HL Deb 21 October 1969 vol 304 cc1678-85

5.58 p.m.

THE MINISTER OF STATE, MINISTRY OF TECHNOLOGY (LORD DELACOURT-SMITH)

My Lords, on behalf of my noble friend the Leader of the House I beg to move the Motion standing in his name on the Order Paper; namely, That an Humble Address be presented to Her Majesty praying that the Minister of Technology Order 1969 be made in the form of the draft laid before this House on Monday, October 13.

The House has before it a matter with which it has already been made familiar by the Statement which my noble friend the Leader of the House repeated, on behalf of my right honourable friend the Prime Minister, on October 13. The changes in the machinery of Government to which this Order will, if it is approved by your Lordships and by the other place, give effect relate to two important areas of Government activity. The first is industrial development at both national and regional level and in both public and private sectors; the second is the planning of our environment. The object of the changes covered in this Order is to make a significant advance in the capacity of the machinery of Government in these fields to reach rapid and high quality decisions. I am sure that whatever differences of opinion there may be about the content of the decisions, the view that they should be rapidly made and of high quality will commend itself to your Lordships.

The first major element in these changes is the merger of the Ministry of Power and the Ministry of Technology. All the existing functions and responsibilities of the Minister of Power will pass to the Minister of Technology, and the Ministry of Power and the Office of Minister will, in consequence, be dissolved. The Minister of Technology will, further, be taking over a number of responsibilities from the Board of Trade. These include the Board of Trade's responsibilities for the distribution of industry, including such functions as the issue of industrial development certificates and the making of building grants and loans and the payment of investment grants to industry, together with the remaining sponsorship functions of the Board of Trade in the field of manufacturing industry.

Thirdly, the Minister of Technology will assume the former responsibilities of the Secretary of State for Economic Affairs in so far as those related to the industrial field, and including the work of the Industrial Reorganisation Corporation. For the convenience of your Lordships I have arranged for a note to be placed in the Printed Paper Office and to be made available in the Library which indicates the distribution of responsibilities among the ministerial team in the enlarged Ministry of Technology, but I want to emphasise the point that the intention is to create an integrated Ministry and not what it is fashionable now to call a conglomerate.

The second major set of changes, my Lords, centres on the appointment of the Secretary of State for Local Government and Regional Planning. He will have the responsibility of giving general direction to the work of the Ministry of Housing and Local Government and the Ministry of Transport, although these two Ministries will continue as before, with their own Ministers having statutory functions and responsibilities. The Secretary of State for Local Government and Regional Planning will be the Minister responsible for the totality of the Government's regional policy, although, as I have already indicated, important aspects of this policy will be the direct responsibility of the Minister of Technology. He will also take personal charge of the negotiations on the reform of local government in England following the Redcliffe-Maud Report and he is further to have special responsibilities for the question of environmental pollution in all its forms.

It may be that Members of your Lordships' House will wish to ask why the Order now before us makes little reference to these changes which I have latterly mentioned. The answer to that is that the creation of the new Secretary of State's office, together with the dissolution of the Department of Economic Affairs, are acts of prerogative which do not require prior Parliamentary control.

If one considers the changes in full, they are important and far-reaching ones. Two former Ministers lose their separate existences while their important functions are allocated elsewhere. But these measures are not by any means a leap in the dark. They represent the further application in two more fields of Government activity of a principle which has already been well tried and proved satisfactory in practice: the principle of concentration in the hands of senior Ministers of broader spans of responsibility. More decisions can be taken on a chain of command basis within large areas of policy and the otherwise unavoidable but still inevitably time-wasting process of inter-departmental co-ordination and consultation is materially cut down.

This broad principle, my Lords, underlay the reorganisation of the Ministry of Defence. It has guided the integration of the Health and Social Security Departments under a single head. It is exemplified in the Overseas Departments where three former Departments have, in progressive mergers, been brought together. We now aim, as I have tried to indicate, to apply this principle in the field of industrial policy and in the field of regional planning. The former can lend itself to the full integration which this Order will bring about; the latter to a more gradual process which the appointment of the new Secretary of State will set in train. I beg to move.

