always be obscured by talk of the "unelected House overruling the will of the people" and the convenient slogan of "Lords versus the People" can once more be invoked.
Over the last two and a half years we on this side of the House, for reasons which we have thought proper, have conducted ourselves with restraint and moderation and have allowed a lot of legislation to go through to which we were bitterly opposed and about the effect of which on this country we had the gravest misgivings. We have done it for the reason that we believe that this House, the unelected Chamber, should not, except in the last resort and in quite exceptional circumstances, override the opinion of the House of Commons which has been elected by the people of this country. If we did not adopt such a course it would be impossible for any Labour Government to govern, since obviously much of the legislation which is introduced is bitterly opposed by those of us in the Conservative Party. It would really not be possible for a two-Chamber system of Government to operate, nor would it be a justifiable position for the unelected Chamber to control the timing of the Government's legislative programme by using its delaying powers.
The question then arises—and it is a perfectly fair question—if the House of
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Lords does not, except in the rarest possible cases, use its remaining delaying powers, what then is it for? During the time we have been in Opposition I have, on a number of occasions, tried to answer that question, and I do so again to-day because I think it is important that I should make clear to those of my Party outside this House who feel so strongly about this Bill exactly what, in my view, is the role of the House of Lords.
There are, I think, three roles. First, there is the revisionary role: and no one would deny the usefulness of this House in that connection. We have only to look at the improvements on that dreadful Land Commission Bill and the Companies Bill which we have made in recent weeks. I do not think that Amendments such as the Government have accepted would have found their way into these Bills if this House did not exist—and if it did not exist, something else would have to be put in its place. Secondly, I think that we provide an excellent forum for discussions of importance and urgency which, as a result of our composition, are often better done here and because of our rather looser rules of order can sometimes only be done here. These debates can and should help to form public opinion on the issues of the day, and I have no doubt that among informed people there is a growing interest in the role of your Lordships' House in this direction. It will increase as time goes on.
These are the two straightforward roles, but there is a third role. There could arise a matter of great constitutional and national importance, on which there was known to be a deep division of opinion in the country or perhaps on which the people's opinion was not known. In a case of this kind, it seems to me that the House of Lords has a right, and perhaps a duty, to use its powers, not to make a decision, but to afford the people of this country and Members of the House of Commons a period for reflection and time for views to be expressed.
Therefore, although we have on occasion felt frustrated at our inability to express our point of view by voting, we have felt that in the interests of the preservation of the second Chamber and, as I believe, of its usefulness, we should conduct ourselves with moderation and

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restraint. I do not think that noble Lords opposite can deny that since they came into office we have acted with forbearance.
We have tried over the past years to lay down certain guide lines as to how the Conservative Party will act in this House when in Opposition. There is, first, the convention of the mandate—that is to say, if a Bill appeared in the programme that the Labour Party presented at the General Election, then it should be assumed that the proposal had been approved by the electorate. Of course, as the noble Lord, Lord Ogmore, pointed out on the Second Reading of the Steel Bill, it is a far from perfect way of judging whether or not an individual item is approved in what might be a very long manifesto, but it would not be possible to carry on Parliamentary Government with these two Chambers unless some sort of convention of this kind were observed.
We have, however, always maintained that we can, and should, express our opinion, by Division if necessary, on certain Amendments to that class of Bill. For example, it seems to me quite proper—and here I must disagree completely with what the noble Lord, Lord Champion, said the other day—for your Lordships to divide upon an Amendment to enable the House of Commons to have another look at a matter and perhaps to reflect upon some new arguments which may have been advanced in this House. No constitutional crisis arises as a result of this. It is a perfectly proper and constitutional action on your Lordships' part. A clash between the two Houses would arise only if your Lordships insisted upon an Amendment.
We have had more difficulty on Statutory Orders because, as they were a comparatively novel way of legislating and very seldom used when the original Parliament Act was passed, they do not come within the scope of that Act, and therefore, if your Lordships decide to divide against an Order and carry the day, that Order lapses for good and all. It can, of course, be reintroduced in exactly the same terms by the Government, but we can throw it out again and again and it can never become operative, since the House of Lords cannot be overruled. Though I can visualise occasions when
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your Lordships would wish to vote against an Order, I should have thought that they would be rare indeed.
We then come to the kind of issue we are discussing this afternoon, on which none of these guide lines apply. I must say frankly that I have found this the most difficult decision to make since I have been the Leader of the Conservative Party in this House. There are sound and powerful reasons which can be advanced for your Lordships standing firm on these Amendments. This Bill has no mandate from the electorate. It deprives the electorate of their right to vote. It is a nasty piece of political jiggery-pokery. Quite legitimately the question will be asked: if you do not stand firm on this Amendment, when will the House of Lords ever assert itself? I cannot deny that my noble friends and I find ourselves in great difficulty.
There are, I know, those, whose opinions I respect who take the view that this is an issue of such importance that we should face the consequences of a firm stand. Yet I think that there are equally powerful arguments to the contrary. We have always maintained that should the House reject a Bill or insist upon an Amendment, the delay afforded would be to enable the House of Commons to think again and to allow the electorate a period of reflection. But in this case, owing to the timing of the Bill, this would not happen. Insistence on this Amendment would mean that the purpose of the Bill would be frustrated for good. In other words, your Lordships' House would take the final decision as to the future of this Bill.
I do not think that any of us has ever argued that the unelected Chamber should in the end have the final say as to what legislation does or does not get on to the Statute Book. Secondly, it has always been my view that the House of Lords will only be able to use its delaying powers once. Members of the Party opposite in another place will, I am sure, make certain either that this House is abolished or that its remaining powers are removed, if there is a direct confrontation of this kind between the two Houses. Therefore, it seems to me that we should be completely and utterly convinced that the issue on which we are staking the future of this House should be one of such importance and of

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such national significance as to leave no doubt, not only in our own minds, but also in the minds of the ordinary men and women whose interests we must safeguard.
My Lords, after much thought, I have come to the conclusion that this is not such an issue, not because it is not important but because it is not of such national significance and constitutional gravity as to fit the criteria I have outlined. It is, of course, rather difficult to describe London as a local issue, but in national terms it is. What happens under the provisions of this Bill would not concern the great majority of our fellow countrymen. It must also be said that this House, composed as it is by nomination or, by heredity, must be particularly careful when matters concerning elections and the electorate are at stake.
Now I hope that no one will read into this counsel of restraint and the advice I have felt obliged to give to your Lordships a sign of weakness or lack of principle. I believe it rather to be the realisation of the role and powers of the second Chamber as it is now constituted. I have been a Member of this House for over twenty years. I have a profound respect for its Members and for this House as a useful part of the Constitution. This would not influence me at all if I considered that the national interest demanded action, and I should not hesitate, regardless of the consequences, political or constitutional. But on balance I do not think that this is of sufficient national importance.
This is not to say that this is not a particularly disreputable Bill. All your Lordships who listened to the earlier stages of the Bill, to the speeches which were made by my noble friends, and in particular by my noble friend Lord Brooke of Cumnor, will have absolutely no doubt as to the reasons for its introduction and its purpose. It is a mean and shabby little piece of gerrymandering of which any Government should be profoundly ashamed; and I must say frankly that I am surprised that noble Lords opposite, who are honourable men, do not dissociate themselves from it. It was noticeable during the speech of my noble friend Lord Brooke of Cumnor in the Second Reading debate how uncomfortable noble Lords opposite looked, and, indeed, one Member opposite, the noble
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Baroness, Lady Stocks, to her eternal credit, got up and said so; she told us that she could not support the Bill, and told us what its purpose was. I notice that the noble Baroness is not in her place this afternoon.
I have no doubt that when Members of the Front Bench opposite look back on their distinguished careers in this House, they will look back on this occasion and be ashamed of the part they have played. The Government can make a plausible excuse for what they are doing, and hide behind that plausible excuse; but they deceive no-one, least of all themselves. The truth of the matter—and we all know it—is that the Conservatives are likely to make considerable gains at the local government elections this year. This, of course, would be undesirable from a Socialist point of view, since, for example, there are educational schemes which most people agree are extremely doubtful and which would be interrupted by the advent of a Conservative Council. And so they have changed the date of the elections.
Noble Lords opposite, obeying their three-line Whip, will no doubt be proud that they have come here to-day to vote on such a high principle. I must warn noble Lords opposite that we shall be looking very carefully at any further moves of this kind. It has been suggested in certain quarters that they intend to delay the implementation of the Boundary Commission Report. The Boundary Commission is an independent body whose duty it is to redress the electoral unfairness caused by the changes of population. It favours neither side. I very much hope that the Government will not be tempted to interfere in this respect. We might all begin to lose a little too much confidence in their integrity. Perhaps noble Lords opposite are pleased with themselves and this Bill, but I say this to them before I sit down. This is a grubby, political manœuvre, and in the end the dirt will wash off on their hands and not only stain them but tarnish their reputation.
3.45 p.m.
THE LORD PRIVY SEAL (THE EARL OF LONGFORD): My Lords, I am not going to make a speech; I did not come here prepared to make a speech. But many years ago, a Leader of the Conservative Party, Mr. Balfour, in another

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place made a speech which drew from the Leader of the Liberal Party, the then Prime Minister, Mr. Campbell-Bannerman, the comment:
"Quit this fooling."
I would suggest to the noble Lord that he would do well to adopt that, and "quit this fooling". Of course, it was all play-acting. He does not believe a word of it—not a word of it. It is laid on in order to placate his extreme followers. It was a manœuvre, if I am allowed to use that expression. It was pretty heavy-handed and leaden-footed and, if I may say so, infinitely tedious and somewhat repulsive.
LORD CARRINGTON: My Lords, I have sat in this House for eighteen years or so with the noble Lord opposite, and I have noticed that the only time he ever gets white with anger is when he is on a very bad wicket.
THE EARL OF LONGFORD: If we are going to descend to personalities, I can only say that the noble Lord looks positively yellow at this time.
LORD CARRINGTON: Who descended to personalities?
THE EARL OF LONGFORD:Perhaps I may be allowed to ascend to an even higher plane of argument than that adopted by the noble Lord.
LORD HARLECH: By the noble Lord opposite.
THE EARL OF LONGFORD: I am afraid I do not follow the relevance of that comment. The noble Lord made some contemptible slurs on my colleagues. I reply to them only by saying that in the ordinary way he would not indulge in that sort of language. But he is in an exceptional position. He has a lot of very wild people sitting all round him, and he has to show that he is a real live man; and he has, I think, shown this. But we love him just as much as ever, although we hope that he will not talk that sort of nonsense too often, as we should be unhappy for him. The noble Lord, behind all that palaver, really took a statesmanlike line. We understand that clearly. He was calling on his supporters to retreat. Therefore we applaud him for his wisdom and
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prudence. We forget the words, and pay tribute to the actual course that he adopted.
The only reason why I rose, apart from the desire to put the record level in terms of Parliamentary outspokenness, was simply to say one thing about the three functions which the noble Lord assigned to the House of Lords. I am speaking without any premeditation; I have not consulted colleagues, and this is not a considered pronouncement from the Government. But equally, as Leader of the House, and particularly speaking for myself after a good many years here, I must say one thing about these functions.
The first function, of revision, we all accept. On the second function, to use this House as a forum for debates, I am glad the noble Lord could say what he did say about the standard here. We echo what he said with regard to both of those functions. But he said also, that, as he understood it, in certain grave circumstances this House had a right to resist, at any rate for a time, the will of the House of Commons. For myself, I could never accept that this was part of the duty of the House of Lords. Legally they could do it within the terms of the Parliament Act. I am not going to offer any opinion as to what would happen if they did; I have not come here prepared to enter into that sort of discussion. I can only say, as someone who loves this House as much as the noble Lord does, and as much as anybody here does, that in my opinion it would be a bad day if the House of Lords ever sought to exercise that right. I hope that it never will, and I look to the noble Lord, Lord Carrington, to make sure that it never does.
3.59 p.m.
LORD OGMORE: My Lords, if I may bring the House back to the more normal pattern of the debate, I was somewhat surprised at the intervention of the noble Earl the Leader of the House, who is usually most courteous and restrained, and for whom we have a great affection. I was rather surprised at his outburst to-day.
THE EARL OF LONGFORD: If I caused the noble Lord surprise, I must explain why I found it necessary to speak

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rather strongly. We were described rather as pickpockets by the noble Lord opposite.
LORD OGMORE: I have no doubt that the noble Lord, Lord Carrington, would say that you are pickpockets. I thought the noble Lord, Lord Carrington, put the case extremely clearly and fairly, and with 95 per cent. of the case he put I should entirely agree. But there are one or two points that I should like to mention from these Benches. We have considered the matter carefully to-day, as we have on previous occasions, and there are one or two points that my noble friends would like me to put.
First of all, what reason would justify the postponement of an election'? Normally, only very grave reasons. We know that a national Election was postponed in 1940 because no one could contemplate a General Election when the country was expecting imminent invasion. Very rarely, in my experience, has there been a postponement of a local government election at all. Offhand, I cannot think of an occasion. But there must be a very grave reason before the electorate has its rights taken away from it.
It is all very well to talk about the difficulties of Parties, the difficulties of returning officers and the difficulties of political groups. The people who matter are the electorate, the voters, and there has been very little talk about them. The reasons advanced in this case, as I understand them, are not reasons of any difficulty on the part of the elector; they are political and administrative matters—matters of convenience only. There are difficulties, it is felt, in having an Election a month later: difficulties for the political Parties and for the local government officials. As one of a political Party, I would say that we must put up with them. If that is the fact, if there are difficulties, we must meet them: it is our responsibility to do so.
Then we come to our position as a House. Have we a right to insist upon our Amendments? In answer, we say, "Yes; we have that right if we believe that a vital constitutional principle is at stake." Is a vital principle at stake here? It certainly is: the right of the elector to vote. Should we therefore be deterred from insisting upon our Amendments to-
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day? Certainly not because of any threats applied from noble Lords opposite or from noble Lords elsewhere—certainly not. If it is necessary, in other words, for us to establish a principle, we must go through with it, whatever may be the consequences.
But, my Lords—and this is the one reason why I would dissociate myself from the noble Lord, Lord Carrington—we feel in this case that if we exercised our right we should in fact not be exercising delaying powers but directly and finally overruling the Commons. I think that is the issue which is really before the House. As the noble Lord, Lord Carrington, said, quite rightly, in the normal way if we insisted on our Amendments they would go back to the Commons, and the Commons would have an opportunity of considering the matter again; and it would come back to us. The Parliament Act would apply. Owing to the peculiar circumstances in this case, the timing of the Election, if we now insist upon our Amendments the Elections cannot take place and therefore we shall in fact not be exercising our delaying powers but directly and finally overruling the Commons.
LORD CARRINGTON: My Lords, if I may interrupt the noble Lord to say so, he is not dissociating himself from me. I made exactly the same point.
LORD OGMORE: I am going on to say why I dissociate myself from the noble Lord. It is not because he did not make that point, but because he did not make it the main point. That is perfectly reasonable on our part. The noble Lord, Lord Carrington, put the case on our right to disagree with the Commons on the general issue. That is the case he put, and he said this was not an important enough issue. Those were the words he used. He said that it was a local matter, not a national matter.
I say that this issue is important enough, and I and my colleagues would be quite prepared to vote to keep the Amendments if it were not for this peculiar circumstance, that by doing so we should not be delaying, so to speak, but should be finally overriding the Commons. It is not perhaps a very great difference, but there is some difference between our points of view, and I believe that I am quite entitled to point out that

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difference. That was why I said I dissociated myself from the noble Lord. I was 95 per cent. with him, but not 100 per cent. I do not think he can complain about that. Five per cent. is a reasonable discount. However, my Lords, those are the reasons which the Liberal Party feel they should put before your Lordships to-day, and we hope that they will commend themselves to your Lordships.
4.4 p.m.
VISCOUNT DILHORNE: My Lords, I should like to say a word or two, if I may, in case the noble Earl, Lord Longford, is under any impression that anything he said put the record level. No one will be convinced by his defence, and I fear that if he really were on trial he would have no chance of an acquittal at the hands of an impartial jury. Let us examine what he was saying, and consider for a moment what was said by the noble Lord, Lord Shepherd. He said in the course of his speech to-day—indeed, it was his main argument—that we must put the law right. Of course, it is what they tried to make the law in 1963.
But putting the law right now can be done, as we know, in two ways; and one way means depriving the electors of their rights. Surely when they decided to put the law right they must have known that that would be the consequence. They must have known it meant that Labour councillors would have another year in office to carry out Socialist policies. They must have known that it would have been avoiding an election and prolonging their term of office. If they did know that, then the remarks of the noble Earl, Lord Longford, are so disingenuous as to be wholly unacceptable. If they say they did not know that—and I am perfectly prepared myself, in view of what the noble Earl, Lord Longford, says, to accept the proposition that they had not the least idea of the consequence of doing what they did—I am perfectly prepared to be persuaded by him that that is the case. But, of course, Governments, like human beings, are presumed to intend the natural consequences of their acts, and if the natural consequences of their acts were to confer such benefits on the Labour Party, one must presume that they were intended. But the noble Earl, Lord Longford, seeks to imply that they were not intended at all.
THE EARL OF LONGFORD: My Lords, may I interrupt? I do not know whether the noble and learned Viscount was here when I was speaking, but I did not address myself to these topics at all.
VISCOUNT DILHORNE: My Lords, I was here throughout the noble Earl's speech. His speech is understandable only on the basis that the Party to which he belongs did not understand what they were doing. If they did not understand what they were doing, then of course it is a very clear admission of their gross incompetence, which we have always suspected; but this time it has come out into the open. The Government on this issue cannot have it both ways. Either they realised what they were doing and did it for Party advantages in that particular way, when they could have done it in another way, or they did not realise what they were doing and did it inadvertently, and inadvertently secured for themselves great political advantages. It is one of the two, and therefore the noble Earl's defence does not result in a verdict of acquittal, but, if successful, in a verdict of the grossest incompetence in their dealing with matters relating to the electorate.
There is another matter on which I would touch. I entirely agree with everything that my noble friend Lord Carrington said about the way the House ought to consider these matters when they arise. I would say this to the noble Earl, Lord Longford, who challenged one proposition advanced by my noble friend. I would say to him that I hope the time will not come when this House becomes again involved in a conflict with another place and has to dissent, and stand firm upon its dissent. But if the time did come when this House should take that course, not in the interests of a Party but in the interests of the nation, then I think it would be the right, and indeed the duty, of this House to take that course in the interests of the nation, come what may.
4.9 p.m.
LORD CONESFORD: My Lords, I wish to add only a very few words. I was astonished by the outburst of the noble Earl the Leader of the House. That may be, of course, because I am a "wild man". That may be his view. I

