Lords Sitting of 10 February 1972

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

VALUE ADDED TAX AND PURCHASE TAX
LORD BESWICK: My Lords, I beg leave to ask the Question which stands in my name on the Order Paper.
[The Question was as follows:
To ask Her Majesty's Government whether they will give an undertaking that the value added tax will not be levied on those goods on which purchase tax has already been collected.]
THE MINISTER OF STATE, DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND SOCIAL SECURITY (LORD ABERDARE): My Lords, this question is still under consideration, but the Chancellor of the Exchequer will deal with it in his Budget statement next month.
LORD BESWICK: My Lords, the question may be under consideration, but is there not a principle here that ought to be decided now? Can it be justified in any circumstances to tax this category of goods twice over?
LORD ABERDARE: My Lords, I am afraid I cannot go any further before my right honourable friend makes his Budget Statement.
LORD JACQUES: My Lords, will the Government give special consideration to the possibility of an interval between the cessation of purchase tax and the commencement of V.A.T.? This would enable traders to get rid of the stock which has been subject to purchase tax and might also give a fillip to the economy.
LORD ABERDARE: My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord for that suggestion. All these matters are under the most careful consideration. We are fully aware of this problem.
LORD BESWICK: My Lords, while recognising that there is a real problem
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here, would the noble Lord at least agree that this has been brought about by the precipitate action of the Government in introducing V.A.T. for Common Market purposes?
LORD ABERDARE: No, my Lords; I could not agree with that. The fact is that the V.A.T. proposals are being put forward at the next Budget in order to give plenty of time for them to be fully considered before they are introduced.
BARONESS SUMMERSKILL: My Lords, may I ask the noble Lord whether we can assume that V.A.T. will not be levied on any goods on which purchase tax has not been levied?
LORD ABERDARE: My Lords, I am afraid that that is a completely different question.
LORD BEAUMONT OF WHITLEY: My Lords, would the Minister agree that the difficulty in which he finds himself is the result of the idiotic custom of changing all the taxes at one secret given moment of the year, and not having a permanent commission on taxation?
LORD ABERDARE: My Lords, I am not prepared to accept that, but I know that there are those who feel that way.
LORD SHEPHERD: My Lords, I wonder whether the noble Lord could answer this particular question. Could he not agree that there is no administrative reason why V.A.T. should be levied on goods which have already paid purchase tax?
LORD ABERDARE: My Lords, I should imagine that that would be perfectly possible, yes; but I cannot anticipate what decision will be made by my right honourable friend when it comes to the Budget.

FRANCE AND N.A.T.O.
3.9 p.m.
LORD SHINWELL: My Lords, I beg leave to ask the first Question which stands in my name on the Order Paper.
[The Question was as follows:
To ask Her Majesty's Government what are the defence facilities arranged between the French Government and NATO in the event of an act of agression against any country associated with NATO.]
THE SECRETARY OF STATE FOR DEFENCE (LORD CARRINGTON): My Lords, the French have withdrawn from the integrated military structure of NATO and they commit no forces to the Alliance. But they do maintain substantial forces in Germany; they are still members of the North Atlantic Alliance; and like all signatories of the North Atlantic Treaty they are committed to regard an armed attack on one or more members in Europe or North America as an attack on all.
LORD SHINWELL: My Lords, I am grateful for the Answer, but is it not rather anomalous that, while the French remain a member of the North Atlantic Alliance, they have contracted out of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation? Has any attempt been made to persuade them to return to NATO, and would it be desirable that they should, rather than have this anomalous and unsatisfactory arrangement?
LORD CARRINGTON: My Lords, as I made plain, they have withdrawn from the integrated military structure, but not of course from the Alliance. Her Majesty's Government—both this Government and the previous Government—have on a number of occasions made it plain that they would very much like to see the French back in the integrated military structure. But, of course, this is a matter for the French Government.
LORD SHINWELL: My Lords, would it not appear from some part of the noble Lord's answer regarding infrastructure that if the French maintain some kind of connection, however remote, it is because they received vast sums of money in the past, way back from 1945, for purposes of infrastructure, including telecommunications, air fields and a variety of other devices, which had an economic advantage as well as a military advantage; so the connection is, although remote, based on what they received largely from the United Kingdom as well as from other countries?
LORD CARRINGTON: My Lords, of course when the French were members of the integrated military structure they received from the infrastructure what was necessary and paid their share of it. Since they have left the integrated military structure they do not take part in it
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except when they wish to do so and pay their share.
BARONESS WOOTTON OF ABINGER: My Lords, might it not be an advantage, as a step towards general disarmament, if Her Majesty's Government followed the example of the French? Would not the Government consider taking this step?
LORD CARRINGTON: My Lords, that is a revolutionary view which I think would not be acceptable in any quarter of the House.