Moved, That an Humble Address be presented to Her Majesty praying that the Ministry of Technology Order 1969 be made in the form of the draft laid before this House on Monday, October 13.—(Lord Delacourt-Smith.)

6.5 p.m.

EARL JELLICOE

My Lords, I should like to thank the noble Lord, Lord Delacourt-Smith, for explaining this Order to us. I believe I am right in saying that this is the first speech he has made from the Government Front Bench since assuming his new and important office. I should like very warmly to congratulate him on his new appointment and wish him well in his new functions. Having given the noble Lord that bouquet, may I immediately withdraw it and say that I noted with pleasure the fact that he is putting a little explanatory note in the Library—I hope that it has been printed—explaining the division of functions between him and his numerous colleagues in the new expanded Ministry of Technology. I have been waiting with impatience to learn how they were going to divide up the cake. I wish that the noble Lord had not withheld this pleasure but had done something more to appease our normal, natural curiosity in these matters.

My Lords, there is one thing that the noble Lord said upon which I should like to take him up. It is this. In explaining the new division of ministerial duties and how the ministerial structure has now been changed, he said that this was a move towards integration rather than a move towards, to use the fashionable Transatlantic words, a conglomerate system. I should have thought that if ever there was a conglomerate, the new Ministry or the new empire over which Mr. Crosland now presides is in fact a conglomerate. Because it is quite clear, so far as I can see, that at the present time he is rather in the same position as the Minister of Defence in the Administrations of the 1950s, poised above a number of separate Ministries, all with their own Permanent Secretaries and all with their statutory functions; and how Mr. Crosland is going to bring all this together has yet to be seen. That of course applies to the change in the ministerial structure as a whole.

My Lords, I do not wish to go unduly into personalities at this stage and at this hour, but I noted what the noble Lord had to say about Mr. Crosland being given responsibility for the implementation of the Redcliffe-Maud Report. I find that in this particular reshuffle there is much that is typical of the way in which the Wilsonian pack is in fact re-shuffled; because, my Lords, if I recall correctly, it was only a matter of some months ago that Mr. George Thomson, fresh from the Rhodesian fields, was put out to pasture with Maud. That was the only function which this Minister, for whom many of us have a very high regard, was given. Although we are sad that this talented Minister was not in a more prominent position in this Government which lacks talent, we were glad that he was grappling with a problem of real importance. But what has happened? As soon as Mr. Thomson has got used to chewing the cud with Maud he is immediately shunted off and pushed headlong into Europe. He may do Maud very adequately; he may do Europe very well, because he is a talented man. But it is an astonishingly light way in which to deal with these important matters not to leave Ministers father longer discharging their functions. I understand that on arriving in the Foreign Office he is going to displace the noble Lord, Lord Chalfont, who has been handling European matters up till now, and the noble Lord will be going back to disarmament affairs, on which he came into the Government with such a great fanfare of trumpets.

We await with interest how this new structure is going to work out. It seems to me that it may have two defects: the fact that one of the two major changes seems to amount to the creation of what is no more than a conglomerate, and the fact that the new and greatly expanded Ministry of Technology (while I am not saying that the Ministry of Power should not have gone to some other Ministry) seems to create a Ministry of quite enormous size. I hope that the Ministers concerned will be able adequately to discharge their new and expanded functions; but they have been set a formidable task, indeed. I should not wish to prejudge their performances and the performance of this new Ministerial machine, but I do have certain doubts in my mind. I have in particular a very real doubt whether it was really sensible for the Prime Minister to initiate these vast changes in the Whitehall structure in what must be the dying months of the present Government. But that, again, is a matter of judgment. With that said and those doubts voiced, I should like again to welcome the noble Lord, Lord Dela-court-Smith to the Front Bench opposite; and while not wishing him particularly well politically, I wish him all the best of personal good fortune during his tenure of his important new office.

6.12 p.m.

