Lords Sitting of 15 May 1969

Preamble
The House met at three of the clock: The LORD CHANCELLOR on the Woolsack.
Prayers—Read by the Lord Bishop of Portsmouth

VIETNAM: UNITED STATES AND USE OF BRITISH AIRCRAFT
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 whether negotiations are proceeding for the Government-controlled firm of Short Brothers and Harland to sell military aircraft to the United States Government for use in Vietnam.]
THE PARLIAMENTARY SECRETARY, MINISTRY OF HOUSING AND LOCAL GOVERNMENT (LORD KENNET): My Lords, Government policy remains unchanged. It is that arms—and this term includes any aircraft for use in a military role—may not be sold by British firms to the armed forces of other countries for use in Vietnam.
LORD BROCKWAY: My Lords, I appreciate that Answer, but is it not the case that these aircraft are the military type of Sky van transport aircraft? Is it not the case that negotiations for them have been with the Pentagon in Washington? And is not the war against Vietnam indivisible? How can there be any guarantee whether these aircraft are used for so-called civilian purposes or military purposes; that they will not be assisting the Americans in the Vietnam war?
LORD KENNET: My Lords, I understand that the United States Department of Defence has a potential interest in the Skyvan, the kind of aeroplane we are talking about, which exists at the moment only in a civilian version. There is no application before the Government for a licence to sell these aeroplanes abroad, and so it is a matter that will have to be considered if and when such an application materializes.
LORD BROCKWAY: My Lords, again expressing appreciation to my noble friend for that answer, may I ask him this question? Would not these aircraft be very important for the purpose of rehabilitation uses? Further, in view of the more hopeful development of negotiations in Paris, could not any licence for them be held up until a situation exists where rehabilitation can be commenced?
LORD KENNET: My Lords, I am sure that the aircraft could be useful in many roles, constructive as well as destructive. I think the question of the application must await the moment if and when it materialises.
LORD TREFGARNE: My Lords, is not the order in question for a licence to build these aircraft in the United States and not to purchase them from stocks built in Belfast? Can the noble Lord say whether the Government's objections—which I have no doubt we all share—to supplying aircraft for the Vietnam conflict extends to prohibition on licensing building operations overseas?
LORD KENNET: My Lords, that is another question, and I know the whole House will agree with me when I say that the situation in the last week or two has made it such that, with any luck, all these considerations will become hypothetical before any deal can reach any conclusive stage.
LORD MILNER OF LEEDS: My Lords, is it not important to distinguish between the military and civil versions of the Skyvan? Would my noble friend agree that Shorts should not be prevented from selling the civil version in the United States because of the policy of the United States Government in Vietnam?
LORD KENNET: My Lords, it seems important to distinguish between the two versions of the plane, one of which exists and the other of which does not exist. The general policy I have already stated in my first Answer.
LORD BROCKWAY: My Lords, is it not the case that these are the military version of the Skyvan transport aircraft?
LORD BALFOUR OF INCHRYE: My Lords, is it not about time we approached the question of exports with an attitude of mind that encourages and not discourages Britain's exports?
LORD KENNET: My Lords, we have to bear in mind the two considerations which may on occasion conflict. On the one hand, exports are a good thing because they bring in foreign currency; on the other hand, we are one of the co-Chairmen of the Geneva Conference which gives us a special position with regard to the Vietnam war.
LORD KILBRACKEN: My Lords, if it is undesirable to supply military aircraft to the United States in Vietnam, is it not all the more undesirable to supply them to such a Government as that in Baghdad which is using them indiscriminately against the civilian population in Kurdistan?
LORD KENNET: My Lords, I really should be grateful for notice of that question.

TELEPHONE SERVICE: S.T.D. FAILURES AND CALL CHARGES
3.10 p.m.
VISCOUNT MASSEREENE AND FERRARD: My Lords, I beg leave to ask the Question which stands in my name on the Order Paper.
[The Question was as follows:
To ask Her Majesty's Government whether operator-controlled calls made necessary by a failure of the self-dialling procedure will in future be charged at the appropriate cheaper rate, thus ending the potential vested interest of the Post Office in mechanical failure of the S.T.D. service.]
LORD BOWLES: No, my Lords. Not all subscriber trunk dialled call failures are the fault of the Post Office. Efforts are being made to reduce those that are. The average cost to the Post Office of an operator-controlled trunk call is twice that of an S.T.D. call. Charges reflect this difference. Callers without S.T.D. must pay operator rates. It would be unfair if customers on S.T.D. used the operator's services at a lower rate than those who do not have S.T.D. facilities.
VISCOUNT MASSEREENE AND FERRARD: My Lords, while thanking the noble Lord for that Answer, which I frankly cannot quite understand, may I ask him whether he can give me some estimate of the cost to the G.P.O. of misrouted S.T.D. calls and whether extra staff are engaged on this?
LORD BOWLES: My Lords, that is a difficult one to understand as well. The position is that in 8·1 per cent. of all S.T.D. calls made in 1967–68, the main cause of failure was congestion on the trunk routes. Up to 1,000 new trunk circuits are being provided each month to relieve this. As regards the other question, 28·9 per cent. of subscribers failed to get their S.T.D. calls through; 15 per cent. of calls were not completed because the customer's number was engaged; 7 per cent. because there was no reply as the chap had gone out; and about 4 per cent. because the number was incorrectly dialled.
THE EARL OF SELKIRK: My Lords, how does the noble Lord know whether the failure is due to the dialling procedure or to the fact that the wrong number has been dialled?
LORD BOWLES: My Lords, I said that about 4 per cent. were due to the fact that the wrong number was dialled or the number was not correctly dialled.
THE EARL OF SELKIRK: My Lords, how is that known?
LORD BOWLES: My Lords, the Post Office is very clever in getting all the figures that are necessary to answer the most extraordinary questions asked in this House.
VISCOUNT MASSEREENE AND FERRARD: My Lords, is the noble Lord aware that apparently the Post Office is not clever enough to have an efficient system of S.T.D. calls?
LORD AIREDALE: My Lords, may I ask an extraordinary question? When may we all hope to have S.T.D. facilities?
LORD BOWLES: By 1975, my Lords.

UNPAID COURT FINES
LORD FERRIER: 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 the total amount of unpaid court fines in the United Kingdom on the latest date for which figures are available; and what proportion, if any, of that total is now deemed to be irrecoverable]
THE MINISTER OF STATE, HOME OFFICE (LORD STONHAM): My Lords, in 1968 the Home Office received from the courts in England and Wales, outside Inner London, fines totalling £12,127,174, and £198,527 was written off as irrecoverable. That is about 1·6 per cent. The arrears on December 31, 1968, amounted to £3,749,625, but they included fines the time for payment of which had not expired. I regret that comparable information is not available for Scotland, where there is no comprehensive central record of fines paid into courts, unpaid fines or fines written off as irrecoverable.
LORD FERRIER: My Lords, I thank the noble Lord for his reply. Can he say whether the courts have power to record a liability to a fine on an offender's insurance card; and, if not, would such power help the situation?
LORD STONHAM: My Lords, the courts have no such power. As to whether it would help, I should have thought there were enough recourses in law to make the noble Lord's suggestion unnecessary. Certainly it would involve a great deal of work to small purpose, because if the amount of fines written off is something like 1½per cent., part of which must come under the new powers of the courts to reduce fines, it does not seem to me that such a stringent proposal as that is required at all.
LORD HAWKE: My Lords, for how long are unpaid fines carried forward? Is it up to the period allowed by the Statute of Limitation? I cannot quite understand why they should be written off at the end of one year.
LORD STONHAM: My Lords, I am sorry if my reply misled the noble Lord. The amount of £198,000 that I gave
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was the amount that had been written off during the year. Some of those fines would, of course, have been imposed in earlier years, just as the amount of £12 million-odd received during the year would be in part fines imposed during 1967. I mentioned that the amount still outstanding was some £3¾ million, but of course 98½ per cent. of that could be expected to be recovered. As to when they are written off, they are written off when the court decides that it is not going to get them.
VISCOUNT DILHORNE: My Lords, is the noble Lord satisfied with the procedure for recovery of fines which are overdue? Also, is he satisfied with this writing off procedure, which means that those who have been fined for criminal offences escape without paying any penalty at all?
LORD STONHAM: My Lords, I cannot accept that of necessity they escape without paying any penalty. That would arise only if they paid no fines at all, but, as the noble and learned Viscount is aware, we inserted into the Criminal Justice Act 1967 a provision for the courts to collect fines by instalments. We are having research into the working of the new 1967 provisions, and perhaps I shall be able to answer that question properly in a few months' time. Meanwhile, things seem to be going pretty well. In Inner London the irrecoverable part is only 1·4 per cent.
VISCOUNT DILHORNE: My Lords, I thank the noble Lord for his reply
VISCOUNT ST. DAVIDS: My Lords, will my noble friend tell me whether this very small figure of 1½ per cent. is perhaps due to deaths, to people permanently leaving the country or to other such reasons? It seems to me a very small proportion to explain in any other way.
LORD STONHAM: My Lords, I think that the small proportion is explained by the general probity of the British people and the efficiency of the courts. My noble friend has suggested obvious reasons for writing off fines. If a person is dead or has gone to another part of the world, of course we must write them off. But when we think of the possibilities for fines being irrecoverable, 1½ per cent. is a very small percentage, and a most gratitfying one.

COMMONWEALTH IMMIGRANTS AND ENTRY CERTIFICATES
3.20 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 what action has been taken to make the system of compulsory entry certificates for Commonwealth immigrants workable by (a) providing an adequate staff at the British High Commissions and (b) completing arrangements with Commonwealth Governments for expeditious communications with applicants at distant places.]
THE MINISTER OF STATE, FOREIGN AND COMMONWEALTH OFFICE (LORD CHALFONT): My Lords, I would remind my noble friend that entry certificates have been issued by British High Commissions in Commonwealth countries since 1962, when the first Commonwealth Immigrants Act was passed. The new requirement that entry certificates shall be compulsory for Commonwealth citizens coming to this country for settlement is an extension of these arrangements, and additional entry certificate officers will shortly be sent to High Commission Offices where the work is likely to be heaviest. Commonwealth Governments have not been asked to make special arrangements for communication with distant places in their countries. This is because experience over the past seven years has not indicated any special need for them.
LORD BROCKWAY: My Lords, while thanking my noble friend for that reply, may I ask him these supplementary questions? First, is he aware that during the Third Reading debate on this matter it was clearly indicated that there was a very inadequate staff for dealing with the larger number of applications which will be made, but that many of us were reassured by the answer of the Minister, who indicated that the staff would be doubled? Could he now say to what extent the staff is to be doubled? In regard to the second part of my Question, is it not the case that in India and Pakistan, and in the small islands in the Caribbean, a large number of applicants
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will live at distant places, with no reasonable opportunity to present their cases at the High Commission offices? Is it not therefore desirable that there should be some consultation with Commonwealth Governments so that these new arrangements can be facilitated?
LORD CHALFONT: My Lords, on the subject of the inadequate number of staff, I think I can best indicate the extent to which we are attempting to deal with this by saying that under the new requirements the work-load is approximately doubled and the staff is being approximately trebled; so this means that we are taking good care to see that the number of extra entry certificate officers is sufficient to meet the need. On the question of people living in distant places in the Caribbean and elsewhere, I can only say that in the past we have not discovered that this has been an insuperable difficulty. Where people live in distant places they usually have to come to the principal cities in any case to get their passports; and in order to get their entry certificates the same thing naturally applies. I can only repeat what I said in my original Answer: that our experience since 1962 has indicated that there is no need for any additional resource of this kind to be provided.
LORD WADE: My Lords, may I ask the noble Lord what consultations have taken place with voluntary bodies in this country with regard to the provision of advice, particularly to dependants, in the countries of origin; and whether any grant will be made to assist in this quite useful service?
LORD CHALFONT: My Lords, I think that all this has indeed been made clear in your Lordships' House by my noble friend. The answer is that there has been full consultation with the voluntary bodies, that there will be such a grant, and that the amount of it is now being considered.
LORD ROYLE: My Lords, may I ask my noble friend whether he will look again at the second part of the Question set down by my noble friend Lord Brockway, with regard to distant places? Is it not a fact that in the Caribbean there are many islands where, of course, there is no High Commissioner's office, and where the transport facilities are not very easy? May I ask him whether he

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would have another look at this matter to see if further help can be given in this regard?
LORD CHALFONT: My Lords, I will certainly undertake to have another look at it. I cannot, however, undertake that the answer will be very much different. I am advised that the work-load in the Caribbean does not make the provision of this kind of thing necessary. The scheme has now been working since 1962—for seven years—and there has been no indication that this kind of thing is necessary. The extra work-load brought about by the new requirement falls largely in India and Pakistan, and not in the Caribbean at all.
THE EARL OF SELKIRK: My Lords, may I ask the noble Lord whether it is a general practice in the Civil Service that when the work is doubled the staff is trebled?
LORD CHALFONT: If the number of staff was inadequate before, yes.
LORD BROCKWAY: My Lords, may I ask my noble friend whether he will ask his office to reconsider this whole matter? Is he aware that many Members of this House, not only from this side, who have some knowledge of this question, know that before the new arrangements were made applicants had sometimes to wait for six days in front of iron gates before their applications were considered; and that at very distant places, more in Pakistan than in India—
SEVERAL NOBLE LORDS: Order!
LORD BROCKWAY: This is a terribly serious question.
SEVERAL NOBLE LORDS: Speech!
THE LORD PRIVY SEAL (LORD SHACKLETON): My Lords, if I may interrupt the noble Lord, I am bound to say that he made these very considerable and forceful points in a fairly long speech on the Third Reading, and I had the impression that my noble friend Lord Stonham answered them pretty fully. I would only suggest that if he would ask a rather short, sharp question, then another Minister will have a go.
LORD BROCKWAY: My Lords, I will try to do so. May I ask the Minister whether his Department will look very
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seriously at this issue, from the point of view both of the personnel able to deal with applicants and of the appalling difficulty of people in distant villages being able to make their applications when they are, very often, 500 miles away?
LORD CHALFONT: My Lords, my noble friend 'will know, of course, that it is the Home Department that is responsible for the administration of this Commonwealth Immigrants Act. My noble friend made all these points before, and I thought they had all been fully and adequately answered by my noble friend. But, of course, I will take note, and will undertake that what my noble friend has said is brought to the attention of my right honourable friend.

STATUTE LAW (REPEALS) BILL [H.L.]
THE LORD CHANCELLOR (LORD GARDINER): My Lords, I beg leave to introduce a Bill to promote the reform of the statute law by the repeal, in accordance with recommendations of the Law Commission, of certain enactments which (except in so far as their effect is preserved) are no longer of practical utility, and by making other provision in connection with the repeal of those enactments My Lords, copies of the Report relating to the Bill, which makes it more readily understandable, will be available in the Printed Paper Office in your Lordships' House and in the Vote Office., in another place. I beg to move that this Bill be now read a first time.
Moved, That the Bill be now read 1a. —(The Lord Chancellor.)
On Question, Bill read 1a, and to be printed.

TATTOOING OF MINORS BILL
Read 3a, and passed.

DECIMAL CURRENCY BILL
3.28 p.m.
LORD BESWICK: My Lords, I beg to move that this Bill be now read a third time.
Moved, That the Bill be now read 3a.—(Lord Beswick.)
LORD FRASER OF LONSDALE: My Lords, may I ask the indulgence of

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the House to intervene for the briefest possible time? This subject is perhaps 150 years old. Nevertheless, I had the honour to be the first in this House to pursue it again, some few years ago, after the South African Government had been the first among our family at that time to introduce decimal coinage; and I had many passages of arms with the noble Earl, Lord Dundee, when he was the Minister concerned. I should like to make just a few observations.
The first is that I welcome the Bill and congratulate the Government upon having brought it thus far. Secondly, I welcome the pound as the unit. I do not think the arguments for the 10s. unit were sound. I welcome the pound for status reasons. Thirdly, I do not consider that the smallest coin in the decimal system now to be brought in—namely, about 2½d.—is too small, for the very good reason that 2½d. to-day is the equivalent of a farthing thirty years ago, and the farthing was hardly used at that time except when playing cards. Very soon 2½d. will be worth very much less; and it will not be found to be too heavy a coin. Furthermore, I do not support the 6d. As well as the noble Lord, Lord Sainsbury, I am a shopkeeper and I know what a fearful muddle the saleswomen and men will get into if they have to deal with the 6d. any longer. Moreover, the extent to which the 6d. is required for automatic machines is almost negligible. I therefore think that the Bill is a piece of good business done by this House and I congratulate this House and the Government.
On Question, Bill read 3a.
LORD BESWICK: My Lords, in moving that this Bill do now pass, I should like to say how much I appreciated what was said by the noble Lord, Lord Fraser of Lonsdale. The House will probably agree that a word of good will to the Bill on its way to the Statute Book is called for. There were some disputations, but the controversies were always carried out with absolute fairness. I thank those who took part and I acknowledge the scrupulous fairness shown throughout the discussions that we have had. We ought also, I think, to offer good wishes to those who will be responsible for the change-over period and, in particular, this House may care
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to send best wishes to my noble friend Lord Fiske, Chairman of the Decimal Currency Board, who was in hospital throughout the time that we considered the Bill here but who just this week, I am glad to say, is back home again. He will have some of the burdens and I am sure that we all wish him well. I beg to move that the Bill do now pass.
Moved, That the Bill do now pass.—(Lord Beswick.)
On Question, Bill passed.

TANZANIA BILL [H.L.]
Read 3a, and passed, and sent to the Commons.
ARMY RESERVE BILL
Read 3a, and passed.

REDUNDANT CHURCHES AND OTHER RELIGIOUS BUILDINGS BILL
LORD KENNET: My Lords, I beg to move that this Bill be now read a third time. I should not like this Bill to leave your Lordships' House without recording the admiration of this House and of the Government for the work of the Bridges Commission, under the chairmanship of a most distinguished Member of this House, which sat between 1958 and 1960 and on the Report of which most of what is in the Bill is based.
Moved. That the Bill be now read 3a.—(Lord Kennet.)
LORD ILFORD: My Lords, I shall detain the House for only a moment to say how glad I am that the noble Lord has referred to the work done by Lord Bridges and the Commission over which he presided. I was Chairman of the Commission appointed by the Church Assembly to frame the Pastoral Measure, which dealt among other matters with the problem of the churches which had become redundant, and I had a special opportunity of appreciating the value of the work which Lord Bridges and his colleagues did in handling that very difficult problem. The procedure for dealing with churches that have become redundant, which is now laid down in the

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Pastoral Measure, follows exactly the work of Lord Bridges's Commission. I am sure that your Lordships, and all who are interested in these matters, will feel deeply grateful to him for what he and his Commission were able to do.
On Question, Bill read 3a, and passed.

FOREIGN COMPENSATION BILL
LORD CHALFONT: My Lords, I beg to move that the Commons Reason for disagreeing to one of the Lords Amendments to the Foreign Compensation Bill be now considered.
Moved, That the Commons Reason be now considered.—(Lord Chalfont.)
On Question, Motion agreed to.

COMMONS REASON FOR DISAGREEING TO ONE OF THE LORDS AMENDMENTS
[The reference is to Bill (35) as first printed for the Lords. The Commons Reason is printed in italics.]