NORTHERN IRELAND: ARRESTS AND DETENTIONS
LORD SHINWELL: 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 how many persons have been detained in Ulster under the Special Powers and other Acts since the beginning of the emergency, how many have been brought before the courts and charged with offences, and how many have been released.]
THE MINISTER OF STATE, HOME OFFICE (LORD WINDLESHAM): My Lords, since the information requested by the noble Lord is available in the form of a table, I will, with permission, arrange for it to be circulated in the OFFICIAL REPORT.
Following is the table:

Arrests under the Special Powers Act

Arrested between 9th August, 1971, and 8th February, 1972

2,376

Released without detention order

1,413

Released after detention order

113

Escaped from detention

10

Released from internment

34

Escaped from internment

1

1,571

805

Held under Regulation 10 (i.e. persons held for questioning)

48

Held under Regulation 11 (i.e. detained)

161

Held under Regulation 12(i.e. interned)

596

805

28 of those arrested under the Special Powers Acts have been brought before the courts and charged with various offences.
Other arrests
Details of arrests under the criminal law for offences in connection with the civil disturbances, are available only for 1971:—

Persons arrested and charged

1,239

Persons convicted

621

Cases withdrawn

145

Cases dismissed

119

Cases pending at end of 1971

354

This information has been obtained from the Northern Ireland authorities.
LORD SHINWELL: My Lords, I am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Windlesham, for his interest in the matter and I shall read the details with interest. Meanwhile, may I ask him whether he has read the article which appeared in The Times newspaper yesterday, by a legal expert, who referred to the somewhat chaotic, anomalous and incongruous situation in Ulster in relation to legal administration? Does not what is con-contained in that article indicate that there should be an inquiry of some kind in order to put the matter in the proper perspective? And, at the same time, would the noble Lord consider its bearing on the whole internment issue?
LORD WINDLESHAM: My Lords, my right honourable friend the Home Secretary is aware of the article to which the noble Lord has referred, but he does not feel able to accept all its conclusions.
LORD SHINWELL: My Lords, does the noble Lord realise that, although his right honourable friend is unable to accept my conclusions, eventually he will be compelled to: he will have no alternative, because unless the internment issue is resolved in some form, even in a modified form, there is not the slightest hope, not the remotest hope, of finding a solution to the Ulster problem?
LORD WINDLESHAM: My Lords, we had a long debate on Northern Ireland only last week, lasting some seven hours. This Question was a specific request for statistics, and as I have arranged to circulate the information in Hansard I do not think it would be the wish of the House that we should debate the whole question of internment again now.