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can only say that I have for many years regarded him, in this House and outside, with both respect and affection; and his words distressed me very much. I do not think they were characteristic. I believe they were words which, when he looks at them tomorrow, he will regret. Whether I am right or wrong about that, I should like, if I may, to refute the answer he made. He said, on his own behalf and without consultation, that there was one point about the three functions of this House mentioned by my noble Leader with which he disagreed. That was the right, in certain circumstances, for this House to delay matters. My Lords, he can be proved wrong in his view of the Constitution by a simple consideration. The only important power which this House has to interfere at all in legislation is the power of delay, and that power exists under the Parliament Acts, the last Parliament Act, which fixed the power of delay at one year, being a Socialist Act. Therefore, in the Socialists' own view this House has a power of delay which, presumably, in some circumstances it has the right to use.
My noble Leader gave his view of the circumstances in which the House should exercise that power, but the proposition of the noble Earl the Leader of the House was that that could never arise. In that case, there is no explanation whatever of the Socialist Act which recognised that right of delay.
The other matter I should like to mention is this. When the proceedings of this House are discussed outside I think there ought to be a limit to the amount of nonsensical falsehood that is said about this House. It is not always possible to reply to nonsense by a Member of another place, if it is uttered in another place, but, when the Member of another place chooses to utter his nonsense in the columns of The Times, then the position is rather different. Some of you may have seen the letter in The Times yesterday from Mr. Eric Lubbock. He purported to describe the actions of the Conservative Party on this London Government Bill in both Houses. This is what he said about it, and I shall trouble your Lordships with only one sentence:
"Yet in spite of several midnight filibusters in both Houses, the public reaction has been negligible".
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"Several midnight filibusters in both Houses".
LORD SHEPHERD: Hear, hear!
LORD CONESFORD: My Lords, "Hear, hear!" says the Government Chief Whip. Let me remind him that if we take the four days in which this House discussed the matter—Second Reading, Committee, Report and Third Reading—the latest hour at which we discussed this matter was on Second Reading and then we concluded our debate before 5.30 p.m. The description of this as "several midnight filibusters" seems to me to pass the limit of idiocy, even from Orpington Man.
I have some sympathy with the noble Lord, Lord Ogmore, whom we always hear with so much respect and affection in this House. When it was pointed out in another place to Mr. Lubbock that his Party in this House had followed the lead of the noble Lord, Lord Ogmore, and that Lord Ogmore had spoken in favour of the Amendments that were being considered, and that the Liberal Lords had voted with the Conservatives in the same Lobby, at that stage the honourable Member for Orpington said this was lamentably true but Lord Ogmore—
LORD SALTOUN: Order!
LORD CONESFORD: My Lords, I am not quoting the actual words; I am paraphrasing. I am not going to offend against the Rule of this House. Mr. Lubbock explained that this was lamentably true, but all this would not have happened, if only Lord Ogmore had had the advantage of reading what Mr. Lubbock had said on previous occasions. I can only say, having regard to Mr. Lubbock's standard of accuracy, that I do not think the noble Lord, Lord Ogmore, would, either on this or on any future occasion, find it necessary to study what Mr. Lubbock said in another place. As I read that letter in The Times I could not help being reminded of those famous words of Dryden:
"The rest to some faint meaning make pretence
But Shadwell never deviates into sense."
4.16 p.m.
LORD CITRINE: My Lords, I rise to support the Motion that we do not insist

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on our Amendments to the London Government Bill. I do so because once again we are faced both with the question of principle, and with the question of the powers of this House. I had to deal with this matter in the course of debate on a former occasion, when I saw clearly that the insistence of the will of the majority of this House must sooner or later lead to a direct clash between this House and the House of Commons. I refer to the "other place", which we do not seem to be able to identify by specific reference.
At least two-thirds of the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Carrington, was up to his usual high and fair-minded standard. I have long respected the noble Lord, and I think he is quite aware of that in the references to him that I have made in this House. Like many others, I suppose, I was full of admiration for the concise, precise and, I thought, logical way in which he dealt with this subject for at least three-parts of his speech.
The noble Lord was made aware of my attitude of mind on this matter when another supposed question of principle was before this House in regard to retrospective legislation, and on the passing of the Bill concerning that issue. This would have meant that several million pounds of the taxpayers' money would have been handed over to the Burmah Oil Company and its associates. I said then that, in my opinion, on a question of high principle, this House had no right to thwart the will of the elected House. Not at that precise moment, but at some little time later the noble Lord, Lord Carrington, asked me whether my reasoning applied to any right of the House of Lords to amend a measure which came to us from the House of Commons. I said, "No". But in respect of matters of clearly announced principle, and high principle, I was quite convinced that it was utterly wrong for this House, composed as it is predominantly of an hereditary element—and let us remember that there is always a threat in this House, however sparsely the Benches on the opposite side may be people in the course of normal debates, of a horde of people who have never taken the slightest interest in the doings of this House being marshalled in support of a policy, which in all probability they had not a glimmer of—
THE MARQUESS OF SALISBURY: My Lords, may I interrupt the noble Lord? I have been in this House now for 25 years, and I have never known a case where that happened. Can the noble Lord quote a case? It is purely a bogey put up by the Labour Party.
LORD CITRINE: My Lords, I have seen an unexpectedly larger attendance on the Benches opposite when any of these matters have been raised.
LORD CARRINGTON: My Lords, may I interrupt? I thought I saw an unexpectedly full attendance on the opposite Benches this afternoon.
LORD CITRINE: My Lords, I am sorry, I did not hear the noble Lord.
LORD CARRINGTON: It does not matter.
LORD CITRINE: Well, it could not have amounted to much. May I proceed with what I have to say? From my experience during the 20 years I have been in this House, noble Lords opposite have not had the experience of sitting opposite a decided majority of another Party. They have never had that experience and I can assure them that I, who have not engaged very much in polemical discussion in this House (I think I can claim this without exaggeration), have felt a sense of frustration and wondered whether it was any use my coming here, knowing there was always the power in the hands of the Conservative Party at any time, by force of numbers rather than by argument, to frustrate whatever was being dealt with in the House at least up to that stage.
My intervention on that occasion of the Burmah Oil Company was one dealing with principle, and that principle is raised again. I did not engage in the debates on this Bill in the course of the Committee or Second Reading stage beyond asking the noble Lord, Lord Brooke of Cumnor, whether he was dealing with this question as a question of high principle. And to his credit, without attempting to trim and qualify, as is so customary with certain politicians, he answered, Yes: it was a matter of high principle. So I followed it up by saying that what we are doing here is challenging the House of Commons on a matter of high principle, and that brings us

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back to the issue with which we are concerned to-day.
The principles which the noble Lord, Lord Carrington put forward, as I said, in two-thirds of his speech, I felt without examining them carefully, were fair, and, I think, summed up pretty accurately what the responsibilities of a Chamber of this kind would be. Then suddenly he veered off, and I wondered why. From the high level at which that speech started, and was maintained up to this point, he went on to the kind of speech that we might have expected from a biased Party politician. I was surprised at that. I thought from what I read in the newspapers that when we were coming here we were going to have a challenge, the kind of challenge which has been threatened so often—I will not say so often, but threatened on former occasions. But suddenly I read in the newspapers that this challenge was not to be made, and I wondered why.
By a pure coincidence, there appeared in the newspapers the Gallup Poll which showed, so far as these polls can be relied upon, a decided improvement in the standing of the present Government with the British public. I wondered, in the light of that quarter of the speech made by the noble Lord, Lord Carrington, whether he, too, with his colleagues, had been affected by the knowledge that the disfavour which they assumed the Government had fallen into because of its justifiable and courageous measures to deal with the economic situation, had put them in such a position that no political advantage could be taken in a Party sense by the Conservative Party. It is a very strange coincidence. The noble Lord will permit me to say, without disparagement, that his speech was read from beginning to end, quite contrary to the advice we are all given and to the Resolution of this House in the Manual of Procedure. Therefore, it was a completely meditated speech, a speech which in all probability had been drawn up in consultation with Party leaders in another place. I think that is a feasible assumption.
LORD CARRINGTON: It is a false one.
LORD CITRINE: I think it is a very high probability, and the noble Lord's
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remark will deceive nobody. I have yet to discern on the part of Members who sit on the Opposition Benches any material difference in the policies, however hare-brained they may be, of the Party leaders in the House of Commons. I have yet to see that difference, and when I do see that difference I shall begin to believe there is some measure of independence and freedom of view expressed, not necessarily by Back-Benchers, but by those who lead the Party opposite. Therefore I am bound to come to the conclusion that, despite the high moral tone that has been taken in this debate, it is basically Party advantage that has been considered in not making this challenge to-day.
I said on a former occasion—and I stick to it—that I should be very pleased to see this challenge made. I believe that every time noble Lords opposite frustrate the will of the Government of the day, they put another nail in their coffin. I have many times tried to console my colleagues on a measure which they believe has been dealt with by this method employed on these occasions by the Party opposite; I have many times said, "Don't worry; you can take it from me they are moving nearer the day when the Constitution of this House will be very materially revised". I repeat that. I regret that I should have heard such a Party harangue in a speech which in the early part was worthy of admiration.
4.26 p.m.
THE MARQUESS OF SALISBURY: My Lords, this is not a debate, I think, in which anyone can feel any enthusiasm about taking part. If I have decided, after listening to a portion of it, to speak for a few moments to-day, it is merely because this is an occasion, I suppose, when anyone who has been, as I have, for a very long time, a Member of your Lordships' House, ought to try to give the House, and Members who have not been here so long, the benefit—I will not say of his wisdom, but at any rate of his experience.
I have had, it so happens, more than one experience of very much the same kind as this when I was leading the Opposition during the 1945 Parliament, twenty years ago. Then, too, we had in this country, as to-day, the curious combination of a big majority for the Labour

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Party in the other House and a big majority for the Conservative Party in this House, and so we had constantly to weigh in our minds what was the right balance between our inclinations and what one might describe, for want of a better word, as our constitutional duty. If we had had only to consult our inclinations we should have thrown out, for instance, all the nationalisation Bills, and a great many others as well: but that would have been, in effect to bring the constitutional machine to a halt; and so we did not in fact, as your Lordships know, take that particular course. We did our best to keep the machinery of the Constitution moving as smoothly as we could, while we reserved—and I say this in particular to the noble Lord, Lord Citrine—always the right of the Second Chamber to maintain its opposition to the first Chamber should we feel that the safety and welfare of the realm was threatened. On that basis we got through the 1945 Parliament pretty well, and I do not think we did any harm. On the contrary, I believe that the prestige of your Lordships' House was sensibly raised by the moderation we displayed at that time.
Now, after twenty years, much the same situation is with us again. Now, as then, there is a majority for one Party in one House and for the other Party in the other House. Now, as then, we are likely as a result—we, at any rate, who sit on this side of the House—to face very unpalatable situations, and many decisions will have to be taken, whether we decide to stand firm or not, which are bound to be awkward for all of us. That is our unhappy position, as we all know, this afternoon.
Many of us do not like this Bill. We regard it, as the noble Lord, Lord Carrington, has already said, as a mean piece of political gerrymandering, quite unworthy of the reputation of Parliament and this country. I do not believe, any more than he does, that there can be many noble Lords, even on the other side of the House, who are really very proud about it. Indeed, to my mind it comes near the point where we in this House should feel obliged to say, "Let us chuck it out and be damned to them all!" But somehow, having turned this matter over in my mind again and again, like many other noble Lords, I cannot feel that it quite reaches that point. Therefore I
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entirely agree with the course which he has advised. But I cannot agree that we have not the right to throw it out should we wish. We have a right. It is a right, although limited, which was conferred upon us by the last Parliament Act. That limited right is the law of the land, and it is no good noble Lords opposite saying we have not got it. That right is there in the Statute Book.
THE EARL OF LONGFORD: My Lords, the noble Marquess seems to be getting a little angry, possibly with me. I never said there was not a legal right. To the best of my belief, I said there was. I said that in my view it would not be prudent to exercise it.
THE MARQUESS OF SALISBURY: My Lords, the noble Lord might not agree with the right, but it is there on the Statute Book. It is one probably rarely to be exercised. We could not do it often. Perhaps it will never be exercised, at any rate in the lifetime of people as old as myself. But it is there. Otherwise, we should have single-Chamber Government, and that, I am sure, is something which the British people would never tolerate.
4.32 p.m.
LORD SALTOUN: My Lords, I shall not detain your Lordships long, but there are some things which have happened which have induced me to speak. I think I can say that I have been in the business that we have been mainly discussing longer than anybody, because immediately after the Parliament Act of 1911 I was devilling a good deal for those noble Lords who had become Constitution-mongers. All sorts of Constitutions were brought up and discussed at that time. In the end, I formed the opinion which I have only once before given to your Lordships and which I will now venture to give you again.
It seemed to me that the Constitution prior to 1911,with two Houses of equal powers, worked well, on the whole. It seemed to me that once there was complete mastery put into the hands of one House over the other the position could never be satisfactory, even if that other House was always most temperate, most courteous and most reasonable. But, as we know, the temper of all public assemblies, I believe even of your Lordships'

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House, is always that of the lowest common multiple. So we can never hope for such a situation.
That being so, it has always seemed to me that your Lordships' House had a great deal of apparent responsibility without any power, and I have always said to myself that that situation can never work properly. In a great measure, it is due to the great qualities exhibited by the Leaders in your Lordships' House on both sides over many years that it has worked at all. As I have said before, I think it would be much better for the country and for the Constitution if this House ceased to exist and the House of Commons had the full responsibility for all its acts. That has always been my opinion, and I have expressed it once before in your Lordships' House when we had a debate on the Constitution. What I have to say is that if ever there comes a time when it appears to me that my duty as a Member of your Lordships' House is to vote against any Government, even if the penalty is the extinction of your Lordships' House, then I shall unhesitatingly take it, and I shall take it with joy.
4.35 p.m.
LORD SHEPHERD: My Lords, it has always been one of my desires to be a hawk, but clearly this afternoon I have to be a dove. I think the noble Lord, Lord Ogmore, was the one noble Lord who got closest to the subject before the House, the question of the Bill and the Amendments. I would only say to the noble Lord that I have deployed the reasons why the Government felt it right to introduce the Bill and why we resist the Amendments of your Lordships' House. At this comparatively late hour, I doubt whether I shall be able to persuade the noble Lord to a different view. Clearly, he has made up his mind.
The noble Lord, Lord Carrington, stated his view as to the constitutional position. I will not go into that. He then made an attack upon noble Lords here. Well, attacks upon honour in politics have been made from time immemorial. I still remember my noble friend the late Lord
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Morrison of Lambeth, making in your Lordships' House a most violent attack upon the noble Lord, Lord Brooke of Cumnor—Mr. Henry Brooke, as he was then—and the noble Viscount, Lord Dilhorne. When the noble Viscount left the Woolsack and we were able to get to know him, we found he was not such a villain as we had thought he was. Certainly the noble Lord, Lord Brooke of Cumnor, is not so bad as my late noble friend led us to believe. I am not quite sure whether this is due to the fact that his noble wife is a Member of the House and keeps a closer eye on him than perhaps was possible when he was in another place. But we have these attacks. They are made, and will no doubt continue to be made.
Having seen all the papers and having seen all those that have been involved in this matter, I am quite satisfied that there was no political pressure put upon my right honourable friend the Home Secretary. I believe the present Home Secretary will maintain the same high standards as did the noble Lord opposite. But I believe that none of us is likely to change our mind if we continue this discussion. There is an important Bill on Agriculture, which I am sure the House would wish to attend to; and I wonder whether perhaps we could now conclude our discussion, and if noble Lords wish to take up wider issues on the Constitution and the area in which your Lordships' House can operate perhaps the noble Lord, Lord Saltoun, could put down an Unstarred Question, or perhaps he might lend his support to the Motion of my noble friend Lord Mitchison. But there will be opportunities to come. I hope that the House will agree that this is not an occasion on which we should continue this discussion but that we should conclude this part of our business; and my hope is that your Lordships will not insist upon your Amendments.
On Question, Motion agreed to.

GENERAL RATE BILL [H.L.]
Report of the Amendment received (according to Order).

AGRICULTURE BILL
4.38 p.m.
Order of the Day for the Second Reading read.
LORD HILTON OF UPTON: My Lords, I beg to move that this Bill be now read a second time. Your Lordships have waited quite a long time for this Bill, which seeks to do many things to benefit agriculture and those engaged in it. Earlier in our discussions this afternoon it was suggested that the large attendance was because of the interest of your Lordships in local government. I was hoping it was because of your Lordships' great interest in agriculture and this Bill. After all, agriculture is still one of the most important, if not the most important, industries in the country. Time is getting away and, if it is acceptable to your Lordships, I feel that my best course is probably to traverse the main provisions in broad outline without detaining your Lordships too long. Then, at the end of the day, I am sure that my noble friend Lord Walston will be happy to respond to questions on which noble Lords may wish to have further enlightenment.
Part I of the Bill implements the policy set out in the White Paper on the Marketing of Meat and Livestock. Over the years, the House has considered a series of Reports by Committees who have inquired into this complex industry, the most recent being the Verdon-Smith Committee, which produced a most comprehensive account of the industry's problems. Various recommendations have been made by these Committees, but all have been convinced of the need for improvements.
The Bill provides for the establishment of an independent Meat and Livestock Commission charged with a wide range of functions to bring about improvements in efficiency over the whole field, from farm to consumer. The Commission will be assisted by committees representing producers, distributors and consumers, who are all, of course, vitally concerned with its work. Clause 2 provides for these committees to be consulted on any matter affecting their interests; they may initiate proposals and make representations to the Commission; and they may be employed by the Com-
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mission in an executive capacity. They will therefore actively participate in the development and execution of the Commission's policies.
Provision for the Commission's functions is made in Clauses 3 to 8 and in Part I of Schedule 1. Producers will be provided with a full range of livestock improvement services and will be helped in a number of ways to produce the type of product their customers want and to market their stock to the best advantage. Those engaged in marketing and distribution will benefit from activities applying to all stages in the marketing chain, from the auction and slaughterhouse to the retail shop. These include the development of research and advisory services and the provision of carcase classification and improved market information. For the consumer, provision has been made in Clauses 7 and 8, and elsewhere, to provide far better opportunities to assess, and discriminate between, the products on sale in the shops. The Commission will take over the important work which the Pig Industry Development Authority has been doing and the Authority will then be dissolved. Your Lordships will no doubt wish to pay tribute to the Authority's work, which will, we hope, be continued and expanded by the Commission, with the minimum of interruption and disturbance of the staff.
In addition to the functions specified in the Bill, the Government have thought it advisable to provide for the possibility that as the industry develops—and it is changing very rapidly at present—a need may emerge for new services or other changes going beyond what is at present proposed. Clause 9 accordingly provides the necessary machinery and powers to permit the Commission to submit schemes for this purpose for ministerial and Parliamentary approval. Your Lordships will know that these powers have been criticised as being too wide, but they are no wider than is necessary to achieve their purpose and they are accompanied by very substantial safeguards, which have been strengthened by Amendments made in the other place, and which in our view will ensure that no scheme could become law unless it commanded a very wide measure of support.
On the question of finance, the Commission will be reimbursed for work done specifically on behalf of the Government,