LORDS AMENDMENT
Clause 1, page 2, line 34, leave out subsection (5).
The Commons disagreed to this Amendment for the following Reason:
Because it alters the financial arrangements made by the Commons, and the Commons do not offer any further reason, trusting that this reason may be deemed sufficient.
LORD CHALFONT: My Lords, I beg to move that this House doth not insist on its Amendment No. 2 to which the Commons have disagreed. The House will remember that this Bill was passed on March 27 with five Amendments. Four of these have been accepted in another place. Amendment No. 2 which was to leave out subsection (5) of Clause 1 of the Bill as it originally came to us, was not accepted, and it has been decided in another place that this subsection ought to stand part of the Bill. The relevant subsection reads as follows:
"When so directed by the Treasury, the custodian of enemy property shall, by way of repaying a payment of £500,000 made out of moneys provided by Parliament for the purpose of implementing the provisions of the agreement recited above for the payment of that sum to the Government of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, pay the like sum into the Consolidated Fund out of money held by him, being former property of a Baltic State or ceded territory."
As the House will see from the Message before us, a question of financial
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arrangements made by the Commons is involved. I need not, I think, elaborate on this. The effect of omitting the subsection is to leave the burden of the payment of £500,000 to the Soviet Government, which has already been made, with the Exchequer instead of recouping the Exchequer from the assets, as was explicitly envisaged in Article 5 of tile Agreement with the Soviet Government of January 5, 1968. It has never been seriously argued, I think, in this House or indeed in another place, that this payment should fall upon the taxpayer rather than upon the claimants to whom the assets are to be distributed and in whose interests the Agreement with the Soviet Government was concluded, and I can think of no reason why it should. As I understand it, the reason why this House deleted the subsection, as the noble and learned Viscount, Lord Dilhorne, said in the course of an earlier debate, was that it was the only way in which disapproval of the Agreement with the Soviet Government could be shown and would give another place another opportunity of considering this matter. Now that it has been reconsidered in another place, which adheres to the view that the subsection should be retained it is the Government's hope that this House -will not feel it necessary to insist on this deletion.
As for the provision in the Agreement of which this House was seeking to express its disapproval, it is perhaps too much to expect that I could at this late stage, bearing in mind all that has been said in this House, convert many noble Lords opposite to the Government's view that the payment of this £500,000 to the Soviet Government was a price which had to be paid, and was worth paying, for an Agreement with them. Nor, I think, would the House wish me to take up any more time in going once more over the ground which was fully debated when the Bill was before us. My Lords, may I perhaps subscribe to the general atmosphere of good will that we have in the House this afternoon by saying how grateful and appreciative I was, as the Government spokesman on this Bill, for the care and expert knowledge with which this Bill was considered. I believe that the Bill as it has now come back is a better Bill than the one which arrived here in the first place. I hope that as noble

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Lords have now made their protest they will be content and will not press any further for the deletion of the subsection from the Bill. I beg to move.
Moved, That this House doth not insist on the Amendment to which the Commons have disagreed.—(Lord Chalfont.)
3.40 p.m.
THE MARQUESS OF LANSDOWNE: My Lords, despite what the noble Lord, Lord Chalfont, said about the atmosphere of good will that prevails in this House this afternoon, I am afraid that I cannot resist expressing views which perhaps cannot be translated as being good will. Presumably this is the last occasion on which we shall be considering this humiliating and objectionable piece of legislation. On May 1, in another place, when your Lordships' Amendments were considered and when, as the noble Lord, Lord Chalfont, has told us four Amendments out of five were accepted, it was pointed out that in Amendment No. 2, to which the Commons have disagreed, privilege was involved. Nevertheless, we are to consider this afternoon the Reason advanced and accepted in another place for disagreement with this Amendment as the noble Lord, Lord Chalfont, has explained to us. We have already discussed at considerable length this squalid transaction between the Prime Minister, the then Foreign Secretary and Mr. Kosygin, and I will not weary your Lordships by again going over all the details, but I feel bound w say that this transaction and what has flowed from it seem to me to epitomise some of the most unpleasant aspects of Government as it is at present practised in this country.
I was surprised and dismayed, when your Lordships were discussing the important legal question of the desirability or otherwise of appeal either against a provisional determination or a final determination of the Foreign Compensation Commission, but not against both on the same matter, to hear the noble and learned Lord who sits on the Woolsack twice assure this House that the Government did not stand to lose or gain, whatever the solution. It seemed to me at the time a strange remark and to suggest, if I may say so, an attitude which was not consonant with the high
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responsibility of the Lord High Chancellor of England. Perhaps if this observation had not also been twice repeated by the Solicitor General in another place when dealing with the same question, I should have dismissed it as simply an unfortunate choice of words. Of course, my Lords, the noble and learned Lord who sits on the Woolsack, and his right honourable and learned friend the Solicitor General, would, one would have hoped, in any case have been concerned solely that the system of law should gain. Thanks to the initiative of the noble and learned Viscount, Lord Dilhorne, the noble and learned Lord, the Lord Chancellor, did finally introduce a new clause which has now been accepted by both Houses of Parliament, and I am grateful to him for this.
But, my Lords, what has all this to do with the consideration of the Commons disagreement with Amendment No. 2? It is this: that, unlike in the case of appeal from a determination of the Foreign Compensation Commission, in the case of Mr. Kosygin's visit to the United Kingdom there was much to be gained or lost by the Government in the appearance or otherwise of a diplomatic success. As your Lordships now know, little or nothing to the United Kingdom's advantage came out of Mr. Kosygin's visit. But in order to present some semblance of success and to achieve political gain for the Government, the Executive has appropriated funds to which it had no right in equity; it has given gratuitously £500,000 to the Government which had oppressed, murdered and subjugated the peoples to whom the funds belonged; it has shown complete contempt for Parliament; it has called in question our reliability as international bankers and it has humiliated honourable men and women in both Houses of Parliament who, because of our present Parliamentary system, have felt bound to support it.
Seven powerful and carefully argued speeches were made by right honourable and honourable Members of the Opposition in another place in support of your Lordships' Amendment No. 2. The Government Benches were practically empty and only the Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs spoke briefly for the Government. There was evidently as little enthusiasm

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to do the Executive's dirty business in another place as there was in your Lordships' House—and yet 95 Government supporters endorsed their bosses' actions. It is my belief, my Lords, that if the honest British people up and down the country knew all the facts of this squalid story as they have gradually and painfully been exposed to us in Parliament, they would be ashamed of the Government and, I believe, resentful that, through the arrogance and uncontrolled power of the Executive, they have themselves been put to shame.
3.45 p.m.
VISCOUNT DILHORNE: My Lords, I should like to add a few words to what my noble friend has said. I am very glad indeed that the noble Lord, Lord Chalfont, has not taken on the Homeric task again of trying to convince Members of this House that the bargain to pay the £500,000 was justified. I have said all I have to say on that matter and I do not propose to repeat what I have already said. I am glad that the noble Lord did not attempt to reopen that subject on this occasion. I am glad, too, that he recognised that in the course of the debates in this House we had secured improvements to the Bill.
I do not want to part company from my noble friend to any material degree, but I must say that I did not read any sinister significance at all into the words of the noble and learned Lord, the Lord Chancellor, in relation to the appeal system. The noble and learned Lord, the Lord Chancellor, was pressed as heavily as I could press him—and I am, I think, at least of considerable physical weight—to give way on that point; and I must say that I think it was perfectly justified to say that the Government, as such, had no interest in the matter, whichever way it went. I know, also, from the time that I held that office, that there always has been a considerable weight of opinion in certain quarters against there being any appeal procedure. We had a very useful discussion on it, and I think that the Bill has been considerably improved by the Amendments which were ultimately tabled in the name of the noble and learned Lord, the Lord Chancellor.
I did press the second Amendment to a Division, and I did so in order that this House could express its views upon the matter and with the object of enabling
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another place to give further consideration to it. That has now taken place, and I certainly should not be one to suggest for one moment, that course having been taken and a Division having taken place really on that basis, that we should now insist on that Amendment.
LORD CHALFONT: My Lords, let me say, first, that I am grateful to the noble and learned Viscount, Lord Dilhorne, for saying what he has said about his interpretation of the remarks made by my noble and learned friend who sits on the Woolsack. I am sure that that, coining from him, will have done a great deal to reassure anyone in this House who thought that there was anything sinister implied by those remarks—I cannot believe that there are very many.
My Lords, I had hoped not to reopen this matter, except in the most formal way, but I cannot, I feel, let pass what the noble Marquess, Lord Lansdowne, has said. Certainly he is right in saying that a good deal of the feeling of good will that existed before he stood up has now been effectively dispelled. I cannot really accept as a fair categorisation of either the Agreement with the Soviet Union or the Foreign Compensation Bill that followed it, the words "squalid", "humiliating" or "shameful". I must reject also emphatically the suggestion that this Agreement was arrived at with the Soviet Union for some ephemeral diplomatic advantage that would accrue to this Government. That is simply not the case. As I said before, and I will say it very briefly again, noble Lords opposite are no more entitled to use this kind of emotive language to describe this payment, in a situation in which there was almost complete incompatibility between Soviet and British views on the legal aspect and, indeed, total absence of agreement in general, than to describe any agreement which involves the payment of money by the British Government. The choice was between a settlement on the terms obtained or the continuation of long-drawn-out negotiations for many years, with no prospect of any better settlement at the end of the road.
The Government took the view that £500,000, a very small percentage of the total assets, was worth paying for Soviet agreement to forgo their claim to the assets and to place no impediment to those assets being distributed to our claimants. We believed that the

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majority of our claimants, in whose interests the settlement was being sought, even though they have no legal title to the assets other than that which we now create through this Bill, and who have been waiting for some thirty years, would far prefer a settlement on these terms with the prospect of early distribution, even though this means a very small reduction in the assets available for distribution. We thought that they would prefer this than indefinitely prolong negotiations in the faint hope that we may save this £500,000 for them. That is the case for the payment and for making the payment out of the assets.
The case for the Agreement we have argued at length in your Lordships' House. Even if I still have not been able wholly to persuade noble Lords opposite that the bargain which we made was a reasonable one, I emphatically repudiate any suggestion that it was "squalid", "shameful" or "humiliating". I believe that it is a good agreement. It was made in the interests of the people to whom this money will now be distributed. I hope, as the noble and learned Viscount has said, that noble Lords will not seek to press any further for the deletion of this subsection from the Bill.
On Question, Motion agreed to.

LAW OF PROPERTY BILL [H.L.]
3.52 p.m.
THE LORD CHANCELLOR: My Lords, I beg to move that this Report be now received.
Moved, That the Report be now received.—(The Lord Chancellor.)
On Question, Motion agreed to, and Report received accordingly.
THE LORD CHANCELLOR THE LORD CHANCELLOR moved Amendment No. 1:
After Clause 6, insert the following new clause:
Business carried on by company controlled by landlord
". At the end of section 30 of the Act of 1954 there shall be added the following subsection:—
(3) Where the landlord has a controlling interest in a company any business to be carried on by the company shall be treated for the purposes of subsection (1)(g) of this
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section as a business to be carried on by him.
For the purposes of this subsection, a person has a controlling interest in a company if and only if either—

(a) he is a member of it and able, without the consent of any other person, to appoint or remove the holders of at least a majority of the directorships, or

(b) he holds more than one-half of its equity share capital, there being disregarded any shares held by him in a fiduciary capacity or as nominee for another person;

and in this subsection 'company' and 'share' have the meanings assigned to them by section 455(1) of the Companies Act 1948 and equity share capital' the meaning assigned to it by section 154(5) of that Act."
The noble and learned Lord said: My Lords, I beg to move Amendment No. 1. This Amendment enables a landlord to oppose a request for the grant of a new tenancy of premises on the ground that a company in which he has a controlling interest intends to occupy the premises for the purposes of its business. It is intended to cure the defect in the operation of Section 30(1)(g) of the Landlord and Tenant Act 1954, mentioned in paragraph 5(i) of the Law Commission's Report on the Act, whereby a landlord can oppose a tenant's application for a new tenancy on the ground that he intends to occupy the holding for the purpose of his own business but not for a business to be carried on by a company which he controls. There is no justification for distinguishing in this connection between a business carried on by the landlord in person and one carried on by a company which he controls. The distinction can in any event be circumvented in many cases. The landlord can resist the new tenancy on the ground that he intends to occupy the holding for his business, and subsequently transfer his interest to a company. The Amendment accordingly provides that in Section 30(1)(g) a business to be carried on by the landlord is to include a business to be carried on by a company in which he has a controlling interest. A controlling interest is defined in the second paragraph.
VISCOUNT COLVILLE OF CULROSS: My Lords, I would simply say that I welcome this Amendment as being another piece of useful clearing up. The noble and learned Lord has explained its purpose; it seems very sensible, and I hope that the House will accept it.
On Question, Amendment agreed to.
Clause 7 [Grant of new tenancy in some cases where section 30(1)(f) applies.]:
THE LORD CHANCELLOR THE LORD CHANCELLOR moved Amendment No. 3:
Page 4, line 44, after ("holding") insert ("and without interfering to a substantial extent or for a substantial time with the use of the holding for the purposes of the business carried on by the tenant")
The noble and learned Lord said: My Lords, I beg to move Amendment No. 3. This Amendment is designed to prevent the possibility, inherent in Clause 7 in its present form, that the court might grant a new tenancy to a tenant who is willing to give the landlord access and facilities for a complete demolition and reconstruction of the premises.
The clause provides that the landlord shall not be able to resist a claim to a new lease on the ground that he needs possession for demolition or reconstruction of the premises, where the tenant is willing to give him access and facilities for carrying out his work. But as the tenant will be retaining notional possession in any case where he is willing to give such access and facilities, no matter how substantial the proposed redevelopment may be, it could be argued that in any such case the landlord does not need possession and accordingly is not entitled to reject the tenant's claim to a new lease. This criticism of the clause, which was advanced by the noble Viscount, Lord Colville of Culross, on Second Reading and in Committee, is met by the Amendment. The Amendment ensures that even where the tenant agrees to provide access and facilities for the landlord's works he will become entitled to a new lease only if the execution of the works will not substantially interfere—either in point of space or in point of time—with the use of the holding for the purpose of the tenant's business.
VISCOUNT COLVILLE OF CULROSS: My Lords, I am grateful to the Government for meeting this point. It was not only I who was worried about the scope of the clause as originally drawn: others who have much more experience than I of the operation of Part II of the 1954 Act thought it possible that this condition went too far as it stood. It is a matter of balance and it seems, from the noble and learned Lord's Amendment,
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that this balance is now restored. Previously I think it went too far the other way. In my view, the matter is now remedied and again, with many thanks to the noble and learned Lord for meeting this point, I hope the House will accept the Amendment.
On Question, Amendment agreed to.
Clause 9 [Saving for tenant temporarily out of occupation]:
VISCOUNT COLVILLE OF CULROSS VISCOUNT COLVILLE OF CULROSS moved Amendment No. 4:
Leave out Clause 9.
The noble Viscount said: My Lords, Clause 9 was widely discussed at the Committee stage of the Bill, and I also mentioned it on Second Reading. I think it would be tedious and unnecessary to go through the arguments which I put forward previously to suggest that, although the provisions in Clause 9 mere no doubt extremely sensible, in the way they have been expressed the clause will add nothing to the clarity of the situation as it exists. I drew attention to the way in which Mr. Justice Cross interpreted the word "occupation" in the second Caplan case when it came before him.
The noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor, with his usual courtesy, said that he would consider this argument again. I have considered it again also and I still think that Clause 9 adds nothing to the clarity which we seek. I do not think that it carries out the objective which the Law Commission suggested should be achieved in this part of the new legislation, in that it does not seem to have any effect upon the objective way in which occupation is looked at. That is already built into the law, as Mr. Justice Cross has described, and this clause does nothing whatever to change that. The noble and learned Lord agreed with me that there was only a small number of cases on which this would impinge and I would suggest that this is not a worthwhile clause in the Bill and that it ought not to occupy the Statute Book. The courts are capable of dealing with this and have already shown that they can do so fairly. Therefore, I would suggest that Parliament should leave the law as it is and leave out Clause 9. I beg to move.
THE LORD CHANCELLOR: My Lords, the Government would advise the

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House to accept this Amendment. I need not, I think, recapitulate the argument put forward by the noble Viscount. The Law Commission have indicated that they do not attach a great deal of importance to this clause. The Government have considered the argument put forward on Committee stage by the noble Viscount, and they accept it.
On Question, Amendment agreed to.
VISCOUNT COLVILLE OF CULROSS VISCOUNT COLVILLE OF CULROSS moved Amendment No. 5:
After Clause 9 insert the following new clause:
Group of Companies.
".For subsection (3) of section 42 of the Act of 1954 (Group of Companies) there shall be substituted the following subsection:—
'(3) Where the landlord's interest is held by a member of a group

(a) the reference in paragraph (g) of subsection (1) of section 30 of this Act to intended occupation by the landlord for the purposes of a business to be carried on by him shall be construed as including intended occupation by any member of the group for the purposes of a business to be carried on by that member; and

(b) the reference in subsection (2) of that section to the purchase or creation of any interest shall be construed as a reference to a purchase from or creation by a person other 'than a member of the group.'"