AIR FARES ON NORTH ATLANTIC ROUTES
3.13 p.m.
BARONESS BURTON OF COVENTRY: My Lords, I beg leave to ask the Question which stands in my name on the Order Paper.
[The Question was as follows:
To ask Her Majesty's Government whether they are now in a position to make a Statement on the further details of the North Atlantic fares structure as agreed originally by IATA in Geneva on December 12 last.]
THE MINISTER WITHOUT PORT-FOLIO (LORD DRUMALBYN): My Lords, we have not yet received by any means all the details of the fares which IATA propose should apply on North Atlantic routes from April 1, and I cannot guarantee that those we have received are absolutely firm. However, it looks as if the London/New York return fares will range from £323·15 first-class, and £226·45 economy class, to £84·05 winter rate for a 22/45 day excursion, plus a surcharge of £5·80 each way for week-end travel. I am sending the noble Baroness a table giving the London/New York and London/Montreal proposed fares and I shall lay a copy in the Library. These fares are subject to the approval of the Governments concerned.
BARONESS BURTON OF COVENTRY: My Lords, I thank the noble Lord for that Answer and I am glad that he is to lay a copy of the table in the Library pending clarification. But may I ask him if I am correct in assuming that the only difference between the passengers using these cheaper services and those paying normal prices is the compulsory minimum length of stay at the destination: in other words, that no advance booking is necessary; that actual dates can be applied for on booking and that the same aircraft will be used for all passengers?
LORD DRUMALBYN: Yes, my Lords, I think this is so, apart from the fact that there is also a maximum period. There is a minimum and a maximum period.
BARONESS BURTON OF COVENTRY: My Lords, arising out of that satisfactory reply may I ask the Minister

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about something which I find difficult to understand? From what he has just said we realise that no advance booking is necessary for these cheaper flights. May I ask the Minister why, speaking on behalf of the Government, he regrets this? Is he not aware that passengers are glad not to have to pay 90 days in advance for a flight they wish to undertake? And why do the Government wish it were otherwise?
LORD DRUMALBYN: My Lords, there were so many double negatives in those remarks that I had a little difficulty in following them. All I can say to the noble Baroness is that if she and I were negotiating this no doubt we should be able to reach agreement.
LORD SHEPHERD: Oh!
LORD DRUMALBYN: Well, my Lords, one can always hope. This agreement has been made to cover all the points in Europe, North Africa, the Middle East and Asia; many hundreds of fares are involved, and of course all the countries have to agree them.
BARONESS BURTON OF COVENTRY: My Lords, I am sure we shall reach agreement one day, and I apologise for the double negatives. Is the Minister aware that on November 25, at column 1226 of the OFFICIAL REPORT of our debate, he said that he regretted that the advance booking period was not going to be necessary for these cheaper North Atlantic fares? That statement has no double negative, and I should like to know why he said that.
LORD DRUMALBYN: My Lords, it is because the advance booking system has worked well between here and the Caribbean.

THE COAL STRIKE
LORD CHAMPION: My Lords, I beg leave to ask a Question of which I have given Private Notice:
To ask her Majesty's Government whether they will make a statement on the meeting yesterday between the
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Secretary of State for Employment, the Mineworkers' Union and the National Coal Board.
EARL ST. ALDWYN: My Lords, with the leave of the House my noble friend, Lord Drumablyn, will answer this Question at a suitable moment after 3.30 p.m.

PORT TALBOT CORPORATION BILL [H.L.]
Read 2a, and committed to the Committee on Unopposed Bills.

STOKE-ON-TRENT CORPORATION BILL [H.L.]
3.16 p.m.
THE CHAIRMAN OF COMMITTEES (THE EARL OF LISTOWEL): My Lords, I beg to move that this Bill be now read a second time.
Moved, that the Bill be now read 2a.—(The Earl of Listowel.)
LORD DAVIES OF LEEK: My Lords, I do not wish to detain the House very long on this Bill, but being a ratepayer of the City of Stoke-on-Trent and a Sudeten Welshman who has earned his living for a while in the city of Stoke-on-Trent, I think your Lordships should know what we are doing here. It is a praiseworthy effort on behalf of the Stoke-on-Trent Corporation, the Mayor and his officials, to use incinerators which will improve the environment and thereby earn some money for the good ratepayers of Stoke-on-Trent by selling the steam to the Michelin Rubber Company. I am also glad to see that there is protection in the Bill for all the ratepayers if their roads, gateways and gardens are thrust aside by a too active corporation in its effort to sell steam. Finally, while welcoming the Bill I hope that the present Government will one day get some steam to improve the environment in which we are living in great difficulty these days.
THE EARL OF LISTOWEL: My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord for his comments on the Bill.
On Question, Bill read 2a, and committed to the Committee on Unopposed Bills.