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and may be assisted by the Exchequer to meet the initial cost of new projects. The main source of finance will, however, be a levy on the industry in Great Britain. There have been some very exaggerated estimates of the possible size of this levy, and it may help your Lordships if I repeat that a levy on all stock at a level comparable with the present P.I.D.A. levy on pigs will probably be adequate. Even if the whole cost of a levy of this order were passed on to the consumer, it would represent less than a farthing per lb. on the average retail price of meat; but in any case we should expect that in the long run improvements in efficiency resulting from the Commission's activities should more than outweigh the cost of the levy.
In short, my Lords, the provisions for the establishment of the Commission offer a real opportunity to obtain greater efficiency in the meat and livestock industry which will be of substantial benefit not only to those engaged in the industry but also to consumers. Before leaving Part I of the Bill, I should add that provision is made in Clauses 10 and 11 for the extension of the calf subsidy arrangements to permit subsidy payments on stock certified on a deadweight basis, and in Clause 12 for the beef cow subsidy which was announced at the last Annual Review.
I turn now to Part II of the Bill, which provides for new schemes to improve farm structure, a new and extended Farm Improvement Scheme and new grants to encourage agricultural investment. I am sure there will be a general welcome for the farm structure provisions. Half the agricultural holdings in this country support farm businesses smaller than one man could run full time, and another quarter require less than the equivalent of two men. Of course many of these holdings provide a reasonable living for the occupier—and, indeed, will benefit from the provisions of this Bill. The Government have made it quite clear that they are fully alive to the importance of the small farmer and the family farm. I am particularly pleased about this, because when I was Member of another place I was regarded as one of the spokesmen for the small farmer. I am glad that my Government have made it known that they, too, are still
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keenly interested in the welfare of the small farmer. No such farmer will be compelled to make use of this Part of the Bill. The Government's aim is to encourage the voluntary amalgamation—and I emphasise the word "voluntary"—of such holdings with other land to make farms which offer full scope to a modern farmer, defined in this Bill as commercial units. If that cannot be done in one step, it is proposed to assist the formation of intermediate units, capable of employing one man's time. There are also to be grants for beneficial boundary adjustments.
This Part of the Bill provides for 50 per cent. grants toward the incidental expenses and remodelling works occasioned by an approved amalgamation or boundary adjustment, and enables loans to be made toward the balance of these expenses and the cost of buying land. When progress would otherwise be slow, the State may buy farms by agreement and incur losses for the purpose of improving farm structure. For farmers dependent on uncommercial units and prepared to relinquish them for amalgamation, there is provision for lump sums or annuities to help them to resettle elsewhere or to retire from farming. To prevent the reversal of amalgamations assisted in these ways, Schedule 3 will ensure that the land stays together in agriculture for forty years. The Farm Improvement Scheme, which has contributed so much to the modernisation of basic fixed equipment on existing farms since 1957, has been given a new lease of life. A further £80 million is provided for the new one-quarter grants, which cover a wide range of occupier's improvements and equipment. One-man farms will still qualify for these grants.
This Part of the Bill also provides (in Clauses 31 to 34) for the new investment grants for agriculture to replace the investment allowances which were withdrawn on January 17 last year. The new incentives have been concentrated for agriculture, as for industry, where they are likely to be of the most value. They take the form of the following three grants. First, there is to be a grant of 10 per cent. on fixed equipment, fixed plant and machinery and long-term improvements to land which do not attract other grants. This will, in particular, assist the specialist livestock producers

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who may be unable to qualify for grant under the Farm Improvement Scheme. Secondly, there is to be a grant of 10 per cent, on new tractors and harvesters, which are two vital and widely used items of equipment.
Finally, there will be a supplementary grant of 5 per cent. to grants for approved work carried out on farms under the Farm Improvement Scheme, on horticultural holdings under the Horticulture Improvement Scheme and, in England and Wales, for grants under the Farm Water Supply Scheme. As the Government recently announced, an additional incentive is to be provided for expenditure between January 1, 1967, and December 31, 1968, to correspond with the increase in industrial investment grants announced in December. The grant on tractors will be raised from 10 per cent. to 15 per cent., and on fixed equipment from 10 per cent. to 12 per cent., for expenditure during this period.
Part III of the Bill is concerned with the hills and uplands. There are three main proposals here. First, a new land improvement scheme designed to increase the productivity of hill land without being tied to the present farm structure; for this the proposed rate of grant is 50 per cent. Secondly, under Clause 42 the Government, in fulfilment of their declared intention, are seeking powers to place the hill livestock subsidies on a permanent footing. The third major proposal is that for certain areas in the hills, which have special problems and difficulties, new executive bodies—to be known as Rural Development Boards—should be established. These will be small independent bodies who will be mainly people with experience of special knowledge of forestry and agriculture. They are required to consult with local authorities and other interested bodies in drawing up a programme for their area. This will provide for the co-ordinated development of agriculture and forestry, and assurances have been given that they will consult private forestry interests as well as the Forestry Commission. The Board will be able to put up a programme of financial assistance designed to help in the implementation of their plans. They will encourage and assist the improvement of farm structure in their area, buying land for amalgamations where appropriate. Although they will no doubt work
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very largely by advice and persuasion, nevertheless to enable them to carry out their tasks effectively it is thought right to give them powers to control land disposals and tree planting that could prejudice their programme. These powers will be exercised subject to the many safeguards for the individual written into the Bill, such as appeals to the Minister against decisions and to the Lands Tribunal on price.
The Government propose to set up only one or two boards in the first instance, and then proceed in the light of experience gained from their operation. Your Lordships will note that before a board is set up an Affirmative Resolution of each House is necessary. I am sure these new executive bodies have a most useful role to play, and I am confident that they will make a real contribution to the re-development of difficult areas in the hills.
Part IV of the Bill provides for the setting up of the Central Council for Agricultural and Horticultural Co-operation to promote and develop co-operation generally throughout the United Kingdom and for the making of a new, comprehensive scheme of grants to be administered by the Council. The scheme will incorporate the various existing co-operative grants, extend them as equally as possible to agriculture and horticulture, and provide for the first time a wide range of assistance for co-operation in production. We are particularly anxious to develop co-operation in production. We believe that such co-operation can prove to be an important way in which smaller producers may increase their viability, and in which producers generally can raise their productivity. These proposals have been widely welcomed, both in another place and throughout the country generally, and I feel sure that they will commend themselves to this House to-day.
Finally, I turn to the miscellaneous but very worthwhile provisions in Part V of the Bill. I am sure that the House will welcome the credit provisions in Clauses 62 and 63, and also the grants to encourage better management through the use of adequate business records in Clause 64. The technical progress of the industry in recent years has been quite remarkable, but this must now be

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matched by improvements in management if the benefits are to be fully exploited. Then Clause 65 enables the introduction of livestock health schemes. I am personally very glad that, by Clause 66, we are helping the conditions of life of our farm workers, by the introduction of a payment-during-sickness scheme. I am sure this will be welcomed by all farm workers.
There we have the Bill. It would be idle for me to pretend that this is not a great day in my life, to be moving the Second Reading of this important Bill. I believe that the Bill in its various provisions, will be of genuine lasting benefit to an industry which so many of us rightly hold in such high esteem, and which in recent years has such a very proud record of increased production. My Lords, I beg to move that the Bill be now read a second time.
Moved, That the Bill be now read 2a. —(Lord Hilton of Upton.)
4.57 p.m.
LORD NUGENT OF GUILDFORD: My Lords, I should like to thank the noble Lord, Lord Hilton of Upton, for the felicitous manner in which he has moved this Agriculture Bill this afternoon, and for the admirable, comprehensive and lucid description which he has given us of its contents. I can certainly join with him in agreeing that it is a useful Bill and has many good things in it. Indeed, there are only a few points in it on which I shall want to criticise it on the Committee stage, and I should tell the noble Lord now that my criticism of the Bill is directed not so much to what is in it as to what is not in it. I have warned the noble Lord, Lord Walston, who is going to reply to the debate, that I should like to go rather wider than the contents of the Bill itself, because I believe that the benefits in it will not materialise unless something can be done for the basic structure of the industry.
It is, I think, germane to remind your Lordships that this Bill started its life in 1965. It is, in fact, a 1965 model, and what we want to-day is a 1967 model. Conditions change so fast to-day—and particularly have they changed in the last three years—that some basic new legislation now, at a time when farmers are
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hard up, when production is slowed up and when Europe is squared up, is required. I advise noble Lords opposite that something more fundamental than this Bill is urgently wanted. What is wanted, I believe, is a complete "rethink" of the economic foundations of the industry, including the very structure of the price guarantee by deficiency payment system. In our agricultural debate in this House last summer I urged the need for a fundamental overhaul of policy on these lines, and I believe that the intervening six months have confirmed the wisdom of that advice. The autumn collapse of livestock prices, and now the Prime Minister's initiative for entry into the Common Market, I think confirm the need for action—and urgent action—now. I only wish I could see some signs of grace in the Ministry of Agriculture that this was forthcoming.
However, let me begin by a brief comment on one or two of the major features in the Bill, and then, if I may, I will pass on to what is not in it. I have a special welcome for Part IV of the Bill, which sets out the measures to encourage co-operation in the farming industry and provides for the setting up of the Central Council for Agricultural and Horticultural Co-operation. This, I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Hilton of Upton, is a major step along the road of development of co-operation, in particular in the field of production and marketing. During the past four or five years I have been personally associated with this work as chairman of the Agricultural Market Development Committee, which I think might fairly be claimed to be the prototype for this new Central Council. Perhaps I should declare an interest in this Part of the Bill—or, as the effect of this Bill is to remove more than half the Agricultural Market Development Committee's functions, perhaps it should be a disinterest that I declare. I should like to pay a tribute to the progenitors of A.M.D.E.C., because I think it has done very useful work in this field. It was founded on the initiative of my right honourable friend Mr. Soames, when he was Minister, jointly with the three National Farmers' Unions. They set up this strange, hybrid body, with the administration paid for by the Farmers' Unions, the membership coming from the Farmers' Unions, and the Ministry

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providing £1½million worth of grants, to promote better marketing.
In practice, our experience has shown that our main activities have turned out to be to encourage and help farmers forming groups, co-operatives and companies to improve the marketing of their produce. The most important lesson that I suppose we have learnt in the last four or five years is that you cannot make any useful progress in the improvement of the marketing of agricultural and horticultural produce unless you turn to its production as well; and, to their eternal credit, the Ministry of Agriculture, working with us in this task, have been most flexible in the administration of these grants and have allowed us to go far into the field of production with the broad purpose of improving the actual marketing of the products. It has been a very fruitful partnership, and I believe I am only stating what is fair and true in saying that the A.M.D.E.C. has been the prototype of this new statutory Council.
This new provision can, of course, do much more. It provides greater powers, greater grants and wider scope, and it can do a great deal to help especially the small and medium-sized farm to make itself viable in the conditions of to-day. But I should record in passing that our experience is that it has usually been the larger farmer who has seen the advantage of combining with his neighbours for this purpose. It has been the smaller farmer who has followed his example and reckoned that if it was a good thing for the big chap, it would probably be a good thing for him too, has then come in afterwards.
First, by combining for marketing it puts a group of farmers (a small group, as a rule) into the position of being a bigger, stronger seller, able to make contracts and, what is even more important, to keep them, and to get beyond the farm gate a bit nearer to the consumer who is going to consume the food, and therefore able to learn more precisely what the consumer wants. On the production side, to which the noble Lord, Lord Hilton of Upton, referred, we have a number of examples of small groups of farmers in the same neighbourhood who have integrated their production together, thereby saving machinery costs and being able to even out the flow of their produce to market, to redesign
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production the better to meet consumer taste by changed breeding programmes, by altering cropping programmes, and so on.
But I think I should just say this word of warning in passing: that every group of farmers who join together in this way are not immediately going to make a fortune. The road to success is a hard one. Success is possible only where there is the right structure and the right management and where there is 100 per cent. loyalty by the members of the group concerned. The result then will be that there will be lower production and marketing costs, and there will be a better return from the market, because they will more precisely meet the consumer tastes that they set out to serve. The Central Council can do just these things. They can give guidance on the right kind of structure to be formed by a group wishing to start and they can give them grants; and I believe that they will do a valuable job over the years. They certainly have my best wishes.
Turning now to Part I of the Bill, dealing with the Meat and Livestock Commission, I can join with the noble Lord, Lord Hilton of Upton, in welcoming the setting up of this Commission. It is, of course, based on the Verdon-Smith Report which was made to the last Conservative Government. To me, it seemed a thoroughly sound Report: a very good Report indeed. In fact, what this Meat and Livestock Commission do is to confirm that the existing system of fat stock marketing, which is based mainly on live auctions, is accepted as the best that we can do. The new Commission are there to guide and help its development, as the noble Lord has described to us. It is perhaps interesting to record that this settles, at any rate for the time being, the great post-war debate about meat marketing in which noble Lords opposite and I have often taken part, as to whether we should continue with the live auctions on the hoof or sale on the hook by grade and dead-weight, usually suggested by the Producer Marketing Board.
Of course, the existing system is very easy to fault—it is full of defects—but it has the ultimate virtue that it works. It works to get a highly-perishable commodity quickly on to the counter in good

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condition. My own view is that Her Majesty's Government have acted rightly to base their legislation on the Verdon-Smith Report, and that this is the best way to proceed. Dead-weight sales will develop on their merits alongside the live markets. In addition, the Commission will have the difficult job of establishing grades—much easier to talk about than to do. They have a useful long-term role to play, and I certainly wish them well. I must add this critical note: that, despite the explanation of the noble Lord, Lord Hilton of Upton, I am still very doubtful whether Clause 9 is not giving much too much power to the Commission. But we can discuss that matter on Committee.
My concern in this field generally is more with the livestock producers themselves, who are now so very seriously depressed. My comment on Part III, the hill land provisions, is similar. They are useful measures, but their value will not materialise unless the confidence of the livestock industry can be restored. The cattle simply will not be there. In passing, I must warn the noble Lord, Lord Hilton of Upton, that we shall have some critical comments to make about the treatment of private forestry in these hill areas when we come to the Committee stage—indeed, some of my noble friends may have some critical comments to make to-day.
The reaction of the farming world to this Bill is slight, because its immediate impact—I stress the word "immediate"—on the basic economic problems of farming is also slight. The grants for farm improvements in Part II and the new investment grants are certainly substantial and very important, but they are no more than the existing provisions of the aid served up in a new form. The farm structure grants to which the noble Lord referred are, in my judgment, mainly sociological, but I certainly welcome them, such as they are.
Now I should like to turn to make a comment on what is not in the Bill: that is, what I believe to be the necessary measures to restore the economic health of the industry and to enable it to meet the nation's needs to-day and indeed tomorrow. I have three major reasons for reviewing the system of price guarantee by deficiency payment in this country. First, and by far the greatest, is, of course,
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the Common Market issue. If we enter the Common Market we know that our system of deficiency payments must go and that we must change to a system of minimum import prices and levies. But after last autumn's experience we have now learned—and I sincerely hope that noble Lords opposite have learned—that even if we do not enter the Common Market the repercussions of the formation and development of the Common Market agricultural policy will still necessitate a change. If we do not make such a change, we shall suffer again and again from price collapse, due to temporary influxes coming on to our own market.
In the meantime, the Prime Minister is going round Europe assiduously wooing the Common Market capitals for Great Britain's entry and stressing that agriculture is our main problem; so that many people in Europe now must know the Prime Minister's policy for solving this problem, or at any rate the outline of it. Is it not time—I put this question to the noble Lord, Lord Walston, whom we look forward to hearing answer our debate—that the Government told our farmers here what is proposed for them? After all, they are the people who do the business. The silence of the Minister of Agriculture on this matter is positively deafening. I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Walston, will give us to-day some indication of Government thinking on this matter. It would also be of great interest to the whole farming world outside—although I appreciate that a statement here could hardly expect to get such good publicity as that of the President of the Board of Trade in a private meeting yesterday.
My second reason for reviewing the deficiency payments system of guarantees—and this is a very cogent one within the industry—is that the continuous postwar expansion of production has stopped; and I believe it has stopped in such a way that it will not recover without some new approach. The December returns for the industry, which have just been published, confirm this. I should like to give just one quotation from the market report published in last week's Farmer and Stockbreeder. Under a headline of "No confidence anywhere", it reads:
"A picture of almost unrelieved gloom is presented by the December returns for England and Wales. They show that there is a complete lack of confidence in every major section

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of the industry. Sheep numbers are falling for the first time for many years. The expansion in the beef-breeding herd appears to be levelling out. The dairy herd is not rising as expected. Numbers of young cattle have turned downwards."
And so it runs on.
To that statement I would add that the overdrafts for the industry have now for the first time exceeded the figure of £500 million. Perhaps I should declare an interest in that, too—I should be happy to be able to do so. But, to be serious, the industry is evidently seriously short of cash. I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Walston, when he comes to wind-up will give us the forecast of the Ministry of Agriculture for production for the year 1967–68, the coming year.
Thirdly, my Lords, there are production problems in each commodity section, some worse than others. By far the worst is in the livestock industry. Let me just outline the problem the livestock industry had to meet. Last autumn the market collapsed; and the important point to notice is that the collapse was due to the policies of the Common Market countries. They each raised import levies on cattle up to £4 per live cwt., or about £40 per live beast. The result was that consignments of cattle for meat due to these countries were immediately switched to wherever else they could go—the only other place being here. A large Argentine consignment intended for Italy was switched to this country, and a considerable number of Irish cattle, also intended for Europe, were similarly switched here. I should say, in passing, that the position of Irish cattle, which normally we welcome here, has greatly exacerbated the collapse of our market. The export subsidy which the Irish Government is now operating has undoubtedly worsened the position, and the result has been that we have had some 18 per cent. more Irish cattle coming on to the flooded market here.
Finally, the export of British fatstock to the six countries of the Common Market was stopped; so that this balancing trade was ruled out. The result of all this was that cattle prices here fell by about £3 per live cwt., or £30 per beast—a price about £20 per beast lower than would occur on a normal market in the autumn. Sheep prices fell almost as badly. The price guarantee system is of some help; but it was not able com-
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pletely to protect the farmers from this fall; especially as the abatement payment worsens the position. It remains to be seen how much the Minister's undertaking to revise this will help. In the store markets, which influence the future, the prices followed the fatstock prices—and there is no price guarantee to help there. To complete the picture, the disincentive to pig numbers has been so sharp that there is now a serious shortage, and a number of bacon factories are in danger of going out of business for lack of through-put.
My Lords, the total effect of this has been that our fatstock industry has suffered the most severe set-back since the war. The seriousness of this arises from our growing dependence on home supplies for our meat. To-day, over 70 per cent. of all our meat is home-grown, compared to the pre-war figure of 46 per cent. During the next five years, inevitably, imports of meat will continue to shrink—especially, I would say, beef from the Argentine, for after that time, I think, we shall not get more than the occasional consignment. New Zealand lamb and Danish bacon will continue to come here in large quantities, but the increased demand from the newly affluent countries will almost certainly increase the price that we shall have to pay for our meat and further reduce our share of it. The present market glut is therefore undoubtedly temporary, and so it is of vital importance for our nation, for our consumers, that as imports decrease, production from our own farms should rise steadily. But exactly the reverse is happening. The set-back last autumn was sharp enough to upset the confidence of the industry. The December returns, the facts that I quoted from last week's market report, prove this.
The rhythm of the industry has been upset, and calves which should be reared-on to make more meat in two years' time are still going to slaughter. Far from getting an expansion in 1968–69, we shall get a reduction in the home-produced supply of meat. For the past century we in Britain have had the benefit of cheap and plentiful supplies of meat, based on cheap imports acquired from all over the world by the enterprise of our own merchants. The trade started from America soon after the Civil War, and it is interesting to note that by 1880 the