The noble Viscount said: My Lords, this is another matter which the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor said on Committee stage that he would look at with sympathy. I need hardly tell the House that my attempt at drafting a suitable Amendment at that stage came to grief. I do not believe I have ever yet drafted an Amendment to any legislation which was not open to very good criticism by the Parliamentary draftsmen, and I cannot pretend that this elegant Amendment is altogether my own work. Nevertheless, if the House agrees that it should be inserted into the Bill, I believe it will make a useful contribution to the working of the Landlord and Tenant Act, because it allows, for a particularly technical purpose, a group of companies to be treated as one when they are the landlord, in exactly the same way as they are under the existing law treated as one when they are the tenant. It therefore puts them in the same position, and, I hope, contributes to the balance between
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the landlord and the tenant in each case, which in both the 1954 Act and Part I of this Bill Parliament has attempted to achieve. I hope, therefore, with the indication that the noble and learned Lord will look favourably upon something that would amend this particular provision, the House will be prepared to accept the Amendment. I beg to move.
THE LORD CHANCELLOR: My Lords, as the noble Viscount has explained, we have considered with him the point which he raised on the Committee stage of the Bill, and this Amendment is in fact an agreed Amendment in which the Parliamentary draftsmen have assisted. It would not, I think, assist the House if I repeated the arguments which the noble Viscount has already so clearly explained. The Government ask the House to accept this Amendment.
On Question, Amendment agreed to.
4.4 p.m.
VISCOUNT COLVILLE OF CULROSS VISCOUNT COLVILLE OF CULROSS moved Amendment No. 6:
After Clause 12 insert the following new clause:
Provision to enable easier comprehension of Part I of this Act
".There shall be published in the Queen's Printer's copy of this Act, after the 2nd Schedule hereto, a reprinted version of those sections of Part II of the Landlord and Tenant Act 1954 which have been amended by this Part of this Act, as so amended, together with such new sections which have been added to the said Part II of the Act of 1954 by this Part of this Act."
The noble Viscount said: My Lords, although I threatened on the Committee stage that I would return to the question of the Keeling Schedule to set out the whole of Part II of the Landlord and Tenant Act 1954 as amended by this Bill, I thought that it would be improper to ask the printers to go through the exercise of putting down this vast Amendment again. I have therefore put down a clause to introduce a short further discussion upon the question of how Parliament can make it clearer to members of the public what we have done when we have passed this Bill.
I would draw attention to the side note to my new clause, because that is what I am trying to do. I am trying to facilitate easier comprehension of Part I of this Bill, and, of course, Part II

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of the 1954 Act, as amended by it. One of the difficulties into which I ran on the Committee stage in attempting to provide a full Keeling Schedule was that the necessary clause to which the Schedule is attached is a very difficult thing to draft. It does not only have to say that the Landlord and Tenant Act shall have effect as amended by this Act, as set out in the Schedule. It has to take account of all sorts of other parts of the Landlord and Tenant Act 1954, and various other amendments that have been made since; and it has to make quite certain that in providing in this way for the reprint of the law no change in the law takes place.
I have had correspondence with the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor on this point and he has explained to me that the drafting of this clause is not a simple matter. He has suggested to me (and this I think is particularly relevant now) that it might be useful in due course to append to this Bill a reprint of those sections of the 1954 Act which have been amended by this Part of the Bill, together with the new clauses which were put into the 1954 Act by this Bill. As is patently obvious to the House, Part I of the Bill is continuing to be amended.
There is another point which I think is still under consideration, and which the noble and learned Lord said he would look at. It has not been raised at this stage in this House, but it will be coming, I hope, in the other place; and, for all I know, it may be discovered that there are other worthwhile Amendments which we should take the opportunity of making to this Part of the Bill. Each of those would require a reprint of a Keeling Schedule were it to be put in at this stage, and also, as I understand it, a careful consideration of the paving clause introducing the Keeling Schedule, so that on each occasion one would make quite certain that one was not changing the law by mistake or by a side wind. I certainly do not wish to add to the work of the Parliamentary draftsmen in doing this on each occasion.
However, I still maintain that the complications of this legislation are such that it is the duty of Parliament, and not of those who write textbooks, to set out as clearly as we are able the effect of what we have done. The suggestion in this
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Amendment (and may I say that I shall not press it), is that we should at the end of the passage of this Bill through Parliament append to it a reprint of the parts that we have changed, together with the additions. This is half-way between a Keeling Schedule, which I put down as an Amendment on the Committee stage, and doing nothing at all. But it is important, for this reason. The noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor said that these Keeling Schedules were of importance for the consideration of the matter by Parliamentarians. So they are. He pointed out that the Law Commission in their Report have put as an appendix a reprint of all the clauses that they have amended, together with the new ones that they suggest. We have changed a great deal of that already and, for all I know, there will be further changes in another place. So the Law Commission's Report is not going to be an accurate guide even to the legislators.
I did, however, suggest—and upon reflection other noble Lords may agree with this—that it is not only the legislators who want to know the effect of legislation, particularly, as in this case, where it is a perfectly ordinary landlord or tenant of a small business who will have to apply the Act, and will find it impossible to apply it in many cases without having to seek professional advice. I do not think that they should have to buy expensive textbooks or go to expensive professional advisers in order to discover what it is that Parliament has been doing. I think that Parliament should tell them as clearly as possible and I have set out one way, at any rate, in which this could be done.
I think it is an important principle that Parliament should try to make as clear as possible what is the effect of the legislation that has been passed. I therefore move this Amendment in order that the noble and learned Lord can tell me, if he is able to do so at this stage, whether the Government have had a chance of thinking further about this matter. I hope that they have, because I believe it is important, and I believe it is a principle which would contribute to the aim, which I know he endorses so sincerely, that we should try to make ourselves plain to the public. I beg to move.
LORD SILKIN: My Lords, I should like to say just a word or two in support of the noble Viscount. I gather that he is not going to press the Amendment, and I can well understand why. But it is of the utmost important, particularly in complicated legislation of this kind, not only that the subject should understand it, but that equally the practitioners should be able to understand in the simplest way what is the effect of the legislation that we are passing. It may not be practicable to do it in exactly the form in which the noble Viscount has suggested, but I hope that it will become the general practice throughout legislation (and I know that it is the wish of the noble and learned Lord on the Woolsack to make legislation simpler for those who are affected by it) that in every case where existing legislation is amended, particularly in a complex form, the exact new legislation will be made available to those who are affected by it. I hope the noble and learned Lord on the Woolsack will be able to give us an encouraging reply, not only in this case, but generally in all legislation.
THE LORD CHANCELLOR: My Lords, if the noble Viscount will withdraw his Amendment I am prepared to undertake to see that there goes into the Bill, before it receives the Royal Assent, a Keeling Schedule, although I cannot undertake that it will do more than reprint the amended sections. The noble Viscount and I are both enthusiasts of the Keeling Schedules, and perhaps, for any noble Lord who is not familiar with them I might say that what Mr. Keeling did was put into a Bill a Schedule which showed what the legislation would look like if the amendments to the Act proposed by the Bill were made. It has always seemed to me that this is a very useful procedure and that it might very well be developed.
It has transpired that while the noble Viscount is also a Keeling Schedule enthusiast, he is so from rather a different point of view, and for rather different reasons. I have always thought that where you get an Act which is going to amend some existing Act, and you read: "Clause 4, leave out words so-and-so; put in other words" it is very difficult to follow. You really have to take the Act and then write these things in, or take
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them out, to see what the change proposed is. Therefore, to have such a Schedule is of great convenience for the legislators. That is not, I think, the burden of the noble Viscount's wishes; he is really thinking about the lawyers who are going to use the Act after the Bill has been passed. This is rather a different thing, and results in a Keeling Schedule of a rather different kind.
VISCOUNT COLVILLE OF CULROSS: My Lords, it would also help the public who do not even resort to the lawyers at all.
THE LORD CHANCELLOR: Certainly, my Lords. I am all for helping both. There are difficulties about this, and more than I have myself realised. Perhaps, for the record, I should just say something about the first kind of Keeling Schedule, which differs from the kind which I hope we are going to put in before the Bill receives the Royal Assent.
There are reasons of both Parliamentary and administrative convenience for deferring the addition of the Schedule to the last possible stage of the Bill. Keeling Schedules add quite materially and unproductively to the labour of Parliamentary draftsmen and, to a lesser extent, to printing requirements, and to the demands on Parliamentary time. Putting the Schedule together does not involve a great deal of trouble—that is largely a scissors-and-paste job. But its contents will have the force of law, so the Schedule has to be introduced by a clause, which must be drafted with great care, to ensure that every subsequent alteration, textual or otherwise, and every reference to, application or disapplication of the relevant provisions of the earlier Act, is correctly re-enacted. This involves a close examination of all relevant Statutes. Moreover, any amendment made to the Bill during the rest of its passage has to be carried through to the Schedule, and its effect on the introductory clause has to be considered. This involves a great deal of unproductive work. As an example, the Marshalled List of Amendments now before the House contains 14 consequential Amendments to the Keeling Schedule of Part IV set out in Schedule 2; if there were a Keeling Schedule in the Bill relating to Part I similar consequential Amendments would have to be made in that Schedule

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for every Amendment standing on the Order Paper regarding clauses in Part I. If the addition of the Schedule is deferred to the last possible stage, all this unnecessary work will be avoided. An argument sometimes advanced in favour of such Schedules is the convenience which they afford to Peers and Members of Parliament, but that does not apply to this Bill, as the amended sections are set out in Appendix 2 to the Law Commission Report. My Lords, there are obviously a number of considerations to be borne in mind when one is dealing with Keeling Schedules, and I shall be very happy at any time to have a general Keeling Schedule discussion with the noble Viscount.
VISCOUNT COLVILLE OF CULROSS: My Lords, the undertaking which the noble and learned Lord has given seems to me to be, as I rather expected, a compromise, and it is certainly not one that I would seek to reject. But with great respect to him I should have thought if one was going to set out the amended sections of the 1954 Act one might just as well set out the new sections put in by this Act. But this is a technical matter, and no doubt it could have an effect upon the drafting of the introductory clause. I am in favour of putting in as much as it is possible to put in. and I think that in the end—probably by the time the Bill gets to the Report stage in another place—it will be possible to decide how much, or how little, ought to be done. I am very happy to leave this to the noble and learned Lord, and to his colleagues in another place, in view of the undertaking he has given. I am very grateful to him, and I believe this will be of real assistance I beg leave to withdraw this Amendment.
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
Clause 21 [Contracts for purchase of land affected by land charge, etc.]:
4.16 p.m.
The Lord Chancellor The Lord Chancellor moved Amendments Nos. 7 and 8:
Page 11, leave out lines 5 to 7 and insert ("' purchaser' includes a lessee, mortgagee or other person acquiring or intending")
Leave out lines 13 and 14.
The noble and learned Lord said: My Lords, these Amendments broaden the definition of "purchaser", in Clause 21, so as to exclude the requirement that he should be a purchaser "in good faith and for valuable consideration". The definition in the clause is based on a similar definition in Section 205(1)(xxi) of the Law of Property Act 1925. The particular requirements of "good faith" and of having given "valuable consideration" are, however, unnecessary complications to Clause 21. The clause is designed to protect a person who enters into a contract for the purchase of an interest in land and who at that stage, under the existing law, is fixed with notice of matters of which he has no knowledge and cannot be expected to discover. For this purpose it is unnecessary that the clause should be confined to a purchaser who acts in good faith, or gives valuable consideration.
The first Amendment deletes from the definition of "purchaser", in subsection (3) of the clause, references to "good faith" and "valuable consideration". The expression "in good faith" is now taken to imply that a purchaser has taken all reasonable care, and made all proper inquiries: and in this sense proper inquiries would normally include a search of the register. The clause, however, is concerned with a situation in which a person contracting to buy land is unable to search the register effectively, because at that stage he may have no knowledge of the names against which he should search. Inclusion of the expression "good faith" in the definition of purchaser would be liable to cause confusion, and might induce purchasers and their advisers to make more rigorous inquiries before contract than are at present required in practice. The deletion of "valuable consideration" is desirable because at the time of entering into a contract for a future purchase (with which the clause is concerned) the question of having furnished valuable consideration does not arise.
The second Amendment is consequential on the first, and unless any noble Lord thinks otherwise, I will put them both together.
On Question, Amendments agreed to.
Clause 25 [Powers of Lands Tribunal and court in relation to restrictive covenants affecting land]:
THE LORD CHANCELLOR THE LORD CHANCELLOR moved Amendment No. 9:
Page 15, line 17, leave out from beginning to ("there") in line 18, and insert—
("(2) So much of section 84(1)(a) as follows the words 'obsolete, or' shall be a separate paragraph (aa) and shall be amended as follows:—
(a) after the word that'").

The noble and learned Lord said: My Lords, if this Amendment is agreed to, I shall not be able to call Amendment No. 10. Amendment No. 9 is one of a series of drafting Amendments which it may be convenient, I hope, to discuss together. They are Amendments Nos. 9, 12, 15, 27 and 30.
VISCOUNT COLVILLE OF CULROSS: And 11.
THE LORD CHANCELLOR: And 11. I thought I had mentioned 11. The first of these Amendments splits paragraph (a) of Section 84(1), into two separate paragraphs, (a) and (aa). Section 84(1), paragraphs (a) (which is itself amplified in subsection (1A)), (b) and (c) set out the grounds on which the Lands Tribunal may discharge or modify restrictive covenants. Whilst each of paragraphs (b) and (c) specifies a single ground, paragraph (a) specifies two grounds: first, that the restriction ought to be deemed obsolete; and secondly, that its continuance would impede some reasonable user of the land. The Amendment secures that each of these two distinct grounds is contained in a separate paragraph. The division is particularly material in view of the fact that the new subsection (1A) applies to the second ground only.
The Amendment adopts the suggestion made by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wilberforce, during the Committee stage of the Bill. The second, third and fourth Amendments are consequential on the first. The second and third are designed to set out the Amendments contained in Clause 25(2) with greater clarity by means of paragraphing. The fourth Amendment substitutes a reference to the new paragraph (aa) for paragraph (a) of subsection (1). My Lords, I beg to move.
VISCOUNT COLVILLE OF CULROSS: My Lords, I think this is an excellent
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group of Amendments. One always has this difficulty, in referring to Section 84(1)(a), as it now is, that one has to talk about "Section 84(1)(a) first" or "Section 84(1)(a) secondly". Therefore, in effect and in practice in the Lands Tribunal, and in the practitioners' terminology, it is already split up. All that this Amendment is doing is to make that separation formal. It will make reference easier; I am sure it will make the law more clear, and I am delighted that the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor is suggesting it.
On Question, Amendment agreed to.
THE LORD CHANCELLOR: My Lords, I have dealt with Amendment No. 11 in dealing with Amendment No. 9. I beg to move Amendment No.11.
Amendment moved—
Page 15, line 19, after ("below",") insert ("(b)").—(The Lord Chancellor.)
On Question, Amendment agreed to.
THE LORD CHANCELLOR: My Lords, I have also dealt with Amendment No. 12 already. I beg to move.
Amendment moved—
Page 15, line 21, after ("and") insert ("(c)").—(The Lord Chancellor.)
On Question, Amendment agreed to.
THE LORD CHANCELLOR: My Lords, this Amendment also we discussed when moving Amendment No. 9. I beg to move Amendment No. 15.
Amendment moved—
Page 15, line 24, leave out ("(a)") and insert ("(aa)").—(The Lord Chancellor.)
On Question, Amendment agreed to.
4.23 p.m.
VISCOUNT COLVILLE OF CULROSS VISCOUNT COLVILLE OF CULROSS moved Amendment No. 16:
Page 15, line 28, leave out ("either").
The noble Viscount said: My Lords, this is the one major subject of dispute which I believe is left in this Bill. It is quite impossible to follow any argument upon it unless your Lordships would be so good as to look at Schedule 2 to the Bill where the legislation as it is now proposed is set out in full. I have already addressed a number of remarks to your Lordships on this mattter in Committee, but I think that this is something to which one must return. The Amendment

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is in fact only a paving Amendment, and with it go Amendments Nos. 18 and 19, which are really dealing with the point of the matter.
The situation, as I understand it, is this. At the present moment, the trouble about the power of the Lands Tribunal to modify or discharge a restrictive covenant under what is now Section 84(1)(aa) of the 1925 Act (after we have accepted the last Amendment—that is the second limb of what used to be paragraph (a)) is that one has to show that the proposition one is putting forward is the only reasonable user of the land, and that the covenant, which may well date back for some time, is restricting this only reasonable user. We have already amended the law to the extent that the text does not now refer to the "only" reasonable user; all it is now necessary to show is that the covenant is impeding "some" reasonable user of the land. But then the Bill goes on to deal with the interpretation of "some reasonable user" and to tell the Lands Tribunal what it is that they may take into account. It is at this stage that the new Sections (1A) and (1B) have been put in, in order to give guidelines to the Lands Tribunal.
What has been done, therefore, is not only to ease the situation so that the Lands Tribunal may consider some reasonable alternative to that which is insisted upon by the covenant, but in addition they are entitled to look at certain matters. One of the things they can do—and this is in the new Section (1A)—is this. They are authorised to discharge or modify the restriction
"by reference to its impeding some reasonable user … in any case in which the Lands Tribunal is satisfied that the restriction, in impeding that user, either—
(a) does not secure to persons entitled to the benefit of it any practical benefits of substantial value to them"—
and there is going to be an Amendment to that—or is contrary to the public interest; and then in looking at whether it is contrary to the public interest, among other things, they take account of the
"development plan and any declared or ascertainable pattern for the grant or refusal of planning permissions in relevant areas"—
and, of course, I think inevitably, any planning permission that has actually been granted for the land itself. To this situation is to be added a perfectly clear provision (the position has been most
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obscure hitherto) that if the Lands Tribunal do on these grounds modify or discharge the restrictive covenant, any person who is entitled to the benefit of it is to be suitably compensated. This is a matter to which we shall come under one of the noble and learned Lord's subsequent Amendments.
There is a balance to be struck here, and I must at once confess that it is a matter of judgment to see which way the balance ought to go. I think one must take a concrete example, as I did before. Let us suppose that there is a house which has been built as part of an estate of houses, all in similar plots and all at very much the same time, and that it stands in an acre of land. The house is subject to a restrictive covenant which says that there shall not be built on that site more than one dwelling. The same thing applies to other houses and other plots round about, and there are people in the neighbourhood who are entitled to rely upon that restriction and, indeed, relying on that restriction, m my of them have gone to live there and bought their houses there because they like to live in a low density area.
It may well be that someone comes along—and it is not a question of his motives; they may be perfectly proper motives—and says, "I think it would be a good idea to have four houses on this plot." That of course is contrary to the covenant, and before he can set about building, without the fear of an injunction being placed upon him, he must go to the Lands Tribunal to have the restrictive covenant removed.
The Bill as it is now drafted would allow the Lands Tribunal to say that four houses is some reasonable user of the land. Many people perhaps, if this was in an area where there was a housing shortage, as is the case in so many places, would say, with the Minister of Housing and Local Government in many circulars and other of his publications, "We must make the best possible use of urban land." And this person who wishes to put four houses on the land would therefore think he was acting in a public-spirited way and helping to fill a mach felt need. He would go first of all to the local planning authority—and let us assume that they grant him planning permission for this project. He then goes to the Lands Tribunal and asks them to

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discharge or modify the restrictive covenant so that instead of having only one house he may have four. The Lands Tribunal are entitled to do this, under the Bill as it now stands, if they are satisfied that the restriction, in impeding the four houses, is contrary to the public interest. They may consult with Government Departments; they may consult with Ministers and their Departments. They are expressly entitled to take into account the development plan, and are also entitled to take into account any other planning permissions granted in the area which give an indication of the way in which development is going.
The development plan is of course very important, because this may say that in this particular area of the town, or whatever it is, it is the policy of the local planning authority that densities shall be increased. Moreover this is done, as I have already said, against the background that there is a housing shortage in that area, and this is the justification for increasing densities. Therefore the Lands Tribunal can look at the development plan, they can look at the actual planning permission and at other planning permissions in the area. What they are interested in is to decide what is the public interest. This is a matter of planning. I will come on to the other things that the Lands Tribunal can look at in a moment, but let us just stop there.
So far it is a matter of planning, and there is only one arbiter of planning in any one area at present, namely, the local planning authority, subject, of course, to the guidance of the Minister and the approval of the development plan. They are the people to whom has been entrusted by Parliament the public interest in so far as land use in that area is related. They are the people who decide, democratically and subject to the Minister's control, what form of development is to be allowed and what is not. It seems to me unlikely that it would be easy to argue that something which has been allowed by the local planning authority is contrary to the public interest.
There is a further difficulty in dealing with this matter because any sensible applicant who wishes to rely upon that particular argument will not be so foolish as to bring to the Lands Tribunal the planning officer of the local authority,
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who may be cross-examined by those who object to this modification or discharge, to say whether or not it is in the public interest to build four houses here. The Lands Tribunal will rely upon the evidence of the planning authority itself and the fact that the proposals must have been passed by this responsible authority. Nor will there be before the Lands Tribunal any representative from any Government Department, or anyone else who can say what is in the public interest. In these circumstances it will be virtually impossible to deny that the proposals for which the modification or discharge is required are indeed in the public interest.
The Lands Tribunal also have to look—and this is the second half of the new subsection (1B)—at the period and the context in which the restriction was created or imposed, and any other material circumstances. There are two points to be made here. In the first instance, I do not object to the Lands Tribunal's looking at the development plan, or at other planning permissions, or indeed at this planning permission, but I do object to their attention being specifically drawn to those, and to specific emphasis being laid upon those matters dealt with particularly in paragraph (b) of the new subsection (1A). It is right in some circumstances that they should look at these things, but I do not think it is right that the whole force of this legislation should now be slanted so severely in favour of the public interest. The Lands Tribunal have also to look at the context and the period when the covenant was imposed.
Then there is the question of compensation. There is this to be said about the context and the period of the restriction. It may be old; it may have related to a time when this particular estate was being split up into building plots; but it may well be, too, that it is the existence of that covenant imposed over all the plots in common which has created the character of that area and has caused people to go to live there and buy their houses and to enjoy it. It may not be anything like so important to look at the period when it was imposed as to consider the effect which its imposition has had upon the people who live there.
We then go on to the question of compensation. It is all very well to say

