Lords Sitting of 20 February 1968

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

THE CASE OF ABLE SEAMAN FIELD
2.35 p.m.
Lord BROCKWAY: My Lords, I beg leave to ask the first Question which stands in my name on the Order Paper.
[The Question was as follows:
To ask Her Majesty's Government what sentence has been passed by court-martial on Able Seaman Cliff Field for desertion.]
The LORD PRIVY SEAL (LORD SHACKLETON): My Lords, Able Seaman Field was not tried by court-martial. He was tried summarily and sentenced to dismissal from Her Majesty's Service and 60 days detention. He will also be serving the 236 days suspended sentence arising from a previous court-martial conviction.
LORD BROCKWAY: My Lords, while I appreciate that reply and thank my noble friend for it, does he appreciate that I am not raising this issue on the ground of conscientious objection? This boy is an Amateur Boxing Association finalist. Is my noble friend aware that I am raising this Question on the ground of the repeated refusal of discharge by purchase? Could he say whether this boy's sentence before he is discharged, of 60 days and 236 days lost remission, means that he will be discharged before that long period is over?
Lord SHACKLETON: My Lords, I am certainly aware that Able Seaman Field is not a conscientious objector. He wished to leave the Navy in order to pursue his career as a boxer. Of the two sentences he is now serving, the 60 days relate to his last sentence, when he was tried summarily, and the 236 days are from a previous sentence, when he was
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court-martialled for an assault on his commanding officer at the time of his previous appearance before that officer. I am not quite clear what my noble friend is asking. I can only say that this man will have to serve his sentence, with such remissions as he may obtain for good conduct. It is true that he had hoped to be released from the Service at an earlier date in order to pursue his career. Later on there was a possibility of release on compassionate grounds, but they were not strong enough.
LORD BROCKWAY: My Lords, is this not a case of a boy of 15 joining the Service under pressure from his family, who have a record of service in the Armed Forces? Is it not the case that his father, who had long service in the Navy, is now in a condition of mental disturbance because of what is happening to his son? Is it not the case that his brother has offered to replace him? And is it not scandalous that boys of 15 should have to serve these long periods in the Services and that when they ask to get out they are repeatedly refused that possibility, even when they are prepared to purchase their discharge, but have to undergo these long sentences?
LORD SHACKLETON: My Lords, I have great sympathy with what my noble friend has said, and I would agree with him in the first of his cases. As to whether this is scandalous, may I say that the matter has to be looked at in the context of this young man's career. He did not ask to be released from the Navy until he was 21, when he was long past the age of being a boy and at a time when he might equally well have entered into a long engagement. I know that my noble friend is pursuing a fundamental issue, which we have already debated in your Lordships' House and which is now under consideration by my right honourable friend the Minister of Defence for Administration. In relation to the broad principle with which my noble friend is concerned, I can only say that it is being again considered.
LORD BROCKWAY: My Lords, I thank my noble friend for that reply.
BARONESS SUMMERSKILL: My Lords, apart from the other points that my noble friend has brought up—and I heartily agree with him on the question of principle—one aspect of the case is

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very disturbing. If my noble friend decided to discharge a man because he wished to be a boxer, would he not be creating a most curious precedent? Could he tell me what he is going to do with other boys who want to pursue perhaps more worthwhile professions and ask to be discharged?
LORD SHACKLETON: My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend. My right honourable friend, of course, has refused to discharge this Able Seaman because he wanted to be a boxer. When I was in the Air Ministry I was once asked to release a very successful "pop" group. In both of those cases the men concerned might earn foreign exchange, but that would not be an adequate reason. It is simply because it would create an undesirable—in fact, an unacceptable—precedent that we cannot single out one career which might have to be postponed. Many of these young men, when in the course of their training it becomes apparent that the Navy or Army is not for them, are allowed to go. The effect of Able Seaman Field's actions is that he will be released from the Service slightly later than he would have been if he had waited for the ordinary procedure to operate.
VISCOUNT ADDISON: My Lords, could my noble friend say whether these two sentences are to be served concurrently or consecutively?
LORD SHACKLETON: My Lords, the 60 days is the more recent award of punishment and, as always happens in the case of somebody under suspended sentence, the remainder of the suspended sentence will be served, but there is a prospect of remission in the light of good behaviour.
LORD BROCKWAY: My Lords, may I ask whether it is not the case that Able Seaman Field has now 60 days to do plus the 236 days' lost remission? In view of this complicated situation, would my noble friend inform us when it will be possible for this man to obtain remission and to obtain the discharge that he has been seeking ever since he was 21 years of age?
LORD SHACKLETON: My Lords, as a quick calculation—it was 236 days—I make it that, with full remission, he will
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serve a combined total of 198½ days. However, I should not like to be bound absolutely by that quick calculation. I cannot state the exact date that he will be released because it will depend on whether he earns remission. If the noble Lord wishes me to give an estimate of it, assuming that remission is earned, I will try to do so. But it will not be an official figure, because it is bound to be hypothetical.

RAIL CLOSURES
2.43 p.m.
THE EARL OF KINNOULL: 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 why they are not prepared to suspend all withdrawals of rail services and closure of stations until the Transport Bill has received the Royal Assent.]
LORD HILTON OF UPTON: My Lords, the Government's aim is to stabilise the rail network as soon as possible so that the new policy embodied in the Bill can have its full effect. Whore the customary detailed examination of a closure proposal indicates that consent is the only possible conclusion, it is clearly right that the decision should be implemented as quickly as possible.
THE EARL OF KINNOULL: My Lords, I thank the noble Lord for that reply. Would he not agree that certain lines at present under the threat of closure could be reconsidered under Clause 36 of the Transport Bill? Is it not therefore totally unfair to allow these closures to proceed?
LORD HILTON OF UPTON: My Lords, full consideration is given to the railways, as indicated in the noble Earl's supplementary question. The Minister, in considering closure proposals, can, and does at present, take full account of the possibility of grant.
THE EARL OF KINNOULL: My Lords, with respect to the noble Lord, I do not think this can possibly be so, because under the clause a new grant is provided—a power which at present the Minister does not have.
LORD REA: My Lords, may I ask the noble Lord whether the Answer to the Question as printed on the Order Paper is: "Yes; they are not prepared"?
LORD HILTON OF UPTON: My Lords, if the noble Lord would like me to repeat the Answer, I would gladly do so, but I think he has the gist of it.

U.S. IMMIGRANTS AND VIETNAM WAR SERVICE
2.47 p.m.
LORD BROCKWAY: My Lords, I beg leave to ask the second Question which stands in my name on the Order Paper.
[The Question was as follows:
To ask Her Majesty's Government whether residence and work permits will be given, in accordance with this country's liberal tradition of political asylum, to Marc Floyd Ellington and John James, American citizens and conscientious objectors to military service in Vietnam.]
THE MINISTER OF STATE, HOME OFFICE (LORD STONHAM): My Lords, as I explained in reply to a Question by my noble friend on January 30, a conscientious objection to military service is not, in general, a ground for political asylum, nor is it, in itself, a ground for refusing admission or enforcing departure. Consideration is given, in the light of normal immigration policy, to proposals, including proposals for employment, submitted by foreign nationals as a basis for stay in this country. This has been explained to Mr. James, who has been granted an extension of stay until March 12, to give him an opportunity to submit such a proposal. Mr. Ellington's present permitted stay as a visitor expires in three weeks' time, but it is open to him to submit a proposal as a basis for extended stay.
LORD BROCKWAY: My Lords, is my noble friend aware that I appreciate that, under the limitations of the decisions, an extension has been granted to these two boys? Is he aware that these boys are sincere conscientious objectors? Further, is he aware that they are both artistes, very sensitive to cruelty in the world? May I ask my noble friend, in view of the fact that we treat those who escape
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from South Africa and from Communist countries as political refugees, whether he will extend the principle of refugees to boys who, for the deepest conscientious objection, are unprepared to undertake military service?
LORD STONHAM: My Lords, I cannot do what my noble friend has asked. We cannot regard these boys as political refugees. An applicant for political asylum must establish that he has a well-founded apprehension of danger to life or liberty or persecution of such a kind as to render life insupportable on racial, religious, national or political grounds, and the possibility of the imposition of a fine or imprisonment for breach of his country's laws would be regarded as punishment and not persecution.
LORD BROCKWAY: Really, my Lords! Is my noble friend aware that these boys would be liable to a sentence of five years imprisonment for refusing their service in Vietnam on the ground of conscientious objection? In view of our own liberal attitude towards conscientious objectors, cannot the Government take the liberal attitude in international affairs of recognising that they have the right of asylum in this country?
LORD STONHAM: My Lords, I think I have made the position perfectly clear.
SEVERAL NOBLE LORDS: Hear, hear!
LORD BROCKWAY: Very badly.
LORD STONHAM: We cannot interfere with the nationals of another country, or interfere in another country's laws. One of these boys, for example, has had his case heard three times in his own country before he left the country, the third time in the High Court of Justice. It is quite impossible to do as my noble friend suggests. But in every case, including these two cases, we generously apply the rules applicable to all foreigners who apply for permission to enter; and both these boys can have their cases considered for a continued stay if only they will put them forward.
LORD BROCKWAY: My Lords, may I give notice to my noble friend that I will raise this matter again at the earliest opportunity?
LORD DERWENT: My Lords, before the noble Lord replies, may I ask

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whether he is aware that many of us on this side of the House are very glad to hear that the Home Office continue to make no differentiation between one alien and another who wish to come here?
LORD STONHAM: My Lords, I think that cases of this general kind should be dealt with—and I do not like to deal with individual cases—in the full knowledge of all the facts; and I very much welcome the suggestion of my noble friend that he will raise this matter again so that it can be fully dealt with and the arguments fully explored—not in this way of question and answer, when we can have only a wholly incomplete picture. I would also say that my Department has dealt with all these cases with the utmost sympathy and has leant over backwards to be helpful. But we cannot interfere with the laws of another country.
LORD FARINGDON: My Lords, is not the practice here, in the ordinary course of events, not to exercise against the nationals of a foreign country who have taken refuge here, laws which are repugnant to us in this country?
LORD STONHAM: My Lords, this is another example of how difficult it is to answer part-questions of this kind. If we have a discussion on this subject it will be possible fully to deploy any differences that may exist between this country and another.

GENERAL HACKETT AND N.A.T.O. OFFICERS' OBLIGATIONS
LORD WIGG: My Lords, I beg leave to ask the Question which stands in my name of the Order Paper.
[The Question was as follows:
To ask Her Majesty's Government whether the pay of General Hackett is borne on Ministry of Defence Votes; whether he is subject to the provisions of the Army Act; and if so whether he is required to comply with the provisions of paragraph 680 of the Queen's Regulations.]
LORD SHACKLETON: My Lords, General Hackett is Commander-in-Chief, British Army of the Rhine, and at the same time Commander, Northern Army Group. His
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first appointment is national, his second international. In accordance with long-established practice, General Hackett's pay continues to be borne on Ministry of Defence Votes. As a serving officer, General Hackett is subject at all times to the provisions of the Army Act. In his national capacity he is required to comply with the provisions of paragraph 680 of the Queen's Regulations for the Army; but as Commander, Northern Army Group, he is subject to established NATO procedures.
LORD WIGG: My Lords, may I express gratitude to my noble friend for the fullness of his reply? Is he aware that it will give general satisfaction to al those who are concerned with the democratic way of life that officers and other ranks serving in Her Majesty's Forces are at all times required to be subordinate to the civil authority, and that statements concerning matters of political moment should be made only by Ministers, or made under their authority?
May I now turn and ask my noble friend a question about General Hackett's relations to NATO Command? Is my noble friend aware that if the same principle as applies to British forces is applied to NATO, it would have been incumbent on General Hackett to have sought permission from the Secretary-General of NATO? Was such permission sought? If not, what protestations were submitted to the British Government through our NATO Ambassador by Signor Brozio? If General Hackett did not consult Signor Brozio, did he seek permission from General Lemnitzer, SACEUR; and, if he did not, why did he seek to obtain authority or permission from General Graf Von Kielmannsegg, remembering that he is a Federal Commander and subject of the West German State, and it so happens that the contents of General Hackett's letter coincided with the views of the German Government?
LORD SHACKLETON: My Lords, I will try to deal with the interesting and important questions my noble friend has asked. First of all, I entirely agree—and I am sure all of your Lordships will agree—that it is a fundamental principle of our democratic approach that the military should always be subordinate to the civil power. The noble Lord then asked me a number of particular

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points as to the dealings that went on within NATO in regard to this particular incident. The fact that General Sir John Hackett's views coincide with General Von Kielmannsegg's views is not very surprising, since they also coincide with the views of Her Majesty's Government. But that is not the substantial point my noble friend is making, which relates to the procedure and whether in fact the permission or the agreement of Signor Brozio had been obtained, or whether he had been consulted. I can only say that, so far as I know, he was not consulted, but I do not know whether he is making any representations on the subject; if he had done so, I think they would almost certainly have been confidential. It would appear, from what the noble Lord has suggested, that there is an area to which my right honourable friend the Secretary for Defence is giving active consideration, and that is whether in regard to NATO procedures these matters of authority for making published statements—however desirable those statements may be—may need further examination. But I think it would be inappropriate for me to go further, beyond saying that I will see that my right honourable friend is aware of the noble Lord's views, and I have no reason to suppose there should not be some substantial agreement.
LORD WIGG: My Lords, I am much obliged to my noble friend.

GIBRALTAR
THE EARL OF BESSBOROUGH: My Lords, I beg leave to ask a Question of the Government of which I have given them Private Notice: namely, Whether they will make a Statement on the reopening of negotiations with Spain over Gibraltar.
LORD BESWICK: My Lords, my noble friend Lord Chalfont will be making a Statement, in answer to this Question, at a convenient moment after 3.30 p.m.

PORT OF LONDON BILL [H.L.]
Read 2a, and committed to the Committee on Unopposed Bills.
ALL SAINTS, STREATHAM BILL [H.L.]
Read 2a, and referred to the Examiners.