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first frozen beef had arrived in this country from Australia. It was sold here at 5d. per lb.—and even then it gave 150 per cent. profit to the shippers. Happy days! But the result here has been that for a long time, for several generations, the livestock industry has survived as a by-product industry: profit margins have been slender, or non-existent.
There is an old joke about three ways of losing money. The quickest is horse-racing; the most pleasant, wine and women, but far the most certain is by fattening beef. In post-war years successive Governments have tried to change that tradition. They have increased prices, and improved the profit margins, but there is still very little profit in the fatstock business, even if everything goes right. If things go wrong, as they did last year, there is no profit in it at all. It is significant that the Common Market countries are fixing their target price for carcase meat at a level which is about one-third more than ours. So market stability, my Lords, is fundamental if we want to get our production increasing, and better returns: if we are to give producers a sufficient return to make a profit out of it.
I hope that noble Lords opposite will bear this point in mind and will take note of the fact that Britain is probably the only open market for meat left in Europe, and possibly in the world; so that if there is any glut at any time, it will come here, unless we protect ourselves. The right way to do that, and to give a fair return to producers is to use the European system of target prices and import levies, and set the target prices at a sufficiently high level to give producers a fair return and a fair living. I hope that Her Majesty's Government will take immediate steps, which they can do, to reconvene the Meat Study Group, and to co-ordinate the phased imported supplies with home production. This system worked very well for cereals, so that at any rate in the interim, until they can move on to a general policy, they can do something to give the necessary stability to this market.
Another section of the livestock industry which needs a change is the poultry industry. It is a vast modern industry, turning over some £270 million a year
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and bringing to our tables, without a penny of subsidy, 400,000 tons of the cheapest meat there is. I should declare an interest in the poultry industry, as I keep some chickens. A simple change is needed in the poultry industry, and the industry has done its homework for the Ministers. The change proposed will involve no cost on the Exchequer: it is simply a change in the marketing system, involving the abolishing of the lion stamp on the egg. At present, we have the ridiculous anomaly that the unmarked eggs which by-pass the official system make continuously 6d. to a 1s. a dozen more than the guaranteed official egg. A series of odd reasons, and un-reasons, account for this, including the superstition of a great many housewives; but if the lion mark were removed, the premium would quickly disappear and this would be to the benefit of all concerned. The whole industry wants the change, the Egg Marketing Board has worked out a viable scheme for doing it, and I hope that the Minister will be able to say something encouraging about the prospect of it getting done.
Even in cereals, my Lords, the most profitable part of the farming economy, there are warning lights. And I am sure the noble Lord, Lord Walston, with his great experience of farming in the Eastern Counties, will know that the profit margins have been tightening. In fact, the wheat price shows a net reduction of 20 per cent. over the last ten years, against continually rising costs. The result has been that farmers have continuously searched for economies in production, and this has undoubtedly led in sonic cases to dangerous practices of husbandry and of continuous corn growing. I dare say that the best land could stand up to it, but I am sure that a great deal of the land growing corn cannot do so. There is an urgent need for a new break crop, possibly rape, and I hope that in this Review it may be possible to find something to encourage that. In the long term this is urgently necessary.
My Lords, let me say this, in conclusion. With the price negotiations in progress, it would not be fair for me now to press Ministers in detail on the financial position of the industry. I will therefore confine my observations to saying that all the signs indicate that profit

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margins have been pinched too hard in the last year or two for the long-term good of the industry. I think the review I have made also indicates that for both internal and external reasons the present system of price support by deficiency payment has had its day and is no longer giving the industry the stability and a fair living that is necessary. So a change to a system which maintains price levels by import controls is overdue. In advising your Lordships to give a Second Reading to this Bill, which I emphasise, is a 1965 model, I must earnestly advise Her Majesty's Ministers to bring forward a further Agriculture Bill, a 1967 model, which will make these urgently needed changes.
5.26 p.m.
LORD HENLEY: My Lords, this 1965 Bill has been going on so long that I thought that I had already spoken to it. In fact, I said so to the noble Lord, Lord Nugent of Guildford, the other day, but he reminded me that it was only in another place that it had already had two Second Readings. However, having got to the Second Reading of this very old Bill at last, I am delighted that the noble Lord, Lord Hilton of Upton, so much of whose life has been spent in various aspects of agriculture, should be moving the Second Reading in this House.
Although I have not in fact spoken already to this Bill, over the last year we have spoken all round it. We spoke of the Price Review on that part of the Bill, the new cow subsidy, which was introduced, and we spoke on the problems of agriculture in the most interesting debate last June which was initiated by the noble Baroness, Lady Elliot of Harwood. To-day, the noble Lord, Lord Nugent of Guildford, has spoken not so much to this Bill as given us a very interesting dissertation on the problems of agriculture as he sees them. I am bound to say that I agree with a great deal of what he said. Therefore, before I go on to discuss the Bill, I wonder whether I might make one or two comments on what the noble Lord said? What he said, I think, amounted to a belief that the Bill is really irrelevant to our problems at the moment, and that it is out of date.
LORD NUGENT OF GUILDFORD: My Lords, may I interrupt the noble
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Lord? I certainly would not say that this Bill is irrelevant. What is in it is good, but it is not sufficiently fundamental to deal with the basis of the industry.
LORD HENLEY: My Lords, I take that point, and perhaps I over-stressed the criticism of the noble Lord. What in fact he is saying is that in this Bill there is no attempt to consider the fundamental problem of agriculture, which is really the question of what we produce in this country and what we import. There is no attempt to reconsider the corollary to that central problem, which is how we support the industry; whether we do it by subsidies, which we suspect is a cumbersome process with the money going into the wrong pockets, or whether we start thinking again in terms of doing it through the price of the end product. I agree with almost everything that was said by the noble Lord, Lord Nugent of Guildford, in this context.
My Lords, I sympathise with the Government very much for not having yet brought in a Bill to deal with these problems. Although we have been talking about these problems now for years, and with increasing urgency in this last year, this is a problem which is so fundamentally different from that with which we have been faced before that I sympathise with the Government in not wanting to tackle it yet. But this, my Lords, is something which we must face. It is a problem which we have been saying is urgent for the last two or three years; yet at the same time we say that this is such a big change that we cannot really contemplate it now. We are getting into the dangerous situation in which the agricultural set-up is becoming provincial and out of line with what is going on in the rest of the world. We simply must face up to these two fundamental issues.
So far as the Bill itself is concerned, the noble Lord, Lord Nugent of Guildford, has said that it was originally introduced at a time when agriculture was still doing well, that during the last two years we have had a struggle to keep going, and that, to that extent, the Bill is out-of-date. I accept that. The Bill is meant to fit in with the National Plan, but that Plan was put forward two years ago. All the major aspects of the Bill are a jolly good try to solve problems

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which have been with us for a long time. I do not know how far they are going to work. We welcome the Meat and Livestock Commission. This does not go so far as some farmers would like in strengthening their position, though it may go too far for others concerned, like the butchers. But in general I accept the Commission and think that it is likely to do well.
I am rather keen on Clause 9 and its associated clause, Clause 2, because I think that these may be fruitful. The Commission are going to produce new ideas, and they will do so in consultation (under Clause 2) with the industry. This may lead to useful developments in the way we organise the marketing of fat-stock. So I welcome Clause 9, in spite of the criticisms that have been levelled against it.
I welcome two other provisions in Part I of the Bill, the extension of calf and beef cow subsidies, which came in with the Price Review. I think that the support structure outlined in Part II is a laudable attempt to deal with a problem which has been with us for many years. I do not know whether this will work, but it is as good a shot at it as any. It has to work against the existing small farming schemes, which pull in another direction, but because certain aspects of Government policy pull in another direction that does not mean that either one or the other is bad. I do not know whether the Government's suggestion of voluntary amalgamation will work or will go faster than market pressure in bringing these about, but it is a good try. Landlords always have the problem that, when they amalgamate two small farms, they may find the cost of amalgamation in terms of capital equipment is not less than the two farms separately. The problem is far from a simple one, as owners of agricultural property will recognise. Speaking the other day on the Industrial Reorganisation Corporation, I suggested that the Corporation could become a landlord and try their hand at dealing with the problem of these small farms, rather on the lines of the National Trust. This may be rather a fanciful idea, but I put it out then, and I repeat it now.
Part II provides for improvement and investment grants. I welcome the enlarged scope of the farm improvement scheme,
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and I am prepared to settle for the grant being only one-fourth instead of one-third, though, of course, there is the 5 per cent. supplement on top of that. I would say that this is a reasonably good bargain, and that on the whole most farmers will welcome it. As regards investment grants, again I simply do not know. Are they necessarily going to be more flexible or better than the old investment allowance? Or is this merely a sop to egalitarianism? Will it help the man who does not pay high taxes more than the man who does? It is anybody's guess; I just do not know. I am inclined to favour a policy which helps the ploughing back of one's own money into one's own work, rather than a straight grant.
Part III of the Bill deals with hill land. This is a special problem, which has to be looked at divorced from the rest of agriculture. I think that probably the Government are doing the right thing here, with a 50 per cent. grant and moving it on to a permanent basis. I like the role of the development boards. If we are going to deal with special problems in areas of special difficulty, we must expect to have special powers. I do not see anything wrong with this. Noble Lords on the Liberal Benches welcomed the Highlands and Islands Development Board, because we thought it was the only way of dealing with a difficult problem. This is another of these landlord problems which have become too big for the modern landlord, and the State is right in devising a scheme to meet it.
The same applies to the rural development areas. They may well be a success, but it depends on the temperaments and skills of the people who run them. There is one point, however, that wants watching. We are getting so many overlapping authorities in every direction, and here is yet another. I need not enlarge upon that, as the point is taken. This point will become increasingly difficult. I am not going to say much about co-operation, about which I know very little. The noble Lord, Lord Nugent of Guildford, obviously knows a great deal about co-operation, and he has told us about it. I welcome the other miscellaneous provisions, but we must watch credit. I think that the A.M.C. wants a bit of a "jerk up", because it is slow and cumbersome and all the other things it ought not to be.

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On the whole I think that the Bill is a sensible, but rather pedestrian, attempt to solve these minor problems, apart from the central problems which the noble Lord, Lord Nugent of Guildford, raised. In giving the Bill a modified welcome, I do so because it is so difficult, as I emphasised at every point, to know how these new ideas are going to work. Will the Livestock Commission work well? Will Clause 9, with Clause 2 in alliance, be fruitful of new ideas? Will the structural position of agriculture be improved by the Government's suggestion, or will nothing more happen than has happened under the pressure of market influence? Will investment grants do as well as the old investment allowance? Will co-operation be promoted by what is in the Bill? I welcome what is a good try, and I hope that the Government will soon have a go at the more fundamental issues. There is really disinvestment in agriculture. Capital is not coming back into the industry. It is obvious to all that it is extremely difficult for any of the partners in agriculture to get a fair return on either the fixed equipment—which is, after all, still more than half the total value of the agricultural industry—or that aspect of the capital structure which is the tenant's capital, his stock, machinery and the rest. Lastly, there is the man who has invested his whole capital in the industry, the worker, who is still the worst paid in industry.
We are in difficulties in the agricultural industry. This Bill will help in a small way some of the smaller difficulties, but the major difficulties will be solved only by facing up to them. This Bill, though good in so far as it deals with the minor problems, does not go anywhere in the direction of the big ones. I welcome the Bill, but I would urge the Government to get down to thinking about the fundamental problems of the industry.
5.42 p.m.
LORD WISE: My Lords, in view of the number of noble Lords who are to follow, I shall be reasonably brief in what I have to say. I was not anxious to speak on this Bill. I have been concerned with agriculture over a long period of years, and I was one of five who initiated the first agricultural policy of the Labour Party for the 1929 Election. However, as there were only three speakers from this side of the House I thought it right
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that I should speak in the debate. I am sorry for the Ministers concerned in introducing this Bill, because, so far as I know, neither of them has played any part in the promotion of it, although they both have long agricultural experience. No doubt they are forced to confine themselves to their briefs. I am happy that I am not in that position to-day.
I speak as a retired farmer with 11 male relatives still farming for a living. I wish the Bill were such that I could support it fully, but I am afraid I cannot do so. I do not want to say much at the present stage; no doubt there will be discussions later on the Committee stage. However, the Bill is something of a disappointment to me, and, in my view, although it is a long Bill and contains many clauses, it is quite inadequate to meet the present conditions of agriculture. I can agree, to a considerable extent, with what the noble Lord, Lord Nugent of Guildford, has said. The industry at the moment is recognised as being one of the most efficient, and the Price Reviews of each succeeding year bear this out. But what the next one will tell us, who can say?
Agriculture is the greatest import-saving industry of all. It feeds half our nation, and could do even better if the financial means in respect of services rendered were forthcoming and some competitive imports were kept out. Farmers and farm workers are not properly rewarded for their labours. They are lessening in numbers and, for the most part, lead hard, industrious and uncertain lives in ever-changing weather conditions such as we have known in the last month. This Bill does not attempt to remedy their position. There are no teeth in it. Now that it is on paper, I am afraid we cannot materially alter this situation.
The Bill sets up commissions and boards for all sorts of things, but does not provide the real means of assuring farmers that they will obtain fair prices for their home products and animals. The Meat and Livestock Commission cannot buy or sell, except so far as is reasonably necessary for, and incidental to, the discharge of other functions of the Commission. The whole crux of the matter, in my view, is that the Commission should have power to buy and sell

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in order to stabilise the markets, obtain remunerative prices for farmers, and end for all time the uncertainty and unfairness of fatstock and other marketing.
The duties of the Commission seem mainly in the direction of giving advice. I expect farmers are by now tired of receiving advice from all sorts of people. But with all the advice which is given, stock prices are unremunerative and stock is often sold at a loss. Cereal prices are the same now as they were ten years ago; but there is no reference to cereals in the Bill. Bread went up a few days ago, but not home-grown wheat. Farming costs are rising, and there has been no Government move for control to restrict these increases of recent years. Everything that the farmer needs has gone up and his returns are stagnant or going lower. Subsidies save many from giving up entirely. It is high time that the Government realised that agriculture is of importance in the nation's economics and survival and legislated accordingly.
In brief, what have we, in the long run, in this Bill? We have a Commission of 10, which will appoint three Committees numbering 45 persons; a Rural Development Board of 12, and a Central Council for Agricultural and Horticultural Co-operation of 14. This is 81 persons in all, due to be partly paid out of the levies on farmers; some to receive pensions, and their necessary staff to be appointed and paid. It will be a very expensive set-up.
How does the farmer share in the good things, if any, in the Bill? He is faced with levies of unstated amounts. The Minister tried to persuade us a few minutes ago that they would be low, but I would remind him that the wheat and barley levies already approximate £2 million, and it may be the same with the levies provided for in this Bill. We receive grants from the taxpayer for certain items which may benefit the farmer, but if he is a small farmer his land may be wanted for amalgamation and boundary adjustments, and he may have to quit. We may receive certain remedies in respect of bank overdrafts. And last, but by no means least, we receive advice on how to run the farming business. My Lords, the Bill has been a long time coming. It is all very nice on paper, but it does not meet present farming needs;
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and, as the noble Lord, Lord Henley, said, I hope that very shortly we shall have something to replace it. I had hoped that the Government would have grasped the opportunity to do something courageous and effective. This Bill does neither.
5.52 p.m.
THE EARL OF DUNDEE: My Lords, I want to say only a word on that part of this Bill which concerns forestry. As for the rest of the Bill, so far as it goes I think it is generally welcome. It is virtually identical with the Bill which was born in the last Parliament and which was based on the White Paper which your Lordships discussed very fully about 15 months ago. I think that is no doubt the debate which the noble Lord, Lord Henley, was thinking about. In that discussion I expressed my own support of nearly all the proposals which are now embodied in this Bill. But I made one qualification: I said that I thought the very extensive and detailed powers of interference which were given to the Rural Development Boards with private forestry would to a great extent restrict and probably frustrate the Government's policy of expanding, forestry in this country.
As the White Paper explained, Part III of this Bill, which gives power to set up these Rural Development Boards, is mainly intended—in fact, I think entirely intended—for hill farming and marginal areas where agriculture for the most part is very poorly off, sometimes quite uneconomic, and where there is usually a large exodus of population either abroad or to the great conurbations; and it is very necessary, if we want to keep the rural population there, that afforestation should expand.
There are two agencies by which forestry can be expanded: the Forestry Commission and private planters. Neither of them has the necessary means or opportunity to do everything that is required in the national interest. Both of them, for various reasons, are timid and reluctant to do as much as they ought. The White Paper talks a great deal about the integration of forestry and agriculture—a very unexceptionable phrase with which we could all agree. But I wonder whether we always think of what it means. In the areas which

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we are discussing now, where large-scale afforestation is required, at the present time very often not more than 5 per cent. of the land which ought to be planted is in fact planted; and very often perhaps 50 per cent. or more of the agricultural land, where the farmer is still struggling along, is really quite uneconomic and ought to be afforested. You cannot talk about the integration of existing forestry with existing agriculture. What you must mean by integration is not really integration but the conversion of large areas of uneconomic agricultural land to productive forestry. That, I think, was brought out very clearly by the Zuckerman Report about nine years ago.
These two agencies, public forestry and private forestry, are doing less than they should, for various reasons. The Forestry Commission are often naturally timid; afraid of offending public opinion, because the whole weight of inertia in this kind of matter is always on the side of doing nothing, against changing the scenery and converting something that everyone is accustomed to into something new and unfamiliar. The Forestry Commission have to contend against that; and, as for the private owner who must, if our policy is to succeed, play a considerable part in the process, he is often reluctant because probably he has not enough cash—and if he borrows money from the bank he would at the present moment have to pay a rate of interest which would make Shylock blush. Although he may—I think most people do—care for his unborn grandchildren, when the moment comes to make a practical decision in the human mind, the pressing needs of the moment often seem more urgent than those of the children as yet unborn.
I have had some experience of this, because I was for some time on a regional committee of the Forestry Commission in the North-East Region of Scotland. Part of our duty was to try to persuade reluctant landowners and planters to do a bit more. Although they quite understood the need for it, it was a very difficult job indeed. I am afraid that all these restrictions—I am thinking particularly of the restrictions in Clause 51 of this Bill—will have the opposite effect from what the Government intend. It looks to me as if the people who drafted this clause had done so on the assumption that large
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numbers of landowners were anxious to plant good agricultural land which ought not to be planted, and there must be all these restrictions to prevent them from doing so. The truth is exactly the opposite. The majority of landowners who ought to be doing more planting are, for reasons I have given, extremely reluctant to do so. They need a great deal of persuasion. And there are the wobbly ones who are perhaps being persuaded they ought to do a bit more, and they will be clean put off by the kind of restrictions contained in Clause 51. It will have the effect of stopping them. They will not bother to fill up forms and make applications to two authorities, the Forestry Commission and the Rural Development Board, instead of to one.
Let me draw attention to subsection (4) of Clause 51:
"The Board may…grant a licence subject to any condition

(a) governing the kinds of trees planted, or

(b) where the licence authorises the planting of a short term crop, requiring the use of the land for growing trees to be discontinued by the end of a specified period, and requiring before the end of that period the carrying out of such works for the clearing of the land as will make it suitable for agricultural purposes…"

and they are also given power to specify the kind of trees which may be grown. These are powers of interference, I think I may safely say, which would be regarded as utterly intolerable in agriculture. It is all very well for the noble Lord, Lord Walston. There is little chance of a Rural Development Board being set up in East Anglia. But suppose he lived in some other part of the country, and suppose a development board consisting of most estimable people came and looked over his farm and told him, "You must not grow turnips here at all; you must grow carrots instead. And as for this field in which you are proposing to grow wheat, you obviously ought to put potatoes here, and put the next one down in grass for the next three years". Were that to happen, I think the noble Lord's well-known amiability might be a little strained. And it would not do any good because it would not result in making the noble Lord farm any better. It would only put him off; and that is what I am afraid will happen to private forestry in areas where these Boards are set up.