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that, because the value of the property next door would be depreciated by the building of the four houses, because they will overlook the garden or because they will be an intrusion into what has hitherto been the character of the neighbourhood, therefore some sum in compensation should be payable. I think that is acceptable and it is right. But you go further than that: you say to the person who bought the house next door, relying upon the existence of this covenant, "We have decided that in the public interest the character of this neighbourhood is to be changed. That is what the local planning authority says and we, the Lands Tribunal, agree that that is in the public interest". You are then saying to that person, "We are arbitrarily changing the character of your area; true, we will compensate for that, but if you wish to continue to live in a neighbourhood possessing this character it will not be here—you must go somewhere else". Therefore you give him no option, if he wishes to maintain this particular character of an area in which to live. He gets no compensation for that.
This is the nearest thing to giving to a private individual the right compulsorily to acquire the benefit of a restrictive covenant—an interest in somebody else's land—that we have seen, perhaps, as somebody suggested to me, since the railway companies were setting up their empires in the last century. If that is what we are doing then I think we are going too far. I do not wish to be immoderate about this matter. I am content that the public interest should be looked at, but not so greatly emphasised.
It will then be said—and this is my final point—"But the courts will pay more attention to the context and the period of the restriction and other material circumstances than they will to the public interest, and they will draw a narrow interpretation of what the public interest means". My Lords, I have not done a profound study of what the courts have said about the public interest, but I would refer your Lordships for a moment to a decision in the Queen's Bench Division last year in a case called Cartwright v. The Post Office. Here a lady named Mrs. Cartwright did not want the Post Office to put a telephone line across her land, which the Post Office wished to do
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in order to take the telephone to two farms on the other side of her property. There were only two other farms involved. The law says that if there is a difference of this sort about whether a line shall go across property, the tribunal to which the difference is referred shall not give its consent to the placing of the line unless satisfied that the refusal or failure of the person to allow the line to go across his property is contrary to the public interest. So here we have a case in which the courts say what is the public interest in this context. Of course it is in this context, but it is an indication.
This case went to the county court judge. Your Lordships will remember that there were only two farmers concerned in Mrs. Cartwright's refusal. What the county court judge said was the public interest concerned in this case was—and I quote:
"I accept that it is in the public interest that many private difficulties be either prevented or speedily remedied. If a child is ill I think it is in the public interest that a doctor should he called as quickly as possible. We provide a free medical service for this purpose and it is in the public interest. On farms accidents sometimes happen with machinery, and although it is an individual who is hurt there appears to be a public interest that the individual should be treated and cured as effectively as possible. If a beast is sick it should be possible to summon the vet, speedily. If a hayrick catches fire it is in the public interest that the fire brigade should be called to put out the fire as quickly as possible. There is an agricultural advisory service and it is desirable that it should he possible to call for its services. In winter in this area"—
it was in North Staffordshire—
"severe weather is experienced and arrangements have to he made for taking children to and from school."
That is what the county court judge catalogued as the public interest involved in the taking of the telephone to these two farmers.
The learned judge of first instance said:
"I respectfully agree with that catalogue of measures, all of which seem to me to be in the public interest"—
and over Mrs. Cartwright's land the telephone line went. I am not criticising that decision. I am sure it was perfectly correct. But what it indicates, I would suggest to your Lordships, is that the courts can take as being in the public interest something of very small local concern indeed. They may be right to do so; but if that is the way it is going to

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be interpreted we are going to have no severe interpretation of this Part of the 1925 Act as amended by this Bill; we are going to have a liberal interpretation by the courts which will in fact endorse everything that the local planning authority has said.
Of course, there will be test cases which go on appeal to the Court of Appeal, but if they follow that line the local planning authority will win, and indeed all that will be involved at the Lands Tribunal will be a second planning inquiry without any of the people who can set out from the planning authority's point of view the arguments in favour of this development. I think this goes too far. I have made a long speech, but I think it most important that we should preserve a proper balance in this matter. I am suggesting that we leave out the specific reference to the public interest and the specific reference to the development plan and the planning permissions, that we leave in the other material circumstances and allow the Lands Tribunal to take such account of them as they think fit. I beg to move.
4.42 p.m.
THE LORD CHANCELLOR: My Lords, I think the noble Viscount would probably agree that as well as discussing Amendments Nos. 18 and 19 with No. 16 we might also take in Nos. 31, 33 and 34, which are really consequential. The noble Viscount is, I think, right in saying that this is the only remaining point in dispute between us.
The object of these Amendments is to limit the power of the Lands Tribunal to discharge or modify covenants to those covenants which are not of substantial value or advantage to the persons having the benefit of them. Such a limitation would not accord with the recommendations of the Law Commission which the clause seeks to implement. The desired effect of making land available for development, where it is in the interest of society that it should be developed and any loss resulting to those benefiting from restrictions on the land can be adequately made up for by monetary payments, would not be achieved.
At present the Lands Tribunal can discharge restrictions only where they impede the reasonable use of land for public or private purposes and secure
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no practical benefits to other persons. As a result of the strict interpretation of the existing provisions of Section 84(1) restrictive covenants can in practice only be discharged where they are almost worthless. As the noble Viscount knows, this position has been strongly criticised for years and Proposition 9 of the Law Commission Report on Restrictive Covenants recommends that the Tribunal should be able to modify or discharge a restriction which is detrimental to the public interest by impeding the reasonable user of land, always provided that adequate monetary compensation can be awarded to those damnified by the modification or discharge. The new subsection (1A) gives effect to this recommendation by giving the Lands Tribunal the necessary powers: (i) where the restriction does not secure practical benefits of substantial value to the persons concerned and any loss they suffer can be made good by a monetary award; and (ii) where the restriction is contrary to the public interest and the loss can be compensated by a monetary award.
The noble Viscount would retain the first head and eliminate the second. He questions the whole policy of allowing planning considerations to override the interests of neighbouring landowners. But his Amendment would reduce the effect of Clause 25 to a very moderate enlargement of the powers of the Lands Tribunal. Where at present they can only act because the restriction confers no benefit, they would in future be able to act where the benefit conferred by the restriction is not substantial. They would also, as a result of the change made in Section 84(1)(a), be able to apply more generous tests in determining whether the restriction is one which impedes reasonable use and therefore ought to be lifted. But the predominant consideration would still only be the extent of the benefit conferred by it. The importance of the second ground lies in the ability to lift restrictions which operate contrary to the public interest even where the loss of the benefit of the restriction results in the substantial depreciation of the value of adjoining land. The Law Commission stressed (Note 3 to Proposition 9) that the Tribunal should be enabled
"to take a broader view whether the use of land is being unreasonably impeded",
and the Government accept this recommendation. Where only monetary loss

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is involved, the public interest as evidenced by planning considerations should prevail.
Some safeguard against amenities being overridden may be found in the requirement that money must be adequate compensation. For instance, it may well be that the Tribunal or the courts will hold that money cannot compensate for a total loss of privacy or the blocking of a beautiful view which was the main attraction of a particular residence. But the task of holding the balance between the interest of the adjoining landowner in his amenities and the interest of society in the full use of land must be left to the Lands Tribunal, in so far as it is not already adequately carried out by planning authorities. It is not possible to find a form of words which could provide a precise line of demarcation.
The noble Viscount's Amendment would not achieve a balance, but prevent the public interest from being by itself any ground for the lifting of restrictions. If the noble Viscount will withdraw his Amendment, I am of course quite prepared to look at the authority to which he has been good enough to refer me and indeed to consider the whole question, because it is that always rather difficult question of just where you draw the line.
VISCOUNT COLVILLE OF CULROSS: My Lords, I am sure that that is the right thing to do, and I am glad to hear that the noble and learned Lord's mind is not altogether closed upon this matter; it never is, but I am glad to have his reinforcement that this is so again on this occasion. I am far from certain that the Lands Tribunal are the proper body to decide on this sort of issue of the public interest as against private interest. I am far from certain that the Lands Tribunal will have before them the material upon which to make that decision; and indeed I think it will be greatly to the advantage of the applicant that he should not bring before the Lands Tribunal anybody who can be cross-examined on the public interest. I believe this to be a cardinal point. The matter will speak for itself from the planning permissions and the development plans, and there will be no opportunity for the Lands Tribunal or for those who object in any way to call in question whether or not this is in the public interest. I do not believe this is justiciable in this particular form.
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It is another matter to decide whether the public interest ought to override, private rights. This is a widespread thing which happens in all sorts of realms in this country to-day. That is indeed what the whole system of compulsory purchase is for. I liken this to compulsory purchase, and I still think, particularly after hearing the speech of the noble and learned Lord, that this measure is slanted in that direction, and it is to that that I object. Local planning authorities have been given even wider powers than they had before to acquire land compulsorily—this is under the Town and Country Planning Act 1968—in order to see that it complies with the development plan. I should have thought those were the sort of occasions, when we have a Ministerial Inquiry and both sides can question what is in the public interest and whether this is correct in the terms of the development plan, when you can judge a matter which is basically quasi judicial.
In my humble opinion, the Lands Tribunal are not equipped, nor will they have the information or the opportunity, to make this choice. I would urge most earnestly upon the noble and learned Lord to think about this matter again. I do not wish to be over-restrictive in the relaxation that this Bill will bring about. I am not seeking to cramp any sort of widening of the extent to which the Lands Tribunal can modify or relax. That is not my intention at all. I am simply saying that we are going into realms which are normally dealt with by Ministerial action and not by the courts, and we should not do so. I should be very glad to have an opportunity to consider this further with the noble and learned Lord, and indeed with others who have helped me very much in seeking to make up my mind on this. I will, however, promise the House that I will return to this at the next stage, but meanwhile I beg leave to withdraw the Amendment.
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
THE LORD CHANCELLOR THE LORD CHANCELLOR moved Amendment No. 17:
Page 15, line 30, after ("value") insert ("or advantage")
The noble and learned Lord said: My Lords, with this Amendment it may be convenient to consider No. 32 as well. These Amendments ensure that the Lands

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Tribunal will not be able to discharge or modify a restrictive covenant which confers "substantial advantages" on persons enjoying the benefit of the restriction unless continuation of the restriction is contrary to the public interest. Subsection (1A)(a) enables the Lands Tribunal to discharge or modify a restriction impeding some reasonable user if the restriction
"does not secure to persons entitled to the benefit of it any practical benefits of substantial value to them".
The benefits of substantial value might be interpreted as meaning only benefit which enhance the monetary value of other land. On that interpretation the Lands Tribunal could discharge a restriction which protects important amenities of neighbouring land (for example, privacy, a fine view, freedom from noise or disturbance) where these amenities are not reflected in the value of the land. This situation arises not infrequently where land currently used for residential purposes has a far higher value for industrial or other development for which the amenities would be irrelevant. By adding the words "or advantage" after "value" the Amendment makes it plain that "value" includes amenity value or other non-monetary value. I beg to move.
VISCOUNT COLVILLE OF CULROSS: My Lords, I think that this Amendment has both value and advantage and I support it.
On Question, Amendment agreed to.
THE LORD CHANCELLOR THE LORD CHANCELLOR moved Amendment No. 20:
Page 16, line 5, leave out ("with") and insert ("in view of").
The noble and learned Lord said: My Lords, with this Amendment goes Amendment No. 35. This is a drafting Amendment to meet a criticism made by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wilberforce, during the Committee stage of the Bill. Subsection (1C) declares that the Lands Tribunal's power to discharge or modify restrictive covenants includes a power
"to add such further provisions restricting the user of or the building on the land affected as appear to the Lands Tribunal to be reasonable with the relaxation of the existing provisions …"
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The Amendment substitutes the phrase "in view of" for the word "with". I beg to move.
On Question, Amendment agreed to.
4.52 p.m.
THE LORD CHANCELLOR THE LORD CHANCELLOR moved Amendment No. 21:
Page 16, line 8, at end insert—
("( ) In section 84(1) there shall be omitted the words ' (subject or not to the payment by the applicant of compensation to any person suffering loss in consequence of the order) ' and the proviso, and after paragraph (c) there shall be inserted the words and an order discharging or modifying a restriction under this subsection may direct the applicant to pay to any person entitled to the benefit of the restriction such sum by way of consideration as the Tribunal may think it just to award under one, but not both, of the following heads, that is to say, either—

(i) a sum to make up for any loss or disadvantage suffered by that person in consequence of the discharge or modification; or

(ii) a sum to make up for any effect which the restriction had, at the time when it was imposed, in reducing the consideration then received for the land affected by it.")

The noble and learned Lord said: My Lords, with this Amendment, I think, can be considered Amendments Nos. 25 and 29. These Amendments delete from Section 84 all references to the payment of compensation for the discharge or modification of restrictions and replace them by adding at the end of Section 84(1) a concluding passage dealing comprehensively with monetary awards. As a result the Lands Tribunal will in future be able, when discharging or modifying restrictions, to order payment of sums of money which will make up for either (i), any loss or disadvantage suffered by those entitled to the benefit of the restriction; or (ii), any reduction in the purchase price received by the vendor of the burdened land at the time when the restriction was imposed, which is due to the restriction.
The existing provisions on compensation are unsatisfactory in many ways. Hitherto, that has mattered little because the powers of the Tribunal have been so narrowly interpreted that compensation was hardly ever awarded. In future the availability of compensation will be a major factor in determining whether a restriction can be discharged or modified under subsection (1A) and a clear statement of the power to make monetary

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awards and the measure to be applied is of corresponding importance. Accordingly, the Amendment deletes the words in the second parenthesis in Section 84(1) (which provide for the payment of compensation to any person suffering loss in consequence of the Tribunal's order) and the proviso to it. The proviso, which is obscurely worded, lays down three criteria:

(i) compensation for the discharge or modification of a restrictive covenant is not to be payable simply because the owner of the burdened land has obtained an advantage thereby;

(ii) the compensation payable to the owner of the benefited land is not to exceed the loss which he suffers;

(iii) notwithstanding (i) and (ii), compensation can be paid in respect of any reduction in the price received in the past for the burdened land, which was due to the imposition of the restriction.

Of these criteria, (i) and (ii) are otiose because it is the nature of compensation that it is payable in respect of loss suffered (rather than gain made by others) and that it is enough and not more than enough to make good that loss. The substance of (iii) is reproduced in the Amendment.
The new passage introduced by the Amendment confers a discretion on the Tribunal to direct the payment of sums by way of consideration for the discharge or modification of a restriction and goes on to state how the sums are to be quantified. The Tribunal are given discretion to make such orders as they think just, and the award is termed "consideration" and not "compensation" to take account of the fact that it may cover not only actual financial loss but also disadvantage, like loss of amenities, which cannot be accurately quantified. I beg to move.
VISCOUNT COLVILLE OF CULROSS: My Lords, it will not have escaped your Lordships' notice that I, too, was not satisfied with the compensation provisions and have put down an Amendment on this point. But I have no doubt that the Amendment which has been moved by the noble and learned Lord is better than mine and I hope that it will be accepted. It is such a pity, surely, that at last we have had an explanation of the proviso to Section 84(1), but at a time
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when it will be useless in future to discover what it means. I have consulted a number of people, and the obscurity of the proviso is such that few have been able to give me any real indication of the scope of its interpretation. I shudder to think what would happen. Whether the clause remains as it is now or is amended in the way I want does not matter; in either case, a clear provision for the method of assessing compensation in the circumstances in which it is to be paid is highly desirable. I think that it is a great improvement indeed to this Bill that we should have this Amendment making it clear, and I earnestly support the Amendment.
On Question, Amendment agreed to.
VISCOUNT COLVILLE OF CULROSS VISCOUNT COLVILLE OF CULROSS moved Amendment No. 23:
Page 16, line 28, leave out ("appearing to be") and insert ("being").
The noble Viscount said: My Lords, this Amendment raises a small point, and it arises in the new subsection (3A) which is being added to Section 84 of the 1925 Act. The subject matter of the new subsection (3A) is to set on foot the necessary provisions by which the Lands Tribunal can sort out who is to take part in the hearing on a question of whether a covenant is to be modified or revoked altogether; and it underlie; the whole of this subsection that there will be rules, both in the Lands Tribunal and, I think, in the High Court, dealing with this matter. I simply want to ask the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor a question. As the Bill is drafted at the moment, the Lands Tribunal are going to give directions as to the people who are or are not to be admitted to oppose the application. The criterion upon which the Tribunal will give directions, as I understand it, is that the people in question appear—or, I suppose, alternatively, do not appear—to be entitled to the benefit of the restriction. It may be that this will all come out quite clearly in the rules. But if, as I hope, there is not going to be a tremendous amount of argument, at the substantive hearing of the application to modify or revoke, about who is or is not entitled to the benefit at that stage (the idea being, believe, that all of this should have been sorted out beforehand) I believe that: it should have been established who is entitled to the benefit and