CHRIST CHURCH WITH SAINT ANDREW AND SAINT MICHAEL, EAST GREENWICH BILL [H.L.]
2.58 p.m.
THE CHAIRMAN OF COMMITTEES (THE EARL OF LISTOWEL): My Lords, I beg to move that this Bill be read a second time.
Moved, That the Bill be now read 2a.—(The Earl of Listowel.)
LORD FARINGDON: My Lords, this Bill and the previous Bill are two of a very large number of Bills which are on their way to your Lordships' House. They all deal with the destruction of churches and the secularisaton of churchyards. I suggest to your Lordships that these Bills are extremely difficult to deal with. We have had a number of them, and I have myself opposed at least one in the past. I find that it is very difficult to know exactly what are the pros and cons of these Bills even when, as I have, one has read the Bill. For example, I think there is no indication in the Bill that is before us at the moment of the age and antiquity of the church. I suggest that in these cases it is very important that this House should be alert on two grounds. The first is defence of architectural monuments of importance; that is to say, the churches themselves. Also, from the amenity point of view, these are, so far as the churchyards are concerned, open spaces. There is a natural tendency for the older churches and churchyards to fall victims to this particular treatment; in other words, to their secularisation. It is because they are ancient that they are likely to be situated in areas where there is very little open space and where even a "pocket handkerchief" of open space is immensely valuable. Unfortunately, they are also immensely valuable in the property market.
I am not opposing this Bill, but I am entering, if I may, a caveat against the too easy passing of these Bills by Members of your Lordships' House. I know

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there are other Members of the House who are interested in this and are disturbed by this process. These two Bills before your Lordships' House are not the only Bills dealing with churches; there are seven more Bills of this kind which are taking their place in the queue. I believe these Bills should not be passed without more extensive inspection than they receive nowadays. I hope they will receive such attention this afternoon, and also in the future.
THE EARL OF LISTOWEL: My Lords, I think we are all aware of Lord Faringdon's continuing interest in the problem of the use and disposal of land released by changes in the structure or condition of churches and churchyards, and these problems are, of course, often raised in Private Bills. I was glad that the noble Lord said he did not wish to oppose the Second Reading of this Bill because, as your Lordships are aware, the usual practice of this House is to give the Bill an unopposed Second Reading so that it may be sent to an Unopposed Committee of this House, and the question of whether it is opposed or not will arise when it is returned to your Lordships for Third Reading. I can assure the noble Lord that his remarks will be carefully considered by the promoters as well as by everybody else concerned with the Bill.
LORD AMULREE: My Lords, I should like to say how much I support what the noble Lord, Lord Faringdon, has said. I did not intend to speak on this subject this afternoon, because I have an Unstarred Question down for next Tuesday dealing particularly with open spaces in London, and I had proposed to raise this matter at that time. But I certainly agree with every word spoken by the noble Lord, Lord Faringdon.
LORD MITCHISON: My Lords, without taking up your Lordships' time, I should like to say that I entirely agree with what the noble Lord, Lord Faringdon, has just said. I used to have a constituency which contained the oldest church in the country, the maintenance of which was a continual "headache", but that is another story.
On Question, Bill read 2a, and referred to the Examiners.

LOCAL GOVERNMENT BILL [H.L.]
LORD MERTHYR: My Lords, I beg leave to introduce a Bill to remove doubts concerning the powers of county councils to make certain grouping orders; and for matters connected therewith. I beg to move that this Bill be now read a first time.
Moved, That the Bill be now read 1a.—(Lord Merthyr.)
On Question, Bill read 1a, and to be printed.

MAURITIUS INDEPENDENCE BILL
3.5 p.m.
LORD SORENSEN: My Lords, I beg to move that this Bill be now read a third time.
Moved, That the Bill be now read 3a.—(Lord Sorensen.)
LORD FARINGDON: My Lords, I apologise to your Lordships and can only claim that you do not often have to listen to me, and I beg you to make that an excuse for listening to me yet a third time to-day. I have been brief on the previous occasions and I will be on this, but I feel I cannot let this occasion pass without a word, as I have for many years had the privilege and pleasure of the friendship of the Prime Minister of Mauritius, Sir Seewoosagur Ramgoolam.
I think Mauritius is extremely fortunate in having Sir Seewoosagur as its Prime Minister. He has shown immense patience and skill in negotiating with Her Majesty's Government. I know that this Bill goes forward with the support—and indeed the enthusiastic support—of all Members of both places in this Parliament. Sir Seewoosagur is particularly conscious of the great difficulties—and do not let us minimise them—which face the newly formed State. Its two greatest troubles are those with which the Prime Minister has done his best to deal in the past and will deal in the future—that is to say, over-population and racialism. It seems a curious thing to say, but I think the recent troubles in Mauritius have shown in a most

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encouraging way the non-racial attitude not only of the Prime Minister but also of the Leader of the Opposition, Monsieur Duval. Both those politicians have shown themselves, if I may put it this way, to be statesmen, and I think Mauritius is lucky in having them to guide her future career. I said I would not detain your Lordships, but I feel this tribute ought to be paid by those who have had the privilege of the acquaintance of the Prime Minister of Mauritius and who have, as I have, the greatest admiration for him.
LORD OGMORE: My Lords, as the noble Lord, Lord Faringdon, has opened a discussion on the Third Reading of this Bill, my noble friends and I feel it is only right that we on these Benches should express our best wishes to Mauritius for a happy and successful future. There has been a long association between Mauritius and ourselves and we feel it is only right that all Parties in the House, and those who sit on the Cross Benches, should express their good wishes at this time.
There are two matters which I feel the Government should consider carefully in their future relationship with Mauritius. The first is that Mauritius depends on us to a large extent for her economic well-being. The Commonwealth Sugar Agreement is of vital importance to her, and undoubtedly in the past it has meant a great deal for the Mauritian economy. As Mauritius virtually has a one-crop economy this Agreement is of tremendous importance, and I hope that in future, as she will now be an independent member of the Commonwealth, instead of being a Colony, the good will of the British Government, whatever Party happens to constitute it, will be afforded to the island.
The second point is that undoubtedly in some way we shall be responsible for the defence of Mauritius. At the present moment I gather we have a battalion of troops there—the King's Shropshire Light Infantry—owing to the internal difficulties which have happened there in the last few months, and I believe it is proposed that those troops should remain there for some time—how long a period, I do not know. There may, of course, be aggres-
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sion from outside, as well as internal difficulties. I think this points to the conclusion that some of us have long come to: that the British Government's policy in reducing the Regiments of the Line is a fantastically stupid one. This is not a defence debate and I will not pursue the matter at any length, but it adds one more example to the claim that I and others have put to this Government, that to spend vast sums on Polaris submarines and their equipment, to continue the nuclear (so-called) independent weapon and to cut down the conventional forces, particularly the British infantry, which it will be impossible to replace when once they are gone, is a policy which cannot but be detrimental to the country.
I would therefore ask the Government once more to look again at this policy and not to cut down the Regiments of the Line, because not only do we need them here in this country but we shall need them in Mauritius and elsewhere; it is quite obvious to-day that law and order could not be maintained in Hong Kong or in Mauritius and various other parts of the world if it were not for the British Regiments of the Line. In those circumstances I repeat my request to Her Majesty's Government to save our old regiments. These are two of the matters which I think arise on this Third Reading. I have no other matters to raise at this time, and therefore I would conclude by once more wishing Mauritius every possible success in the future.
On Question, Bill read 3a.
LORD SORENSEN: My Lords, I am sure that all Members of this House appreciate the good wishes that have been expressed by the two noble Lords to supplement those that were expressed on the previous occasion, and I am sure, equally, that the people of the new independent country of Mauritius will appreciate the sage remarks made by both noble Lords. As for the reference to the Regiments of the Line, I am utterly incompetent to deal with that matter, but I will certainly see that it is passed to the appropriate quarter. My Lords, I beg to move that this Bill do now pass.
Moved, That the Bill do now pass.—(Lord Sorensen.)
On Question, Bill passed.

LOCAL AUTHORITIES' DIRECT- LABOUR BUILDING DEPARTMENTS
3.12 p.m.
THE EARL OF KINNOULL THE EARL OF KINNOULL rose to ask Her Majesty's Government whether they are satisfied with the commercial and financial practice adopted by the direct-labour departments of local authorities and whether these contribute adequately to the national economy. The noble Earl said: My Lords, the subject of direct-labour departments of local authorities, their work and their cost to the community, raises, I appreciate, a fairly wide avenue for an Unstarred Question. I am particularly glad to see that my noble friend Lord Brooke of Cumnor and other noble Lords intend to take part in this short debate, as well as the noble Lord, Lord Kennet, for the Government. Perhaps I should say at the beginning that there are a great many differing and varying services that the direct-labour departments provide for the community, and some of them, such as street cleaning, refuse collecting and sewerage are thankless tasks carried out often under difficult conditions by a loyal and in many cases underpaid staff. All of us, I am sure, would wish to pay tribute for those services.
The purpose of my Question to-day is to draw the Government's attention to the widespread concern that is felt about the work, the productivity and the efficiency of the direct-labour building departments of local authorities, handling both the maintenance work and the new construction work; for it is these departments which, week by week, absorb so much of our national and local resources and which almost week by week are shown by one report or another to be almost squandering public funds through inefficiency. Yet despite the cases we read about, despite the recommendations on cost control by the District Auditors Society, and despite the recommendation by the Prices and Incomes Board, in their Report No. 29, on more work study leading to greater productivity, the Government appear to have shown a singular lack of leadership in seeking ways to improve the efficiency of these departments. I hope to-day that the noble Lord, Lord Kennet, will be able to tell us what positive plans they have for the future.
As the House will be aware, by far the biggest proportion of work handled by the direct-labour building departments is concerned with repair and maintenance work. In fact, I believe I am correct in saying that out of the 178,000 men employed by the 1,300 local authorities in the direct-labour building departments four-fifths of them, or 138,000 men, are engaged in maintenance, and only one-fifth, or 28,000 men, are employed in new construction work. When one examines the productivity figures and the cost figures of those maintenance departments, the general picture appears that the departments are being run far too often on the principle of low wages and low productivity. The noble Lord, Lord Kennet, will, I am sure, have far more facts than I have been able to glean on this point, but I am sure he would agree that the scope for improving the management and the productivity of those departments is enormous. The Prices and Incomes Board highlighted this in their Report No. 29, and they strongly recommended that more work studies should be carried out; and not only that body but the District Auditors Society as well came out in favour of stronger cost control. But I think I am right in saying that, despite those recommendations, the progress towards more work study and towards bonus incentive schemes is proving very slow.
I am told that over the past ten years only one-quarter of the local authorities have instituted work studies and bonus incentives, often with the help of management consultants, and the results of those studies coupled with incentives have been a truly remarkable and astonishing increase in productivity, ranging from 60 per cent. to 100 per cent. Yet, despite that staggering saving, and with the evidence that incentives clearly increase productivity, again it is a remarkable fact that only 16 per cent. of the entire direct-labour department staff are at present on such incentive schemes.
The enormous slack that can Le taken up in maintenance departments following work studies and incentives can best, I think, be demonstrated by the actual savings that have taken place in various local authority areas. In Norwich City, for instance, over £40,000 was saved within one year following a work study and a resulting management planning and

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budgetary control service. In Slough, I am told, over £100,000 has been saved; in Grimsby £68,000; in Cardiff £100,000; in Wolverhampton £60,000; in Nottingham £90,000. To many of these local authorities this can represent up to 6d. on their rates. All these examples, and the many more examples I could quote, prove, in my opinion, the urgent necessity to persuade local authorities to examine their maintenance departments by work study without further delay and to stop the waste of national resources.
I consider that the Government themselves should take a leading part in this matter. One is aware that the Government set up the Mann Committee to examine maintenance departments, and perhaps the noble Lord, Lord Kennet, when he comes to reply can say when he expects the Committee's Report to be published. The policy adopted by many of the local authorities in placing a very low percentage, in some cases no percentage at all, of maintenance work to outside contractors is, I believe, a policy that should not be encouraged when the management and productivity of direct-labour departments is so much in doubt.
May I turn briefly to the new construction work of the direct-labour departments? The record of these departments in recent years is even more unhappy than that of the maintenance departments. The House will be aware that the direct-labour departments employ about 26 per cent. of the total labour force in the new construction industry, yet their productivity contributes only some 14½ per cent. of the national productivity. Despite this, the Government have never disguised their encouragement to local authorities to increase their share of new construction work and in a circular, No. 50/65, have even issued a directive absolving local authorities from obtaining any outside competitive tenders. They followed this up in 1966 by announcing that direct-labour building costs were proving cheaper per square foot than outside contractors' costs. This has always been questioned.
But despite this optimism on the part of the Government, we have witnessed in the last two years an increasing number of failures by direct-labour departments of local authorities. In the well known
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case of Salford City, where the costs escalated by some £700,000 above the original estimates, we learn that 33 out of 40 separate contracts given to the direct-labour departments have exceeded their original estimates. We learn also, with regard to this case, that the root cause of the trouble lay in poor management, poor budgetary control and poor productivity. As the House will know, the result of the inquiries led to the closure of this department, and in other cases where investigations have been carried out—in Southwark, Camden, Coventry, and in Wolverhampton—we have seen overspending on the original estimates as high as 30 per cent.
With all this recent evidence, are the Government really still satisfied that their Circular 50/65 is in the best national interest? The method the direct-labour departments adopt for estimating the new work has been under fire for a considerable time, both from the outside contractors, their competitors, and also from the District Auditors Society who consider that the on-costs have never been carefully enough taken into account. I hope that when he comes to reply the noble Lord, Lord Kennet, will be able to say what action, if any, the Government intend to take to see that the direct-labour departments' estimating procedures are improved.
The policy of outside tendering in competition with direct-labour departments has also been the subject of debate for some time, and the Banwell Committee examined this in great detail. The House will recall that this Committee came down in favour of negotiated tenders or selective tenders from contractors they already knew—suitable contractors. I suggest that this question of direct-labour departments of local authorities is a subject of tremendous concern, and to-day I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Kennet, will be able to advise us what steps the Government intend to take to try to improve the efficiency of these departments so that they may contribute more adequately to the national economy.
3.25 p.m.
LORD FISKE: My Lords, I am sure that this is a subject which will be debated here with knowledge and with skill. I am sure that we are all grateful to the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, for the way