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My friends and I have put down a few Amendments for the Committee stage, and they are intended to help the Government in pursuit of their policy, and not to hinder them. I will give only one short example of the kind of thing I am going to try to do. If your Lordships will look at the beginning of Clause 51, you will see that subsection (1) lays down that:
"no person shall plant land in the area of a Rural Development Boad with trees except under the authority of a licence granted to him by the Board."
Then the Bill goes on to say that this shall not apply
"(a) to planting by the Forestry Commission"—
Of course, it would be a nonsense if it did—and
"(b) so long as the covenant, agreement or scheme in question continues in force, to land which is, on the establishment of a Rural Development Board, subject to a forestry dedication covenant or agreement as defined in the Forestry Act 1947…"
Of course, it would make an absolute nonsense if they were able to stop the planting of land if the covenant had already been agreed, but the Amendment I should like the noble Lord to consider is that this exemption from licence should apply not only to land which already has a dedication covenant when the Board is constituted, but to all future agreements in that area, after the Board is constituted, which are agreed between the owner and the Forestry Commission. I think that would make much better sense of this.
I am quite sure that I know the answer which some of the noble Lords' officials will ask him to make. It will be that this Amendment is quite unnecessary, because the Forestry Commission are supposed to be in close consultation with the Rural Development Board all the time, and of course the Forestry Commission could not accept land for dedication if they had not previously agreed to do so in consultation with the Board. But it does not always happen quite like that. Perhaps I may tell the noble Lord and the House what happened to me only fifteen years ago.
In 1952 I wanted to plant a fairly considerable area of ground in the Scottish Highlands. The Forestry Commission were delighted, and they accepted it for dedication. At that time, the emer-
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gency war regulations governing the use of land had not been repealed, and to get authority to accept dedication the Commission had to sumbit it to the Regional Agricultural Executive Committee (which was very much the same kind of body as these Boards will probably be) before they could complete the dedication agreement. The Regional Agricultural Executive Committee refused permission and said that I could plant only bits of it. There were doing their best, but they knew very little about forestry.
I was faced with two alternatives: either I had to face two or three years of tiresome and frustrating argument, or else I had to take a risk. I took the risk and I planted the whole thing in one season. If I had done it under this Bill I should have been liable to a fine of £200. I do not know what penalty there would have been under the war-time emergency regulations, but I wrote to the Secretary of State and said: "I have now planted this land. It is done and finished, and the Forestry Commission are delighted to accept it for dedication. You can, of course, stop them from accepting it if you like, but it seems to me, as you have been imploring landowners to plant trees, and since I am one of the very few landowners who has done anything about it, you ought to be grateful to me for doing it". I am glad to say that nothing happened, and it is now a flourishing young wood.
What will happen is that the Forestry Commission may be prevailed upon by members of the Rural Development Board (who may hold different views from the Commission) not to accept ground for dedication when it ought to be accepted and would be approved by all good judges of forestry. That is why I should like to provide in this clause of the Bill that only the Commission, and not the Board, shall have the duty of deciding whether or not the land shall be accepted for dedication, and that the Board ought not to have to be consulted about it in advance.
I would like to impress upon the noble Lord, who probably agrees with me already, that there is a physical limit to the number of people in this country who have enough talent and enough knowledge to be able to interfere successfully in other people's business. They are not

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innumerable. We found that out during the war, of course, when we had to recruit so many people of less than the highest standard of intelligence to administer the many war-time regulations which were necessary. We had to go out into the highways and the hedgerows and recruit all sorts of people, some of whom came rather near to illiteracy. I remember one case of a temporary civil servant who had to issue the petrol coupons, who spent the entire morning in trying, unsuccessfully, to look up one telephone number in the telephone directory because he was never able to remember the order in which the letters of the alphabet were arranged.
I am not suggesting that the people who will be put on the Rural Development Boards will be that kind of person. I think they will be admirable and good people: a worthy alderman, probably; possibly an eloquent and loquacious trade union official; probably a stolid and amiable retired secretary of the local branch of the N.F.U.—all very good people but not necessarily fitted, by nature or experience, to determine these questions of whether land should be planted; and, if so, how it should be planted.
I am not against all kinds of control; I am in favour of some. I and my friends supported the Highlands Development Board which is now set up in the Highlands. That is a fairly good Board; at least, it has a very good Chairman, and it is efficient, within the limits which it is allowed. But one reason why we supported it was because it did not have these meddlesome powers conferred in advance on the Rural Development Boards under Clause 51 of this Bill. I happened to be on one deputation about this subject to the present Secretary of State for Scotland a little more than a year ago, and I am glad to say he assured us that it was not his intention to extend the powers in Clause 51 to the Highlands Development Board. Indeed, I am quite sure the Board would be the last people to want them. They will not want to go hopping round, telling everybody whether to grow spruce or larch on a piece of ground, or, indeed, to interfere with dedication schemes between the Forestry Commission and private individuals.
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I hope, my Lords, that the Government will seriously and favourably consider the Amendments, which are intended to be helpful, and which we shall seek to move in the hope of modifying those parts of the Bill which seem likely to retard and to restrict the expansion of British forestry.
6.10 p.m.
BARONESS ELLIOT OF HARWOOD: My Lords, I hope that in this debate I shall not go over ground which other people have already covered. I should like to say that I hope the noble Lord, Lord Wise, will never apologise for addressing this House on agriculture. He could not have made a more admirable speech. It showed quite clearly that he understands the problems of farmers, which is what most of us speaking in this debate are. I declare an interest, not only as a farmer, but as chairman of an agricultural auction market. I am very interested in the Meat and Livestock Commission. I am glad that in the Bill the recommendations of the inquiry have been followed and that we are to he allowed to sell meat on the hoof and on the hook. I am sure this is important, and I hope that this policy of being able to do one or the other will always be adhered to, because I think the auction markets serve a very useful purpose and provide a service for the farmers. It would be a great pity if they were prevented from dealing both with store-stock and fatstock.
I am glad that on the Meat and Livestock Commission there is to be a committee dealing with the consumer side of meat production, because I think that the idea of labelling and describing meat as it is sold in the shops will be very valuable and useful to the housewives and to others buying meat. I welcome also Clause 12, which brings into being the beef cow subsidy for animals that are dairy calves which are being bred for beef. I think it only fair and right that this subsidy, which up to date those of us who have hill cattle have been receiving, should not be denied to other producers of beef calves, and I am glad that has been agreed.
I should like to say a word about Clauses 30 and 31 which deal with agricultural investment. I would say, in the presence of the noble Lord, Lord Hughes,

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that he and I have had quite a correspondence on this subject, and I have received very courteous and friendly letters from him without being able to impress him with my point of view. Nevertheless, I am going to try again and I hope he will not object. The noble Lord, Lord Henley, drew attention to the fact that the improvement grants and agricultural investment grants have been changed to some extent. They have been reduced in one case from one-third to one-quarter, which is not very welcome. On the other hand, there are many additional items of farm equipment which will now qualify for grant, and that is certainly a good thing. But for some farmers who are engaged in upland and hill farming, some of these investment grants are really hedged about with unnecessary restrictions. For instance, I take particular exception to the fact that all the time they stress that to attract grants machinery must be fixed, and that nothing which is a mobile unit, unless it has its own propulsion, like a tractor or combine harvester, will be able to rank for grant.
I should like to give one or two examples, because this is something which I think is very foolish, and I believe it could be altered easily without a great deal of trouble. Take threshing mills which in the old days were built into buildings. On many old farms in Scotland you will find threshing mills built into buildings, and the corn had to be carried to those mills inside, where it was threshed. To-day this is quite old-fashioned; you either thresh corn with a combine harvester, if that suits you best, or you have a mill which you can pull with a tractor and take wherever you like so that it is available for your work. If it is one which you can pull with a tractor, you cannot get any grant. If it is one which is fixed inside, you can. This seems to me extraordinarily silly. If you have a drying apparatus for drying corn, potatoes, hay or what-have-you, and it is fixed in a shed, it is eligible for investment grant. But a mobile blower, one which is hauled by tractor, which you can take into the field and put under a haystack or baled straw-stacks, and is therefore infinitely more useful than one which is fixed, is not eligible for investment grant. The dryer which you can take from one place to another pulled by tractor is far more
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valuable than a machine fixed inside a barn.
We live in an age when engineers are continually inventing new machinery, and the more varied the use the greater the help for the farmer. A mobile milking parlour may be much more valuable to the milk farmer than the static bale, but one is eligible for grant and the other is not. I have a letter from a young man who is just starting to farm, an enterprising fellow, trained in an agricultural college. He has written:
"In order to make the best use of my land for milk production I decided to invest in a portable milking parlour which would allow the whole farm to be grazed and the policy to be more flexible. On this type of parlour … no grant is paid. If the same parlour is concreted into [a static] position, thereby losing its main advantage, the full grant is paid."
I foresee the time when modern machines may all be able to be moved around and be of increased usefulness, and the Minister of Agriculture in the 1970s and 1980s will be tied by these clauses which will limit investment grants to fixed machinery. This is putting a premium on old-fashioned methods.
Somebody described this as a 1965 Bill. We are trying to look further forward to 1968, 1969, 1970, and so on. We want to be up-to-date and modern, and I suggest to the Minister that if his grants are going to be tied in this way they will encourage people to have old-fashioned methods, when we are all longing to have as modern and advanced methods as possible. I have had quite a lot of correspondence with the noble Lord, Lord Hughes, in this matter, and naturally he has to stick to the letter of the law. But I am suggesting that when we discuss it in Committee we might explore this and see whether or not an alteration could be made to make it infinitely more valuable to the farmers.
I should like to turn to Part III of the Bill, which deals with hill land. I welcome Clause 43 which amends the number of years for the winter keep scheme, extending grants from three to five years. This is a great help, and enables farmers to plan ahead. Five years in a farming enterprise is not a long time. With a big scheme of hill improvement, which can be very expensive if it includes hill draining schemes or the making of roads for access to shepherds'houses—even

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though grants are available for roads—five years is not a long time to see a major return for this expenditure. I also welcome Clause 40, which means that the date 1967 no longer applies, and that help will continue for the hill farmer beyond this year.
Several noble Lords have made comments on the particular needs of agriculture, and I do not want to trespass on your Lordships' time to enlarge on that. But the really desperate situation of some of our hill farming enterprises is well known, or should be well known, to the Minister. I hope the Government and those who are planning the Price Review will realise what is happening. It really is no use urging the increased production of sheep and beef unless the return on these commodities pays. We are not standing here to run charitable food producing enterprises, but to make a proper contribution to the feeding of our people, and thereby save the nation's import bill and help the balance of payments. The Bill is designed to help farmers and I think it will; but if, as the result, we produce more and there is no market for the produce, then the whole object of the exercise is negatived.
Lord Nugent of Guildford has drawn attention to the different aspects of the plight of agriculture. Somebody has mentioned overdrafts. If he can, I should like the noble Lord, Lord Walston, to answer one other question. This is not mentioned in the Bill, so perhaps I ought not to raise it. It refers to overdrafts. My question is this. When does the noble Lord think that the Chancellor of the Exchequer is likely to refund the selective employment tax which is coming back to those in agriculture? Innumerable forms have been filled in by myself and many other farmers, and not a single farthing has been returned to us at all. I hope that it will not be long before we do get something back. Overdrafts are one thing, but overdrafts plus selective employment tax really is another. I beg of him, if he can, to do something about this with his right honourable friend.
Lastly, I would mention one word about establishing Rural Development Boards. I am always rather chary of setting up more boards, consultative councils, or what-have-you, to tell people what
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to do. The noble Lord, Lord Wise, counted 81 people who were going to be involved in all this. Not one of them will produce anything except questionnaires, memoranda, bits of paper, telling us what we are supposed to do. They are all going to be paid. The salary of any decent official must be a decent salary, otherwise we shall not get good officials. These officials will have to consult with other local authority officials. And so it goes on—more and more officials, none of them producing anything at all, except memoranda and questionnaires.
Those of us who are in local government rather resent appointed people coming along and doing jobs over our heads, when if we were given the money we could probably have done the job ourselves, and with much less controversy. I do not know about the rural parts of Wales, in regard to some areas of which people are considering these boards. But I do know about the rural parts of Scotland. Already there is a Highland Development Board, a Border Economic Development Council, and I do not see the need for any more appointed authorities in Scotland and I hope that the Secretary of State will think twice before he sets up any more boards in Scotland.
There is emphasis in the Bill on co-operation between agriculture and forestry. This, obviously, is of the greatest importance. But it is already happening. Certainly in Scotland there is a close liaison between the Scottish Woodland Owners Association and the Forestry Commission. There is a close association between the Scottish Land Owners Federation and the Forestry Commission. Private woodland owners have made enormous contributions to forestry. The noble Earl, Lord Dundee, and the noble Duke who is to speak later, have far more knowledge of this than most of us, and have done probably more than anyone, as indeed has the noble Lord, Lord Lovat. I should be strongly opposed to handing all forestry over either to a Rural Development Board, or indeed to the Forestry Commission, with a lot of ad hoc bureaucratic powers which may cause much ill-feeling and interfere with the considerable good will and co-operation which exists between the many interests in rural areas to-day.

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With those few remarks, I support this Bill. I hope that in Committee we shall be able to mice some Amendments, and that these Amendments will be treated by another place with respect, because in your Lordships' House I believe we have a great fund of knowledge to draw upon. I know that the noble Lord, Lord Walston, is fully aware of that, he himself being a great expert. I hope that we shall be able to improve the Bill. I support it in so far as it goes some way, if not all the way, along the road to help the farming industry.
6.15 p.m.
LORD INGLEWOOD: My Lords, I am glad to follow the noble Baroness in this debate. She farms on the other side of the Border from me. May I say, too, to the Minister how glad I am to see that this Bill applies both to England and to Scotland? Too often we have separate Bills on agriculture and other subjects brought before us, when, with a little more preparation and a little more give and take, we could draft one Bill which would be of general advantage. So this Bill will be especially welcomed by those who live along the Border, on both sides, and who have to put up with a good deal of inefficient administration in different fields because of this separate legislation. I am glad that we are not adding to that inefficiency to-night through this Bill.
I should like to apologise for the fact that I may have to leave before the end of this debate. I dislike asking leave to do that, but if I had not perhaps spoken in every Agriculture Bill since I first entered the other place twenty years ago—that is, I have spoken from both sides of both Houses—perhaps I should not have asked your Lordships' permission to excuse me this evening. But I wanted to add a word about this Bill; and I would say, first, that I think the Minister must have done well in the Legislation Committee to get authority for such a long Bill. There is always so much potential agricultural legislation in the pipeline that it is a question in the Department of what is to be left out. I would echo the words of my noble friend Lord Nugent of Guildford, who has already shown what a pity it is that the fundamentals have been left out. A great deal of this long Bill con-
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sists of the less important matters. Anyone who has served in the Ministry of Agriculture must sympathise with a Minister after a year of poor weather and had prices.
The income of the industry is falling. To bring this debate into perspective I should like to think that when the noble Lord, Lord Walston, comes to wind up, he will be able to give us the up-to-date calculations of the income of the industry. He must have these figures, because they are always available at the time of the Price Review. The latest figure we have at the moment is that contained in last year's Price Review White Paper. If he has not on the Box before him the up-to-date figures, I hope he will ask some official to get them for him, because they are relevant to this debate.
I would support my noble friend Lord Nugent of Guildford when he expresses the need for basic re-thinking of our support system, and carrying on where my late chief, Mr. Soames, began. Particularly ought the Minister to do this in the light of present practice and thinking on the Continent. I hope that the Price Review, which we shall hear about not many weeks hence, will show that this is happening in the Department, even if there are no indications of it in the Bill.
At Question Time to-day a Question was asked which demonstrated how easy it is for this agricultural support system of ours to become so complicated that the ordinary man can barely understand it; and the Minister must be constantly on his guard against letting this system become ever more complicated. It can easily become unintelligible, and I should like to invite any noble Lord who has a copy of the Bill beside him to look at Clause 10, which deals with calf subsidies, which are, of course, relevant to any small farmer in the country. The clause is virtually unintelligible. At every Price Review time there is a special temptation to introduce some new refinement such as this; but these refinements are no substitute for basic thinking.
Having said that, I would add that it is not always the Minister's fault when these refinements have to be introduced. The abolition of investment allowances was not the fault of the Minister of Agriculture. But I am doubtful—here I must part from my noble friend—about the wisdom of including mobile equipment,

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such as tractors, in the investment grant provisions, together with fixed equipment. There may be a few votes in it—I admit that. But I rather doubt whether for purely administrative reasons this is the right way of doing it, and whether, if it was necessary to grant aid for the purchase of tractors, harvesters and other machinery, it ought not to have been thought out in another way. I am glad, however, that the Farm Improvement Scheme is continuing. I would not quarrel with the drop in the rate. It is much better that the scheme should continue, because it has brought immense benefit to an industry which was badly starved of capital for fixed equipment.
I should like now to turn to the Rural Development Boards, which I think every speaker has mentioned. They are, indeed, a great experiment in Socialism. I have always supported the idea of greater integration of agriculture and forestry in hill areas, but I cannot see that this is a good way to do it; or, indeed, the simplest way. An elaborate new organisation is being set up, and I think that Lord Wise's calculation of 81 as the membership of all these bodies allowed for only one Rural Development Board. Under the Bill there could be many more than one.
This provides for an elaborate new organisation and the writing into a Statute of a whole list of restrictions and controls which, so far as forestry is concerned, applies, as I see it, to only one half of the industry: that is to say, private forestry, and not to the Forestry Commission. I would ask the noble Lord, Lord Walston, what the private forestry industry has done to deserve Clause 51. I have never seen a clause of this sort, in any Bill, crying out more loudly for amendment. How many Rural Development Boards is it in the Government's mind to set up? I am told there is likely to be one in some part of Wales, and probably another in the Pennines, but that there is unlikely to be one in Scotland. What has Scotland done to deserve this favour?
BARONESS ELLIOT OF HARWOOD: Everything.
LORD INGLEWOOD: As I see it, too, if it is considered that the Pennines are a suitable area there is no reason why the boundaries of the board should not
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extend from the Scottish Border to the Peak.
Then one comes to the question of overlapping which was mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Henley. When the noble Lord comes to reply I hope we shall be told what are the planning powers of Rural Development Boards. How are they going to fit in with the planning authorities? There will surely be a clash with administration in a National Park area if the boundaries of a Rural Development Board should overlap with those of a National Park. It could well be that the country in a National Park exactly satisfies the sort of conditions set out in this Bill for the establishment of a Rural Development Board. There is no doubt at all that rural interests, and not just foresters, are particularly apprehensive, too, about the composition of these Boards. The chairman is going to be a figure of great importance, and whom are we going to see chosen? Will it be an ambitious Socialist urban alderman, or even a safe Socialist alderman to whom the Party feel that they owe some service in his later years? If one follows precedent, those are the sort of people from whom these chairmen are likely to be chosen.
LORD WALSTON: Like the chairman of the Steel Board?
LORD INGLEWOOD: Perhaps he would do; I do not know. This criticism is not against the idea of helping the small farmers in these areas to amalgamate, nor against helping agriculture, forestry and tourism; but I am against what I believe to be the absurdly far-reaching powers when little or no amendment of the existing powers of the Minister, and very little addition to his existing A.L.S. staff, would enable him to go a long way, if not the whole way, towards achieving important results, such as helping the small dairy farmers in the poorer parts of the Pennines to amalgamate. The Minister already has powers in his hands in this respect, and if they are not sufficient they could be made sufficient with far less amendment than the setting up of this elaborate and expensive system. I am sure that substitution of such a policy not only would cost less but would have general support in the countryside. But I admit it would not be Socialism. The Minister must, indeed,