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who is not. Therefore, the directions which the Lands Tribunal give as to those who are to be allowed to oppose the application itself ought to be based upon certainty, in so far as that can be achieved in law, as to the benefit that the people who are allowed to come may possess.
There are preliminary methods of finding out who those people are. If there is a dispute at the initial stage, when this matter is being discussed by the Lands Tribunal, it can be adjourned and go to the Chancery Division; the rules provide for that, and the Bill provides for that. But once that has been done will it be perfectly certain under the rules that the people who are there to oppose the application will be there in fact to do that, and not to argue any more about whether or not they are entitled to the benefit of the covenant. I ask this because if they return to that matter simply because it appears to the Lands Tribunal that they are entitled to the benefit, then I think we shall have interminable arguments and a great deal of time wasted. It is to raise that point that I move this Amendment.
THE LORD CHANCELLOR: My Lords, this is a small point on which we are not, I am afraid, altogether agreed. The new subsection (3A) introduced by the Bill requires the Lands Tribunal to give any necessary directions as to persons who are or who are not to be admitted to oppose the application because they appear to be entitled, or not entitled, to the benefit of the restriction. The Amendment would alter this to provide for the admission of persons because they are entitled to the benefit of the restriction. The implication of the altered wording is that the Lands Tribunal would decide whether or not a person is in law entitled to the benefit of a restrictive covenant. This is wrong, because the determination of questions of
law is reserved for the court by Section 84(2). The new subsection (3A), which is based on proposition 11 of the Law Commission's Report, is not intended to alter this position. In order to determine who are the proper parties to be heard in opposition to the application the Tribunal must take a prima facie view on questions of law as to the validity or enforceability of the restrictive covenant, or the annexation of
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the benefit to particular land. They will do so when giving a ruling as to the persons who appear to be entitled to enforce the benefit of the restriction, and if this ruling is not accepted the legal issue is, under the subsection, to be referred to the court. The Amendment would blur the intention which lies behind the subsection, and therefore I am afraid that we are unable to accept it, though I shall be happy to discuss the point further with the noble and learned Viscount at any time.
VISCOUNT COLVILLE OF CULROSS: My Lords, in fact I do not think there is any difference between the noble and learned Lord and myself, because I entirely agree that the substantive issue of who is or who is not entitled to the benefit should go to the Chancery Division under Section 84(2), and that is what the whole provision is intended to ensure. The noble and learned Lord will, however, take my point that it is really essential that this matter should be cleared up before the substantive hearing. I am talking only about the content of the rules, which will be the way in which the method of giving directions is spelt out. It is in the rules that we shall get this straight; it is in the rules that it will be made plain that this is, as it
were, an interlocutory issue which must be decided before the substantive
application comes on. It is simply to make sure that this point is brought home to the noble and learned Lord (I am sure he is well aware of it already) that I put down this Amendment. I entirely accept his explanation. So long as the rules ensure that it is done in this way I am quite happy about it, and I beg leave to withdraw the Amendment.
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
5.4 p.m.
The LORD CHANCELLOR The LORD CHANCELLOR moved Amendment No. 24:
Page 16, line 40, at end insert—
("( ) In section 84(11) at the end of paragraph (b) there shall be added the words 'or of section 19 or 23 of the Civil Aviation Act 1949'.")
The noble and learned Lord said: My Lords, Amendment No. 38 is also relevant to this Amendment. The purpose of the Amendments is merely to bring up to date the references to restrictions imposed for civil aviation purposes in Section 84(11) of the Law of Property

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Act 1925. These restrictions are exempted from the jurisdiction of the Lands Tribunal. Section 84(11), as reproduced in Schedule 2, refers to the Air Navigation Act 1920 which has now been repealed and largely re-enacted by the Civil Aviation Acts 1949 to 1968. As I said during the Committee stage, reference to the 1920 Act remains a necessary one because many restrictions were imposed under provisions of the later Acts, which substantially re-enact powers conferred in 1920 as a result of perpetuation and saving provisions found in the later Acts. ft is, however, desirable to refer to the present-day empowering provisions which have succeeded those of the 1920 Act, where they can be identified, and the Amendment does so.
The Amendments have the further advantage that they dispel any doubt whether some agreements for civil aviation purposes restrictive of the user of land which are authorised under later legislation are covered by the reference, in paragraph (b) of subsection (11), to the Air Navigation Act 1920. Section 19(7) of the Civil Aviation Act 1949 allows a local authority to impose restrictive covenants when selling land around an aerodrome, and under Section 23 of the Board of Trade are enabled to acquire the benefit of restrictive covenants in connection with civil aviation purposes. The history of consolidation of the Civil Aviation Acts is complicated, and it may be that some of the powers referred to in sections 19 and 23 do not derive directly from the Air Navigation Act 1920. My Lords, I beg to move.
On Question, Amendment agreed to.
Schedule 2 [Law of Property Act 1925: Section 84 reprinted with Amendments]:
VISCOUNT COLVILLE OF CULROSS: My Lords, may I intervene to say that all the noble and learned Lord's remaining Amendments are purely consequential. I shall not move any of mine. It may be that the noble and learned Lord could take the remaining Amendments formally.
THE LORD CHANCELLOR: My Lords, I gladly avail myself of that offer, and if I may put together the remaining Amendments in my name I shall do so if that is not inconvenient to noble Lords May I move Amend-
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ments Nos. 25, 27, 29, 30, 32, 35 and 38 en bloc? As no noble Lord objects, I need not put them all severally from the Woolsack. I move that those Amendments be agreed to.
Amendments moved—
Page 20, line 26, leave out from ("restriction") to ("on") in line 28.
Line 32, after ("or") insert ("(aa)").
Page 21, leave out lines 1 to 10, and insert ("and an order discharging or modifying a restriction under this subsection may direct the applicant to pay to any person entitled to the benefit of the restriction such sum by way of consideration as the Tribunal may think it just to award under one, but not both, of the Following heads, that is to say, either—

(i) a sum to make up for any loss or disadvantage suffered by that person in consequence of the discharge or modification; or

(ii) a sum to make up for any effect which the restriction had, at the time when it was imposed, in reducing the consideration then received for the land affected by it.")

Page 21, Line 11, leave out ("(a)") and insert ("(aa)").
Page 21, Line 16, after ("value") insert ("or advantage").
Page 21, Line 32, leave out ("with") and insert ("in view of").
Page 23, line 8, at end insert ("or of section 19 or 23 of the Civil Aviation Act 1949").—(The Lord Chancellor.)
On Question, Amendments agreed to.

PUBLIC HEALTH (RECURRING NUISANCES) BILL
5.7 p.m.
LORD AUCKLAND: My Lords, I beg to move that this Bill be read a second time. This is a very brief and politically non-controversial Bill of four clauses which was moved in the other place by my honourable and gallant friend the Member for Carshalton, and it passed through its Second Reading in the almost record time, I think, of 15 minutes flat.
The purpose of the Bill is to elaborate upon and indeed improve the much weightier 1936 Public Health Act. Under the 1936 Public Health Act local authorities were given powers to deal with nuisances at the time of the nuisances being committed. The purpose of this Bill is to deal with nuisances which recur from time to time. We can all think of some of them. Of course, the Noise

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Abatement Act 1956, and the Clean Air Act, have largely disposed of the problems of smoke and of noise, but there is the problem of the man who consistently mows his law on a Sunday afternoon with a mower which makes far too much noise and which shatters the peace of the neighbourhood or, even worse, if he cuts it at nine o'clock at night. Under the 1936 Act he could be taken to task by the local authority if he was caught doing it at the time, but under this Bill if the local authority find that he is committing this inconvenience at frequently recurring intervals he can be dealt with accordingly.
The two main aspects of this Bill are concerned with smell and obstruction. We have an increasing number of rubbish tips, some of them quite unauthorised, littering our countryside. These give off very offensive smells and every now and again things are added to them. Under this Bill the local authority has powers to make those responsible stop this practice. There is no provision for increased penalties other than those under the 1936 Act, but those nuisances which occur regularly can be stopped. The Bill does not apply to Scotland, because Scotland was go-ahead enough to put this legislation in force some while ago. But following the 1963 Wilson Committee on Noise, action will at last be taken in England and Wales. This is an age of do-it-yourself, and since hiring labour is expensive there are to-day more and more machines on the market. The Bill is not a kind of spoil-sport Bill, to prevent people tidying up their gardens and so on, but there are those who do not do it very effectively and, perhaps, at great inconvenience to their neighbours and others.
To deal briefly with the clauses of the Bill, Clause 1 empowers a local authority to serve a notice prohibiting the recurrence of a nuisance, and subsection (3) gives power to serve the notice whether or not the nuisance is in force at the time. This is really the main force of the Bill. As I said earlier, it can deal with, say, a lorry which unloads rubbish or material and blocks an entrance to a thoroughfare, causes an offensive smell or infringes safety regulations. Clause 2 gives power to a local authority to complain to a justice of the peace in cases where there is non-compliance with the
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prohibition notice. Clause 3 enables a private person to make a direct complaint to a magistrate.
We are living in days when our countryside is gradually being built on. We are losing much of our valuable farmland and many of our beauty spots. This is all part of progress and in many cases we cannot complain, since we cannot have it all ways. But we can, at least, prevent some of the nuisances which this Bill seeks to rectify and I ask your Lordships to give it a Second Reading.
Moved, That the Bill be now read 2a.—(Lord Auckland.)
5.14 p.m.
LORD BROOKE OF CUMNOR: My Lords, I should like to welcome this small but valuable Bill, and to congratulate my noble friend on having introduced it in your Lordships' House. I feel a certain sense of guilt, because now that it has emerged that the public health law of England has for long lagged behind the public health law of Scotland in this matter, I ask myself why I did not rectify that omission when I introduced a Public Health Bill into Parliament in the year 1961. It was an omnibus Bill which dealt with a very wide variety of subjects, yet I regret to say that I missed this one.
This Bill seems to me to have another value over and above those which my noble friend has mentioned, in that it should save a good deal of local government time. One of my experiences in local government was that local government officers were liable to have to waste a good deal of time when they were trying, ineffectually, to serve a notice on somebody who was doing something which he should not. The noble Lord, Lord Kennet, will be familiar with the way this is liable to happen in the case of housing nuisances. There is no doubt that in the past, when local authorities have been seeking to get a nuisance abated, their officers have had to waste time, as the service of an abatement notice is not valid and effective unless it is served at a moment when the nuisance exists. These recurrent nuisances may be occasional and intermittent, but if they only happen, for example, on a Saturday evening that may be just the time when it is hardest for

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the local government officer to serve a notice.
I am slightly puzzled by some words in subsection (1) of Clause 1 which say:
"Where a local authority are satisfied that a statutory nuisance has occured on any premises and is likely to recur on the same premises …"
I confess that I do not see how a local authority can satisfy itself that a nuisance is likely to recur unless it has already occurred at least twice. However, these words do not suggest that it need have occurred more than once before the local authority reaches its decison. I can well understand, of course, that if it is a matter of noise caused by machinery, the noise is likely to recur whenever the machinery is operated. But it seems to me quite clear that when it is a nuisance such as the dumping of rubbish, a local authority could not satisfy itself that the nuisance was likely to recur unless it had already occurred several times. The wording of the Bill may be quite satisfactory there, and experience may say that it is. But it seemed to me to he a point worth raising, and I think it is right to raise it, because one must think of the protection of the individual as well as the protection of the general public.
I wish the local authorities to have these new powers, but nobody would wish them to use these new powers extravagantly or carelessly. It seems to me essential that a local authority should have cause to be fully satisfied that there is a likelihood of recurrence before it sets on foot the procedure laid down in the Bill. That is all I have to say, and the fact that this Bill has passed quickly and non-controversially through another place gives one great hope that it may before long reach the Statute Book.
5.19 p.m.
LORD BURDEN: My Lords, like the noble Lord, Lord Brooke of Cumnor, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Auckland, on introducing this Bill. As has been explained, its purpose is to fill one of the gaps in the provisions of the Public Health Act 1936 relating to statutory nuisance. Under the 1936 Act, an abatement notice can be served only in respect of an existing nuisance. If the nuisance has ceased, a notice cannot be served unless the nuisance recurs. Thus, for example, where a hole in the roof has been badly
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patched a local authority can take no effective action until some more rain, or something similar, demonstrates that the patch is ineffective. The Bill empowers local authorities to serve nuisance notices where a nuisance has occurred arid is likely to recur, even though at the time the notice is served the nuisance is not in existence, and even though a previous notice may not have been served. I would not claim that this measure is one of first importance; but it is a useful one. I am sure that the local authorities will find it useful; and it has the blessing of the Association of Municipal Corporations. In those circumstances, and as the Bill comes to us without having caused any difficulty at all in another place, I hope that your Lordships will give it a Second Reading
5.21 p.m.
LORD ILFORD: My Lords, I am sure that the local authorities will welcome this Bill and feel indebted to my noble friend for having brought it forward. As the noble Lord has just said, it is aimed at stopping up one of the gaps in the existing public health legislation, and I hope that it will do so effectively. I do not think that any great difficulty is likely to arise in the construction of the words "likely to recur". I do not think the local authorities will have much difficulty in determining whether or not a nuisance is likely to recur. Take the case that the noble Lord, Lord Burden, has mentioned, of a defective roof on which repairs are
carried out by the landlord, but where the repairs are not really adequate to ensure that the nuisance will not recur. I do not think the local authority would have much difficulty in determining that in a case of that sort the nuisance was likely to recur. Whether that is so or not, I am sure that this is a useful and valuable Bill. Perhaps it can be improved in Committee. It will, I am sure, be welcomed by the local authorities.
5.23 p.m.
LORD KENNET: My Lords, it is clear that the Bill meets with a general welcome. I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Auckland, on introducing it. On the detailed point made by the noble Lord, Lord Brooke, about Clause 1(1), we can go into that in Committee, unless I can allay his doubts about it at the moment. But it seems to me that it is

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all right, because, supposing that a nuisance is committed once and the local authority then serves its abatement notice, that is the end of the matter unless the citizen makes the nuisance again, in which case he is contravening the abatement notice and the local authority may take him to court. So it seems to me that the important thing is what happens after the abatement notice is served, and not what precise grounds the local authority may have for thinking that the nuisance is going to recur before they serve the abatement notice.
There is little for the Government to add. The whole point of the Bill is to prevent not only inconvenience but a certain kind of cat-and-mouse game which is played in some parts of the country by those who understand the present loophole only too well. They start making their noise, or their smell, or whatever it may be, in the full knowledge that after the council has resolved to serve a notice on them it will be open to them to stop making it, so that by the time the officer comes round with his notice there is nothing to be done. This Bill will put an end to that cat-and-mouse nonsense, and will, in my personal experience, bring relief to a great many people who are suffering nuisance and ought not to be.
LORD AUCKLAND: My Lords, I am most grateful to noble Lords on both sides of the House for the welcome and help which they have given to this small Bill. I hope that it will pass into law very quickly.
On Question, Bill read 2a, and committed to a Committee of the Whole House.

NURSES' PAY AND CONDITIONS
5.25 p.m.
LORD AMULREE LORD AMULREE rose to ask Her Majesty's Government what steps they propose to take to improve the conditions under which nurses work.
The noble Lord said: My Lords, at the present time there are in the country about 420,000 State-registered nurses, 52,000 student nurses, 104,000 State-enrolled nurses, 18,000 pupil nurses and 46,000 auxiliary nurses or nursing auxiliaries, making a total of 640,000 people. I
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am sorry to have to give these figures: I shall not give your Lordships any more. The National Health Service is at the present time the biggest of our national industries, and one can see from the figures I have quoted that the nurses are really the largest category of staff in the National Health Service. One could really say that they are carrying the Service—to a very great extent, anyhow. There are quite a number of people who do not really know what nurses do, or what their work is. The nurses are the people who make possible the work of all sorts and kinds in hospital. One is told about the more spectacular work now done by surgeons and physicians in the case of transplants, cardiac resuscitation, intensive-care units and all that spectacular work which has cropped up in the last ten or fifteen years. I think I am right in saying that if it was not for the skilled nurses working with these surgeons, 75 per cent. of their work would be labour in vain.
So I come to the first part of the Question I want to ask the Government. Is it right that the terms of pay under which the nurses work should be settled by
the Whitley Council machinery? The Whitley Councils, as your Lordships will remember, were established in 1916, I think it was, by a committee under the chairmanship of Mr. J. H. Whitley, who was a Liberal Member of Parliament, which recommended the formation of joint industrial councils. These were to deal with pay and other disputes between the employer and the employed During the war, the nurses' pay was regulated by a committee called the Rushcliffe Committee, which was a temporary committee in that I do not think it was meant to be there for a very long time. But in 1948, when the National Health Service came into being, it was decided that the Whitley Council was the right procedure for the nurses' pay.
The management side consists of representatives of quite a number of bodies, of which I will quote just a few: the Ministry of Health, the regional hospital boards, the hospital management committees, the Association of Municipal Corporations, and so on. But behind these is the Treasury. Therefore, the employers' side has not really got the same power to negotiate as that which you find if you are dealing with

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a purely industrial set-up, where the staff side and the management side can talk together directly.
In that case, the management side has full control over what it decides to do, whereas in this particular case, I think I am right in saying, the Treasury is the overriding factor. I was a member of the staff side at one or two Whitley Council meetings, when I was working with the occupational therapists. I am bound to say that I found appearing before the Whitley Council was a most disheartening, discouraging and disappointing affair. I admit that they were extremely nice; they could not have been kinder. But you knew from the start that nothing was going to happen; and when you came away nothing did happen.
The doctors have been rather cleverer than some people, because about ten or twelve years ago a Committee was appointed, under the chairmanship of the noble Lord, Lord Pilkington, which recommended that there should be a Review Body, with an independent Chairman and six members—not medical people at all—who should make recommendations on the pay of doctors working in the National Health Service, both those working as general practitioners and those working in the hospital service. The doctors working under the local authorities, I believe I am right in thinking, came under the Whitley machinery which controls local authority matters. At any rate, the recommendation of the Pilkington Committee mean that, in the case of doctors, we have this Review Body, which has reported eight or nine times and, broadly speaking, has given a great deal of satisfaction to the profession.
The question I want to put is this. Why should there not be a similar review body dealing with the nurses' pay?—because the nurses have now become a professional body of people, as doctors are professional people. Nursing is no longer a calling, as it once was, when nurses would do anything for nothing: that cannot be expected to happen now. Nurses have become a professional body of people. The young nurses are now recognised as students who require a well-designed curriculum, expert instruction and guidance in the training schools and in the practical work they do in the
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wards. But one must realise that in their instruction in the wards, in their practical work, both as qualified nurses and as student nurses, they represent the main labour force working in the wards. So, although it is true to say that the younger—some of them men—nurses are students, they are in fact doing a great deal more than students do, because they carry a very considerable amount of responsibility.
Moreover, supposing they were not there working in the wards, one does not quite know what would become of the wards. More people would have to he employed from somewhere. Nurses are called upon to supply a full 24-hour nursing service in the hospitals, and the people who are recruited as student nurses are required to have considerable educational qualifications. For the normal entry, they must have two "0" levels, of which one has to be in English; for the teaching hospitals, they try to get them with five "O" levels, to correspond with the radiographers and physiotherapists and members of the other professional bodies working in the hospital.
I will come now briefly to the question of nurses' pay. A student nurse, gets £395 a year, gross. From that she has to pay superannuation, national insurance, income tax and quite a large sum for board-and-lodging; so that the amount she finally takes home is something in the neighbourhood of £240 a year. I may have my figures wrong, but I do not think so. These scales rather correspond to those of the other members of the nursing profession. Take a ward sister, who carries a great deal of responsibility and does a great deal of real hard work: her maximum salary is £1,300 a year. I think I have that right, but I am always prepared to he checked on the figures. What is said in excuse is that if nurses do not want to live out, in a great many cases they have accommodation provided for them. That is true. But take the case of a student nurse: she has only a bedroom and a communal living room. Perhaps for a student that is not too had. A staff nurse, or a qualified nurse, may get a bed-sitting room and a communal room, too; but this does not compare well with people of the same intellectual background, working in private, who can have a little apartment for themselves and do