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in which he has introduced this matter this afternoon, because so often the subject of building by direct labour can become a political shuttlecock between the champions of private enterprise, on the one hand, and the champions of public enterprise on the other.
I want to suggest to your Lordships that this is not enough. What we really need is an assessment of building by direct labour in our society: what are its advantages, what are its disadvantages, what are its limitations, and what are its possibilities. I think this is not perhaps the easiest of moments at which to discuss this subject, because in the whole field of local government we have to await the Report of a Royal Commission whose findings its would be wrong for anybody to try to anticipate. If by any chance the Royal Commission should come down in favour of larger units in local government, then of course the case for building by direct labour would be that much strengthened, because I think it is the size of the local government unit that can often decide whether a direct-labour department is a viable proposition or not. For example, first, the larger authority can so arrange its work that there is continuity of work for the direct-labour department—surely the most important part of all—and, secondly, by reason of its size, it can secure a better management structure both in salary and therefore in calibre.
I should like to pause for a moment to consider this question, because one of the great handicaps to direct-labour building by local authorities is the fact that none of the opportunities that are open to a private trading organisation is open to a local authority, for the simple reason that the salary of its chief operatives must be fixed within the scale of salaries of officers of local authorities. Nor has a local authority the power to dispense any of the fringe benefits which can be done in the private sector. This has a great effect on management calibre and, as I shall hope to show shortly, on the size to which the organisation can grow and the complexity of work that it can undertake.
There is one more thing that I want to refer to, which I think is most important. It is that the direct-labour organisations that I know carry out their full part in the training of apprentices.
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This, within the building industry, is something of supreme importance. If we do not train apprentices we must not complain of bad or shoddy workmanship. It is up to the local authorities—and I think they are doing this—to set an example to the building industry as a whole, to see that the proper quota of apprentices is trained. I have noticed that in the last twelve months the apprentices' register for the year ended December, 1967, showed a figure of 13,839, whereas that for the twelve months ended in December, 1966, was 16,369. So it will be seen that there is a considerable fall in the training of the next generation of building operatives. This, I think, is one of the most important activities that a direct-labour department should indulge in.
As I see it, the great disadvantage of direct labour is the impossibility of its always—I stress "always"—going to tender, unless it is also to be allowed to tender for work outside the province of the authority's own work. I underline "always" because I believe that any direct-labour department should from time to time put itself to the test with its competitors, to make quite sure that the whole of its organisation is competitive as well as being publicly owned. Such a course ensures that the quantity surveyors, the accountants who look after the building accounts, and the critics, are on their toes. In a field of productivity which takes place in the full blaze of Press and public watchfulness, direct labour must be seen to be more economical and of benefit to the ordinary ratepayer.
Should it have limitations? This is something which your Lordships will wish to consider very carefully. The noble Earl referred to its work in the maintenance of a council's corporate estate. This is a very valuable contribution to the public work. In the authority which I know best, there is a permanent force of some 7,000 men who are responsible for maintaining and repairing something like 250,000 dwellings. They do this as permanent employees of the authority, pensionable with the same sickness rights, and so on, as anybody else employed by that authority. This must be seen as a great improvement in the terms of employment which normally obtain in the building industry as a whole.

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There is another great sphere of activity in which I believe that direct labour can be very usefully employed, and that is where it is virtually impossible to give an estimate unless it is heavily weighted. I will illustrate what I mean by that. Before the war, in the Mile End Road, in Stepney, there was a very well-maintained estate of 24 almshouses and a chapel, maintained by Trinity House for (the inscription says) "decayed mariners". At the end of the war that group of almshouses, built about the time of Wren, was a bombed ruin, and a decision had to be taken as to whether it should be swept away with a bulldozer, or whether it should be restored to become a useful addition to the housing provision in that part of London. The second decision was ultimately taken.
No ordinary contractor would have dared to give an estimate for this job unless it had been extremely heavily weighted, so heavily weighted, in fact, that the authority would probably have been unable to accept it. By giving it to the direct-labour department, however, it was possible to do several things. It was possible to restore those almshouses to their previous glory; it was possible to provide housing at economic rents to people who found themselves, for social reasons, working in Stepney, so that it has never been a burden on the ratepayer; and it gave unique opportunities to train the building authority apprentices in work which they would never otherwise have seen. To my mind, these were worthwhile objectives which went towards restoring what is now a unique and very pleasant corner of what used to be the Borough of Stepney. I consider that direct labour is eminently suitable for that sort of work.
We then come to new work. It is in regard to new building work that we have to think of limitations, since so much new building work employs not only builders but many other professions and skills. It also involves very expensive and seldom-used plant, and it may be that new building undertaken by direct labour should be confined to new building that falls within the scope of an ordinary builder and is not the sort of work usually undertaken by a large-scale contractor. But, with that limitation, it is fair that the direct-labour departments should have some new work, so long as they can
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prove to the authority, and through the authority to the public at large, that, taking one job with another, they can do it as cheaply as, or cheaper than, the private contractor would do it. Public accountability and eternal vigilance are essential requisites to public enterprise of any kind, and perhaps in this sphere they are more essential than ever. But I am sure from my own experience that if this is done there is a great role indeed for direct-labour building.
3.35 p.m.
LORD NUNBURNHOLME: My Lords, may I crave the indulgence of your Lordship's House if I read my speech, for the sake of accuracy? The Tenterden Rural District Council, in whose area I live, have been practising building by direct labour since 1946. I am very grateful to the Chairman and officers of this Council who have readily made available the following information which I feel will be of interest to your Lordships.
The Tenterden Rural District Council is a small authority, which has a penny rate product of £830, and administers a population of 8,000. The Council has built houses by direct labour successfully over a period of 22 years, completing a total of 286 houses, fiats and bungalows. Direct-labour contracts at present in hand consist of 24 bungalows and 8 houses. The direct-labour department carries out maintenance and repair of over 800 properties and also is carrying out major improvements and extensions to pre-war houses. Cost of building has been reasonable and tenders have always been lower than those of outside contractors. The following figures of actual cost confirm this.
In 1966, 12 3-bedroomed houses were completed at a cost of £1,860 per house. In 1967, 19 bungalows with central heating and other amenities for old people were completed at a cost of £1,935 each. This year the latest direct-labour tenders for one-bedroomed bungalows to Parker-Morris standards are £2,100 each, and for three-bedroomed houses to similar standards at £2,770 each. This latter price compares favourably with the Ministry's cost yardstick of £3,008 per house. This may seem a large increase on the 3-bedroomed houses over the 1966 figure, but one must bear in mind that the new 3-bedroomed houses are built to

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a higher standard, which also includes central heating. Direct-labour building bears its proper apportionment of salaries, architects' fees and administrative costs, and overheads on wages, stores and tools, and these facts are carefully checked by the district auditor annually. The Council is satisfied that the workmanship is of a high standard. This is shown in the repairs account, and is also due to the fact that the same workmen who build the houses also have to maintain them, and often live in them. There are both good and bad builders, and this can apply to housing authorities; but it is certain that the strict financial control and supervision of local authorities and the penalties attached to both officers and councillors must, in the long run, keep them on the right path.
If any of your Lordships are interested in further details of costs et cetera, or in seeing what this very small Council has achieved, the Chairman and officers will be delighted and proud to show them what the Council is doing. In conclusion, my Lords, I feel that the facts and figures quoted indicate the desirability of the employment of direct labour in council building. The saving of costs in this authority appear to be at least 10 per cent. However, it is essential to have very accurate planning and programming of work. Also, good supervision is a "must". Certainly I would stand up for the small authorities' being allowed to continue using direct labour.

GIBRALTAR: TALKS WITH SPAIN
3.40 p.m.
THE MINISTER OF STATE FOR FOREIGN AFFAIRS (LORD CHALFONT): My Lords, I should like, with permission, to repeat a Statement being made in another place on the subject of Spain and Gibraltar. The Statement which is being made by the Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs is as follows:
"We delivered a Note to the Spanish Government yesterday proposing that the talks at official level which we had planned to hold last year should begin in Madrid on the 18th of March. We have suggested that either side should be free to raise whatever subjects it wishes to discuss."
That is the end of the Statement.
THE EARL OF BESSBOROUGH: My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord for repeating that Answer to us here. I am glad to hear that negotiations will be beginning on March 18, but I should like to ask the noble Lord this question. I notice that the Answer says that the Government have suggested
"that either side should be free to raise whatever subjects it wishes to discuss."
I do not know how carefully that Answer has been worded, but is the noble Lord aware that Ministers in another place, and I think here, have repeated on various occasions that the sovereignty of Gibraltar cannot be at issue, and I hope that that is a subject which will not arise. As we know, it is a subject in which all Spaniards are interested. I should be grateful if the noble Lord could explain this particular wording to us, and also if he would give us an assurance—repeated assurances have been made, I think, both in this House and in another place—that the interests of the people of Gibraltar themselves must be paramount.
LORD CHALFONT: My Lords, we have made it perfectly clear to the Spanish Government that we are not going into the talks in order to discuss the transfer of sovereignty. But many of the practical problems of Gibraltar, such as, for example, the division of territorial waters in the Bay, raise questions of sovereignty, and for that reason we should not want such questions to be excluded from the discussions. We think that the talks will have the greatest chance of success if the agenda is kept open, and that is why we have suggested that both sides should be free to raise whatever subjects they wish to discuss. I can repeat the assurance that I and other members of the Government have made before, which is that we are determined, and we remain determined, that the views of the inhabitants as to where their interests lie shall not be ignored.
LORD MERRIVALE: My Lords, will Her Majesty's Government and the noble Lord bear very much in mind, when tackling these discussions next month in Madrid, the words of the noble Lord, Lord Shepherd, when he said last Thursday that it was Her Majesty's Government's aim that the Gibraltarians should have maximum control over their internal domestic affairs? Also, will the

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noble Lord consider raising at these discussions the Spanish restrictions against Gibraltar, because they extend over a wide field, including labour, tourism, trade, social and cultural aspects and political and psychological matters? Also, does the noble Lord not feel that one of the items for discussion should be the question of reducing the restrictions on the frontier and in the air?
LORD CHALFONT: My Lords, of course we will bear in mind what the noble Lord has said, including what he has said about the restrictions that are visited upon the people of Gibraltar at the moment. In the talks we will, of course, try our best to bring about an improvement in the situation there.
LORD GRIMSTON OF WESTBURY: My Lords, as there is a possibility that the recent United Nations resolution on Gibraltar may be brought into the talks, could the noble Lord say what Her Majesty's Government's attitude is to that?
LORD CHALFONT: My Lords, I think that my noble friend Lord Caradon has made the attitude of Her Majesty's Government to the United Nations resolution quite clear—and we have made it clear to the Spanish Government—that we do not intend to conduct any talks on the basis of that resolution.
LORD STRATHCLYDE: My Lords, my noble friend asked that the views of the people of Gibraltar should have paramount consideration. The noble Lord in replying said that they would not be ignored. Are we to take that as being the same thing?
BARONESS EMMET OF AMBERLEY: My Lords, may I ask the Minister whether there will be a representative of Gibraltar at the talks?
LORD CHALFONT: My Lords, I am afraid that I cannot answer that question off-hand. I will get the information and will let the House have it. So far as the noble Lord's question is concerned, I cannot go further than the wording I used in my Answer. We have used this formula before, and I think it would be unwise if I were to depart from it now. We are prepared to say, and to mean, that the interests and the views of the people of Gibraltar, which were made
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clear in the recent referendum, shall certainly not be ignored in our talks with the Spaniards.
LORD ST. OSWALD: My Lords, I shall naturally study the words of the noble Lord with great interest. But I suggest to him that he has given the impression that never will the British Government consider any form whatever of transfer of sovereignty; and I suggest that whereas it is spoken of as if the interests of the Gibraltarians and a refusal to contemplate this are identical, it may in fact be that a refusal ever to contemplate or discuss any form of transfer of sovereignty is exactly opposite to the interests of the Gibraltarians. I am sorry that that is a very complicated way of setting out a complicated subject, but what I am saying is that I hope the Government will not go in as didactically as the noble Lord sounded to me this afternoon.
LORD CHALFONT: My Lords I would agree with the noble Lord that that is a very complicated formulation. But I assure him that we shall not go into this didactically, as he puts it, or with our minds closed. But he will know, and the House will know, that when my noble friend Lord Shepherd was recently in Gibraltar he was able to confirm that the views of the Gibraltarians as reflected in the referendum are absolutely clear and unequivocal. There can be no misunderstanding between us about what they want, and we certainly will have their interests and their views very much in our minds when we go into these talks. But we shall not, as I say, go into them with closed minds.
THE EARL OF ARRAN: My Lords, have Her Majesty's Government not given an unequivocal assurance, both to this House and to another place, that in no circumstances will they consider the surrender of Gibraltar and the Gibraltarians to the Spanish Government?
LORD CHALFONT: My Lords, I have said even to-day that we have made it clear to the Spanish Government that we do not go into these talks to discuss the transfer of sovereignty.
THE EARL OF BESSBOROUGH: My Lords, therefore the use of the term "whatever subjects" either side "wishes to discuss" was perhaps a little ill-chosen. Will the noble Lord not agree?
LORD CHALFONT: NO, my Lords. It was precisely and very carefully chosen for the reason that I said in answer to an earlier supplementary question; that is to say, there are a number of practical questions into which the question of sovereignty comes. But we are not going to discuss the transfer of sovereignty.