LORD DELACOURT-SMITH

My Lords, if I may with leave of the House, I should like to comment on what has been said by the noble Earl opposite. May I begin by thanking him sincerely for his kind words of congratulation. May I also take the opportunity of expressing my thanks to his noble colleague Lord Carrington and to other noble Lords who were kind enough to make remarks on my appointment on an earlier day, when I was not able to be in my place in the House.

The noble Earl referred to three major points: to the distribution of duties in respect of the Secretary of State for Local Government and Regional Planning, whom he suggested was to preside over a somewhat conglomerate organisation; the substantial size of the Ministry of Technology, and the timing of the operation. Perhaps I could comment in turn upon these three points to which the noble Earl has addressed himself. So far as the Secretary of State for Local Government and Regional Planning is concerned, the two Ministries of Housing and Local Government and Transport will continue with their own Ministers, retaining their present range of functions, saving that the Ministry of Housing and Local Government now has some additional responsibility in the regional planning field. The Secretary of State will have these two Ministries under his general direction. He will take personal charge of the negotiations on local government reorganisation. He has said that he will direct personally the work of regional planning and, as already indicated, he will have special responsibility in relation to all aspects of environment pollution, the co-ordination of action of the executive departments and the examination of the adequacy of the existing machinery.

He has also to examine the possibility of the closer integration of the two Departments. They have not been merged. It is not proposed to merge them at this stage on the same lines as the Ministry of Power and the Ministry of Technology. The two Departments throw up common problems which require a unified direction, but they do not appear to the Government to have in the whole range of their functions the same community of pattern which enables the Ministries of Technology and Power to come together. Perhaps I may call the noble Earl's attention to the way in which the Ministry of Technology has been described in the note which has been placed in the Printed Paper Office. I am sure that the noble Earl will find some suitable occasion in the future to comment upon the contents of that note, when he has had a chance of seeing it.

To return to the position of the Secretary of State for Local Government and Regional Planning, I may say that the parts of the two Departments under him appear to us to be less close to each other than, for example, any part of the Ministry of Power is to almost any part of the Ministry of Technology. It is a measure of the care and attention and of the extent of examination and thought which has been given to this whole operation that we reached the conclusion that an immediate merger would carry the risk of creating a conglomerate, a heterogeneous, Ministry and one which would be difficut to manage. That is why this much more gradual approach has been adopted in the case of the local government and regional planning side of the machinery of government, compared with what has been done on the industrial side under the auspices of the newly enlarged Ministry of Technology. I trust that what I have said will convince the noble Earl that this is not something fortuitous, that the difference in treatment is on a real basis and that it is related to the sort of anxiety which he expressed.

The noble Earl went on to say that the Ministry of Technology was a very large Ministry. That is true. But if one applies the measure of the number of non-industrial civil servants, it will not be much larger than some Ministries which we have already had operating in Whitehall. The new Ministry of Technology will have 26,000 non-industrial staff, against 22,000 which it had before this operation. There will still be the Board of Trade, with its reduced functions, which will have the effect of enabling the President to concentrate attention on export matters, with some 16,000 non-industrial civil servants against 18,000 formerly employed. It is true that if one includes all other staff, the whole staff of the Ministry of Technology would fall a little under 39,000. Here again, if one compares this with the Ministry of Defence or with the Post Office, which was until so recently a directly controlled Government Department, one finds that the size of the Ministry of Technology in terms of staff does not equal either of those Departments. On this subject the noble Earl reserved his position to maintain the affairs and activities of this new Ministry under critical scrutiny, and we shall endeavour to give a good account of ourselves when he seeks to apply that scrutiny to us.

The noble Earl, in conclusion, raised the question of timing. It might well be said that there is never a perfect time for any change. Certainly it is the view of the Government that it could hardly be regarded as right to wait because of a particular political situation at the time, when, as I think is generally accepted, there is the necessity for some substantial change in our administrative arrangements in these fields. If, indeed, these changes are well-considered, suitable and likely to enhance the conduct of public business in these two important fields, I hope noble Lords will agree that it was right to make the change and not to expect the public to wait before further measures of this kind were put in hand.

On Question, Motion agreed to: the said Address to be presented to Her Majesty by the Lords with White Staves.