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not have to lead this communal life which some people do not find very attractive.
Therefore, my Lords, as part of my Question I should like to ask whether nurses cannot in some way be paid more. Let me give one or two more figures. At the present time a senior nurse cannot earn more than £2,950 a year. That is the maximum. I saw an advertisement on May 1 in the Nursing Times for a senior nursing officer who was to be paid from £2,530 up to £2,950. She was to have full charge, from the nursing point of view, of 4,500 beds, of which 1,300 were for mental patients. I will not go into the details of the beds; but there were 4,500 beds in 17 hospitals. She was going to have to accept responsibility for the accident ward, the out-patients department, training for both (State-registered and State-enrolled nurses—and all for the figure I have quoted.
Compare that with the salaries which the nationalised industries pay their Chairmen. I do not suggest that the nurses wish to be paid as much; but the Chairman of B.E.A. gets £11,000 a year; the Chairman of B.O.A.C., £15,000, and so on. Even some of the minor jobs, like that of an area gas manager, carry a salary of from £7,000 to £9,500. The only really tiny one is the North Scotland Hydro-Electric Board, where the Chairman is paid merely £4,750—it seems unfair on the North of Scotland. The Royal College of Nursing do not make very big claims. They suggest only that the top salary might be increased from £2,950 to £4,500 a year. These are the two questions that I want to put to the noble Baroness, and I shall be grateful for any reply that the Government may give me.
5.38 p.m.
BARONESS BROOKE OF YSTRADFELLTE: My Lords, that nurses are news to-day is clearly apparent. The traditional picture of a quiet, gentle, reassuring, comfort-giving figure in an attractive uniform is in some cases being superseded by a more militant and aggressive individual demanding her rights and perhaps sometimes forgetting her duties—or so the Press, television and radio would have us believe. Although this new militancy is by no means universal
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and the methods adopted are not acceptable to the vast majority of the profession, there is a general feeling of unrest, frustration and unhappiness that could develop into a permanent malaise unless something is done to arrest its growth and cure its cause.
What are the causes of the troubles? In a short debate such as we are having to-day it is impossible to attempt to cover the whole canvas. I shall confine what I have to say to looking at a few of the problems to be found facing both the giving and the receiving ends of the service. It has been said categorically, over and over again, that the salary structure is inadequate; that at the top it does not give sufficient reward for added responsibility or sufficient incentive to encourage trained and experienced nurses to seek promotion. The Salmon Committee on senior nursing staff structure advocated the creation of a new top post.
On this information being made available there was excitement in the nursing profession that at last they were going to be paid for what they were doing in terms of responsibility and years of experience—a new top post, that of Chief Nursing Officer. The training and experience for such a post. and the responsibilities it carries, are both challenging and impressive; and as the noble Lord, Lord Amulree, has already told your Lordships, the salary, the peak salary, is £2,950. The figure of £2,950 is not an arbitrary one; it was suggested by the Prices and Incomes Board in its Report on Pay of Nurses and Midwives in the National Health Service. The Board did not even have the grace to say "Grade 10 nurses—the top grade—are worth £5.000, but we cannot afford to pay it." It is this that has helped to cause some of the bitterness among nurses at the moment.
My Lords, we are living in an age when technical developments and organisational changes in the profession call out for mature, experienced nurses of the highest calibre with management skill. That goes for all the new techniques which are necessary; the exciting new equipment and the use of new drugs, too. The student nurse must be conscientiously taught, and the facilities for teaching and learning must be improved if full advantage is to be taken of the advances

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in medical and surgical skills that are being made all the time.
The second grade that I should like to consider is that of ward sisters in general hospitals. Ward sisters are highly skilled personnel. They carry heavy responsibilities for the bedside care of the patient, for the administration of their ward, and for teaching. Many nurses would prefer to stay on this clinical side of the service for the whole of their professional lives, in close contact with patients, but they are deterred from doing so by the low level of salary which can be obtained even after many years of service. As the noble Lord, Lord Amulree, has told us—and I do not hesitate to repeat this figure because I think that this is what we want people to realise—the salary scale of a ward sister is £970 a year, rising to the giddy height of £1,315, with nine increments before the maximum point is reached. Who would be a ward sister with only those mouldy "financial carrots" dangling in front of her?
The third grade is that of student nurse. The student nurses provide the main labour force for the hospital, and he or she is paid a training allowance which is then treated as a wage and is subject to deductions, superannuation, National Insurance and, with rare exceptions, income tax also. Whatever else your Lordships may not know about the pay and conditions of the nursing profession, I am pretty certain that you are all aware of the introduction of the "pay as you eat" scheme. The principle of "pay as you eat" is not universally unpopular, but the inadequacy of the training allowance to cover the principle in practice is the cause of the trouble. All innovations tend to cause rumpuses, but, given time and good sense, and enough cash, this scheme should settle down, after initial teething troubles—one of which, it seems, is that there is not enough food for the teeth to chew.
Some hospitals appear to have been more skilful than others in the introduction of the scheme. The standard should be universal and steps must be taken to see that it is so. Nurses are doing heavy physical work and they are always hungry. Forty years ago, when I was a probationer-nurse, when we came off duty at half-past nine in the morning, having been on the run since 7 a.m.—and the same thing holds good to-day—we fell
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upon the remains of the supper of the night before; beefsteak and kidney pie, rice pudding, coffee, rolls, anything we could lay our hands on. We were
ravenous. And in spite of the vital statistics which are always much in the news, I do not believe that it is very different for the nurses in training to-day. I believe that they get just as hungry as we were.
What I can never understand is why, when a pay award is made to the nursing profession, more money is promptly required for board-and-keep emoluments, and the amount is backdated to the day of the rise. Surely, if food and domestic help charges have risen the emoluments should have been increased before the pay award and not appear to be part of a package deal when the cash is eventually being handed out. Most of the student nurses to-day are expected to house, clothe and feed themselves an a training allowance of less than £8 a week; and that, as we all know, just cannot be done with any margin for enjoyment or pleasure. I will not bore your Lordships with the training allowance that I had 40 years ago.
These nurses are listed as student nurses on the establishment. May I suggest that they are neither the one nor the other? At present they are largely hybrid, and so they get the worst of both worlds. If the nursing care of the future is to be equal to the advances in medical knowledge and equipment which have been made in recent years, and which are being made all the time, the student nurse must be regarded as a student and given all the necessary facilities to enable her to be one. Never before in nursing history has the position of the tutor been of greater importance. There is so much to teach and the average ratio of tutors to students is 1 to 40. The student is mostly learning for only a quarter of the time, and she spends only about one-sixth of it in the School of Nursing. For the rest of her time she is helping to run the hospital, with Saturday and Sunday duty and no overtime, and a considerable amount of lonely, often frightening, night duty.
The theory is that a nurse receives teaching in the wards, but with the general shortage of trained staff, she is often on duty for eight hours without receiving any instruction at all. Nurses have always

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been in evidence, apparently in sufficient numbers to staff our hospitals and to enable the domiciliary services to be maintained. We, the public, my Lords, are aware of them when we are ill and need their skills; when we are on the receiving end. But when we are well and away from their ministrations, then all too easily we tend to forget them. The time has come when we are being jolted into consciousness that the prevalent disease of unrest is beginning to show signs of activity and that the less stable and responsible members of a great profession may try to organise rebellion against conditions of service and pay.
I hope, my Lords, that Her Majesty's Government will rise to the occasion; that they will set up the necessary machinery forthwith to seek out some viable solution; and the first blow that I should like to see them strike is against the "sacred cow" of Whitley, the most unrealistic and unimaginative body ever set up as a guardian of fair play. Money, or the lack of it, is the crux of the matter. I think that the noble Baroness, the Minister of State, deserves all our sympathy. She has a gigantic task on her hands with the Treasury as the "giant", and although her name is not "Jack" and she belongs to the opposite sex, I believe that she will have a pretty good shot at climbing the beanstalk of knotted sheets and at running off with the goose that lays the golden egg, so essential to the solution or easing of the infinite number of problems that await her in the Department for which she is now answerable. I wish her all the luck in the world.
5.47 p.m.
BARONESS SUMMERSKILL: My Lords, I find it difficult to say anything after what the noble Baroness, Lady Brooke of Ystradfellte, has said. She, of course, speaks with the knowledge and the passion of a woman who has known the life of a nurse, and has realised that it is not all nobility; that there are hard times and frightening times—I am glad that she used the word "frightening"—in relation to the work done by a young nurse who may be left alone in a ward all night, sometimes for eight hours, while the doctors go home to their comfortable beds. When the doctors leave the wards and go home, they say to themselves,
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"Thank God I am not that little nurse!". Whatever happens during the night; if for the first time in her experience a patient dies, the young girl is left to face death and do all that is necessary. It may be an elderly man or woman who dies. This is all horrific but, unfortunately, so few people consider these things after they have left the hospital well and happy.
The noble Baroness, Lady Brooke of Ystradfellte, talked about, "these gentle women". It reminded me of what they said about the suffragettes; how people raised their eyes and said, "How is it that these gently-nurtured women can even consider violence, and behave in this unladylike way?" If you call something that a woman does "unladylike", that is enough—she will immediately do anything and be completely passive. And so we have a rather interesting parallel, because these women have not suddenly revolted, they have not done something which is entirely out of character. In a way they are rather like the suffragettes. Before the suffragettes revolted, for thirty or forty years they had come to Parliament and asked, in a gentle, ladylike way, to have the franchise. These women who are now in revolt have used every other means to get their grievances remedied. They have behaved in a gentle way. They have gone to their sisters and matrons and Members of Parliament, written hundreds and thousands of letters over the years, describing the conditions, which the noble Baroness has described, and asked, "Is this fair? Can you do nothing to help us?" And they have been ignored.
I feel that the discussions going on at this moment between the Trades Union Congress and the Government are relevant to this matter. These discussions are concerned with the use of the strike weapon. The T.U.C. says that in no circumstances must the strike weapon be taken from them, because the withdrawal of labour is the only weapon that the workers have, if the terms of their employment are not good. The Government say that all they are doing is to ask for a cooling-off period; that the trade unions shall wait for a fortnight, but they realise that it is absolutely legitimate for a worker if his terms of service are bad, to withdraw his labour.
The nurses we are discussing to-day are some of the finest workers in the country.

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The whole House will agree with that. But while legally they can withdraw their labour, they have no moral right to do so. These girls are aware of that. They realise that morally they must stick it out, irrespective of the hours, the uncongenial conditions of work and the miserable pay. So they and the doctors are the only workers in the country—and their services can really never be estimated in pounds, shillings and pence, however much we give them—who cannot say, "if you do not treat us fairly, we shall withdraw our labour." Now they are making a protest, a violent protest, and all the nice people hold up their hands, shocked, and say, "Not the nurses, surely?" Yes, my Lords. The nurses have had enough of being ignored and exploited.
The noble Lord, Lord Amulree, gave figures of an 84-hour fortnight, and sometimes the nurses can work for a stretch of 77 hours of night work—heavy, physically arduous work. Girls of 18 and 19 have to heave up men of 15 stone, rub their backs so that they will not get bed sores and spend all night running in and out with bed pans and cleaning them—doing things that the relatives of these people would never do. That is why so many people are in hospital, because the jobs these little girls are asked to do will not be done—and quite understandably—by the relatives.
Although I recognise the point made by the noble Baroness, that if they were paid enough money they could pay for their meals, I feel strongly that a responsible committee should not have decided that a still growing girl—people do not stop growing until they are about 22 or 23—whose strength can be overtaxed, physically and mentally, should not be ensured regular and adequate meals. This committee, for the first time in the
history of nursing, have literally washed their hands of their full responsibility for the feeding of their charges. And when I say "charges", surely that is the right term; they have not washed their hands of the disciplining of these girls. I am told that the nurses have to get in at a certain time. They are the only workers in the country who have to do so. Apparently discipline is still exercised by people who seem to enjoy that kind of power, although they will still leave the same girls alone all night in a ward.
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In my opinion, this policy is absolutely opposed to the contemporary approach to the feeding of young people. Even business firms recognise that young typists and office workers, if they are to get the best work from them—all right, it is enlightened self-interest, if you like—must be properly fed, and that it pays them to give their workers subsidised luncheon vouchers, vouchers which can only be used for food. So there is no question of these firms not recognising that the feeding of these girls is important. Most of these office girls live at home. Their mothers give them a good breakfast, they get a good dinner at night—arid the firm gives them a subsidised lunch. That is what is being done in business, but not in our hospitals.
These nurses, who are dedicated to their vocation, are easily exploited and the committee has washed its hands of the full charge of their feeding. I believe that this is a fundamentally wrong policy. It is in the interests of the patients, as well as of the nurses, for these girls to be adequately fed. To put up with their kind of life, they must not feel irritable for one moment. They have always to be in a good temper, always to be placid, always to be patient with a patient, who may not be the nicest kind of individual. If they are not adequately fed, it is easy for them to change from kind nurses with good bedside manners into very irritable individuals.
Both the noble Lord, Lord Amulree, and the noble Baroness, Lady Brooke of Ystradfellte, talked about the physically arduous work that nurses do. I am told that it is estimated that these girls walk ten miles a day. It is interesting to know that those in authority have recognised this. The doctors have said that these girls are doing such arduous work that their feet must be looked after,
otherwise they may become flat-footed. So a regulation has been made that a special kind of shoe must be worn. This is significant, because it indicates the strain under which these girls work. Nevertheless, this special kind of shoe, which costs £4, has to be paid for by the nurse, although it is designed to help the work of the hospital.
I feel that this policy, which is fundamentally wrong, will lead to the poorest nurses, who are not subsidised by their parents, being unfairly treated. Let us

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recognise that there are two kinds of nurses. There is a waiting list of nurses wanting to go to St. Thomas's, across the river, where they are known as "Nightingales", because of course it is Florence Nightingale's old teaching hospital. There is a certain cachet—snob value, if you like—about going to St. Thomas's. Often these girls are the children of wealthier parents. It is fairly easy for some parents to subsidise their girls in hospital by sending them big parcels of food, and so on. I say that the policy of looking after these girls should have been planned in the light of the need of the poorest girl in the country.
I want to talk about the student nurse. As I said the other week, the word "student" is an absolute misnomer: it has no meaning whatever when applied to these girls. They are full-time hard workers at a physically arduous job. If they are students, then they should get a grant free of tax, and they could conduct their own lives as medical students do. If they are not students but workers, then they should be given a reasonable wage. But these girls are neither. They are used as cheap labour, with the result that often they are too exhausted to study adequately, and it is not surprising that so many of them give up in the first year. I am astonished that those in authority do not ask themselves: "Why is it that this large proportion of girls give up in the first year?" In fact, they have simply turned a blind eye to this problem, and when not enough girls have come forward they have gone to the under-developed countries and Commonwealth countries, where nurses are desperately needed, and imported them into our hospitals. I am quite happy that these girls should come here, but the fact that our girls are not coming forward must be glaringly obvious. Yet nobody has taken any notice of this.
Finally, in order that noble Lords may realise what an extraordinary position it is, I want to say this. I learned from an item in a newspaper two days ago that nurses are charged 2s. 6d. for a prescription. In a hospital where there is a dispensary full of drugs of every kind, with its own dispensers and pharmacists a nurse is charged 2s. 6d. for a prescription from this miserable little wage that
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she has. Again on the subject of pay, the orderlies and the domestics in the ward get a bigger take-home pay than the nurse.
I would ask the Government, as successive Governments have so many times been asked, directly or indirectly, not to think in terms of appointing a Royal Commission. As a matter of fact, I am told that this idea has been turned down (thank heaven!) in another place. A Royal Commission is a committee which goes on from year to year and, it seems to me, never comes to the right decision. I would ask that someone in authority should have the courage to say that this is so unjust and also so short-sighted, from the point of view of the hospitals and the country, that these girls are justified in making a protest. And I hope that as a result these conditions will be changed forthwith.
6.3 p.m.
LORD GRENFELL: My Lords, I am deeply grateful to my noble friend Lord Amulree for raising this question. He has spoken of pay, and I wish first of all to say a few words to your Lordships on this subject. I have taken the case of a first-year student nurse, under 25 and resident, who is seeking to obtain the certificate of State Registered Children's Nurse. There are different scales; they are a little higher for non-resident nurses, but the average applies to all nurses. I seek to put before your Lordships the case of those young girls who are unmarried and live in, who have chosen nursing as their vocation and whose services we need so badly. I ask the Government for consideration not only of these, but of the whole profession from top to bottom.
A matron in charge of 700 beds, who has responsibility for the training, guidance and efficiency of the nurses under her charge, receives a salary of £2,262. If living in, £344 is deducted for rent and laundry. This post is usually the peak of a career within the nursing services, and her responsibility is enormous. In a moment I am going to give your Lordships
statistics which I have taken from Queen Mary's Hospital for Children,
Carshalton, which is within my group. Before doing so, however, I should like to make a few general remarks.

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In years gone by it was understood that girls took up nursing as a vocation; and this, in my dictionary, is defined as:
"a divine or spiritual injunction or guidance to undertake a duty".
Those days are over. I have the honour to be associated with a number of charities and to the best of my ability I have seen to it that those who administer them are all similarly paid and, so far as possible, work in conditions comparable with people in other work, athough, naturally, many accept a lower wage in view of the nature of their work. I am blessed in my group with having lovely buildings, but in my privileged position as a Member of your Lordships' House I would speak for all, fully realising that the dreadful construction of some of our hospitals, and especially those for the severely subnormal, makes the well being of nurses vital for the whole future of the Hospital Service.
I should like to put before your Lordships the facts of the pay of a first-year student nurse, resident, remembering that this student nurse does duty on the ward when available from her studies, and does a 42-hour week. Basic pay for the month is £32 18s. 4d.; week-end pay and night duty, if in the course of duty, nil. Deductions are: lodging £2 1s. 8d., tax £1 8s. and National Insurance £2 16s. 4d; total £6 6s. Net pay received is thus £26 12s. 4d. This student might earn up to £3 a month in overtime. If we assume that she pays £2 6s. 1d. a week on food (and I shall be talking about this in a moment), she will have left £18 10s. a month, or £4 12s. 6d. a week, for all other purposes, including clothing herself in her civilian clothes, which, like other young girls, she wants to do, and everything else. Is it reasonable to expect the nursing profession, both men and women, to accept this pittance of a wage in what is called a vocation? It would be impossible in the name of humanity for them to strike.
I have now dealt with the pay. In the name of all justice, I protest about the structure of the Whitley Council and all its works. Someone must put forward the case of the nurses in our land, and if, as I see it, it is not done by the Whitley Council, I join with Lord Amulree and everybody else in this House to-day in protesting against the situation of nurses both in pay and conditions. This, my Lords, may seem to be the moment to sit down,
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but I believe that what I am about to say may be of value in assessing the advantages and disadvantages of the much publicised question of that dreadful phrase, "pay-as-you-eat".
I confirm the interjection I made in the Second Reading of the Nurses Bill, that the success of this experiment depends on good administration. The first criterion must be that anyone who wishes to have full meals throughout the day does not pay more than was automatically deducted from his or her pay under the old system; that is, £2 6s. 1d. per week. That is vital, and I have heard rumours that this criterion is not being followed in some hospitals. The second criterion is that the nurses have time to get their meals and pay for them without curtailing too much of their time off, and in this regard, by reconstructing the servery we are trying to ensure that the available meals are visually shown, so that the time of queueing can be reduced. Before producing my figures, may I say that I have visited the cafeterias of both Queen Mary's and St. Ebba's Hospitals, and have sat down with and talked to the nurses while they were having their meals. I have received favourable comments on the new system and the food.
It is difficult to judge on the first five weeks of any scheme, but I produce these figures for all using the cafeteria. It would appear that all concerned are, on the whole, better off, but we must take into account that it is a short period in what I feel is a long-term project. At Queen Mary's Hospital for Children, the overall finance of the cafeteria experience of the first five weeks is as follows. sums formerly collected from staff pay-packets for full board and residence, not now deducted, for about 300 staff—and that figure is an average residence staff figure over a year—and covering those five weeks, amounted to £2,237. The increased allowance made to non-resident student nurses for meals taken free when on duty amounts to £476. The total increase in income to the staff is therefore £2,713. Sales of meals in the cafeteria direct to all grades of staff amount to £1,618. The difference between the former figure and the latter—that is £1,095—is money which the staff have received and which has not been spent by them in our dining rooms, although there is general satisfaction with the quality of