LOCAL AUTHORITIES' DIRECT- LABOUR BUILDING DEPARTMENTS
3.48 p.m.
Debate resumed.
LORD GARNSWORTHY: My Lords, I wish to return to the subject raised by the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull. We were listening a few minutes ago to what I thought was a very informative speech by the noble Lord, Lord Nunburnholme. Before that we had the great pleasure of listening to a most constructive speech from my noble friend Lord Fiske. I rise to comment briefly on the experience of the local authority on which I serve. Surrey is not a housing authority, and we employ only a comparatively small number of men in what are generally referred to as direct-labour teams. But we have a fairly large architects' department, and I think the results that we achieve there may be of some interest in our consideration of this matter. The total annual capital value of building work in the county undertaken by the county council amounts to between £4 million and £5 million, and of this total the sum of £3 million is handled inside the architects' department. That leaves a quite substantial amount of work to be placed with outside architects and consultants, but it gives us the advantage that we are using both methods.
May I take as an example a job which costs, say, £225,000? If the architectural and consultants' work is paid for at the full-scale rates laid down by the R.I.B.A. and the other consultants' professional bodies, the figure of the cost is 14 per cent., or £31,500. If all the work is done inside our own architects' department, the percentage cost—and I am allowing for the overheads involved additionally—comes to 11 per cent., or £24,750, representing a saving on a job of that size of £6,750. So it will be seen that on the total volume of work in the county undertaken within the architects' department the difference between the
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cost when paid for at what are known as the full-scale rates and the cost when the job is done by our own architects' department represents a saving of some £90,000 a year. I think I ought to say that this authority, like some other fairly large authorities, has been able to negotiate scales slightly more favourable than those I have mentioned as being laid down by the R.I.B.A. and the other consultants' professional bodies, and on that basis our saving is in point of fact slightly less; but it amounts to at least £70,000 a year.
I think it is proper that I should pay tribute to the very efficient organisation of the architects' department in Surrey, and to add that the services it renders extend beyond those given by outside architects. Further, the cost of schemes that have to be revised or, occasionally, scrapped is included in the figure of 11 per cent. that I mentioned earlier. Obviously, if those schemes were done by outside architects then that cost would be outside that 11 per cent. I trust that this very brief statement may be of some interest to your Lordships in our consideration of this subject, and helpful in the determination of the Question raised by the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull.
3.54 p.m.
LORD BROOKE OF CUMNOR: My Lords, we have listened to a series of informed speeches, and that alone must gratify my noble friend Lord Kinnoull and help him to feel that it was worth while initiating this debate on a somewhat specialised but very important subject. He asked whether the Government would tell us what practical plans they have for raising the efficiency of direct labour departments, and I hope that we shall get an answer to that question from the noble Lord, Lord Kennet, because to all appearances the one practical step which this Government have taken has been the issue of a circular which was more likely to militate against high efficiency in local authorities' direct labour departments than in favour of it.
I have never been one of those who have seen this problem in black and white, with no shades of grey. I have always thought that there was a place for direct labour, and I think the debate this afternoon has upheld that view. I have always been against those who have thought that the philosophic basis of

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direct labour justified it, however badly it did in practice in particular circumstances. I found myself in agreement with a great deal that my old colleague and, I suppose, enemy in London, the noble Lord, Lord Fiske, said on this subject from his great experience. But what I think your Lordships would like to know is whether the Government are now going to adopt a more vigorous policy to secure higher efficiency in the direct-labour departments of local authorities, rather than let matters rest with the 1965 circular which in itself removed a safeguard designed to ensure efficiency.
It is a fact that, where it has been possible to measure it, the value of output per man employed by direct-labour departments tends to be lower than the output per man employed by private industry working on similar tasks for local authorities. I was glad to hear the noble Lord, Lord Fiske, say that in his view the case for using direct labour on maintenance and repair work was considerably stronger overall than for using it on new building. In the field of most local authorities there is certainly a good deal of work not suitable to be done by ordinary outside contract. It is work which it is difficult to measure or evaluate in advance. For example, there is the day-to-day repair and maintenance work which needs to be closely linked with repair because it would be a mistake to have some people coming round to do the maintenance and then others following on afterwards to do repair work which the maintenance men had laid bare.
But the fact that output per man tends to be lower tells against direct labour on new construction work; and, on the whole, a large building firm can offer greater scope for ability, and therefore attracts abler men to its senior posts. There is also more variety of work within the field of a building firm working for a variety of customers than there is in an ordinary local authority area, though I grant that some exceptionally large local authorities can produce the variety.
But that does not mean that there can be no part for direct labour to play where circumstances are favourable. For example, circumstances are favourable to direct-labour experiments in a place where local builders are not very good, or are
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not really up to the sort of work which that particular local authority has to get done; circumstances are favourable where there is any evidence of a "ring" among the local builders; and circumstances are favourable where the building industry is at any given time so overstretched that it is extremely difficult for a local authority to get genuinely competitive tenders because, quite frankly, the builders have so much work on their hands that they do not want to take on local authority contracts in addition. I hope that the Government broadly agree with my analysis so far.
Now we come to the problem as seen through the eyes of a local authority. If it embarks on construction work by direct labour, it must be able to provide continuity of work. That is easier, on the whole, for a private building firm. It has a multiplicity of potential customers, whereas, as the noble Lord, Lord Fiske, said, the local authority's direct-labour department has only one. I noticed what the noble Lord said about the larger authorities of the future being able to build up a much stronger direct-labour department than a small authority can. Well, I think it is too hypothetical, either for him or for me, to seek to forecast the findings of the Royal Commission. I sometimes wonder whether local government, as it is to take shape in the future, may not be something very different from the local government that he and I first entered many years ago.
A local authority will wish to keep its direct labour force continuously employed, and so it may be tempted for the sake of continuity to put it on to jobs for which it could have got lower prices from private enterprise and thereby saved its ratepayers' money. This is exactly the problem that I had to face when I was the responsible Minister; and in the year 1959 I issued a circular which said that a local authority with a direct labour force must periodically—not every time, but periodically—test its efficiency, by seeking competitive tenders for at least one contract in three. The rural district council referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Nunburnholme, will not have had anything to fear from that requirement, for he said that that rural district council frequently went to tender and that its direct-labour department was able to do better than the lowest tender it received.

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Had I been someone who saw this problem solely in terms of black and white, who thought private enterprise always ideal and direct labour no good at all, I should not have taken the responsibility of saying that a local authority need go to tender for only one contract in every three. But there are unfortunately people on the other extreme—I seek to steer a middle course between them, as did the noble Lord, Lord Fiske, to-day—who think that everything is wrong with private enterprise and everything is right with direct labour, and that therefore it does not really much matter whether direct labour results are tested by open competition with private enterprise.
I remember that not very long after the issue of the circular to which I referred, the Salford City Council sent a deputation to see me to try to persuade me to release it from that one-in-three obligation. I note with interest that Sal-ford is one of the authorities which in recent times has got into serious trouble through overspending by its direct labour force. Nothing that has occurred has convinced me that it is a wrong policy to insist that a direct-labour department should have to compete with private enterprise for at least one in three contracts.
My Lords, it was Mr. Crossman, as Minister of Housing and Local Government, who weakened unwisely. In Circular No. 50/65, referred to by my noble friend Lord Kinnoull, and issued in November, 1965, he released local authorities from that essential obligation to test the competitiveness of their direct-labour departments periodically against the service that private building firms could give. He said they would do well to go to tender sometimes; but he put no obligation on them to do so. Until this weak policy is remedied, until every local authority is required and obliged periodically by Government insistence to compete with private enterprise prices, the series of disquieting reports from the independent district auditors exposing wasteful expenditure by direct-labour departments will continue.
I have in front of me the district auditor's report dated August, 1967, on the building department of the London Borough of Camden, part of which I formerly represented in another place;
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but my old borough is merged in Camden, and Camden is under different political control. What the district auditor said was:
"An examination of the 1966/67 bonus claims of the men in the seven area forces showed:

(i) that a large proportion of the bonus claims were for work for which no written orders—either by the Building Department or by the 'customer' department—could be traced;

(ii) that many bonus claims were for work which did not appear in the time-sheets of the tradesmen making the claims;

(iii) that, in many cases, materials which were apparently essential for particular jobs had not been issued to tradesmen who had claimed bonus for those jobs; and

(iv) that only a small proportion of the bonused work had been independently checked and that this small cheek had revealed a high proportion of over-claims."

The district auditor came to the conclusion that a considerable amount of ratepayers' money was being wasted by inefficiency in this Department which permitted these excessive claims.
But I particularly want to invite your Lordships' attention to this farther passage in the district auditor's report. He said:
"In 1961/2, 1962/3, and 1963/4, the Building Department's tenders were the lowest and the final costs of the jobs concerned were reasonably within the Department's estimates. In 1964/5, however, the Building Department's tender was the highest of the four submitted and they failed to get the job. No competitive tenders have been sought since then although it is fair to add that, in discussion at audit, the Building Manager fully accepted the need to test the market from time to time in open competition. In view of the decline in profitability and competitiveness suggested by the later section of this report on New Building Schemes, the Council will doubtless wish to assure themselves that the Building Department's maintenance work is being carried out efficiently and economically, and it is suggested that they could with advantage resume the former practice of requiring competitive tenders from lime to time, preferably somewhat more often than once a year."
My Lords, I apologise for the length of this quotation; but from it you will see the mischief the 1965 circular has done. It has conveyed to local authorities running direct-labour departments that it is not really very important to test their efficiency against private enterprise from time to time. One then finds that the district auditor comes along, after the money has been spent, after the money has been wasted, and, in

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effect, criticises the council for not having applied this test of competition—the very test from which this Government have officially released the local authorities. Every penny that is wasted here or elsewhere in local government has to be paid for by the public; whereas if a building firm wastes money the loss falls on the owner of that firm, or on the shareholders, and not on the innocent public.
Sometimes, when I hear people taking the extreme side in defending direct labour in all circumstances, I feel that they are bemused by the old fallacy that goods which are sold at a profit are more costly to the public than goods on which no profit is made. One has heard that stupid expression of view. Of course, the public is not nearly so foolish. Out shopping, as between two articles of equal quality, one buys the cheaper automatically. One does not dream of asking which shows the lower profit, and choosing to buy it on that account. High efficiency can produce goods at low cost with substantial profit. Low efficiency will produce neither profit nor value. Profit is the resultant of efficiency, and efficiency is spurred by competition. That really is why capitalism is intrinsically more effective than Socialism in getting the public value for money.
But I must not go away from my noble friend's specific Question into a discussion of Socialist and capitalist philosophy, though it is very relevant to this subject; it is at the very root of it. In authorising that 1965 circular, Mr. Crossman showed that he cared more for Socialism than for the pockets of the ordinary family that has to pay its rates, and, through the rates, to meet the losses on direct labour schemes if they are "bodged". To judge by recent local government elections, the public is not very keen just now to pay the price of Socialism.
My Lords, I believe that this debate will do great good if it produces a further anxiety in your Lordships' House and elsewhere, to have the pros and cons of direct labour, and its relative suitability and unsuitability in different circumstances, coolly analysed. There has been much too little of that in the past, and a step away from it was taken by the issue of the 1965 circular. It is that
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circular which has done so much damage by creating the wrong atmosphere, and furthering the idea that direct labour is a good thing in itself, even when it does not deliver the goods as cheaply as they might have been obtained in other ways.
Some of the revelations of waste in the district auditors' reports on direct labour schemes operated by Labour-controlled local authorities seem hardly consistent with the tense, taut, atmosphere of technical efficiency which the Labour Government have declared their determination to demonstrate. Until they realise the mistake of that 1965 circular, or until they take other and thoroughly effective steps to safeguard the public against waste by ill-advised or ill-managed direct-labour departments of local authorities, the Government are being inconsistent with their own policy of higher national efficiency. That is what I think this debate is about; that is what we are asking the noble Lord, Lord Kennet, to answer.
4.15 p.m.
THE JOINT PARLIAMENTARY SECRETARY, MINISTRY OF HOUSING AND LOCAL GOVERNMENT (LORD KENNET): My Lords, the House will be grateful to the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, for raising this interesting question. In the main we have had a good discussion on it, though during the closing moments I detected a suggestion of the "shuttlecock" element as my noble friend Lord Fiske called it. That I shall do my best to damp down, rather than pursue it with full ballistic vigour. It was extremely important and interesting for us to hear from no fewer than three noble Lords about their own experiences, whether as chairmen, members or, indeed, beneficiaries of direct-labour departments of differing sizes. I was particularly impressed by the fervent endorsement of the operations of what must be the direct-labour department of one of the smallest building local authorities in the country.
The noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, was right, I believe, to emphasise at the beginning that we are not talking just about maintenance, or just about house building, but that the term "council workmen", wherever we may find them, is another name for members of a direct-labour organisation. They do street

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cleansing, highway maintenance, horticulture, and God knows how many other things besides the maintenance of buildings and the building of buildings. To put in proportion the complaints which we have heard about the operations of certain direct-labour departments (I am not minimising them: there have been regrettable episodes), I should like to remind the House that most local authorities in England have a direct-labour organisation dealing with building maintenance. Within that, less than most—a minority—actually carry out construction work with direct labour. Out of all the local authorities in England, no fewer than 1,297 use direct labour. Of those, 187 use direct labour for the building of new buildings, including houses. This roughly confirms the picture given in other terms, in terms of actual men employed, by the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull.
My Lords, there is one thing I must emphasise right at the beginning about the decision whether or not to have a direct-labour department at all. I was most interested to note that nobody suggested that in general local authorities ought not to use direct labour and ought not to maintain such organisations. I think that perhaps the noble Lord, Lord Brooke of Cumnor, went furthest towards it, in using the word "experiment" about direct-labour organisations; saying that it was a useful field of experiment in the use of direct labour. Of course, my Lords, these things are established at a very high level.
LORD BROOKE OF CUMNOR: My Lords, I do not want there to be any misunderstanding. What I said was that most local authorities could very wisely use direct labour on their maintenance and repair work. If I used the word "experiment" in my speech, I think that I was using it in the context of new construction. Obviously, the first time a local authority uses direct labour for that it is an experiment.
LORD KENNET: My Lords, I did not mean to misinterpret the noble Lord, and of course I accept his explanation. But the question whether or not local authorities should have direct labour at all, and, once they have it, whether or
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not it should be used on this or that—typically on new construction—is a matter for the local authorities, and is not the business of Government. Naturally, any Minister of Housing, as the noble Lord, Lord Brooke of Cumnor, from his longer experience, will know better than I do, is concerned to see that those local authorities which have direct-labour organisations, use them sensibly. Successive Ministers have had different ways of approaching it and each has done his best, but it is not the job of the Minister of Housing and Local Government to say what tasks a local authority should set to be done by direct labour.
The burden of complaints which have struck the public conscience and have been mentioned to-day against direct-labour departments, especially in new building, concerns inefficiency and waste and I think we need to dwell on that for a moment. I would emphasise that I am not saying there is no inefficiency and waste, or that the Government do not have to do anything about it. I shall come to that. But would one be right to form a negative judgment about direct labour, as such, because of these examples of inefficiency and waste? I believe not. If one were to say, "O.K. it just proves that you should not employ direct labour at all", since the job has to be done, that would leave, as the only possible alternative, that the work should be done by contractors. And, of course, 90 per cent. of new house building is done by contractors.
We should compare inefficiency and waste on the part of private contractors with the examples which are before us of inefficiency and waste in direct-labour organisations. This is an extremely difficult thing to do, because with direct-labour organisations one can tell exactly what a building job costs, because the council has to pay up. When the contractor does the same job, one cannot tell exactly what it costs. One can tell the price that he tenders and what, after negotiation, the council may finally pay; but one cannot tell the cost. The contractor may make a thumping profit or, equally likely, he may make a loss He is not going to tell us—this is the nature of private enterprise. It operates on balance from year to year and gets by like this.