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give back confidence to the industry and reverse this trend of falling prices, before he finds himself in the position of the psalmist and able to echo his words:
"For every beast of the forest is mine, and the cattle upon a thousand hills".
6.35 p.m.
LORD BALERNO: My Lords, I should like to support what the noble Lord, Lord Inglewood, has said about the application of this Bill equally to Scotland and to England. I should like to join with him in congratulating the Minister upon steering this by no means uncomplicated Bill into the safe haven of your Lordships' House. I trust that such refitting as may be necessary will be done with expedition, and that this much needed Act will be brought quickly into operation, and so remove a degree of uncertainty and consequent anxiety which impending legislation inevitably produces. And all the more so when it concerns an industry based on a large number of small units, and an industry which, as the noble Lord, Lord Wise, has so ably pointed out, is at this moment somewhat overcast by hard times and the consequent difficulty of making a reasonable profit.
As a member of the Pig Industry Development Authority, whose functions will be absorbed by the Meat and Livestock Commission, it is with some trepidation that I venture to speak on the first Part of the Bill. But there are two points I wish to make. The first concerns the period of uncertainty to which I have referred in so far as the present staff of P.I.D.A. are concerned. The shadow of the axe has been hanging over them for nearly two years. I appreciate the tribute which has been paid to them by the noble Lord, Lord Hilton of Upton, and I should like to add mine for the way in which the P.I.D.A. staff have maintained their energy and drive. That, I think, is all the more reason why an assurance as regards their continuing employment would be a most useful encouragement, and it certainly would be welcomed by the members of the Authority who realise how much of the success of P.I.D.A. has been due to the devotion of its staff. I welcome the assurance of the noble Lord, Lord Hilton of Upton, that the work of P.I.D.A. is to be continued with the minimum of interruption.
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The other point I wish to make is on the broad organisation of the Meat and Livestock Commission. I must confess that when the structure of the Commission was first announced I was very sorry that the main divisions were not vertical by animals—beef, mutton, pork. But on reflection I am convinced of the rightness of the proposed horizontal divisions representing respectively the producers, then a combination of marketing, processing and distribution, and, thirdly, the consumers. The method by which the Consumers Committee is constituted is an extremely attractive one, which I hope might be used as a model for future developments in other fields.
I welcome the proposals in Part II of the Bill which make possible the amalgamation of uncommercial units and the improvement of farm boundaries. Especially important are the proposals to pay lump sums or annuities to those occupiers who release the whole or part of their land for amalgamation. In this connection, I trust that there will be a fairly liberal interpretation of the term "uncommercial", and that its definition will include that the land is uncommercial by reason of the age or infirmity of the farmer. Indeed, if I had my way in this matter I should like to include inefficiency of the farmer as falling within the term "uncommercial". In every industry where grants for assistance are made by the State, there are some persons who seek benefit by making false statements. The effectiveness of much of this Bill will depend on the speed with which grants can be made. In the past there have been cases where delay has meant missing the benefits for the production of a whole year. If a greater measure of trust could be reposed in the farmer—and in the vast majority of cases this can be safely done—these matters can be settled much more quickly than has sometimes been the case in the past.
However, the quid pro quo for this should be more severe penalties for the farmer who makes a statement which he knows to be false. I submit that on summary conviction a fine of £100 is small in relation to a false statement by which the farmer could put £1,000 in his pocket. I realise that on conviction by indictment the extent of the fine is unspecified, and that both have sentences of imprisonment. In the initial stages of

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the application of this Part of the Bill immediate and summary retribution will be a very salutary warning to those applicants for grants who may feel tempted to be a little careless in the preparation of their application. I hope that some adjustment may be made in this respect.
With regard to the Rural Development Boards, there are two points which occur to me, and both are peculiar to Scotland. Pace the noble Lord, Lord Inglewood, the Bill obviously anticipates extension to Scotland. I would question whether adequate notice of the establishment of such a Board is given by a notice lodged at a county council office. While the detail of the Board's rights should be available for inspection at the county council office, I think that notice of its establishment should be given a much wider publicity. I share the apprehension of the noble Lord, Lord Henley, and the noble Baroness, Lady Elliot of Harwood, in this matter. There are now so many statutory bodies which have crept up behind farmers, of whose existence a farmer becomes aware only when he transgresses one of their regulations.
My other point relates to Clause 48, and I should have thought that the Scottish equivalent of the English Land Tribunal was the Scottish Land Court. I feel there must be good reason for the difference, and it would be interesting to a non-legal person like myself to know the answer. I must say, in fairness to the noble Lord, Lord Walston, that I do not expect to be given the answer this evening. I welcome the Bill and the attitude of the Government and of the Minister while it has been going through another place. I believe that something like 50 Amendments put down by the Opposition have been accepted, and there is general good will to see this Bill on the Statute Book as soon as possible.
In conclusion, I should like, if I may without impertinence, to revert to Part I of the Bill which deals with the Meat and Livestock Commission, in which I have already declared my special interest. In Schedule 1, Part II of the Bill, it is stated that the
"Commission shall be a body corporate with perpetual succession".
As a sort of Morituri te salutant I would echo those words in the Schedule, and wish the Commission long life and perpetual succession.
6.42 p.m.
LORD LOVAT: My Lords, I should like to begin by congratulating the noble Lord, Lord Hilton of Upton, on the charming way in which he introduced the Bill. He made it sound so good that, although I would not say that some of the compulsory powers, and some of the farming by decree, which inevitably creeps into a very great document of this kind, were concealed, they were not, perhaps, made clear enough by any speaker except the noble Lord, Lord Wise, who I thought made a first-class contribution to the debate.
As farmers, we welcome almost everything in this Bill, because most of the things that are set out are inevitable with advancement in agriculture. I would make certain reservations, and I should like to speak on this occasion for the Highlands of Scotland. The noble Baroness left off on the Borders. I am glad to think that her rapidity and rate of fire has far exceeded that of any other speaker, and it is an honour and a privilege for me to treat her as my far from venerable great-aunt. We who are left in the debate shall all lag far behind her.
The Highlands have peculiar problems of their own. I would remind your Lordships that they represent two-thirds of the land surface of Scotland, and it seems to me that the hill farming side of this country has been neglected in the past. At a time when I took a more active part in your Lordships' House, I did a certain amount towards the passing of the Hill Farming Act, in 1946, and the Livestock Rearing Act, in 1951. Farming in the hills is now at the crossroads, and I genuinely believe that all that good work will be wasted, unless the Government take immediate action to arrest the drift of confidence of people, and take into account the necessary adjunct to hill farming, which is the long-term aspect. I cannot believe that, with a world food shortage, more should not be done in the hills.
The hill farmer, particularly the sheep hill farmer, sees himself now in a position in which he cannot begin to get back as little as 2 per cent. on his capital; and nobody wants to continue like that. If any of your Lordships have visited the Beauly or Conan Valleys after the recent

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disastrous floods, you will readily understand that one bad year in the hills can wipe out four or five years' farming profits in a declining industry. I am not well versed in Board of Trade matters, or in exports over imports, but it seems to me surely possible not to dump cheaper meat, whether it is beef or mutton, in a country which is trying to economise. I feel that attention to the whole long-term aspect in hill farming is lacking.
I am delighted to hear from the noble Lord that there is every chance of subsidies continuing. I shall not elaborate greatly on subsidies. I do not approve of them, but one certainly could not farm in the hills without them. But it is not a bit of good dangling 25s. on a ewe, or so much per hill cow, if it is expected to last only for a year, for two years or for three years. In the case of hill cattle, which multiplied on the hills in the past—and surely this could he done again—it is not a bit of good having a three, four, or five year programme, because before you come into production you are only starting with your first calves. You start with heifer calves; it is two and a half years before you put them to the bull, and another year before you get a calf; and by the time you sell your store cattle you may very well find yourself in Queer Street, with the subsidy coming off again.
I have said that the Highlands have particular problems, and one of the greatest, apart from the weather, the unrelenting climate and the poor soil, is the fact that we can only sell store animals out of the hills. Store cattle and sheep come on the market at the same time, and there is a glut, which it is impossible to deal with. There is nothing sadder than to see a hill man, who has been working for a year to get his lambs or his weaned calves to market, finding that there is absolutely no demand for them. But he cannot take them home, because he is faced with the severity of the winter, and has sufficient keep only for his breeding stock, with no followers.
I am sorry that this Bill has said nothing in any part of it about land reclamation. That seems to me to be
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one of the most important aspects of agriculture to-day in this country. We are losing 40,000 acres a year to various requirements other than farming. There is a Land Commission, which I am sorry to think could not be sent out, all 2,000 civil servants, every morning, with their buckets and spades, from Newcastle to reclaim part of the Humber Estuary. The general idea in the Highlands, which I have myself put to the Highlands and Islands Development Board—which, after all, is the first of these Development Boards in existence—is to try to reclaim land.
There are thousands of lost acres in the Spey Valley, and some of the more productive mud flats in the various estuaries could unquestionably be converted to make the Highlands, at any rate, self-sufficient. I feel that the Highlands may well be the poor relation in agriculture. Yet we do, of course, grow a lot of the barley which produces the whisky, which in turn raises levies of anything up to £150 million in taxation annually. We have no communications, and we could do with a lift in the hills. I hope that the noble Lord will pass on that reminder to the Secretary of State for Scotland.
House adjourned during pleasure:
House resumed.

ROYAL COMMISSION
7.0 p.m.
The following Bills received the Royal Assent:

Consolidated Fund,

Education,

West Indies,

London Government,

London Bridge.

House adjourned during pleasure:
House resumed.

AGRICULTURE BILL
7.12 p.m.
Debate on Second Reading resumed.
LORD RATHCAVAN: My Lords, after that very historic interlude, which I hope that we shall see, at any rate occasionally, in the years to come, we return once again to the Agriculture Bill. This is very much an omnibus Bill. It deals with a great many matters and I propose to mention only one or two points. First, I should like to say something about hill farming; secondly, about the amalgamation of uneconomic holdings, and thirdly, about co-operation. I welcome the proposals for stabilising subsidies and other benefits which are proposed for hill farmers. After all hill farming is about the most hazardous of all forms of farming. I was a hill farmer in Northern Ireland for some years, and there the land was not good hill land; it was boggy, peaty soil, rather, I suppose, the same type as the soil you would find in Argyllshire. The sheep which I had on my farm were pure bred Blackfaced.
The dangerous time in hill farming is the winter and the early spring, before the new grass comes. After a severe winter, when the grass comes late, the ewes are weak and have little milk when the lambs are born in April. Often there is a bitter East wind in April—certainly there was in my part of the country. I remember that on one occasion during one of these bitter winds 22 lambs were born in one night. The shepherd did his best to put them in a sheltered place for the night, but when he came back in the morning 20 of them were dead. That is the kind of thing the hill farmer is up against. There is also the problems created by foxes and dogs. It is extraordinary how careless so many people are about keeping their dogs in at night. The animals go out and become killers on the hill. They can maim and cause the death of numerous sheep. Then there are vermin—for instance, the grey crows. I remember one occasion when a ewe was cast; that is to say, it had fallen over on its back and because of its big fleece, could not get up. While it was in that helpless state a grey crow pecked out both its eyes. The wretched animal was blinded for life. Fortunately the shepherd came upon it soon afterwards and the animal was taken down to lower
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ground. It lived on for several years and had a lamb every year, so that was not so bad for the poor thing, considering that it was completely blind.
Perhaps the worst of all hazards is snow drifts in winter. To-day the weather forecasts help the shepherds and very often disasters may be prevented, because if sheep can be gathered and taken to lower ground they can at any rate be kept together. But sometimes blizzards come without warning when the sheep are scattered over the mountain. I have lost as many as 100 sheep in one night; they were buried and smothered to death under the snow. I just mention these details, my Lords, in order to show the difficulties under which a hill farmer works and how much he deserves the subsidies and other benefits that he has received in recent years, and will continue to receive under the provisions of this Bill.
I should like to say a word about Part II of the Bill. I am especially interested in the provisions relating to the amalgamation of small uneconomic farms with larger units and how this will operate in Northern Ireland, where I believe that there are 20,000 farms of under 20 acres. It must be remembered that in Ulster there are no tenant farmers, because under the Land Acts, which began in the time of Gladstone in the 1870s (and there were later enactments right up to the 1920s) all the tenant farmers were entitled to buy their land from the landlords. Consequently, all the farmers in Ireland to-day, both North and South, are absolute owners of their land, subject, in the case of some later sales, to small terminable annuities.
We also have a system there called the conacre letting of land, under which small farmers can let their land for the season only to neighbours with larger farms. Let me give an example. A small farmer with 15 acres may let his land for the season under the conacre system for, say, £150. If he is an old man he will probably also draw the old age pension and he can continue in his house. Such a man, I think, would not wish to come under the scheme in this Bill, unless the grants which were proposed in the White Paper issued in August, 1965, were to be considerably increased. In regard to this point, I was glad to see that the present Minister of Agriculture,

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Mr. Peart, admitted in another place that the grants published in the White Paper were not sufficient and would have to be increased.
However, quite apart from the proposed scheme in the Bill, I am told that in recent years a large number of small farms in Northern Ireland have been absorbed by purchase into larger units, so that something has already been done. I believe that there have been recent talks between the Minister of Agriculture here and the Minister of Agriculture for Northern Ireland, and I wonder if the noble Lord, Lord Walston, could tell me whether any decisions were reached in those talks.
In conclusion, I come to Part IV of the Bill, which deals with co-operative schemes. This is an admirable idea, but how far will it work out in practice? That remains to be seen. I am afraid that the British farmer is not very co-operatively minded. Perhaps the greatest experiment ever tried in these Islands in agricultural co-operation took place in Ireland at the end of the last century and the beginning of this. With that scheme the name of Sir Horace Plunkett will always be associated. Under the scheme, co-operative creameries and other industries were set up. I think they were quite successful, but I am afraid that few of them remain to-day. This Bill is obviously going to become law, and I hope that its provisions will prove beneficial to the agricultural community.
7.25 p.m.
LORD SOMERS: My Lords, I want to deal with only one point in this Bill, and I promise to be brief. I refer to Clause 31, which deals with grants for fixed machinery. Presumably, fixed machinery includes batteries. Many noble Lords may accuse me of introducing the old bogey of humanitarianism again. Well, perhaps that is so; but it depends on how one looks at this: whether one regards the prevention of unnecessary suffering by defenceless creatures as a desirable thing or not. I happen to be one of those who do. I am not going to hold for a moment that the domestic fowl is one of the most intelligent of creatures. The fact is that it is very much the reverse. But one does not have to be very intelligent to suffer pain, fear and
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discomfort. Probably the more stupid you are, the more you suffer, because you do not realise either how to get rid of pain or how long it is going to last.
Of these three elements, the first, pain, is rather a doubtful quality so far as batteries are concerned. Whether de-beaking causes pain, I am not prepared to say, but it certainly causes discomfort. The other two are quite certain. I can see my noble friend Lord Ferrers sitting there, all ready to say that the birds are kept in an extremely comfortable and warm situation, protected from bad weather. But, with all due respect to my noble friend, that really is absolute nonsense, because surely that is making the birds into human beings. If one were a human being, I do not think one would like to spend one's life sitting strapped into a chair in the comfort of a warm room and, what is more, having one hand cut off so that one should not hit the man sitting in the chair beside one. There is no doubt that battery birds live a totally unnatural life. They get no exercise; they live in semi-darkness, with never a glimpse of the sun and, in present circumstances, with not enough room even to stretch their wings. On top of that, there is this question of de-beaking, which must cause discomfort at least.
Apart from the humanitarian aspect of this question, let us look at the quality of the product of batteries. I was reminded only last week that this is Quality and Reliability Year. If we want quality in eggs, we shall certainly not go to a battery, because there is nothing on earth more tasteless than a battery egg. I think it should be made compulsory to label them as such, so that they should not be sold in shops as normal eggs. They are even worse than deep-litter eggs, which are themselves not nearly so good as free-range eggs. From all points of view, batteries are not desirable machines, and I wish that the Government could make it possible to exclude them from these desirable grants for fixed machinery that are included in this Bill.
7.30 p.m.
VISCOUNT STONEHAVEN: My Lords, I want to speak only briefly on this Bill. To begin with, I should like to say that although there are benefits from the Bill, there is no substitute whatever

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for proper prices for agricultural produce, and I hope that the Price Review which is now on the way will recognise this fact. This is a palliative, perhaps, but it is no cure whatever for the real problems which the industry is now facing.
I desire to seek some information on Part I in regard to farm and structure improvements, and the promotion of agricultural investment. Clause 26(1) says:
"The appropriate Minister may in accordance with a scheme…
Who makes that scheme? Am I right in assuming that you can make a scheme yourself as a landlord in conjunction with your tenant? Or who makes it? The clause just says, "in accordance with a scheme". It goes on to deal with an "uncommercial unit", but qualifies it by saying that an uncommercial unit
"shall be owned and occupied…"
Does that mean to say that unless you own and occupy it a tenant cannot get a golden handshake? I do not understand this. I apologise for my stupidity in not being able to undersand it, but perhaps it could be made clear.
I come now to another matter on the same subject, in Clause 27. The words which appear in Clause 27(1) are:
"an individual who in prescribed circumstances…"
What are the prescribed circumstances? You cannot see them anywhere in the Bill—at least, I cannot. Then the clause goes on to deal withan uncommercial unit of land, and so on. I should like to know whether a landlord, if he agrees with his tenant and everybody else, can join two intermediate units and make one commercial unit. An uncommercial unit, yes. But can you join two intermediate units? This is not clear to me, although probably it is to everybody else, and I should like, if possible, to have it ironed out. Later on, talking about these units, the clause says:
"calculated in a prescribed way …"
What is the prescribed way? It does not tell you that. Then Clause 27(1) paragraph (c) says:
"subject to the provisions in Part III of this Act, in accordance with arrangements approved by a Rural Development Board as being for the purpose of facilitating the a forestation of land in the area of the Board."
I earnestly hope that we shall never have Development Boards in Scotland;
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and, anyway, we shall not have them for six or seven years, because I am thankful to say that we are well down the list of places that are to be afflicted with these other people to manage their business. But it seems to me (and this point was mentioned, I think, by the noble Lord, Lord Nugent of Guildford) that if you have an agreement to dedicate land to forestry with the Forestry Commission, this should be good enough. I think "a development board" should come out, and the words "and/or", or something of that sort, be inserted instead.
I want to note, in passing, a very unusual act of generosity on the part of the Treasury. It is so unusual to have an act of generosity on the part of the Treasury that I wonder if they have noticed it. It is on page 22 of the Bill, where it says that the annuity can be enjoyed by the wife. Quite frequently, an antique Highlander takes for his second wife a young and bonny lassie of 17 or 18, and it seems to me that the Treasury will be paying that annuity for a very long time. This is most generous of them, but I do not suppose they have thought about it.
Perhaps I may point out one other matter. Later in the Bill the Minister takes to himself powers to take on a part holding while waiting for it to be made into a commercial unit. There is a danger here which I am surprised is not covered. Here it not only says that he may amalgamate and so on, but uses the words "to use the land". I should have thought that the temporary tenant, who can be turned out without security of tenure, should at least be given the option of the combined unit when it becomes a commercial unit. Otherwise, this is merely an invitation to the Government to nationalise land. I think this is wrong. I do not think it is in the interests of the farmer, and I think that this protection should be given to the tenant farmer, so that one or other of them makes sure that the tenant farmer gets it and the Government do not set up a bureaucratic institution.
If I may now take up one other point, which was mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Elliot of Harwood, it is the question of fixed normal plant and so on. I should, of course, have declared an interest here before I started, but I think everybody realises that I am up to