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the food. There already appears to be less wastage on plates, and I can assure the House that so far as I and the matron can see, none of the nurses are in any way starving.
There can be no doubt that the Hospital Service as a whole needs very careful thought. We have had Green Papers, and Committee after Committee, but I feel sure that we should have immediate action on the nurses situation if there is not to be a rather sad breakdown in the near future in our relations with the finest profession in the world.
My Lords, I have taken up just those two points, as I believe that short speeches should be the order of the day on Unstarred Questions. I sincerely hope that after the Summer Recess a full-dress debate will be arranged which will bring in all aspects of the Hospital Service, and I shall then have a lot more to say. I believe that a careful reappraisal of the whole pay structure of the Hospital Service must be made, and consideration must be given to the future of the nursing profession in the context of making it more interesting, cutting down to a minimum custodian care, especially in the subnormal hospitals, and encouraging nurses to reach out into the educational sphere—not that they do not do this so far as possible, but my dream would be that incentives should be given to make it worth while to train in teaching methods and hence make the whole field of nursing ever more interesting.
I would say, finally, in spite of what the noble Baroness, Lady Summerskill,
said, that I sincerely hope that our nurses will not start marching. I feel it lowers the whole standard—especially if they march in uniform. They are wonderful people, and I think they must know that there are very many of us who are doing all we can to see that they get a good deal.
6.17 p.m.
BARONESS HYLTON-FOSTER: My Lords, I also should like to thank the noble Lord, Lord Amulree, for raising this question now. I hope that as it has come at this time it may perhaps help the noble Baroness, the Minister of State, to start climbing up Lady Brooke's knotty beanstalk. I should like to say a few words to emphasise some of the points already made, but from the nurses' angle,
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as I think it right that I should declare at this moment that I am on the Register of State-enrolled nurses.
As has been said, student nurses are quite unlike all other students. I think this cannot be emphasised too often, because they carry this tremendous responsibility which no other student pretends to carry. Second-year students, as has already been said may well find themselves—particularly at night—on a ward quite alone, when sister is off duty, in charge of anything up to 24 patients. For this they get, I think, in round figures, about £6 a week; and for £6 any of our lives can be in their hands. In my view, pay should be related to responsibility.
I want to talk quite separately about pay-as-you-eat. This morning I discussed this subject with one of the London matrons so as to get a really up to date picture of her view. I feel that there is some confusion between pay-as-you-eat for student nurses, and pay-as-you-eat for older nurses. Student nurses—as has already been emphasised—are very hungry young people, and they ought to be given the opportunity of eating as much as they want whenever they want, without having to dip into their own pocket for it. Again, when student nurses are on night duty it is absolutely essential that they should have their night drink in the small hours of the morning, without having to decide whether the cost is coming out of their pocket money. If it is coming out of their pocket money they have to weigh up whether it is worth having the drink at night, or the meat by day or whether they would not rather put the money towards the new shoes (which we have been told cost about £4), or perhaps towards the holidays. They should have this food or drink as their right. Of this I am quite certain.
However, I think that the older nurses present a different problem because often they are part-time and married; many of them are working not in acute wards but geriatric wards, and they choose this kind of nursing because it suits their home life. As older people they do not need so much food; they are probably not still growing. Also, they have (this is the point that the matron I was talking to thought was essential) an outside interest. If she had the choice, she would have all

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student nurses living out, too, so that they also had a completely separate life apart from their work in hospital.
The student nurses' work, in the early days of training, is also physically heavy. As student nurses progress with their training and with nursing techniques, the work becomes easier and lighter. But, of course, the older nurse, the nurse looking after geriatric patients, does a type of nursing which needs immense patience. Those who look after the type of patient who—we have to face it—can never get better do a job which can indeed be very soul-destroying; and those doing it need a complete change when they are off duty so that their minds are taken off their work. All nurses must be properly fed. A tired nurse is not a good nurse, and when a nurse is tired accidents can happen.
A modern nurse does not like to be called a dedicated person. She probably is one, but she does not like to be called it. I think it is to-day's Times that describes her as a normal, happy career girl who, because she likes working with people, goes into nursing. She will remain in nursing only if the status, pay and conditions are made acceptable to her. I think we simply must remember that there is no uniformity of hospital conditions; there is no uniformity of hospital meals, and there is no uniformity of hospital matrons, either. Therefore, I ask myself: are the plans for the hospitals and the hospital services really designed to tidy up administration, rather than for the benefit of the nurses and the comfort of patients?
6.23 p.m.
LADY RUTHVEN or FREELAND: My Lords, I also should like to thank the noble Lord, Lord Amulree, for asking this Question. I feel I have very little to say that has not already been said by previous speakers. I feel very strongly about the nursing profession, having been at one time chairman of three nursing committees at the same time, two in teaching hospitals in London and one in a psychiatric hospital in the country. I have had the opportunity of talking to, and have had many friends among, senior nurses and matrons and I have talked to many nurses in training, and have learnt from all something about their work, their training, and the con-
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ditions in which they work. I have also, unfortunately, had a good many operations and have been in hospital quite a number of times. I have been in hospital not only in London but all over the world—in the Middle East, India, China and the United States. I think I can say quite definitely that everywhere I have regarded my recovery as 70 per cent. due to the nursing I was given; and that goes for all the different nationalities who have nursed me.
I am very shocked by this outburst that has taken place, and I mind that the nurses should be put in this very prominent position. I think it is entirely due to the unfortunate pay-as-you-eat (that awful expression), and I think it has had a very distressing effect on all non-resident nurses in training. Not that I think the nurses want to be residential. In fact, most of them do not. I am quite sure your Lordships know that no young person really wants to live at home, even her own home, a hall of residence at a university, or a nurses' home. Most of the nurses would like to live out and pay for the meals they take from the hospital. It is really an extremely small, pitiful amount, after deductions for income tax et cetera, that nurses are left with to live on and pay for their meals, and this has caused the unfortunate outcry in the country.
I was going to quote the various figures that ether speakers have quoted before me, but I think that as I know more about nurses in training in London I will speak a little about that subject. We know that they get London weighting, if they are in a London hospital, of £90. But there is a great difficulty in London because those who live out have a very high rent to pay and often have very high fares. I have an example here. It is that of a third-year student in London who has an average of £9 a week, after statutory deductions, and has to pay between £3 10s. and £4 10s. for accommodation. One third-year student whom I know personally pays £3 10s. to share a house with eight other nurses, sharing a room with one other person. She has to pay 12s. a week in fares to and from the hospital. This leaves her just under £5 to cover everything else. This girl gets some help from her parents, but as the noble Baroness, Lady Summerskill, said, we really ought not to take that into

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consideration. We must cater for the girl or boy who has no help from her or his parents. Now as a non-resident student this girl, who has been getting all her meals free on duty, will be considerably out of pocket. She will be given £66, reduced by tax to about £52, to cover the cost of such meals; that is only £1 a week. I do not know how she is going to manage. A second-year student nurse under 21 years of age would be even worse off than the third-year student because her allowance is smaller.
This is the crux of the matter. Whereas in the past when nurses had their meals in the hospital they could eat as much as they liked, now they will look at the menu to see what is the cheapest item on it and will probably buy that. Surely this is not a very sensible way of looking after these young people aged from 18 to 21, who must be fed properly if they are to perform these heavy and exhausting duties which, as various speakers have said, can also be very emotional. Their physical strength must be sustained if their duties are to be carried out properly and efficiently. We know that all the hospital meals are subsidised, but I think that either they must be subsidised even more—otherwise the nurse will not get sufficient food—or we must think of something such as a luncheon voucher or supper voucher which will be provided from hospital funds.
There is one small point about which I should like to ask the Minister. It is on the question of London weighting, which for nurses living out is £90. I am told that nurses working in the Department of Health receive £120 a year, as do other civil servants. I cannot see why nurses in hospital should receive less.
I should also very much like to support what has been said by the noble Lord, Lord Amulree, and various other speakers, on the question of calling nurses "student nurses". This is completely ridiculous. If they did not work in the hospitals practically all the wards would be closed down at once. I am sure that everyone who has taken part in this debate feels the same. We must either give these girls a proper training allowance and treat them as students and not tax them, or else treat them as part of
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the staff and pay them for the work they are doing.
I should like to say a word now about qualified staff. The newly qualified staff nurses also have great difficulty in managing on their salaries. The budget of one staff nurse known to me, which is typical of many, shows that her take-home pay averages about £56 a month, out of which she pays a rent of £3 10s. 0d. or £4 0s. 0d. a week for a flat which she shares with three other staff nurses. She has to pay for all her meals on duty, and she also has to pay for electricity and gas and fares to and from the hospital. As the noble Baroness, Lady Summer-skill, said, the staff nurse has to buy her shoes and stockings, although why they should not be part of the issue of her uniform I have never been able to understand.
At one of the hospitals in which I worked for some time as chairman of the nursing committee we used to have a number of Australian nurses on the staff, but most of these have left to take jobs outside nursing. One such staff nurse recently resigned after four months to take a routine clerical job for which she is paid £20 a week. She was a good nurse and was sorry to leave the hospital, but she had not expected nurses' salaries to be so low in this country and she wanted to take a holiday in Europe before she went back to Australia.
Now I should like to come to the senior staff. The latest blow is the recommendation of the Prices and Incomes Board that the maximum salary to be paid to a chief nursing officer—recommendation No. 10 of the Salmon Report—should be £2,950. In my view this is absolutely inadequate for a man or woman who must hold high nursing qualifications, who must have extensive and varied administrative experience in nursing, and who must have attended a top management course. I wonder what is the maximum salary of such a nurse's colleagues on a course of this kind? I imagine it is certainly a good deal higher than £2,950. The chief nursing officer in a large hospital may be responsible for a budget in the region of £2 million; for the deployment and control of up to 2,000 professional nursing staff, and for the co-ordination of education services for probably some 700 students. On the professional side, responsibility is

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for the standard of nursing care given to all patients, and in a modern hospital group there may be more than 3,000 in-patients. One specialist London hospital has nearly 2,000 out-patients a day.
The chief nursing officer advises recruitment boards and committees on all matters affecting the nursing service and prepares, interprets and reviews nursing policy in consultation with professional colleagues, including medical staff whose arguments and tactics appear to the nurses to be reasonably effective where pay is concerned. All this for £2,950 a year at most. I saw the advertisement mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Amulree, asking for a chief nursing officer for a hospital or group of hospitals of 4,000 beds, and the salary offered was £2,250 per annum, no doubt eventually reaching that tremendous salary proposed by the Prices and Incomes Board of £2,950.
My Lords, I think the Government should have some new thoughts on the salary structure of the entire nursing profession. The status of the nurse in training should be reconsidered, and if we had an adequate number of sister tutors it would he possible for the nurse to complete training in two instead of three years. This has been tried in several places and is effective. If the nurse was treated as a student, deductions for income tax would be removed and the nurse would certainly be a little better off.
The salaries of tutors are worrying, and they should also be studied, for we are not encouraging fully trained nurses to take on the job of tutor. We are not encouraging the fully trained staff sister or ward sister to come in and be trained as a tutor, and those who are tutors are often leaving the nursing service and going into technical colleges where they can earn more than they can in the Health Service. Specialisation in medical and surgical care in our hospitals today is making new demands on nurses and involving them in new and exciting work. He or she has to be very well trained, and therefore we need more tutors to do this training.
I think that the salaries of the higher paid nursing staff should be studied carefully with regard to their responsibilities and the leadership which is required of them. I know it is difficult to compare
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responsibilities, but I cannot believe that in any other profession they would be rewarded at such a low level as is paid to a chief nursing officer.
No one has greater admiration for the Health Service in this country than I have, but we shall not be able to recruit or even keep our nurses unless we do something to bring salary scales in the profession more into line with those paid for equivalent technical skill, responsibility and administrative capacity such as in the Civil Service and in industry. I do not think that we are encouraging young people to come into the nursing profession; we are not providing an incentive for them as opposed to the rewards offered in other callings. Nursing is a remarkable profession. I agree that it is not a vocation, but I believe that in the heart of every nurse there is a feeling that they are contributing something to the good of humanity. Surely we do not want to lose these people from the profession which, after all, deals with birth, life and death.
6.36 p.m.
LORD AUCKLAND: My Lords, over the years the noble Lord, Lord Amulree, has enabled us to discuss a number of medical matters in this House, but I doubt whether he has afforded us a more valuable exercise than the present one, when the emotive heat of this very human problem has indeed reached boiling point. We have this valuable debate in which we have a number of expert speakers (myself excluded) to discuss, albeit briefly, a most important topic. Like many of your Lordships, my family has a long record of service on hospital committees and hospital boards, both prior to and during the National Health Service. I myself have served on the house committee of the Children's Hospital, and I now serve on the committee of one of the hospitals under my noble friend Lord Grenfell, to whom on more than one occasion we have owed deep debts of gratitude.
I should like to deal with one particular subject, that of accommodation. We have embarked on a programme of new hospital building that is by no means adequate, but with the commitments which we have in various public fields we obviously cannot have all the hospital buildings we need. I have raised this question before, and I raise it again now. I hope that in this matter of the

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problems facing the nursing profession particular attention is being given to the accommodation of nurses who come, say, to the South of England from the North of Scotland, from Northern and Southern Ireland and from the Commonwealth. These girls—and indeed men—cannot get home every week-end, nor even every six months, even if they had the money to do so, which they most certainly have not. I believe that much of the problem surrounding nursing is due to the fact that the nurses' homes in which they live are, even to-day, substandard.
There is, too, the question of ward design. For example, we have heard of Orpington Hospital, in Kent, with one student nurse looking after 90 patients in a long ward. Supposing an emergency happened half-way down the ward—presumably she would have to run down and cope with it, and there might be two or three other emergencies happening at the same time. I was in Finland last year and I visited two hospitals there in which they have small wards, each containing four to six patients. Comparing Finland with this country is not, obviously, comparing like with like. And I recognise that they do not have the same problems of public expenditure as we do. Nevertheless, I hope that some of our architects, when they design our new hospitals where our nurses, both student nurses and senior grades, have to work, will perhaps pay more visits to Scandinavian countries where design is so vital. I believe that our own hospital designers could learn a lot there.
On the subject of food, I do not speak with anything like the same knowledge as many who have spoken so far, but it seems to me that much will depend, bearing in mind the all too inadequate allowance given to the hospital authorities, on the quality of the catering officer. While we are rightly considering the pay of our nurses and our sisters and matrons, we must also consider the pay of the catering officer and the catering staffs. I am not thinking so much of the London teaching hospitals. There was an article in one of the papers about St. Thomas's Hospital and the catering there. Of course, they may well have more than one catering officer; they may have somebody who can go to the market and bulk-buy vegetables.
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And St. Thomas's are obviously in a much better position, for example, than a hospital in Rugby or Stafford or Sunderland, where there is a great deal of industry, and where, understandably, the catering officer, if he or she can find a more highly remunerated post in a large industrial concern, will go there rather than to a hospital.
My noble friend Lord Grenfell has mentioned Queen Mary's, Carshalton and Epsom, an area with which I am connected on hospital committees, and I can fully endorse what he says, although some of the mental hospitals in the Epsom group are not as fortunate as others in their design or their facilities. So it is not only well outside London that these problems occur.
Quite clearly, as the noble Baroness, Lady Summerskill, and others have said, food is all-important, particularly to the student nurses. One cannot expect a young girl of 18, or a young man, a young student male nurse of 18 or 19, to look after a ward, perhaps of 50 subnormal patients, or a children's ward or a geriatric ward, if he or she has to filch in their pockets to see whether they can afford two or three shillings for a meal. I think that the Government really must be seized of this problem.
There is another important point here, and that is the change in nursing techniques. There are now more accidents on our roads; there are accidents in our factories; there may well be a serious rail accident at 1 a.m.—as there was near Newcastle the other day. That means that nurses, perhaps student nurses, have to cope with casualties, particularly if the accident occurs in an area where there is a shortage of nurses in the hospitals concerned. How splendidly they cope, too! If this debate has done nothing else, I hope that it will reveal to the Government that this problem of the nursing profession cannot any longer be left to Committees and Commissions of Inquiry. The need is urgent now. Surely the Prices and Incomes Board, which has already burst its seams on a number of occasions, can burst one more seam.
6.47 p.m.
BARONESS ELLIOT OF HARWOOD: My Lords, it has been said that this debate comes at a very appropriate moment, as indeed, is true. So far as I am concerned,

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it could not have come at a more appropriate moment, as I have just spent six weeks in Westminster Hospital after a serious operation, and I am well aware that I stand here and make a speech simply because of the skill, not only of the surgeon and doctors but of the nurses who have been looking after me with absolutely untiring devotion and skill for so many weeks. I intervene because I cannot in adequate words express my gratitude for the devotion and efficiency and skill of the medical staff at the hospital. I always knew (although I never experienced it before) of the great skill of our nursing profession. But to experience it makes one realise that here is something—which I believe to be different from any other country in the world—their single-mindedness towards the patients; the fact that it does not matter whether it is day or night, the patients' needs are their first consideration.
The noble Baroness, Lady Summerskill, rightly said that much of what they do is just hard slogging work, running up and down corridors answering bells, doing the very simplest and most humble things for one, as well as practising the skills which are needed for the difficult and important care after operation. What impresses me so much is that there are no demarcation lines in this profession. Nobody says to you, "That is not my job". If you ring a bell and want something, the staff nurse may do it for you; or the student nurse comes. But if none of them is available the sister will come: nobody says, "It is not my job." They all work together as a team, and they all work for the interests of the patient.
They are on duty for long hours. They work at weekends. Their pay and awards and salaries are, in my opinion, absolutely inadequate. We are all guilty—I am guilty as well as everyone else—of not having fought harder before. After all, this situation has been going on for a very long time. There are Members of your Lordships' House who have taken up this matter and have been working for it for many years. I feel guilty because I have not done it before, but I feel utterly dedicated to the fact that I shall do it now in every possible way I can.
I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Amulree: what is wanted is a new structure for the nursing profession, which not only includes student nurses but goes
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right up to the top. I have nothing but contempt for the Whitley Council, with its 55 members: it is not a negotiating body but a public meeting. How can one negotiate with a public meeting? There should be a small committee representing both sides, and bringing the whole structure of nursing into the modern world. We spend much money on research—not perhaps as much as we should—in order to save people's lives, and this is all most vitally important. But, my Lords, our lives, those of us who are ill in hospital, are in the hands of nurses every time there is an operation, every time new techniques are tried out. It is the nursing profession that holds the responsibility of life and death so consistently. I do not know how it is that this profession seems to have been so inadequately paid.
In my life, having been at one time chairman of an education committee, I have fought for better pay for teachers, for instance. That was one of the things one was anxious for. But when I look at the pay of teachers to-day I find that it is considerably better than it was in the past. They have three months' holiday in the year; they have weekends off unless they happen to be doing something special for the children, for which they get paid. Yet so far as I can make out from those who have been quoting figures in regard to nursing, no nurse is offered three months off every year for holidays; nor do nurses get every weekend off. Occasionally they have a weekend, but nothing to compare with what other professions get.
Nursing is a marvellous profession, and we want to encourge as many young girls as possible to join it. But why should they, if they see their contemporaries going into other professions, secretarial or much less skilled professions, and getting far more money? It is all wrong. For too long the shades of Miss Nightingale have closed around, not the growing boy but the growing girl. It is time that all this stopped and a new look was given to this profession.
Like many others who have spoken, I do not think that inquiries are necessary. We all know about this profession. We have skilled women able to negotiate. We have many skilled people who understand and know the whole range of the