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The only way we can make a sound judgment on this is by looking at the failure rate of building contractors, because if a building contractor repeatedly finds his costs well above the tenders he puts in, he cannot exist and goes out of business. This, although it may or may not involve loss to the public, certainly indicates inefficiency. So let us set against the examples that have been given—I need not name them again—in the direct-labour field the fact that in 1966, the last year for which the convenient figures are available, no fewer than 481 private building firms went bankrupt. This figure does not include voluntary liquidations. Noble Lords would be right in imagining that the six or eight glaring examples of inefficiency in direct-labour organisations which have been given are offset by something on a much larger scale on the other side, though, in fairness, I must remind your Lordships again that private contractors are building 90 per cent. and direct-labour departments only 10 per cent. of the houses in this country.
THE EARL OF KINNOULL: My Lords, could the noble Lord tell the House how many of the firms which went bankrupt were employed by local authorities? This is relevant.
LORD KENNET: My Lords, I cannot do that, but I think (speaking subject to later correction if I am wrong), probably a large majority of them did house building, or at any rate jobs comparable with what direct-labour organisations do, including the building of houses in the private sector, if not for local authorities.
The noble Lord, Lord Brooke of Cumnor, said that in the case of inefficiency and waste by private builders the loss does not fall on the public, whereas in the case of direct labour organisations it does. This is not so. The loss sometimes does fall on the public. If a local authority employs a contractor to build houses and the contractor "goes bust" sometimes the local authority has to pay up. So that in such cases inefficiency and waste falls on the ratepayer as surely as it does in the other case.
VISCOUNT STONEHAVEN: My Lords, would the noble Lord bear in mind that a local authority can, and often does,
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insure against this contingency at a nominal rate, in which case the loss does not fall on the ratepayers, whereas they cannot insure against direct-labour losses?
LORD KENNET: My Lords, that can be done, but even that does not always help. Noble Lords who are familiar with this field will remember that last year a couple of local authorities were badly "stung" by the well-publicised collapse of a private developer.
I hope that we can agree that this should not be an ideological matter. House building is a difficult trade. It is tricky for many reasons, and mistakes are made by all who operate in this field. I think that noble Lords opposite should not maintain or continue to claim that the record of direct-labour organisations is in any way worse than the record of the private sector. To do them justice, they did not do so. They just attacked the record of the direct-labour organisations. I would say that there are faults on both sides and that it is less than just to attack one side on this. At this point, with your Lordships' approval, I should like to draw the curtain on the "shuttlecock" aspect of these organisations.
My Lords, I come now to the question of the one-in-three bid. This idea has a long history, which is not always remembered. The Girdwood Committee, which inquired into the costs of house building in 1948, found that it was then the practice of the Ministry of Health (we were then under the first Labour Government) to approve building by direct labour only where the estimated cost had been tested by competitive tendering or where it was known to compare favourably with current tender prices in the locality, so that tendering was not needed to show it. That was the situation throughout the lifetime of the first Labour Government. When the Conservatives came to power, they declared themselves against this procedure of competitive tendering in most cases, and adopted the 1959 rule requiring that only one contract in three should be put out to competitive tender.
I would point out that the first move made by the present Opposition when they were in office was to reduce the impact involved in competitive tendering

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on direct-labour organisations. That ran for six years, and when Labour came in again we found that this was not working right, not because it was in itself an undesirable idea—I do not think there was anything ideological in this—but because it was found to be too mechanical and was preventing direct-labour organisations from planning a straight run of work for themselves, because they might have been tripped up on every third job. Though it is hard to measure these things, it was making direct labour less efficient than private developers who could organise straight runs of work for themselves, because they could "dot about" and take contracts here and there, taking the ones where they could win, because they were good at that type of work.
In this respect I was particularly interested in what my noble friend Lord Fiske said, that it was acceptable to reinstate competitive tendering only if the direct-labour organisations were allowed to jump about and do jobs in other people's areas so that they could become almost national concerns like the big developers. It had another effect which was possibly even more undesirable. There was an incentive to "fiddle", because it meant that direct-labour organisations, especially the big ones, which had so many jobs going all the time that nobody knew which order they came in, were under strong temptation to undertake only the jobs they knew they could do best and most cheaply. This was not good. It annoyed the contractors against whom they would have had to compare estimates, if they had been put out to competitive tender in the proper way, and led to frictions and difficulties. It worked out in a mechanical way and tended either to make it difficult for the building up of a steady run of work or to make for what I might call, without stretching a point, "fiddling" on the part of local authorities.
So we went back on this. Direct-labour organisations were no longer obliged by circular to test one in three. The noble Lord was fair about this. He pointed out that the then Minister did not say that there ought not to be any more testing, but that it would be a good thing to do this from time to time. I should like to assure the House that this is being done to a considerable extent. It is
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done not by order, regulation or degree of the Minister, but by a nod and a wink from the principal regional officers of the Ministry throughout the country, and it seems to be working out on the ground with such a degree of common sense that I did not even bother to inquire how often it was being done. Indeed, I should not get meaningful figures, because I should never know whether the testing had been carried out entirely on the initiative of the local authority or because there had been a suggestion from the regional officer of the Ministry. That is the way things go now, and, so far as the Government can see, this is a satisfactory condition. We are getting competitive tendering, and if a direct-labour organisation seems to be going off on a long run of untested operations, then it is given a pretty strong hint that it ought to test one or two by competitive tender.
LORD BROOKE OF CUMNOR: When the noble Lord says that they are given a very strong hint, can he say what he he means by that? I understand how these strong hints are given but, having been the responsible Minister for four years, I know also how local authorities can ignore even very strong hints. What sanction are the Government applying in the last resort?
LORD KENNET: My Lords, these are day to day operations, and the noble Lord will know what good reasons there are for a Ministry and local authorities to remain on good terms. Any deterioration of relations in one field may sometimes cause deterioration in others, and this is a situation which is desired to be avoided by both sides.
There is one detailed point on costing which I think is worth making. Many complaints which are levelled against direct-labour organisations boil down to the fact that the final costing sometimes turns out to be higher than the estimate. This is, of course, the exception rather than the rule. We forget the thousands of schemes which go ahead without any trouble whatever. Sometimes when the cost turns out to be higher than the estimate there may be perfectly good reasons for it: the total of the work may have been increased during the run of the job; there may have been some agreed change. Very often such things (shall I say?) get ignored by those who are predisposed

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against these organisations, especially the local Press and so on. In the remainder of the cases, where there is no good reason for the increased cost, it may be a case of bad estimating, in the first place, or it may be a case of bad supervision of the work while it is going on. Bad estimating does not necessarily mean the loss of public money. This has to be borne very much in mind. It only means the loss of public money if a contractor could have done the job more cheaply at the final cost. The mere fact that the direct-labour organisation estimated £1,000 and carried it out at £1,500 tells you nothing about whether a private contractor would have been able to carry it out at less than £1,500, however he estimated in the first place. Of course, bad management, once a job is begun, always means waste, whoever is doing it. Sometimes the waste disappears altogether, and we never know about it. That is on the private side.
Because the new subsidies—and here we come to an important point—introduced under the recent Housing Subsidy Act are payable on the estimated cost at tender stage and not on the final cost, local authorities now have a strong financial incentive for making sure that the direct-labour department's estimate is realistic and that there is no subsequent overspending, because if there is they get no subsidy on it. This is in itself a large part of the answer to Lord Kinnoull's Question as he put it down.
Even beyond that, of course, there are cases where there has been clearly mismanagement, and in these cases successive Ministers are not now, as they have never been, inactive. I think it is worth reminding the House that in the case of Salford, which has been mentioned once or twice, it was found that they were overspending very badly, and my right honourable friend Mr. Mellish, who was then the Joint Parliamentary Secretary, urged the council to retrench and cut down to maintenance and small building projects and reform their organisation. This they have done, and I am sure noble Lords opposite would agree that they are right to have done so. This they began to do before the recent change in that part of the world. When a direct-labour organisation over-reaches itself, this kind of radical reappraisal may be necessary, and all sorts of changes urged
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upon local authorities. I give Salford as one example of a case in which this was done. If it happens again, it will be done again.
The noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, mentioned the Report Study of the District Auditors' Society, but this point was not taken up in the debate. This Report plays a large part in the present situation, and in the view of the Government is of some importance. The District Auditors' Society last year produced, on the initiative of their own members, and primarily for the use of their own members, a useful Study on the financial control of new works undertaken by direct labour. The Minister made this Study available to those interested as long ago as last April, and a copy was placed in the Library of this House. My right honourable friend then entered into consultations with the local authority associations about the steps to be taken in the light of this Study. He has now received their agreement to the formation of a small Working Party drawn from local and central government. If there are any reserves on the part of any of the local authority associations about the possibility of joining this Working Party, I hope that the Government can rely upon the help of those noble Lords opposite who are interested in this matter to remove those reserves. This Working Party will draw up a short manual of principles of financial control and management for the work in question using the District Auditors' Society's Study as a basis. This manual, if it is acceptable by all concerned, could very well turn out to have a long-lasting and profoundly useful effect in the field that we are considering.
We have talked a lot about where direct-labour building has gone wrong. I want to wind up by giving the House two examples of local authorities where direct-labour building has turned out very well indeed. The County Borough of Sheffield have calculated that their direct labour force has saved £1½ million over 17 schemes comprising over 5,000 dwellings. On 11 of these 17 schemes—and this will please the noble Lord, Lord Brooke of Cumnor—the contract was obtained in competition with private contractors. To go to the other extreme, a rather small building authority, the

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Bladen Urban District Council, build about 100 houses a year on direct labour, and they do it at about 25 per cent. below the Ministry's cost yardsticks. These achievements are often forgotten in the blaze of publicity coming from certain quarters in the Press about the failures of the system.
To conclude, I have said what the Government are doing, but perhaps I can wrap it up in one sentence. We are seeing that there is competition when there appears to have been a long run without it, and where there appears to be a case for it. We are no longer in the mechanical method of one in three. We have set up this Working Party with the local authority associations—and I very much hope that they will collaborate—to go into what may turn out to be a kind of bible or a system for the guidance of direct-labour organisations. We sometimes descend like a ton of bricks. The Government are not convinced that there is a case for any more compulsive reform or any more general examination. I should perhaps clarify the point that the Mann Report, about which the noble Earl asked, was into the central government's direct-labour organisation—and I refer to the maintenance organisation of the Ministry of Works. So it does not come into this particular field. Having said all that, I should like to answer the noble Earl's Question by saying that the Government are convinced that they make a contribution, and that it is a useful one. In the overwhelming majority of cases it is well and wisely carried out. There is no case for the nationalisation of the building industry into so many local authority direct-labour organisations, and there is no case, equally, for the capitalisation of those existing municipal organisations.
THE EARL OF KINNOULL: Before the noble Lord sits down, I wonder if he could say whether the Government intend to expand or encourage the
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work studies in the local authority departments concerned, particularly to encourage productivity?
LORD KENNET: Certainly, my Lords. It is a question once again of encouragement. If a local authority have the resources to do this, and think it wise to do so, then of course they will get any advice and help they can from the Ministry to do it. But I am not sure to what extent it is the Minister's role to urge an authority to carry out a work study into its own affairs if the authority does not want to do so. On the other hand, what the Ministry can do is to help to diffuse the results of studies carried out by one authority, among other authorities who may not have the resources to make their own.

AIRDRIE COURT HOUSE COMMISSIONERS (DISSOLUTION) ORDER CONFIRMATION BILL
Brought from the Commons; read 1a, and (pursuant to the Private Legislation Procedure (Scotland) Act 1936) deemed to have been read 2a and reported from the Committee.
NATIONAL LOANS BILL
Brought from the Commons, endorsed with the Certificate from the Speaker that the Bill is a Money Bill within the meaning of the Parliament Act 1911; read 1a, and to be printed.
REVENUE (No. 2) BILL
Brought from the Commons, endorsed with the Certificate from the Speaker that the Bill is a. Money Bill within the meaning of the Parliament Act 1911; read 1a, and to be printed.