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the hilt in interest in this. I am not quite so sanguine about this business as the noble Baroness appears to be. I have installed a dryer, and have equipped it with a tractor-driven fan, and the reason I did this was because the electric distribution system in Scotland is single-phase. A high-powered single-phase motor is an expensive thing. There are technical difficulties in starting it; it can be done, but it is not easy, and it is not like a three-phase. If I had installed an electric motor to drive this fan, I should have got grant on it without question. But this would have been a stupid thing to do. In my own particular grain dryer I have one Aga fixed by a couple of bolts which fills the thing and this gives grant. Then I have three bins and I empty those bins with another. That does not give grant although it is exactly the same Aga. My fan does not give grant. My heater does not give grant. How are you going to work a grain dryer without a fan or a heater. Of the ducts that take the air through the grain, the portal, as you might say, which is bolted to the concrete, gives grant, but the duct from the portal which carries air to the grain does not. Schedule 4 of the Bill lists all the various items on which you can get grants, and paragraph 17, which has been added, says:
"Any operation incidental to any of the operations specified in the other paragraphs of this schedule or necessary or proper in carrying it out or securing the full benefit thereof."
I should like an answer to this. If that does not cover the point of the integral parts of a dryer, if you cannot operate without it, I do not know what does. It appears to cover it. But I am quite sure that if I think it does, it does not! Therefore, I should like the noble Lord to make this point quite clear.
7.40 p.m.
THE DUKE OF BUCCLEUCH AND QUEENSBERRY: My Lords, I am sorry if I am delaying the conclusion of the debate, but I will be very brief. I feel that this is a Bill which deserves a wide discussion. I should like, also in a few words, although it does not deal with all the major problems of farmers, to thank the Government and the noble Lord, Lord Hilton of Upton, for bringing forward proposals which are due from time to time and provisions which will be beneficial
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to agriculture and to production from the land.
I would refer briefly to advantages in the voluntary amalgamation of small farms in cases where they are unlikely ever to be economic, with a better distribution of fields among adjoining farms. Also, I should like to add a reminder that this should be done with considerable care and knowledge of the circumstances, and not necessarily in all cases, as I am sure the noble Lord realises, as others do, that there are very many occasions where a small farm may not be economic to one person but it can be to another, and can provide a very useful stepping-stone to a person on his way to a bigger farm. These amalgamations have been practised by landowners where opportunities have occurred, and it is satisfactory that this action has been in accordance with official policy; and I feel it can be continued by individuals as well as under Government auspices.
In this matter, and more so in other parts of the Bill, including the changeover from allowances to investment grants, the procedure seems to be more complicated than is necessary and to bring more complications and delays and cost to farmers and those concerned with the management of land and farming. Perhaps also it may involve less freedom of choice of production from the land. I should like to feel that simplifications may be possible during the further stages of the Bill.
I do not find a friendly welcome for Rural Development Boards, or that in Scotland any wish, or need, has been shown for them to be set up. I am happy to think that there have been indications, which I hope will continue, that there will be no hurry to set them up and that there will be a careful watch first on such Boards which are set up in other places in the United Kingdom. I think we all agree that the selection of membership of these Boards is very important indeed, and some of us are anxious that it may be difficult to secure for them the services of persons of the greatest wisdom and experience, who are probably already fully engaged and employed in their own work and in many other local government and other local works.

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This is not a Bill for the protection of forestry, but the growing of trees comes into it. There is an appearance of discouragement and more control for private forestry, rather than encouragement of private forestry. In so far as land may be released for forestry by these Boards, it seems that preference and advantages are mainly for the Forestry Commission, and there is not equality for all who are willing to help the nation by growing trees and producing more timber. And yet locally, when sites are released for forestry and are distant from Forestry Commission forests, and when acreages are small, the planting and management are much more suitable to be done by individuals on the spot; and the Forestry Commission quite properly do not want to be bothered too frequently with places which they know are less suitable to themselves.
I was relieved to hear the noble Lord, Lord Hilton of Upton, state that consideration would also be given to private forestry. I should like to ask whether it is accidental or deliberate in this Bill that a preference seems to be given to the Forestry Commission with an advantage over other growers; and, if so, why this is. The two branches of forestry, State and private, work very closely together. I work very closely with both, and I am sure that all in forestry want each to make its maximum contribution, one helping the other, and conversely. We should like to believe that Government and Parliament want an expansion of forestry by all who can do so.
Occasional references are made to what the Government will do for forestry, but this seems to be one of those things which are everyone's responsibility and which are always being postponed. I do not suppose that this is the occasion to go into forestry very much, but as it has been mentioned in the Bill I feel it is justifiable to emphasise a few words which I hope will be taken up by those more concerned with it. I trust I shall be excused for a few very gentle points of disagreement; and I hope this Bill will be further improved in this House.
7.47 p.m.
EARL FERRERS: My Lords, we have had quite a long debate and it seems indeed extraordinary that this Bill, which originally started so long ago as Novem-
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ber, 1965, has at last come up to your Lordships' House. At one time I wondered whether it would ever reach us. It certainly had a thorough vetting in another place when there. I was delighted to see the noble Lord, Lord Hilton of Upton, put the Government's case this afternoon, because he, like his noble friend Lord Walston—I was going to say are fellow travellers. If I say that, I do not mean it in any form of derogatory political sense, but merely that they hail from the same part of the world as that from which I come, and it is good to see two people from East Anglia put the Government's case. I only wish it was a better one, but it is good to see them.
The noble Lord, Lord Hilton of Upton, said he had some pride in moving this Bill, but I think that as the debate went on his pride must have withered somewhat, because most of the debate seemed to consist of criticism. Indeed the Bill did not evoke the welcome his pride must have anticipated, because even from his own Party he managed to succeed in getting only one noble Lord to back up this "wonderful Bill"; and he, the noble Lord, Lord Wise, took the biggest swipe at the Bill of any noble Lord who has spoken. I reckon that Lord Hilton of Upton's Bill has had a pretty rough ride one way and another this evening. But he hoped it was a great Bill, and I think the Minister of Agriculture in another place certainly said that this was a great Bill. We had a big Agriculture Bill in 1947 and one in 1957, and I think the idea was that as this was 1967 this Bill also would be a great Agriculture Bill.
I do not believe it is a great Bill. It has many good points—it certainly has—but it has bad ones, and no real beacon shines out from the Bill pointing the way ahead for agriculture over the next decade. There is nothing in the Bill which will restore to farmers the confidence which they have lost during the last 18 months or so. There is nothing in this Bill which will give them the feeling, "Now we know where to go. Now we have the light, and we can invest and go ahead". This is what agriculture wants. This is what farmers want. This is what they have not got, and this is the opportunity which the Government, in this Bill, have missed. Instead of producing a Bill which will give farmers the confidence which they require, the

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Government have produced this Bill which contains a major amount of minor alterations and a minor amount of major ones—and I certainly do not intend to comment on each and every one of them, otherwise we shall be here until tomorrow and longer.
The whole of Part I of the Bill is devoted to setting up the Meat and Livestock Commission. This is a huge undertaking, and a brave one, and I certainly hope that it will prove successful. It will certainly prove expensive. The noble Lord, Lord Wise, had some severe doubts on this, and I have even heard that the suggested cost by the Verdon-Smith Committee of £2 million a year is an underestimate of considerable magnitude. I wonder whether the noble Lord, when he replies, can give us any idea at all how much this will cost to run.
So much of the success of this Commission, as of all Commissions, will depend, of course, on the people who are appointed to it. In this Bill the practice of the Government has differed slightly from that which has been evident in some other Bills, in which the members of the Commission have been announced before the Parliamentary proposals have been approved. I wonder whether the noble Lord can give us any indication who the members of the Commission will be, and indeed when the Commission will be set up. This is the thing in which all farmers, traders and slaughterers are interested. To set up a Commission such as this is a big undertaking, and many eventualities must be catered for, but the sympathies which many people—noble Lords on this side of the House, farmers, traders, slaughterers and people in the meat industry—have for this Commission and its chances of success are lacerated by the sweeping and crippling provisions of Clause 9.
To my mind, this is an obnoxious clause, the cause and need for which has never been adequately explained. Nor has it been explained this afternoon by the noble Lord, Lord Hilton of Upton. It allows the Commission to "compel or encourage", and it is interesting to note the juxtaposition of those particular words and the priorities given to them. It is not "encourage and compel". It enables the Commission to compel and
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encourage people to do various things, and it enables the Commission to put a man out of business, whether he is a producer, a slaughterer or a trader. Why? The only reason we have been given for this (and it was given in another place) was that we must make provision for the unforeseeable future. I do not believe that is a sufficiently good answer. I think it is wholly wrong for the Government to take such wide and crippling powers without a specific purpose in mind. If there is a specific purpose I suggest that we should be told about it, and if there is not a specific purpose, these wide powers should not be taken.
Turning to the clauses which deal with farm structure, the amalgamations which are envisaged and the grants which are going to be made to encourage them, here, speaking personally, I congratulate the Government. They have grasped a very prickly nettle. In my view, they were quite right to do so, and equally right so to draft the clauses that any forms of amalgamation on this score should be voluntary and not compulsory.
Farm structure over the next few years is going to alter; circumstances will make it alter—and here I am not thinking only or necessarily of small farms. I believe the future will show a polarisation of the size of farms into, on the one hand, extensive farms of a larger nature and, on the other hand, smaller intensive family farms. It will be just as unviable in the long term to be an extensive farmer who is not large, as it will be to a small farmer who is not intensive. Units must get bigger, and I think the Government are right to give this encouragement. Whether the carrot contained in the Bill will be big enough to make the donkey run is another matter. I personally doubt it, but no doubt the Government will watch this point carefully. But the sad and the odd part about this is that the policies of the Government are running directly against each other. Their left hand does one thing, and their right does another.
Here is the Minister of Agriculture, encouraging the elimination of unviable units and encouraging, by amalgamation, the increase in the size of units. This is right and wholly acceptable, for larger units are a fact of economic life, whether one likes it or not. But what does the Chancellor of the Exchequer do? With

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his estate duty and capital gains tax he deliberately and specifically causes the fragmentation of units. I am not just making a Party point here, and I hope the noble Lord, Lord Walston, will seriously consider this, because I intend to show him factually the stupidity of the present situation. No one can call a 40-acre farm a large one, nor even a 90-acre farm, and one can well visualise an amalgamation of them into a 130-acre farm, which would be a sensible and logical thing to do. Any farmer so amalgamating two units will get a grant upon them, and if this comes about the unit must stay as one for 40 years. I stress this period of 40 years because it is an important factor in this example. The unit must stay as one for 40 years, otherwise the grant is returnable.
Let us now consider the fate of the owner-occupier of 130 acres. Since 1938 inflation in this country has increased at about 4 per cent. Compound, and it is a reasonable assumption to make that it will continue at this rate. Let us assume that in 1945 an owner-occupier bought a 130-acre farm for £11,000. By the mere processes of inflation, without any real improvement being made to his farm or his holding, in 1965 that holding would have been worth £25,000. It would have gone up from £11,000 to£25,000 in 20 years, and by 1985 it will have gone up to £55,000—by the mere processes of inflation. The owner-occupier dies in 1985, 40 years after he purchased his farm. Along comes the Chancellor of the Exchequer and claims, in capital gains tax and estate duty, £16,700—more than the whole of the sum of money which the owner-occupier paid to purchase his farm in the first instance. The Chancellor of the Exchequer claims what is in fact 30 per cent. of his total assets. In order to find this money, what do his executors do? They sell—and they have to sell—40 acres.
So we have the ridiculous situation of the Chancellor of the Exchequer splitting up a 130-acre farm into a 90-acre unit and a 40-acre unit, and at the same time the Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food paying a grant to join the two units together again. I suggest that as individual tactics the Government may be able to argue each case forcibly, but as overall strategy I would
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suggest that such dichotomy of views is mad. I am glad to see that the Government have decided to continue with the Farm Improvements Scheme. I have always considered this to be one of the best methods of spending money on agriculture, because it encourages the farmer and helps him to equip himself capitally for the future, and by such capital equipment to lower his costs of production. I am, however, sorry that the Government have seen fit to reduce the size of the grant from 33⅓per cent. to 25 per cent. I know that the argument is that although the subsidy is less, it is spread over a wider area. That is a perfectly valid argument to have and to project. But personally, I think it is wrong, for the value of the one-third grant, which is a very substantial grant, spread over a smaller area is a far greater incentive to the farmer to invest his money than is a system whereby the farmer has to find 75 per cent. of the total capital cost. We are getting into a state of a proliferation of little grants and regulations which will do no one any good.
Earlier this afternoon I asked a Starred Question about how many grants there were that are applicable to agriculture, and to my intense and huge surprise the noble Lord opposite told me there were only 16—I think he said 16 farming grants or subsidies. I was greatly surprised. I thought there would have been 150. But it only goes to prove the point, that these 16 grants and subsidies have so many bits and pieces twisted on to them, added on to them, and so many restrictions on them, that the comprehension of them becomes almost impossible. I only hope that the noble Lord will stick by the assurance which he gave me in his supplementary reply, that everything will be done and is being done to keep them as simple as possible because, with the greatest respect, this is not the case with this Bill. It makes grants far more difficult to comprehend and far more difficult to interpret.
I do not for one minute suggest that the Government support of agriculture should be curtailed, but I do suggest that it should be rationalised and that the grants available should be fewer and bigger. And no one will suggest that will not make things simpler to run, cheaper to administer and easier to understand.

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There is even provision in Clause 31(1)(c) for a 10 per cent. grant to be payable on an improvement, provided that the improvement is not already covered by another grant. It seems to me that we are getting to a position of absurdity. I do not decry grant aid as a system to encourage investment, but I do not believe that a 10 per cent. grant will encourage anyone to invest. I think that the economists in the Ministry of Agriculture are being given too big a heyday, adding bits here and subtracting bits there, so that the farmer does not know where he is, to what he is entitled or what is expected of him. I would suggest that the noble Lord, Lord Walston, takes this message over grants back to the Ministry of Agriculture. Quite simply, they should be bigger, fewer, simpler.
Nevertheless, I congratulate the Government on making what may appear to be a small but what is, in fact, a very significant change to the Farm Improvement Scheme; namely, changing the criteria on which the farming improvement grant is paid from the "prudent landlord" test to the "prudent owner-occupier" test. In the past, far too many sound and sensible schemes were strangled by the restrictive noose of the "prudent landlord" test, and this alteration is wholly commendable.
Similar reflections to those that I have made on these grants can be made in respect of Clause 32. Here the Minister has replaced the old investment allowance on tractor and combine with an investment grant. In the old days, one could work out in five minutes the written-down value of a tractor. Not so under this Bill. A farmer will in future have to apply for a form and fill it in; and the form is then to be shunted backwards and forwards within the Ministry for no less than two years, in order for the farmer to reap two payments of grant, the aggregate of which will be less than the total to which he was entitled before. This is a shocking waste of time and money, and it is a method of which I suggest the noble Lord, Lord Walston, should be ashamed. I do wish that even he—though I suppose this is too much to ask—could stop this bureaucratic machine from expanding like some huge amœba over everything, spreading its protoplasm everywhere. It
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has become quite impossible. I believe that it is a grossly unnecessary and retrograde step on the part of the Government, and it cannot in the long run be to the credit of agriculture or the taxpayer.
My noble friend Lord Nugent of Guildford said that agricultural indebtedness and overdrafts now exceed £500 million. The sad part—and the noble Lord, Lord Walston, knows this—is that over the past decade or so capital investment in agriculture has not come out of profits, as it should have done, but out of extra bank borrowing. This has been possible mainly by virtue of the fact that inflation has increased the value of the land, which has frequently been used as a security for the borrowing. This is not a healthy situation. In my view, far more of the capital investment in the future ought to come out of farm profits, and I wish that I thought this Bill would do more to see that it does.
My Lords, there are many Parts to this Bill, and I have chosen to comment on only a few of them. If I appear to have been critical, I hope that the noble Lord will understand that it is not just for the sake of being critical, and that such criticism as I have made does not apply in equal proportions to all Parts of the Bill. I think that this Bill has good Parts to it and good points in it. I should like to give it a warm welcome, because Bills designed to help and encourage agriculture deserve a warm welcome and every encouragement. But my welcome to this Bill is not so great as it should be, or as I should have liked it to be, for two basic reasons. First, it deliberately sows into agriculture more controls, more restrictions, more form fillings and more regulations, at a time when these should be reduced. Secondly, it fails completely to strike the note which it should strike, and for which agriculture is yearning; namely, that of giving a strong guiding light to agriculture for the future and to farmers in particular, to show them what is wanted of them, and what is expected of them, in the years that lie ahead.
8.8 p.m.
LORD WALSTON: My Lords, it is for me a great pleasure to take part once more in an agricultural debate. I do not know whether I should declare an