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nursing profession and all that it means. What we have is a lot of stubborn, obstinate men in Government circles who are determined to continue to exploit this profession as it has been exploited in the past. I hope that the noble Baroness, Lady Serota, someone for whom we all have enormous respect, and who really understands these matters, will stand up to some of her colleagues and tell them that we in the House of Lords, who in many ways are regarded as old fuddy-duddies, and what you will, feel so strongly about this that we will back her up together with anyone else who will see that this profession is given the proper status, the proper standing and the proper pay to which it is entitled in this day and generation.
6.52 p.m.
LORD VIVIAN: My Lords, the hour is getting late for a Thursday Sitting in your Lordships' House, and so I will try not to detain noble Lords for more than 15 minutes on this most important subject on which the noble Lord, Lord Amulree, has so rightly given us the chance to air our views this afternoon. To begin with, I would say that we have been discussing one of the main priorities on our home front. The subject matter concerns England, Scotland and Wales, as to the grave injustice which has been meted out to nurses, and which I can only describe as monstrous, Her Majesty's present Government have an urgent duty to perform; namely, to root out the injustice as expeditiously as possible. Legislation should be brought in whereby nurses have a fair deal for the noble and self-sacrificing work which they perform, with such dedication, for the good of our nation. As things are, nurses are working in tens-of-thousands of instances in outdated hospitals, with poor rations for which they are made to pay from £2 6s. 1d. to £3 a week. They are further asked to pay £6 per year for cups of tea and coffee.
Further, I ask your Lordships whether you consider rises in pay of between £30 and £60 a year, awarded in March, 1968, to be adequate or just to the nurses. It is my belief that all noble Lords and noble Baronesses who have the privilege to speak in your Lordships' House, no matter where they sit, will see to it that
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in future, and speedily, will press for and pursue legislation whereby those dedicated and long-suffering members of our society will receive their just reward for the wonderful qualities that they possess and the hard and dedicated work which they perform.
Believe it or not, my Lords, to be a nurse one must have great patience, a sense of humour, two pairs of hands, two pairs of feet, a couple of sets of brains and dedication. What have the Government meted out to these nurses as a reward for their extraordinary qualities? With humility, as a Back Bencher I will give your Lordships the answer, although in your hearts you know it already. They were given "tea and sympathy", as the Daily Express, a newspaper which often hits the nail on the head. put out as a heading on their main leader in the issue of to-day's date. That has been backed up by a brilliant cartoon by the beloved cartoonist, Giles, on the same theme.
This insult of "tea and sympathy" does not cease with student nurses—a term by which I know and appreciate that they do not like to be called. It is meted out to them along with other nurses in the nursing profession. It concerns charge nurses and ward sisters, right up to the matrons of hospitals, in whose particular case, for "carrying the can" in a position of great responsibility, no matter how big the hospital may be, the maximum salary they can earn is £2,950 a year. The noble Lord, Lord Amulree, underlined this; therefore I need say no more.
I would term the cynical indifference of the Prices and Incomes Board of Her Majesty's Government as the main cause of the feeling of injustice among the nursing profession. We learn that the Whitley Council—and I do not respect them—is to meet against on May 30. If they have to meet at all, why do they have to wait until May 30? The Council should meet immediately to consider every facet in the pay structure in the nursing profession and also to find ways in which members of the committee can best improve the conditions under which our nurses have to work.
Noble Lords will perhaps allow me to quote the last four paragraphs of this morning's main leader in the Daily Express. I do so because it puts into words

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better than I can what I feel would be the forthright opinion of the electorate of this country if a referendum were taken in regard to the subject we have discussed this afternoon and on which noble Lords and noble Baronesses have made such valuable contributions. The last four paragraphs of the leader read as follows:
"The Whitley Council is to meet again on May 30. Between now and then let
the management side, representing local authorities, regional hospital boards and Ministry of Health, understand one thing. Far from expressing the public's view by the preposterous offer of tea and milk, they do the country a grave disservice. Pay these young women the extra £1 a week. Daily they demonstrate that they have earned it."
Yes, my Lords, they have earned it.
I can see a ray of hope for a happy and just outcome of this appalling injustice which has continued for far too long for those engaged in the honourable profession of nursing the sick and needy. Her Majesty's Government are fortunate in having Mr. Richard Crossman as the Secretary of State for Social Services. With humility, as a Back Bencher, may I say that I believe that he, like myself, is now aware of the disgraceful results that this so-called "new deal" has brought in its wake to the student nurses in our already understaffed hospitals. I believe him to be a man of high principle and a man who has shown in the past that he will not stand for injustice. Through the medium of your Lordships' House, I would say to the members of the nursing profession, "Give him a chance once again to root out the injustice that has been meted out to you"; and I would most certainly add that you can rely on the Minister, the noble Baroness, Lady Serota—whom noble Lords, in common with myself, no matter where they sit in this Chamber, welcome on Her Majesty's Government's Front Bench—as a lady of great principle, knowledge, humanity and understanding.
I repeat that I believe that the two Ministers I have mentioned have a high sense of duty arid will see to it that the injustice of which I have spoken passionately will be remedied, and that they will work untiringly to find a formula to show justice in this very important matter. The only thing that can go wrong is if the Leader of the Government in control at the present time chooses to lock himself
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in his ivory tower once again and take control himself, without listening to the considered advice of his own appointed Ministers.
As things are to-day, is it too much to ask, if this and other injustices in Government continue, that the Leader of Her Majesty's Government should immediately think of putting Queen and Country before self? If this noble step was taken, then at least some very creditable words would be written in history books for future generations to read. Again, through the medium of your Lordships' House and as a mere Back Bencher, I know that I can tell members of the nursing profession that in the Lord Privy Seal, the noble Lord, Lord Shackleton, they have a man in whom they can place their trust; for he, too, is a man of great principle who has the utmost respect of those of us who are privileged to sit in this Chamber. Having said that, I would add that I also know that the nursing profession could equally rely on my noble Leader, the noble Lord, Lord Carrington, when the electorate calls upon us. the present Opposition, to take over the reins of Government.
The hands of the clock are advancing, so with your Lordships' permission I will conclude on a personal note which has a direct connection with the nursing profession. I have spoken passionately in the interest of those tens of thousands of the nursing profession who are vital members of the lifeline of the electorate. Your Lordships could have been spared my speech quite easily, for I have spent a sixth of my 63 years and two months in hospitals, nursing homes, and such like places, and by all the medical rules I should not have been able to address your Lordships this afternoon. I thank my Maker that he has spared me to do so. From my medical history—with which I do not intend to bore your Lordships—I should have been six feet under the ground many years ago. Some 15 or so years ago I was given a new lease of life by a brilliant surgeon, backed up by equally brilliant nursing in a hospital in England. Some three years later I had a third major operation and I was once again given hack my life, for which I give my grateful thanks to an eminent doctor, a famous surgeon, a well-known anaesthetist, and a highly trained operating theatre staff, plus, my Lords—and here I

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give my especial thanks—the nurse who refused to go off duty for 36 hours so that she could care for me through the most difficult post-operative period, knowing full well that my chances of survival were only one in ten.
I am a bit long in the tooth now, but through the great help and encouragement of nurses on many occasions in my life I have been enabled to make my modest contribution to Lord Amulree's important Unstarred Question. I have said what I have without trundling into your Lordships' House with a caliper on my right leg and a surgical boot built up some 1¾ inches. How is that, my Lords? It is so because a nurse who I met on holiday, knowing that as a young man at the age of 16½ I was worried about having to wear such surgical appliances, gave up her time and taught me to walk without it. I can never thank that nurse sufficiently.
So it is that I will resume my seat, and I hope your Lordships will forgive me for referring to myself in my speech. I have done so only to illustrate the wonderful and noble work that nurses of every grade are performing in our country today. The benefactions that happened to me through the loving care of nurses have not happened only to me; they happen in some form or other throughout our country each minute of the day and night, in every week, in every month, and in every year. My last words—and they come from the depths of my somewhat fast-beating heart—are, "You cannot let the nurses down and I know you will not do so".
BARONESS STOCKS: My Lords, I must apologise for this uncovenanted intervention but I will indeed be brief. At the moment nursing is in the news, and I very much hope that this debate will be fully reported in the Press. I also hope that in the course of that report some emphasis will be given to the suggestion made by the noble Baroness, Lady Hylton-Foster when she, I think, put her finger on the proper solution of the eat-as-you-earn question by distinguishing between the student nurse and the older nurse. I think that is a very important point and I hope that the Press will take notice of it and emphasise it.
7.8 p.m.
THE MINISTER OF STATE, DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND SOCIAL SECURITY (BARONESS SEROTA): My Lords, the whole House, the nursing profession, and indeed the public, will all be grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Amulree, for raising this important and topical question to-day. I wish at the outset of my reply to endorse what has been said in all parts of the House about the vital role which nurses play in the effective functioning of every aspect of the Health Service. We all welcome back the noble Baroness, Lady Elliot of Harwood. If ever there was a testimonial to medical and nursing skills, it was the powerful and vigorous speech which we heard from her to-day.
No one, least of all Ministers responsible for the Health Service, could be complacent about the present situation. and I am only too conscious of the need for further improvement in many of the spheres which have been touched on in the debate arising out of the noble Lord's Question. I think it is also important, when considering the present position, not to overlook the progress already made, or to forget to pay tribute to those responsible for the improvements that have been achieved over these last years. The noble Lord, Lord Amulree, reminded us, when asking his Question at the outset of our debate, of the rapid strides that have been made in medicine in the last twenty years, and of what these, in their turn, have meant in terms of demands on nursing skills and the new developments and new techniques that they have necessitated. The noble Baroness, Lady Brooke of Ystradfellte, reminded us, too, of the additional responsibilities which these developments have placed on the nursing profession, and I should like to add the tribute that we all pay to them for the resilience they have shown, for the way in which they have met the changes in the demands made on them, and for their readiness to adapt their skills to these changing needs.
I think the whole House will also agree that there have been considerable improvements in the general conditions over the range of the service and under which nurses work. There have been improvements in pay, in hours of work, in relief

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from non-nursing duties, and in equipment and environmental conditions, although all of us would wish to see these improvements go further and faster. Many noble Lords have also indicated that the conditions under which nurses work are affected by many things: by their physical surroundings (and here I take note of the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Auckland); by the standard of buildings in which they work, and by the accommodation in which they live when they are resident. Here it is gratifying to note that in the coming year we are to spend twice as much on hospital building as we did in the years 1963–64.
The conditions of nurses are also, of course, affected by the equipment which they use; by their training; by their opportunities for adding to their knowledge at later stages of their career; by the management—and this has already been mentioned in the debate—at the top of the nursing profession; by the wards, which will be reflected in the efficiency with which their nursing duties are organised, and also by the extent (and I regard this as of the greatest importance) to which they are still required to cope with clerical and domestic duties that do not require the trained skills of a professional nurse. Lastly, we are all conscious that we need to look carefully at the arrangements which are made for them when they are not working, especially the need to consider the impact on nurses of the uncertainty which many of them suffer in not knowing their off-duty times and their holidays.
For reasons which I think we all understand, the debate to-night has confined itself in the main to the current issue of pay, including pay-as-you-eat. The noble Lord, Lord Grenfell, suggested to us that at a later stage we might have a full debate over the whole range of problems affecting the nursing profession and developments of the future; and the noble Lord, Lord Auckland, in a very thoughtful speech, touched on some of the points that we might discuss in a future debate of that kind. Because of the hour, I shall confine myself this evening to answering the major issues that have been raised; namely, the question of pay and the effects of the recent introduction of pay-as-you-eat.
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First of all, several noble Lords—the noble Lord, Lord Amulree, at the outset, and other noble Lords later—asked about the Whitley Council, and whether we needed new machinery for dealing with questions concerning nurses' pay. The noble Lord. Lord Amulree, suggested that there should be independent review machinery, using the analogy of the arrangements introduced for the medical services. I think I ought to remind the House that this last revision of nurses' pay, which I will mention in some detail in a moment, was in fact an independent review. It was carried out by the National Board for Prices and Incomes in 1968, and the role in this case of the Whitley Council was to translate the Board's recommendations into specific agreements by the process of collective bargaining.
When the Government accepted the Report of the Prices and Incomes Board last year as being consistent with the incomes policy and commended it to the Whitley Council for negotiation, the effect of the recommendations on pay as a whole was that there was a general increase of 9 per cent. in salaries and training allowances, with a 14 per cent. increase for certain grades. I think that these figures have, in a sense, been somewhat forgotten in the past few days of heightened public debate on a particular aspect of the new arrangements. These increases have been paid in two stages. A 4 per cent. increase was paid in June or July, 1968, and was backdated to October, 1967. The remainder of the increase over the range of grades was paid on January 1 this year.
I believe it was the noble Baroness, Lady Brooke, who touched on the question of the introduction of pay-as-you-eat and its relationship in the time scale to the payment of the last instalment of the overall salary increase. Pay-as-you-eat was deliberately not introduced until a few months—in fact, some three months—after the last of the increases, in order to give nurses time to assimilate to the new situation. I submit to the House that, at the time of a 3½ per cent. ceiling, both the Board and the Government recognised that exceptional treatment for nurses was called for in the terms of an incomes policy.
The Board also recommended other substantial improvements in nurses' pay

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and conditions of service. These recommendations also have been implemented and have, I believe, been welcomed in all parts of the House. These included an increase in the mental lead from £50 to £100 from April 1, 1968, and its extension to all grades of nursing staff in psychiatric hospitals. I
know that that particular award was welcomed by the noble Lord, Lord Auckland
and the noble Lord, Lord Grenfell, who take a particular interest in this aspect of our National Health Service. There was also a similar lead of £100 to nurses employed in geriatric and chronic sick hospitals, and a revision of the system of special-duty payments for work at night and at weekends has been made from June, 1968. The Board also recommended the introduction of special rates of training allowances for students in general training over the age of 25.
Also, as part of its general settlement, the Board recommended that there should be a revision of the existing system of board-and-lodging charges. The objective here, as I indicated during the Second Reading of the Nurses Bill, was not that the Government, or the Whitley Council, or hospital management committees, or Regional Boards or local authorities should wash their hands of responsibility for nurses' meals and a proper standard of eating. The recommendation was made as a result of continuous requests over the years from the nursing profession itself. Here I very much take, and endorse, the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Hylton-Foster, who said that in this matter there is a difference between the student nurse who is resident and the qualified nurse, who to-day is generally non-resident and frequently part-time.
Only yesterday, when I was in a hospital out at Epping, I discussed with three different groups of nurses their own reaction to this scheme which has not yet been introduced in their hospital. It was perfectly clear from the discussion that it was the student nurses who were the ones who were going to be most closely affected by the charge, when it was introduced. Here again I was grateful for the point that was made by the noble Lord, Lord Grenfell, about the introduction of the canteen system in the hospital for which he is responsible. These nurses out at Epping were waiting
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for their scheme. In this case the Hospital Management Committee decided not to introduce it until it could provide a full service so that each nurse, particularly each student nurse, should not encounter any hardship because of the changeover to the pay-as-you-eat scheme.
It is, I think, the practical application in these first five weeks which has revealed certain defects, not in the principle of the scheme as such, but in its administration, and particularly in relation to communications within the Hospital Service itself. This is why my right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Social Services wrote to all hospitals in the National Health Service urging them to introduce the scheme with care and consultation, and also to assist individual nurses who were in difficulty during the changeover period in ways which would prevent any hardship falling on any individual nurse or, indeed, on any group of nurses.
Noble Lords will have been reading in the Press in these last two or three days of the situation that has arisen since the introduction of pay-as-you-eat, and will have read the accounts of the meeting as recently as Tuesday of this week of the Nurses and Midwives Whitley Council. At this meeting, the Management Side made an offer of a reduction of £18 in the annual lodging charge for younger students (because we accept the particular point that has been made in this debate), which would have left only a token charge in being for those in their first year. The Staff Side countered with a claim for £1 a week or free meals for younger students, pupils or nursing assistants, or, alternatively, for free meals vouchers for one main meal a day, which would amount to much the same.
The alternative they put forward is, I think, very much in line with the views that the noble Baroness, Lady Summerskill, put forward to us as a way of ensuring that nurses who undertake such arduous physical as well as mental work—and I hope we remember that, although the physical strains are great, the mental strains are just as great on nurses to-day—are able to afford a meal that is relevant to the needs and the strains which the performance of their duties requires. I can assure your Lordships that the Government are as aware as anyone that nurses, especially young nurses, should be able to afford such a meal. The

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Management Side's proposals would have meant that the nurses concerned would have been able to get four meals a day, including two main meals, on four days a week, plus cups of tea on duty and at night, at standard subsidised prices, without touching what had been their take-home pay under the old system.
My Lords, I think that everyone will appreciate that the timing of this debate, although it is particularly apposite in certain senses, makes my position a somewhat difficult one. Discussions are proceeding, and I think the House will understand when I say that we must await their outcome. No one could be more conscious than I am of the need to find early solutions to these problems. Negotiations will continue, but I hope they will continue in the atmosphere that the Management Side, which includes representatives of my Department, are not anxious or wanting to be mean, or to show lack of sympathy with the nurses. On the contrary, we are anxious to do all we can to assist in the improvement of their conditions.
Some of the things mentioned in this debate, and the recent uproar in certain quarters (but only in certain quarters) at the introduction of pay-as-you-eat, are really symptoms, I believe, of deeper causes of anxiety—much deeper than the question of meals—and I think we should all like to see them tackled. The particular controversy has served to highlight some of the more deep-seated grievances and problems within the profession. These are matters which it is not possible
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to deal with in a debate of this kind; but all noble Lords, many of them sitting in this House now, who have a very close personal knowledge of and involvement in aspects of the National Health Service will, I think, agree with me in this analysis of the present position. Many noble Lords have themselves indicated some of the problems which are the causes (if I may put it this way) of the present unrest.
My Lords, I hope it will be possible to look at some of these matters as well as the pay question, which will be reviewed in the next comprehensive review of pay covering all grades of staff, which will no doubt be starting in the next few months. On the immediate issue, which is currently under negotiation, I am sure that both sides of the Whitley Council are as conscious as any Member of this House of the need to find early solutions. For my part, I am deeply grateful for the helping hands that have been offered to me to-day in climbing up the slippery bean-pole which the noble Baroness, Lady Brooke, mentioned. After these last few weeks I am only too conscious of the difficulties of the task which I share with the Secretary of State for Social Services; and it is an immense support and comfort to me to know that noble Lords not only understand these problems but also wish me well in my battle5 on behalf of the nurses.
House adjourned at twenty-seven minutes past seven o'clock.