REGIONAL ECONOMIC PLANNING COUNCILS
4.41 p.m.
Lord ILFORD Lord ILFORD rose to ask Her Majesty's Government whether they will state the responsibilities and functions of the Regional Economic Planning Boards and Regional Economic Planning Councils and their intended relation to the local town planning authorities. The noble Lord said: My Lords, I beg leave to ask the Question which stands in my name on the Order Paper. I put down this Question in the hope that it will enable the Government to tell us something about the work which is being done by the Regional Economic Planning Boards and the Regional Economic Planing Councils. I also hope that the noble Lord who is to reply on the Government's behalf will be able to tell us something about their intentions for the future of these two bodies.
Your Lordships, I think, have not heard very much about the activities of the Regional Economic Planning Councils. These bodies were set up soon after the Government took office. They have no express statutory authority, but were formed under the general powers of the Secretary of State for Economic Affairs. They have no executive powers and their functions, as I understand it, are purely advisory. Their purpose was stated then to be:
"To provide effective machinery for regional economic planning within the framework of the National Plan."
Since then, the National Plan has gone into cold storage, and I imagine that planning is proceeding for the second edition of the National Plan which will in due course, I suppose, make its appearance. So far as I am aware, the functions of these bodies have never been more precisely defined than by the Secretary of State in the statement from which I have just quoted.
I am not aware of any other statutory body whose responsibilities and functions are defined in more general or uncertain terms. The Government have in fact created a whole structure of Councils and Boards covering the whole country and having no express statutory authority at all. Parliament has really heard nothing of them, except the statement by the Minister, which I read a
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moment ago. There may be good reasons for this unusual procedure. I hope the Minister will tell us whether the Government regard these Boards as a temporary or a permanent part of our local administration, and, if they look upon them as a permanent part, whether it is intended to give statutory authority to them in the usual way.
These Councils have been superimposed upon the local planning authorities. It is not surprising that when bodies whose functions are defined in such imprecise terms are superimposed upon other authorities, with very similar although not identical functions, a certain amount of uncertainty and misunderstanding should result. Attempts are made periodically to resolve these uncertainties by holding conferences with the planning authorities, and by the action of some of the chairmen of the Councils who have made efforts to establish personal contacts with planning authorities and, indeed, with the local authorities in their regions which are not planning authorities. Certainly contacts made in that way have proved to be very helpful. Not all the chairmen have seen fit to do that. Nevertheless, over a wide field, in spite of the attempts of planning authorities and planning Councils to avoid misunderstanding, there remains an atmosphere of uncertainty, indecision and, I am afraid, in some cases, frustration. I hope that to-night the Minister will have an opportunity to clear the air.
The first thing one has to recognise about these Councils—and this is vital to the whole of our understanding of what they are supposed to do—is that they are the instruments of central Government and are no part of local government. Yet in some cases they have been treated, and indeed have sometimes treated themselves, as though they represented a third tier in the local government structure. I hope the Minister will make it clear that these councils are the instruments of central Government and not in any sense an addition to the structure of local government.
These Councils and Boards were intended to be concerned with economic planning, leaving the physical planning to the planning authorities; and that, I believe, is still the intention. But it has

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been found that, as a practical matter, you cannot very well separate physical planning from economic planning, and indeed the two are almost invariably inter-twined. It is therefore important that these Councils should maintain contacts, not only with the local authorities which are planning authorities, but with the local authorities which are not planning authorities. It may well be that the authorities which are not planning authorities will be most directly affected by the decisions the Councils make. A Council, for example, may decide that a certain industry should expand in a certain place. Its expansion will involve an expansion of the local authority's housing programme; it will involve more schools, an increase in the welfare services and all the other things that go with population. So I hope that the Councils—I know that some have done so—will make contacts not only with local authorities which are planning authorities, but with those local authorities which are not, which may be very much affected by the decisions the planning Council will take.
I do not intend to-night to enter upon the various uncertainties and misinterpretations which must necessarily be encountered when negotiations between bodies whose functions are so similar take place. One difficulty which I think has proved to be a real obstacle has been that of "confidentiality" as it is called. I gather that the members of the local planning councils are subject to the Official Secrets Act and accordingly they are very careful not to disclose, in the course of their negotiations, anything which may bring them into trouble with the authorities. That puts a serious limitation on those discussions which take place between local authorities and planning Councils. I think it has been found that "confidentiality" is a real obstacle. I hope it will be possible to release the strictness of "confidentiality" when these negotiations are taking place. If a local authority is not told what the ultimate purpose of the planning Council is likely to be, it is difficult for them to make a useful contribution to the discussion, and I hope a much greater degree of frankness will be possible in these discussions in the future than has been found to be the case hitherto.
One other matter that I want to deal with is that these Councils, like all such bodies, are beginning to develop ambitions. It is suggested from time to time that they should be given executive functions—functions perhaps to make broad planning decisions. If that were done it would mean that the character and functions of the Council would be completely transformed and it would add to the present two-tier structure of local government a third tier which could result only in a further difficulty in negotiation and further intricacy of our local administration.
Another suggestion that is made is that the Councils should include a number of elected persons, or of persons who are nominated by the local authorities. I think that suggestion would completely defeat the purpose which the Minister had in mind when these Councils were created. It is not by any means the case that if the individuals were elected they would be the persons from whom the Minister would wish to have advice. It would mean that the persons elected to the Regional Planning Councils might not be in possession of either the qualities or of the knowledge which the Minister desires from them. In that way it would completely defeat the purpose which the Minister has in view. I hope to-night the Minister will be able to assure us that neither of these suggestions will find favour with Her Majesty's Government.
There has been built up an immense structure of circumlocution about these Councils. No doubt they have done valuable work, and if to-night I may have appeared once or twice to be critical I hope nothing I say will be interpreted as a reflection on them, and it will not be thought that I have failed to recognise the valuable service which the men and women who serve on these Councils have given, without remuneration. I have no wish whatever to reflect adversely on what these Councils have done. I imagine many of them have completed the task which was set them in the first instance. Four, if not five, have produced valuable surveys of their areas, and it may be that when these surveys have been produced the work which they have to do will come to an end. I do not know whether that is so or not.
But does the work which remains to be done really justify this elaborate structure of Councils and Boards, with their paid chairmen and their staffs and all the expense which goes with the setting-up of bodies of that kind? Is it really not possible to find means by which the existing planning authorities, either singly or grouped together, perhaps in a standing conference or otherwise, could furnish the Minister with the information which he needs for central planning? I should have thought that this was possible, without creating this great structure of new authorities. Instead, there has been built up alongside local authority planning what is virtually a duplication of the present planning authorities. The Government ought to consider how far this duplication is really necessary and how much longer it will continue to be necessary. If they regard it as permanent they should give it the express statutory authority which is customary when such bodies are set up and which at present the Economic Planning Boards and Councils do not possess.
4.58 p.m.
VISCOUNT GAGE: My Lords, I want to support this Question put by my noble friend, but from the rather special angle of the South-East Region, which in some ways is different from any other region, first, because of its immense population of 17 million—bigger than a number of European countries, bigger than the whole of Norway, Sweden and Denmark put together—and also because it contains London, which is not only the biggest city in Great Britain but also a focal point of that drift to the South-East which has been causing so much concern in recent years; and secondly, because the problems of this region tend to be more national in character and less purely regional than those of any other region.
I approach this subject from the humble point of view of a local planning authority. I call it a humble point of view because it is fashionable to-day to regard local planning authorities as so parochial and so restricted in their outlook that their views are hardly worth considering. It may be that this criticism is justified, but I can only assure your Lordships that up to the present it has been extraordinarily difficult for us to be anything but parochial. All the
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time we have been willing to put into our schemes the elements of these wider national conceptions if we had only been able to discover what they were. The sort of questions we should have been very willing to have guidance about were such matters as whether we should take London overspill and, if so, in what form, whether in the form of planned movement, expanded towns, with industry; or whether we just expanded the number of commuters we were to have; and what sort of industry we were to be allowed for our own purposes.
All this was wrapped up with the question of the drift to the South-East. It was really not possible to get answers to those questions. All we could do was to send up our schemes, prepared to the best of our ability, and see what happened. In due course, which might have been anything up to two years, they were returned to us with the Minister of Housing and Local Government's comments and amendments. We did not quite know what happened to those schemes in Whitehall, but we assumed that they had been the rounds of all the other Ministries, and that the Ministry of Housing and Local Government had acted as co-ordinator of those views.
The system worked, up to a point, but it was clearly very wasteful of time and effort to prepare plans simply on a sort of trial-and-error basis. So we were very glad when we learned in the early 1960s that the then Government, the Conservative Government, were going to produce a South-East Study. And when the Study was produced, in 1964, it did give us some guidance. It tried to indicate the kind of target population we should aim at, and indicated the towns which might be expanded. It was all very tentative, however. A number of figures were obviously wrong. But perhaps in the course of time we should have hammered out something. All that, of course, is academic, because the present Government, when they came into power, almost immediately withdrew the South-East Study. The reason, we understood, was in connection with the newly formed Department of Economic Affairs, and we rather understood that the Government did not think sufficient examination had been made of the economic problems that were then arising.

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This question of how far economics is essential to physical planning, as my noble friend has said, has never really been entirely clarified. Even a local planning authority can understand that implementation of these plans needs enormous amounts of money, for housing, roads and what-have-you. With the lack of resources it might well be that those resources would have to be rationed. But we were aware that one of the dangers of planning was that one might move into a sort of dream world, with wonderful projects for reconstructing various areas and building road systems that never really took shape at all but existed only on paper. So anything which would bring greater realism would have been very welcome. Beyond that we really could not see.
As we were recently told by Professor Jukes, economic planning really means a number of different things and introduces a whole lot of new agencies. As Mr. Enoch Powell has recently pointed out, it may mean a computation of the number of people employed in filleting fish or preparing dehydrated vegetables in 1973. But, in all seriousness, I believe that it is partly the failure of the Government to be more specific on this question of how economics are essential to physical planning that has caused certain confusions to which he referred. This is perhaps by the way.
My Lords we waited for three years, and in 1967 there appeared Stategy for the South-East. The form of this production was somewhat suprising. It was not, as in the case of the South-East Study, sponsored by the Ministry of Housing and Local Government—indeed, it was not sponsored by any Ministry. It was a report of the Economic Council to the Secretary of State for Economic Affairs, and to this day we do not know whether or not the Government accept it. Yet we have been asked by the Chairman of the Economic Council to comment on it. I feel that this is slightly putting the cart before the horse. As I have said, large questions of policy do arise in this area. We have seen in the past the difficulties that have arisen from the drift to the South-East. We are now beginning to see some of the problems created by Government measures to reverse that movement and push back
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industry to the North. The example of Woolwich is very clear in our minds. I think there will be more such cases, and some Department may well have some reservations before the scheme is finally approved.
But even supposing the Government take the whole of these great schemes as a basis for discussion, what is to happen then? I suppose that there will be some formal consultation with the local authorities. So far, there has been very little. It is true that the Chairman has had a number of working luncheons with the various authorities, and certainly we do not grudge Mr. Hackett his working luncheons, or any other luncheons: we shall always be glad to see him. But these are not a very obvious substitute for proper, formal consultation. Although we in local government are a pretty well disciplined lot, we do have views, and in this particular connection those views do not entirely coincide with the views of the Strategy for the South-East. I think there will be some disappointment if our views are ignored.
It is not at all surprising, of course, that there should be differences of opinion. Town planning is not an exact science; economics is not an exact science. In fact, your Lordships may remember the dictum of Mr. Lloyd George who, at a moment of exasperation, said that if there were six economists there would be seven opinons, two of which would be the opinions of Lord Keynes. I am only arguing that this Strategy for the South-East is an extremely competent document, very well supported by logical argument, and I am glad to see that a distinguished member of the team that produced it is to take part in the debate this afternoon.
But there are other arguments that can be advanced, equally supported by logic, and in fact what is happening to-day is that an enormous number of what I might call prize essays are being written, putting forward and supporting all sorts of views without anybody being quite clear in his mind who is going to judge who will get the prize. We are sending our comments and our prize essays not to the Economic Council but to our voluntary associations of all the authorities in the South-East that is to say, the London

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Standing Conference, presided over by my noble friend Lord Nugent of Guildford, and it may be that this body has a very valuable part to play in ironing out differences and reaching agreement on various points.
Even so, it is exceedingly unlikely that it will be able to iron out all disagreements. I cannot imagine even the most complete form of consultation reaching unanimous agreement, for example, on the question of the third London Airport, and whether it should be at Stansted or not. There will be other similar cases. Decisions have to be taken, and I am asking how they are going to be taken. Hitherto, as I have said, the Minister of Housing and Local Government has been the Minister who has presented the local authorities with Government policy, and probably in the past he has, no doubt with great difficulty, attempted to co-ordinate ministerial policy. That is a highly important thing in planning, never more so than at the present day when Ministers keep having more and more powers conferred on them. Without this co-ordination we can easily have a position where we can establish trading estates which, under his licensing system, the President of the Board of Trade never allows us to fill up. We can have a situation where the Ministry of Transport authorises the closing down of a railway line just before a town is going to be expanded. We can have a situation where, having carefully preserved a large area of beautiful country, the Minister of Power finds it necessary to put a nuclear power station in the middle of it. All these things can happen if there is no co-ordination.
I happen to know that one point at issue to-day is the extent to which statutory undertakers ought to come under the planning law. I am pointing out that we cannot deal with these things at local level; they must be dealt with at ministerial level, or even at Cabinet level. Is the Minister of Local Government going to continue these functions as hitherto? He is the only Minister who has statutory planning powers. He is the Minister who has power to amend our schemes and to decide on appeals, and he seems the obvious Minister to continue this function. Alternatively, is some new system envisaged? Is there
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any significance in the fact that this Report Strategy for the South-East was conceived as the responsibility of the Department of Economic Affairs, and that this debate is being answered by the representative of that Department? One thing I must say is that I most devoutly hope it does not signify that henceforward town and country planning is going to be under dual control, the Ministry of Housing and Local Government working through the local authorities, and the Department of Economic Affairs through the Economic Council, and that the local authorities will, in effect, be under two masters.
We in local government have to consult a whole host of bodies, such as the Land Commission, the Countryside Commission, the Forestry Commission, the Electricity Generating Authority—all statutory undertakers in their respective fields. I make no complaint about that. But if in addition to them, under some obscure phraseology in regard to the word "consultation", we shall be required, in effect, to submit our basic plans to the Economic Council before we send them to the Minister, I do not think that would work at all. I do not believe we should ever get finality.
I have noticed that Lord Beswick is a most experienced debater, and I am perfectly sure that he is capable of making a well-reasoned and well-informed reply to questions of this sort without conveying any information whatever. My noble friend behind me is perhaps more confident than I am that he will give that information. But on the assumption that my supposition is right, I might perhaps express a hope that the Minister of Housing and Local Government will be restored to his old position quite soon. Of course, in matters of this magnitude time must be given for consideration. That is perfectly true. It is also true that on the strength of this document, and before it has been approved, the G.L.C. is already making plans for decanting its population with certain boroughs, without even informing the local authorities who are concerned round about of their rights. That is just an example of the confusion that I hope will be avoided in future. I agree that this is a large subject, and that it affects a great number of people. I think that