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interest, because I am not quite certain whether I am in fact a farmer or not. I am perhaps what some people might call a weekend farmer. I criticise my son's farming when I go home. But I cannot really pretend to be actively engaged in it myself, so possibly I have no direct interest to declare, but I still have a very great interest in this industry. I have enjoyed listening to this debate, and I am grateful to those noble Lords, and it is the majority of them, who have given a welcome to this Bill.
I must confess at the beginning that I find myself in basic disagreement with almost every noble Lord who has spoken, because the attitude which has been taken is to say—and I hope I am not misrepresenting the general view—that the Bill has good points but that it does not get down to the fundamentals of agriculture; it skates over them. There I disagree. After all, what are the fundamentals of agriculture? What does agriculture want? It wants security, it wants an assurance against violent changes, and it wants a knowledge that its products will be needed in increasing quantities. It wants all of those things, and I suggest to your Lordships that it has got them. It has the 1947 Act and it has the 1957 Act, both of which give those securities and assurances against violent changes. Provided agriculture is prepared to believe them—and, of course nobody can insist, particularly a politician, that his words are believed—it has had a whole series of statements from the Prime Minister, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the First Secretary and many other Members of the Government to the effect that agriculture is not only important to-day, but has an ever-increasing role to play in the National Plan. It has all those things.
But that is not enough; it needs more. What it needs in order to increase its already great competitiveness in terms of the rest of the world is a sound basic structure. In the first place, it needs a sound marketing organisation to close that gap that we so often talk about between the producer and the consumer, and it needs a courageous tackling of a problem which we do not hear so much about now—although in the old days we used to hear of it, and it is still with us—that of the marginal farm.
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I suggest to your Lordships that this Bill tackles those three points. It tackles the structure in farming by the provisions which have, on the whole, received a welcome from your Lordships, and I am grateful for it. There is this scheme for the voluntary amalgamation of farms—and I repeat, as my noble friend made clear at the outset, that this is purely voluntary. The noble Earl, Lord Ferrers, wondered whether the carrot was sufficiently strong or attractive to make the donkey run. I do not know if it is. But the donkey has been running for quite a time. Over the years there has been a process of amalgamation of holdings. There has been a process of the running down of small farms, marginal farms, inefficient farms—call them what you like—by degrees. Often after their total productivity and the national capital expended on them has been largely squandered, they have been amalgamated into larger units. That is why the average size of our farms is mounting steadily, in spite of the impact of death duties which has been with us for a long time. That has been happening.
One may say: Why bother to do anything else about it if it is happening? There are two reasons why we should do something about it. One reason is that it is not happening fast enough for the efficiency of the industry in which we are all interested. The second reason is that, when it happens without any carrot at all, it entails a considerable degree of hardship on those farmers who are farming these marginal farms, wondering if they should give up. They are old, possibly; they are inefficient; they have not the training; they are under-capitalised, or whatever it may be, for the struggle on their farms, because they cannot afford to give them up. It is a great hardship to themselves and a squandering of the natural fertility and resources of that land. This carrot has been added to the natural economic processes—interference, if you like, with the natural economic processes, which some noble Lords may deplore; but they are in order to encourage a natural process, to make it go faster in the national interest, and to remove much of the hardship which in the past has gone with it. That, I repeat, is striking at one of the fundamental problems of our agriculture to-day—assisting our farms to become viable units, to cope

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increasingly with the conditions, not only to-day, but ahead.
Secondly, it tackles the marketing problem with livestock. I am most grateful for the kind words which, almost universally, have been expressed in favour of the provisions for the Meat and Livestock Commission. Of course, some of the comments have been somewhat contradictory. At one point the noble Earl, Lord Ferrers, praised the words of my noble friend Lord Wise, who unfortunately was not able to remain until the end. He then went on to criticise Clause 9 which, as he thought, gave frightening powers to the Commission. On the other hand, he may remember that my noble friend Lord Wise criticised the Commission on the ground that it had not teeth to it. He wanted more. So, in spite of some superficial resemblance between the noble Earl and my noble friend, when they get down to discussing the Livestock Commission I think they will find several basic differences between them.
However, we have tackled this important problem, one of the most important problems of marketing in the whole of the agricultural field. That is another fundamental approach. There is the continued assistance to co-operation in all its forms. I will come back to this and deal in more detail later with some of the comments made about that. Again it is something which I think everybody agrees must be dealt with in our agriculture. We do not want agriculture consisting solely of great farms, enormous farming enterprises, ranches of 10,000 acres or whatever it may be. We do want to have the small farmer still having ample opportunity. If he wants to give up, we have the scheme for voluntary amalgamation. But if, as I hope, he wants to stay—and I know that many of them will—he must be assisted by various forms of co-operation, not only in marketing, but in the ownership of the machinery, and in the actual cultivation of his soil, and so on. Some of them do it already. So much the better. But here is positive assistance to help them in this.
Finally, there is this question of what, as I said, was in earlier days called the marginal farm and the marginal areas of agriculture. There we are bringing in the Rural Development Boards to deal
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solely with this problem of a whole area, not necessarily within the boundaries of any one local government area, but within natural agricultural boundaries where the standard of living, because of the climate, because of the fertility, because of the communications, or whatever the cause may be, is too low.
I apologise in advance for detaining your Lordships, but many points have been raised, and I do not want to miss too many of them. Much has been said in criticism of these Rural Development Boards. With respect, I think that most of the criticisms are based on an entire misunderstanding of what these Boards are supposed to do. In the first place, let me make it quite clear that there is no suggestion that these Boards will be widespread throughout the whole country; that they will march from Wales up across the Pennines, up to the Borders into the Highlands, and back through Yorkshire, and even into East Anglia. There is no suggestion of that kind at all.
The first of these Boards has not yet been decided. Where it will be I do not know. Who will be the members of it, who will be the chairman of it, I cannot say. But I can assure your Lordships that the chairman will not be, in the words of one noble Lord," an ambitious Socialist alderman". I can equally assure your Lordships that he will not be an effete and idle Conservative Peer. Whoever he is, he will be chosen because he is a good man who knows his job; who has ideas and is capable of undertaking this important activity. The activity is to ensure that the selected area, instead of becoming a rural slum steadily going downhill, with people leaving it, roofs falling off the houses, weeds growing where crops should grow, or used to grow, and so on, is developed in a way which will be good for the country as a whole. Whether it is going to be developed in the way of large-scale sheep farming and extensive farms, or whether it will be developed purely for forestry or for amenities, tourism or whatever it maybe, I do not know. It will be for the Board to decide that. It must have sufficient power to develop the whole area in that way. That is why it has these powers over forestry.
A good deal has been said on this matter, but in view of the functions of the Board which I have described to your

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Lordships it is clear that if an area is decided upon by the Board as being, for example, an adequate place for a particular form of tourism, one cannot have a private a forestation scheme put up in the middle of it which will spoil the whole plan. It must be co-ordinated and controlled. The same goes for the Forestry Commission; but as the Commission is a national body it will, from the beginning of this scheme, work in so closely with the Rural Development Board that there is no need to make special provisions in the Bill. It is not going to be treated any differently. All forestry, whether Forestry Commission forestry or private forestry, will be co-ordinated into the development of this particular area.
So I suggest to your Lordships that in these four ways this Bill is striking at some of the fundamental weaknesses in our present agriculture structure, and, coupled with the statements of members of the Government and the previous 1957 and 1947 Acts, I believe it provides the basis for a still further advance of our own agriculture.
I should now like to deal with some of the points which have been raised during the debate. The noble Lord, Lord Nugent of Guildford—and I thank him for his very thoughtful speech—talked about the whole question of livestock farmers' confidence, the collapse in the autumn of confidence in livestock prices, and so on. I do not deny that there were very serious misgivings among farmers during that period, but I believe that those misgivings were largely ill-founded. After all, we know that livestock prices fluctuate. It is because we know of those fluctuations that our present system, which Lord Nugent of Guildford appears to want to change, including the whole price structure and deficiency payments, was brought in; so that even if the market price drops, the final result to the seller, the producer, if not absolutely constant, at any rate does not drop in a corresponding way. That, I believe, is the right way to do it. Although I freely admit that the sellers of stall cattle did suffer at that time, they would have suffered very much more had there not been the system of support prices and deficiency payments which we now have and which the noble Lord and, I imagine, his friends wish to do away with.
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I should like to remind your Lordships and the farming community as a whole, when they talk of a lack of confidence, of what has been done for livestock producers in the last two years. There is a useful little list in the last two Annual Reviews. The guaranteed price of fat cattle was raised in the first Review by 4s. and then by a further 10s. per cwt. in the second Review. The new beef-cow subsidy has been introduced; the rates of the hill cow subsidy have been raised, as have the rates of the calf subsidy. The guaranteed price for sheep has been raised; and the hill sheep subsidy has been put on a continuing annual basis. In the light of those actions over the last two years, I do not see that there is any justifiable reason for lack of confidence over the long term. I agree that there are periods when prices drop rather low; but there are other periods when they rise rather high. We have just been through a had one, and have come out of it. But that is not a reason either for losing confidence yourself, or, if I may say so, for encouraging other people to lose their confidence.
The noble Lord, Lord Nugent of Guildford, mentioned A.M.D.E.C. and asked some questions about it. I was very glad he mentioned it. Obviously one listens with great care to everything the noble Lord says, but more particularly when he speaks with such authority on A.M.D.E.C. itself. I should like to thank him, both personally and, if I may, officially, for the magnificent work he has done as chairman of that body. I think we must bear in mind that although it is true that a considerable proportion of the grants which A.M.D.E.C. have recommended have gone to the assistance of co-operation, their sphere of activities goes very much further than that. After all, the scheme covers marketing generally, and any responsible person or body with an interest in the marketing of agricultural and horticultural produce may apply for grant, provided the proposal which is being put forward holds out the prospect of benefit to producers. So I am quite certain—and I hope the noble Lord shares my certainty in this—that when the new Council is established to deal with co-operation there will still be a great deal of scope for A.M.D.E.C. in the more general fields of marketing. I

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hope that any fears he or his colleagues may have on that score will by now be dissipated.
LORD NUGENT OF GUILDFORD: My Lords, may I interrupt the noble Lord to say that I did not express any fears on that?
LORD WALSTON: I think that I was rather transposing and thinking of the fears which the noble Lord, Lord Balerno, expressed on P.I.D.A. Perhaps I might come to that also, and assure him that there need be no fears of any kind for any of the staff of P.I.D.A. Clause 22 (1) provides for the transfer of the assets, liabilities and obligations of the Authority to the Commission. This covers a number of matters, but not least the liabilities and obligations of the Authority to its staff. These include any contracts with the staff and any other obligations there may be with respect to their employment. So that, subject to any changes, the staff will be employed on the same conditions as exist at present with regard, for example, to such matters as periods of notice on both sides for the termination of contract. In this respect, the position of the staff in relation to the Commission should be exactly as it was previously in relation to the Authority. The Commission itself will make its own arrangements with its staff, but in the long run there will be so much wider scope for the Commission that there is no fear at all that there will be any diminution of its activities.
The Common Market was another matter that was mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Nugent of Guildford. The words he used were that the Prime Minister was now assiduously wooing the Six. He further suggested that, in carrying out this wooing, the Prime Minister must have formulated our own agricultural plans so that he could discuss it with the Governments of the Six. The noble Lord went on to suggest that, that being so, there was no reason why British farmers and your Lordships should not be told what those plans are. I think that that is in some measure—although I know it is entirely unintentional—a misrepresentation of the present situation. These visits to the members of the Six are in no way the visits of a wooer. They
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are visits in order to explore, to discuss, to find out. They are exploratory in the widest sense. I can assure the noble Lord that there are no detailed, worked-out plans for the shape of British agriculture when we sign the Treaty of Rome or anything of that kind. If we sign the Treaty of Rome—and, as I think most noble Lords here know, I personally hope that we shall—we shall clearly have to discuss the whole question of our agricultural policy. But that is not to-day and it is not to-morrow, and what we are dealing with to-day is the situation as it is to-day and to-morrow. Therefore, I think it is right for this Bill to confine itself to those matters.
The noble Lord, Lord Henley, was in many ways very kind to us. He said that we were making a jolly good try to solve the problems which have been with us for a long time. He spoke of a laudable attempt, and matters of that sort. He was somewhat lukewarm in some of his other comments, although I do not object to that. I think it is natural, particularly coming from the northern climes, to be lukewarm about some of the things which are done in Whitehall and in Westminster. But I am glad that he agrees that what we are doing is on the right lines, and I hope that what I have said has allayed some of his fears that we are not really getting down to the fundamental problems.
The noble Lord, Lord Wise, told me that he was unable to remain to the end, because he had to catch his train back to Norfolk, and I think I have already dealt with most of his comments. He mentioned the point that in his view farmers were tired of receiving advice. I must say that I do not subscribe to that view, even though the noble Baroness seems to nod her head in agreement with the noble Lord. But from such little experience as I have and from the information I get, it seems to me that the services of the National Agricultural Advisory Service are far more in demand now than they were five years ago or ten years ago, which is not an indication that the farmers do not want to receive advice. If it is good advice they will receive it. The services of the Milk Marketing Board are very much in demand and have had an enormous impact on raising the efficiency of our agriculture

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and of our dairy herds. So I would not subscribe to that view at all.
I hope that I have dealt with the remarks of the noble Earl, Lord Dundee, on forestry and on the general problem of the Rural Development Boards. The noble Baroness, Lady Elliot of Harwood, made, as always, a very valuable, interesting and well-informed speech, though I would say, on the question of drawing the line between where you get your investment grant and where you do not—and other noble Lords raised this matter, too—that it is always possible to find examples of ridiculous dividing lines. The noble Viscount, Lord Stone haven, mentioned some, too. A line must be drawn somewhere, and wherever the line is drawn you can produce some examples. But that does not mean that your line should not be drawn. It should be drawn, and I think that where the line has been drawn at the moment is, on the whole, a reasonable and rational point. I would point out to the noble Baroness that, as I understand it, tractors do receive an investment grant, self-propelled combines do, and harvesting machinery does, and the line has been drawn between static machinery and mobile machinery—mobile under its own power. That is as logical and as easily administered a distinction as one can get.
The noble Earl, Lord Ferrers, made great play with the difficulties of these grants that they were too complicated and we ought to make them simpler. This is an example of what happens when we make them simple. We say that self-propelled and mobile vehicles get the grant. Then we get noble Lords and farmers saying, "This is ridiculous. Look at what happens." But if one answered all these points there would be far more complications in administering the grants, far more form-filling, far more inspectors, and all the things which the noble Earl wants to do away with.
EARL FERRERS: My Lords, with the greatest respect, if the noble Lord's Government had kept the position as it was, where one obtained all these things by virtue of the investment allowances as opposed to going into investment grants, there would not be all the problems which the noble Lord is now encountering.
LORD WALSTON: My Lords, we should not have those problems, but we
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should have others. Then, of course, we always get complaints from farmers who, for one reason or another, pay no tax or very little tax and who say, "We are getting no advantage from these investment allowances, and all the big boys who are making the big profits are the ones who get them." We have been attacked to a certain extent to-day, but more often in the past, for helping the big boys more than the little boys, and this is one way of helping the little boys. One cannot have it every way. In the matter of the selective employment tax—
VISCOUNT STONEHAVEN: My Lords, before the noble Lord moves on, may I remind him that I asked whether he would interpret paragraph 17 of Schedule 4, which says:
"Any operation incidental to any of the operations specified in the other paragraphs of this Schedule or necessary or proper in carrying it out or securing the full benefit thereof."
Can you get the full benefit of a crop drier without a fan?
LORD WALSTON: No, my Lords, you cannot. But, frankly, without being in any way offensive to the noble Viscount, I think that this is rather a specific matter. I should be very happy to write to him about it without trying to explain, in any more detail than I have attempted to do already, all the reasons why the line has been drawn in this particular place and has gone through the middle of his fan.
If I may now go on to the selective employment tax, I am glad to be able to tell the noble Baroness that repayments are already being made. I understand that something like £4 million has already been repaid, and I am very glad to say that I am one of the recipients. I hope that before long it will extend its way up into the North and that the noble Baroness herself will also be a recipient. While I am on the subject, may I say how very pleased I was to hear her kind words, speaking as a prominent representative of the consumer, and also those of the noble Lord, Lord Baler no, on the new regulations embodied in this Bill, which will go some way, if not far enough to satisfy my noble friend Lady Burton of Coventry to improve the situation of the consumer as regards marketing?
The noble Lord, Lord Inglewood, is not here, but even if he were I do not

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think he would be surprised if I did not comment on his questions about farm income. I do not think that they are strictly relevant to this Bill, though they are, of course, extremely relevant to the Price Review which I hope your Lordships will have the opportunity of debating before very long. Somewhere, I have notes on what other noble Lords have said, but I seem to have mislaid them. So I hope that if I have left out any serious points I shall be taken up before I sit down on this; or, alternatively, that noble Lords will write to me, when I will do my best to answer any questions.
In conclusion, I should like to say what those of us who have remained until this late hour all know so well, that agriculture is a great industry, and it is not only great in size but great in achievement. At least since 1939, its record is indeed a very proud one, and I think we can say without any fear of contradiction that if all the other industries in this country had equalled agriculture in its achievements, in its increased output, in its stabilisation of prices and in its increased efficiency, our economic life would be much easier than it is at the present time. I, for one, am proud to be a member of the agricultural community. There are very few countries in the world which can vie with us in yield per acre, in yield per animal or in output per man, and very few indeed which can vie with us in our record of holding prices in check.
The result of this achievement has led not only to import saving, to which noble Lords have already referred—and very substantial and important import saving—but also to exports; very substantial exports indeed, amounting to something in the neighbourhood of £100 million in the last year. That is quite an achievement for an industry which used to be regarded as being the poor relation of the other, more modern, technologically minded industries. But it is not only agriculture which has benefited from this, or this country which has benefited: the industries ancillary to agriculture also have benefited. We have made enormous advances, for instance, in plant breeding, which have benefits throughout the whole world. From our fertiliser factories there have been very substantial exports, based
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on our home agriculture. There have been advances in herbicides and pesticides; and, of course, in the agricultural machinery industry itself. Because of the firm home base, we are now exporting agricultural machinery, and in 1966 the value amounted to over £140 million.
My Lords, all these are things which people should know about more. People engaged in agriculture should know about them, and be proud of them; people who are not engaged in agriculture should know about them, and be grateful for them. They have been achieved for a variety of reasons. They have been achieved because we have good farmers and farm workers. That is at the core of it all. They have been achieved because we have first-class scientists and engineers; and they have been achieved also because, over the years, we have had Governments—and this includes both Parties—which have instituted and created the right framework in which this agriculture could develop. Included in Government are the National Agricultural Advisory Service officials, the civil servants, and the politicians, too. I believe that this Bill is one more example of the type of Government action which helps agriculture along the path of further advance, and I am confident that in the years ahead the industry will find that what is being legislated for to-day will help it to continue with the advance that it has already made.
LORD LOVAT: My Lords, the noble Lord was kind enough to say that he would, allow a question by anyone who had been left out. I raised the problem of the Highlands, which are a very large land mass where more can be done than in any other part of the United Kingdom if we get our chance. I do not know whether the noble Lord is leaving the answer to that point to the Secretary of State for Scotland, but I would remind him of what I have said already. We sell for less, and we have to pay a great deal more for what we buy. This is a perfectly intolerable state of affairs, bearing in mind the distance from any market.
LORD WALSTON: My Lords, I accept what the noble Lord has just said. The Highlands are a problem on their own. There are—and there is no need for me to recount them, because the noble Lord knows them well—a whole series of items

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of special legislation which have been enacted in order to help with these problems; not to solve them, but to help with them. I think that some of the provisions of the Bill will help, although, of course, they are not directed specifically towards the Highlands. We have the curious arrangement here, as the noble Lord knows well, of the Ministry of Agriculture in England and, North of the Border, the Secretary of State for Scotland. I know well that both of them are fully aware of these problems, and are thinking of them the whole time. I can-
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not give the noble Lord any more specific answer, but would refer him once more to those items in this Bill, particularly those to do with livestock, and to some of the livestock subsidies, which I believe will be of some help, particularly to his own area.
On Question, Bill read 2a, and committed to a Committee of the Whole House.
House adjourned at a quarter before nine o'clock.