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is all the more reason why the planners at the top should themselves be planned, and why we of the lower grade should operate under an intelligible chain of command.
5.16 p.m.
LORD DONALDSON OF KINGS-BRIDGE: My Lords, it is probably a good thing that one representative of a planning council should also be a Member of your Lordships' House, and as such I feel it encumbent on me to say something about my experiences. I am a member of the South-East Planning Council, which has come in for some rather threatening looks from the other side. I shall make a short statement and confine it almost entirely to generalities. I have absolutely no intention of defending step by step the organisation of regional planning throughout the country. I think it is possibly a good idea. I think we have to see how it works, and I think we shall make our decision in due course when we see how it works.
Originally, many of us who were appointed to this body felt a good many of the doubts which the noble Lord, Lord Ilford, has, if I may say so, so acidly expressed. We were pretty hesitant as to what good we could do, how useful another advisory body would be. After all, it absorbs the time of able men in public life, and a large number of highly paid and competent civil servants, and has no executive power whatever. To begin with, it seemed to us that every issue that was brought before us had already been decided by somebody else. But I am glad to tell your Lordships that we have now been sitting for nearly two years and there is a general feeling among us, I think, that we are less uneasy than we were about our relevance to the whole subject. As the noble Viscount, Lord Gage, has pointed out, the Council spent its first year producing this document Strategy for the South-East, which I think was a year well spent, and I hope that this strategy may in fact get the prize which the noble Viscount suggested might be available. But he complains, I think a little early, that it has not yet received the Government's blessing. It is an immensely complicated subject. There are an enormous number of people whose views have to be taken into consideration. The noble Lord and
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the noble Viscount would be among the first to complain if we brushed these views aside or treated them cavalierly. So I think the noble Viscount must be reasonable and remember that this is not yet six months old. I believe the chances are extremely high that a strategy such as this will be adopted as a guide to development in the South-East. This, of course, does not mean that the lines can never be passed. It simply means that anybody who wishes to cross these lines will have to have a good reason for doing so.
I have said that I think most of my colleagues on the South-East Planning Council are convinced that there is a genuine need for an overall body of this sort to sit in permanent session to take account of the changing trends in population level and housing statistics which come in month by month and are constantly being revised; to receive at the earliest moment notice of the intentions of the various bodies functioning within the area—that is to say, local and central, public and private; enormous bodies like the G.L.C., and small but important bodies like the Location of Offices Bureau. There is an enormous number of intentions to be co-ordinated, and one job of this Council is to plot all these intentions on one canvas and to try to see how much they conflict, then to point this out and to try to make sure that, as a group, they are conforming to the general strategy, and, where necessary, to give advice about priorities. As the enormous developments in this area occur—and they will happen, whether we plan it or not—the availability of men and materials will become shorter, and somebody will have to settle what is to be done first. I entirely agree with what was said on the other side of the House that there should be no intention by these bodies to be executive; this would confuse the issue completely. But there is a strong case for somebody who is not executive and who is not personally involved to look at this complicated question as a whole and to give the responsible Minister advice on what to do.
I will not say a great deal more about this subject. I will not take this step by step, but if we simply look at the

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Stansted story it will help us to realise how useful bodies of this kind could be. This is not the moment to open up the question of Stansted, with its rights and wrongs, but it is enough to say that if the South East Planning Council had been in existence when the Stansted project was first taken up, it would have subjected it to the fiercest critical scrutiny, because it is slap in the middle of one of our country zones. We should surely have wanted to know the arguments for and against alternative sites and should have wanted them to be made public. We should surely have insisted on having a proper explanation of why it is so difficult and expensive to move the Ministry of Defence installations in the South to some slightly less suitable place. And if, after all this, the verdict had still been Stansted, which it might well have been, I take it that the local inhabitants would have been just as angry as they are now, but the rest of the country would have been able to see that all the right questions had been asked and answered before the decision was taken.
I am pleased that the noble Lord, Lord Ilford, does not complain that these bodies are not elected. We have a much wider cross-section of articulate and independently-minded people than we possibly could get if they had to stand for election. We have on our body four or five highly distinguished people expert in planning, transportation, docks and such matters, and we also have a few, as it were, common-sense additions, of which I hope humbly to be one. I have no qualifications at all; it is probably not a bad thing to have a few. Within our deliberations I consider we have extreme democracy. We are a nonpolitical body and there is no political bias observable. All issues are debated fiercely and without fear or favour; and the chairman, if I may say so, is quite hard-worked. This is very healthy. My own belief is that in the course of time we shall find that these nine Regional Councils have an independent, well-taken view of the problems of their areas, debate them honestly, fairly and sharply, and can give advice to the Government on the best way to solve the formidable problems which are going to confront us in this very small island in the next fifty years.
5.25 p.m.
LORD INGLEWOOD: My Lords, the three noble Lords who have just spoken have all been looking at this problem through expert eyes, my two noble friends on this side of the House from long experience in local government, and the noble Lord who has just sat down as a member of a Regional Economic Planning Council. I want to look at the problem through the eyes of the man in the street, for it is surely ultimately for the good of the man in the street that this whole organisation has been set up. It is understandable that he is becoming increasingly puzzled. Advisory committees are a familiar part of the machinery of Government, but these Regional Economic Planning Councils do not seem to fit in with the recognised ideas of how such committees do their work and render their reports, as has been mentioned by the noble Viscount, Lord Gage.
If I am rather more critical than the other noble Lords who have spoken, I hope that no one will think that I am unfairly so. I have often been asked in the North of England, where I live, what exactly is the purpose and power of our Economic Planning Council. Up to to-day, I have only been able to reply that I do not know. I doubt whether anybody really knows. Unfortunately I have seen their patronage increasing, and this is not a good thing. I have also noticed—not, I am glad to say, in our part of the country, but, judging from what I have heard from other parts—that some Councils make no attempt to disguise their growing ambitions. The noble Lord, Lord Ilford, mentioned this matter.
I have heard it said that the purpose is to bring Whitehall to the Regions, but that, to me, is a meaningless platitude, because no Minister or Department can possibly delegate worth-while responsibility either to individuals or to a committee which have neither the traditions nor the discipline of the Civil Service or any reasonably direct responsibility to Parliament.
This really is a most timely debate which my noble friend has introduced, and I hope that the Government will take full advantage of the opportunity to make clear not only the present

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position, which is far from clear, but also the future intentions of the Government and the developments which they would like to see.
I have spoken to the Minister, and he knows generally how I feel; and as I do not want to make his reply any more difficult, it might be easier if I were to frame my speech (which will not be a long one) in the form of four questions. The first is: will the Minister clear up the question of the Government's policy for these committees? We know that the word "advisory" can be elastic. I can see two possible aims. Some people have thought that they were appointed primarily to help the Government frame and implement their policy. If so, I would ask why one finds in the ranks of these Councils members who would call themselves Conservatives, when we know Government policy is based on Socialism. I would again ask: have these men who call themselves Conservatives been taken in? I hope that that is not so, but when I look from where I live in the North across the Border into Scotland I can see a body comparable with an English Regional Council, though not exactly the same, presided over by the Secretary of State, which I should have thought an undisguised political body.
If this is not the Government's intention for the English Councils, as other people think, and if they are designed to find the greatest measure of common ground between us all in furthering the various policies for the good of all, which is a worthy object, why have some chairmen been appointed whose whole career in the public service has been associated in people's minds with Party politics? I must point out that I should be just as critical if these chairmen whom some of us may have in mind had been Tories as if they were Socialists. A lifelong Party politician cannot be the best chairman for an advisory body of this sort.
Having said that, I do not want anybody to think that I am wishing to question in any way the great ability, the energy or the honourable motives of the chairman of the Northern Economic Planning Council, even though his methods leave us all wondering. But while some Councils—the Yorkshire and Humberside Council, for example—set
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about their business with commendable modesty, our Northern Council seems to have a non-stop programme of Press conferences and T.V. appearances, and to make use of all the paraphernalia of modern public relations which, as I have said, can only puzzle people. This has another effect, which I think is unfortunate: that it tends to disparage in people's minds the standing of local authorities who do not generally indulge in public relations officers and techniques of this sort.
As to the membership, the noble Lord opposite has told us of the membership of his Council, which I think is broadly representative of other Councils, and therefore I will not go into this subject at any length. But I will say, in regard to the industrialists who are members of Councils, that it seems to me that they tend to represent bigger interests and the principal industrial organisations, whereas I feel that Councils would be stronger in some ways if there were more who had experience of smaller-scale industry. Having come here via another place—and the noble Lord, Lord Beswick, will I think agree with me here—I cannot help but wish that more of these industrialists had at one time or another in their successful lives offered their services to local government, and particularly county councils; the ballot box is very good discipline and experience for us all.
Then another difficulty was mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Ilford. I understand that members of Regional Councils are subject to the Official Secrets Act, because it happens that they must see Government papers which presumably are not for general distribution. This must put the members of local authorities at a certain disadvantage, particularly if, as mayors or chairmen of their authorities, they have certain knowledge affecting their own area but which under the Official Secrets Act they are not allowed in any way to indicate, either to their officials or to their colleagues.
When referring to the membership of the Councils, in our part of the world we must not forget Mr. Lee, a Minister in the Department of Economic Affairs, who I gather has special but not very clearly defined responsibilities for the North of England. He is a Minister in

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the D.E.A., which is the sponsoring Department for the Regional Councils in all areas, and so I find it a little difficult to see what special responsibility he has for us when he must be equally responsible for everybody else. I should like the Minister to say whether Mr. Lee's responsibilities also run in Scotland, or whether the boundary between England and Scotland in this particular instance is just one more iron curtain. It really is extremely difficult to understand exactly how all this fits in.
My last question concerns the financial side, and it has to do with the cost to the country of this whole organisation. It is now several years since these Councils were appointed. The Boards are surely only a larger edition of the meetings of the principal officials of the central Government Departments in the main provincial towns, which have been going on for a very long time, but the Regional Economic Councils are new. Of course, when I ask the cost I am not referring to salaries, because there are no salaries for members except the wretched pittance which is paid to the chairmen—and wretched it must be in proportion to the time and effort which they put in. Your Lordships are well placed to sympathise with those who put in a lot of time for nothing.
What I am concerned with is the cost of this whole system of what has been called "bringing Whitehall to the regions". This volume, Civil Estimates, 1967–68, is very large and thick. It has hundreds of pages, but I cannot find one single reference in it to the cost of these Regional Economic Planning Councils and Boards which we are discussing here this afternoon. There is no information of any sort or kind. Under the D.E.A., all one learns is that, like almost every other branch of the public service when it comes to salaries, regional policy was staffed this year by 175 men and women drawing salaries to a total of £289,000, as against the 160 who were doing the same job last year. May I ask whether the noble Lord anticipates that next year those figures will be higher still?
Surely I am right in supposing that local authorities' accounts are all audited and published, and I should like to ask the noble Lord who is to reply why the accounts of the Regional Economic Boards and the Regional Economic
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Councils should not be audited and published in exactly the same way as the accounts of local authorities. For instance, I am certain that there has been a considerable increase in the staff and in the expenditure at Wellbar House in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, which I used to know some years ago, and there must now be a huge bill for travelling and for conferences. And when we consider this question of conferences, the expenses go far beyond the expenses of Council or Board representatives. Conferences in the North of England are not the same as conferences in Whitehall, where you pick up a telephone, speak to a colleague, collect your file and walk across the street. Local authority and voluntary society representatives who attend our endless conferences travel 60 or 70 miles and may have to spend a night away from home, and often it seems to them that the conference has been in aid of very little else, except an excuse for one more Press hand-out in the interests of the Regional Council. I think, and I am sure other noble Lords will agree with me, that this whole organisation is ripe for attention from the Public Accounts Committee in another place.
Having said all that, I should like to finish by saying that I am in no doubt at all that we need some organisation to help members of county councils and county borough councils to think more widely and to consider problems which cross their boundaries, because the county area is too small an area for much of our planning to-day. Not least ought this to be possible when the county boundary happens also to be the boundary between England and Scotland or the boundary between England and Wales, which at the moment does not happen. Further, I am sure that, with the help and cooperation of others, members of county councils ought to be encouraged to take more cognisance of the economic factors affecting their areas. This is what lies behind this whole conception of regional economic planning, but I doubt very much whether the Regional Economic Councils and their Boards as at present set up are the best method of achieving it.
5.38 p.m.
LORD BROOKE OF CUMNOR: My Lords, I think it will be clear to the Government by now that what my noble

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friends are seeking in this short but excellent debate is clarification and fixing of responsibilities. I feel that I ought to crave your Lordships' indulgence for taking up the time of the House on each of the two Questions which we have been debating this afternoon. This one, however, happens to be on a subject in which I have had a deep interest for a great many years. It must be thirty years now since I ventured to submit a memorandum urging regional development policies to the Royal Commission on the Distribution of the Industrial Population, which was admirably presided over by Sir Montague Barlow. Since then I have had twenty years experience in local government and ten years as a Minister of the Crown, so I hope I can see the whole question from most of the relevant points of view.
It was I who some eight years ago initiated the South-East Study, which was the first effort of its kind to examine the planning problems of a whole region, and I sought to get it done within what I might call the framework of local government. The question which I think my noble friends have been asking to-day, particularly my noble friend Lord Gage, is whether we are now blurring responsibilities by carrying on planning work partly under the ægis of the Minister of Housing and Local Government through the local planning authorities, and partly under the ægis of the Ministers of the Department of Economic Affairs through these Regional Economic Planning Councils.
That seems to me a very pertinent question. I have no doubt whatever that Planning with a capital "P"—the sort of Town and Country Planning which is done by local authorities—is of little value unless it has a sound economic basis. Town and country planning, if it is thought of merely as an amenity exercise, is bound to go wrong and to lead people astray in the present day. But unless the Government are going to deprive local authorities of their planning functions—and, indeed, the Minister of Housing and Local Government of his overall planning responsibility—it is a little hard to see how the Department of Economic Affairs and these Regional Economic Planning Councils fit into all this.
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Thirty years ago I was pleading that the Barlow Commission should recommend to the Government the creation of regional machinery, which in those days was almost non-existent. Now I have a great deal of sympathy with the complaints of my noble friends that the machinery is becoming so complex that effective action may be inhibited. Perhaps I should explain a little more what I mean by that. I am not doubting the competence of any of these bodies; and I do not doubt it for a moment when the noble Lord, Lord Donaldson of Kings-bridge, says that the members of his Economic Planning Council, as they continue their work, become more and more conscious of the importance of the work their Council is doing. That is natural and as it should be. But what masters is not only that each separate piece of the machinery should be satisfied that it is doing a worth-while job, but the it the whole collection of pieces of machinery should fit together into one effective machine which is going to turn out goods.
My Lords, that is what we are worried about at the present time; and we are the more worried because a tremendous amount of this work—this very largely unpaid work of public service—falls upon a limited number of extremely busy people. I know how busy the key people in local government always are. I suspect that a great many of those who are serving as colleagues of the noble Lord, Lord Donaldson, and Mr. Hackett, for whom I have a high personal regard, on the South-East Planning Council, are extremely busy people in their own right, so to speak; and I am sure the same is true of the regional economic bodies elsewhere. Because they are busy people, they must realise the more that this work needs to be done with economy of time, economy of paper and economy of result. In other words, the machinery must be so designed as to create the best possible value at the end with the minimum expenditure—my noble friend Lord Inglewood might say "of money", but I am inclined to say of people's scarce, valuable time. Now this is where we are all hoping that the noble Lord, Lord Beswick, will be able to help us. My noble friend Lord Gage, in his very clear speech, emphasised how real is the danger of local authorities becoming confused by the appearance of a series of

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reports. They may be valuable in themselves, but what exactly is the authority of each one?
It is a tremendous task. I grant at once that the Government are in a dual difficulty. One difficulty is of their own making and that is in having created the Department of Economic Affairs; because I should have thought there was bound to be some overlap between it and the Ministry of Housing and Local Government in this field. The second difficulty, not of their making, or only partly of their making, is that this is a period of transition in local government. Many people think that the old pattern of local government is inadequate for the burdens it is increasingly having to bear, but few of us would honestly wish ourselves into the job of the members of the Royal Commission, believing that we could easily write a Report showing how local government should pan out. The truth is, as I said earlier this afternoon, that the local government of the future may be—I do not know; but it may be—very different in pattern from the local government in which a number of your Lordships, including myself, have gained our experience; and the Government are having to develop their regional economic policy—an important task—at this transitional stage of local government.
What I am asking is that the Government should make as clear as they possibly can to all concerned just where the responsibilities lie, just what local authorities must be prepared to do, and just where the decisions eventually are going to be taken. If we can get this right I am sure that we can improve the pattern of machinery for the better government of this country and for its better economic development on a regional and national basis. But if we get it wrong, we shall be wasting a great deal of key people's valuable time and missing a tremendous opportunity. I hope the Government will accept that this debate has not been initiated in any Party political spirit, but that the Question was put on the Paper, I think most wisely, by my noble friend Lord Ilford from the conviction that the House of Lords is a place where there is time, as there is not always in another place, to ask the Government to state clearly how they see the machinery and how they desire the machinery to operate.
5.48 p.m.
LORD BESWICK: My Lords, we have had an interesting discussion, and I hope that it will prove to be a useful one. Those noble Lords who have spoken have kept closely to the Question put down on the Order Paper by the noble Lord, Lord Ilford; and, as did the noble Lord, Lord Brooke of Cumnor, who preceded me, I appreciate very much the spirit in which the noble Lord initiated our discussion. It was particularly interesting, I thought, that, although there were criticisms to be made, there was no noble Lord (and certainly not the noble Lord, Lord Brooke of Cumnor, who initiated the South-East Study) who in any way attempted to controvert this idea of a regional approach to our problems. As the noble Lord, Lord Brooke, said, it is a matter only of the effectiveness and efficiency of the system that we are anxious to establish. I hope I am right when I say that I accepted the reference by the noble Viscount, Lord Gage, to my debating ability as a compliment. In any event, I assure him that this evening I am concerned only to try to state, or to restate, the thinking of the Government about the regional planning machinery.
My Lords, may I first distinguish between the Regional Economic Planning Councils and the Regional Boards? As the noble Lord, Lord Ilford, said, the Councils are advisory bodies—and I emphasise, as he asked me to emphasise, this word "advisory". Their purpose is to assist the Government in two main ways. The first is to consider the needs, potential and the problems of a region as a whole, so that the Government can take a more informed view in the formulation of national policy. Secondly, the Councils are required to develop plans, and a broad planning strategy, for each region as a guide for action by the Government themselves and for the other bodies within the region who have executive powers and responsibilities. As my noble friend Lord Donaldson said, the Council members are appointed by the Secretary of State for Economic Affairs as individuals with knowledge and experience of the region, capable of making a contribution to the planning of the region as a whole. The members are drawn from both sides of industry, from local authorities, and from universities and professional bodies concerned with

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aspects of planning. The Councils, therefore, embrace a very wide range of experience, and few will doubt the value of their contribution in the planning field. The members are not, let me stress, appointed as representatives or delegates of any public body or interest. This means that they are free to advise on what they consider to be the best interests of the region as a whole.
The Boards, on the other hand, consist of representatives of the main Government Departments concerned with the economic, physical and social planning in a region. They customarily include representatives of the Board of Trade, the Ministries of Agriculture, Housing and Local Government, Transport, Labour and Technology, with the representative of the D.E.A. in the Chair. Most of these Departments have had regional representatives before these Councils were established, and most of them are fairly fully occupied with their different departmental responsibilities. But the Board does provide greater co-ordination of the work of the Departments, and through the Board the Councils are provided with the basic information and supporting services which they need. The provision, in this way, of facts available to Government and information about Government policies enables the Councils to form their own ideas against a practical and realistic background. The Councils and Boards together therefore constitute the regional machinery. I have stressed that the Councils are advisory, but of course they are also the only bodies concerned with the task of economic planning for a region as a whole. The Government must therefore attach weight to the views and advice which they receive from the Councils in relation to regional matters.
The planning work of the Councils is not dependent upon there being a National Plan, although, naturally, they must take full account of national policies and national planning studies. At the same time most of us will appreciate that economic planning is a continuous process, and Councils, by studying their regions and formulating proposals, contribute to national planning as it evolves. The noble Lord, Lord Ilford, has been concerned, as was the noble Viscount, Lord Gage, with the relationship of these regional bodies to local town planning
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authorities and local authorities generally.
The powers and responsibilities of the local authorities are defined by Statute; and those Statutes are in no way affected by the existence of the Councils and Boards. The Planning Councils have no executive powers, and cannot take decisions, which can only be taken by the Government and by the local authorities. Their influence, which can be considerable, comes from the fact that they look at problems on a regional scale, and the value of the work they do is enhanced by their capacity to identify regional problems as a whole. These arrangements do not affect local authorities' own duties and rights, particularly of access to Government, nor do they diminish the need for local planning authorities to cooperate together. The Government see no conflict between the bodies such as the Standing Conferences of Planning Authorities and the Planning Councils. On the contrary, there is here a fruitful basis for co-operation between the statutory authorities responsible for local planning and the Councils concerned with the application of Government policy in the region.
The noble Viscount, Lord Gage, mentioned a particular case where there had been, he thought, some confusion as a result of proposals made by the South-East Planning Council about decanting overspill population in a certain borough. May I say how much I appreciated the intervention by my noble friend Lord Donaldson of Kingsbridge and the way he gave his point of view about the relationship of the South-East Council with the local authorities within their area. But I imagine that the noble Viscount was referring to the Hastings incident. I understand that the South-East Council recommended that Hastings should have an overspill scheme. This was noted by the Ministry of Housing and Local Government and by the Greater London Council. As a result the G.L.C. approached Hastings to negotiate agreements.
It might be thought that here was an example of a Regional Council, by virtue of their responsibility to range over the region as a whole, identifying a suitable borough for overspill decanting. The G.L.C. is, of course, free to open discussions with planning authorities about

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overspill, and Hastings, as a county borough, was under no obligation to consult neighbouring authorities unless they were directly affected. I see the noble Viscount wishes to intervene, but perhaps I may add this, which I hope will to some extent meet the noble Viscount. It may be that it would have been wiser if the East Sussex County Council, of which the noble Viscount is a distinguished member, had been informed. I quite agree; but this was, in fact, overlooked. But there was nothing here which in any way acted against the principle or the structure that we are discussing. However, it should have been a matter of courtesy, I should have thought.
VISCOUNT GAGE: My Lords, I intervene to say, in the interests of strict accuracy, that the Hastings area appears in the South-East Study strategy map as an area for future study—by whom it does not say. I agree that it might have been developed, as it was under the South-East Study; but the same thing had been happening also in Hampshire.
LORD BESWICK: Yes, my Lords, but surely there was a local authority, the G.L.C., whose responsibility was to consult with local authorities, here, in fact, consulting with a county borough who, for their part, were quite entitled, without any permission or other consultation, to discuss a matter of common interest. I quite agree that it might have been better if those two local authorities had kept informed the surrounding East Sussex County Council. But I am assured that this is an isolated incident. Most of the Council's strategy and the reference they made to the overspill proposals is related to the long-term. There is no immediate urgency about the decisions. But the Government are anxious that the uncertainty created should be cleared up as early as possible, and I understand that the Government reply will be made public as soon as possible.
That was one particular example and, as I have said, I think in that case we are dealing with an isolated incident. But I recognise that the noble Lords who have spoken, including the noble Lord, Lord Ilford, himself President of the Association of Municipal Corporations,
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must speak with an experience which reflects a feeling among local authority organisations; and if they say that there is to some extent uncertainty, then clearly there must be some basis for the views they express. On the other hand, my Lords, I do not feel that we should exaggerate the degree of uncertainty. I do not think it would be wise, either, to overlook what has already been done to clear away this uncertainty, and to establish greater understanding.
For example, last November the Secretary of State had a useful meeting with representatives of all the local authority organisations; with the A.M.C., the County Councils Association, the Urban District Councils Association and the Rural District Councils Association, and I believe there also were present representatives of the Greater London Council. The discussion which they had was specifically to consider this matter of the relations between the local authorities and the regional bodies. My right honourable friend has every hope that the respective roles will be more clearly understood and that, consequently, there will be established greater scope for cooperation. I understand that as a result of that meeting a memorandum has been prepared setting out the factors discussed and the understandings which were reached. Preliminary discussions on the draft of that memorandum have already begun with some of the local authority organisations.
The noble Lord, Lord Ilford, spoke, as did the noble Lord, Lord Inglewood, about the inhibitions which, they felt, might be placed upon some Council members by virtue of the fact that they operate under the Official Secrets Act. It is true that they are sometimes consulted by the Government on matters about which there is a degree of secrecy, or, at any rate, the matters are confidential; and clearly it facilitates frank discussion with the Regional Councils if this secrecy is observed. But although some measure of restraint is necessary, I am surprised, and indeed sorry, to hear that this is causing any real difficulty. Certainly, it is the intention both of the Government and of the Councils to strengthen their co-operation and not allow the operation of the Official Secrets Act to come between them in any significant way.

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My Lords, since I was asked to make this clear, I emphasise again that it is the desire of the Government that there should be the closest possible relations between the Councils and the planning authorities, with each side helping the other to the good of both. Co-operation is the keynote, and there is no question at all of the Planning Councils being imposed on the local authorities as an intermediary between them and the Government.
The noble Lord, Lord Inglewood, asked about the cost of these Regional Councils. I can understand that he had some difficulty in picking out the various items because, as I have said, the members of Regional Boards are themselves members of different Government Departments, and, of course, their salaries are carried on the different Departmental Votes. The annual expenditure on the D.E.A. Vote of the Northern Regional Economic Planning Council, which is what the noble Lord asked about particularly, is for the travelling and subsistence allowances only, plus an honorarium of £750 to the Chairman. The travelling and subsistence costs of all the Councils are included in the amount under sub-head "B" of the Department Vote. The noble Lord will find, if he looks at the Command Paper, that under sub-head "B" of the D.E.A. Vote there is an amount of £75,000, but this includes the general administrative expenses of the Department, as well as all the travelling and subsistence allowances for all the Councils in the country.
LORD INGLEWOOD: My Lords, in the interests of accuracy will the noble Lord allow me to say that it was £75,000 last year? It is £82,000 this year, which shows the upward trend.
LORD BESWICK: My Lords, the noble Lord is better informed than I am. I am dealing with the Civil Estimates for the year ending March, 1968, and the figure under subhead "B"—I quite agree with the noble Lord—is £82,000, as against £75,000 last year.
The noble Lord asked whether these accounts are audited. Of course, the estimates of Government Departments come under the Comptroller and Auditor General. The noble Lord, Lord Inglewood, also asked about the New-
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castle office in which he seemed to think there had been changes, and where he thought there might be expenses. I gather that the Northern Regional Economic Planning Board has a supporting staff of 19 in the Regional Office, whose total salaries amount to approximately £35,000 per annum. In addition, of course, they incur the normal travelling expenses.
My Lords, the White Paper on Town and Country Planning (Cmnd. 3533) stated clearly that it is the intention that the local planning authorities should consult planning councils on the formative stage of planning so that account part be taken of the Council's views on regional policies and strategies in the preparation of local authority plans. It is, of course, for the Ministry of Housing and Local Government to consider the development plans of local authorities and for the local planning authorities to consider how far their plans should be adjusted in the light of the strategy for a region that may be recommended by a planning council. It is the intention that both central and local planning should be influenced by the studies and advice on regional considerations from the Councils and the Government make public their views on the reports prepared by the Councils, but the final decision rests, and must rest, with the executive authorities.
That is the position at the present time. I was asked about the future. Many ideas have, of course, been floated in various quarters about the development of regional machinery. As noble Lords will know, there is a Royal Commission sitting now to consider the future of local government. Its findings and recommendations will, no doubt, have a bearing not only on the shape of local government but on regional planning itself. I cannot, therefore, speculate as to what may be the development of these regional planning bodies in the future. We must wait to see what comes out of the Royal Commission's Report.
For the present, my Lords, the Government are satisfied that the Councils have an important role to play as advisory bodies, and they will continue to give them every support. I was very grateful that the noble Lord, Lord Ilford, felt able to pay a tribute to the contribution made by the Regional Councils, by these unpaid people. For my part, I should like to add my tribute to the work and

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effort put into regional planning by some 240 people, all eminent in their own walk of life and all very busy but who nevertheless contrive to serve their region in this way. In particular, the studies and reports they have prepared have earned
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wide commendation, and I hope that we shall find it possible to congratulate them on what they have done so far.
House adjourned at eight minutes past six o'clock.