SOLICITORS (AMENDMENT) BILL [H.L.]
LORD TANGLEY: My Lords, I beg leave to introduce a Bill to prevent non-British subjects being prohibited from becoming or practising as solicitors; to amend the Solicitors Acts 1957 to 1965; to make further provision as to the Council of The Law Society, the Compensation Fund maintained under the Solicitors Act 1957, the taxation of solicitors' bills, the administration of oaths and taking of affidavits and the termination of a solicitor's retainer; and for connected purposes. I beg to move that the Bill be now read a first time.
Moved, that the Bill be now read 1a.—(Lord Tangley.)
On Question, Bill read 1a, and to be printed.

NEW ZEALAND AND AUSTRALIAN LAND COMPANY LIMITED ORDER CONFIRMATION BILL
Brought from the Commons; read 1a, and (pursuant to the Private Legislation Procedure (Scotland) Act 1936) deemed to have been read 2a and reported from the Committee.
SUMMER TIME BILL
Returned from the Commons, agreed to.

BUSINESS OF THE HOUSE
EARL ST. ALDWYN: 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.
Moved, That Standing Order No. 36 (Arrangement of the Order Paper) be dispensed with on Tuesday next for the purpose of enabling the Motions for an Humble Address and on the Emergency Regulations 1972 to be taken after the Airports Authority Bill.—(Earl St. Aldwyn.)
On Question, Motion agreed to.

BUSINESS OF THE HOUSE
3.20 p.m.
LORD SHACKLETON LORD SHACKLETON rose to move, That the Fourth Report from the Select Committee on the Procedure of the House, with the Amendment, and the Motion on Procedure of the House standing in the name of the Earl of Perth, with the Amendments thereto, be considered this day in Committee of the Whole House. The noble Lord said: My Lords, I beg to move the Motion standing in my name on the Order Paper. In order not to take up too much of the time of the House I will only say that this proposal, which is that when we come to debate the Procedure Committee Report and the Amendments thereto the House should go into Committee, is in fact provided for in our Standing Orders, and there are precedents—for instance, when the House was debating the Draft Standing Order on Leave of Absence. At one time there was only one Amendment down, which I think we could have managed without going into Committee, but with a group of Amendments, and taking into account that the House sometimes has some difficulty with these Reports and that Peers may wish to ask one or more questions in the course of the discussion, I would urge the House to agree to go into Committee. I hope that this course, so far from prolonging the proceedings on the Report of the Procedure Committee, may in fact shorten them. I beg to move.
Moved, That the Fourth Report from the Select Committee on the Procedure of the House, with the amendment, and the Motion on Procedure of the House standing in the name of the Earl of Perth, with the amendments thereto, be considered this day in Committee of the Whole House.—(Lord Shackleton.)
LORD ABERDARE: My Lords, I can confirm what the noble Lord the Leader of the Opposition, has said: that there are precedents and that this is provided for in our Standing Orders. I am grateful for his suggestion, because, like him, I think this is now a very complicated matter, with two Motions and an Amendment to the first one and two Amendments to the second. I think we should stay much more clearly in order if we were in Committee than in any other

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way. I would therefore recommend to the House that it accepts this Motion.
On Question, Motion agreed to.

NATIONAL INSURANCE REGULATIONS (VALIDATION) BILL
Read 3a, and passed.

PROCEDURE OF THE HOUSE
3.25 p.m.
THE EARL OF LISTOWEL: My Lords, I beg to move that the House do now resolve itself into Committee.
Moved, That the House do now resolve itself into Committee.—(The Earl of Listowel.)
On Question, Motion agreed to.
House in Committee accordingly.
[The LORD STRANG in the Chair.]
THE EARL OF LISTOWEL: I beg to move that the Fourth Report from the Select Committee be now considered. I should like to remind the Committee that when noble Lords wish to debate a Report of a Committee of the House they usually do it on the subsequent Motion, That the Report be agreed to, which I shall move in a few moments.
Moved, That the Report be now considered.—(The Earl of Listowel.)
On Question, Motion agreed to.
The Committee's Report was as follows:

METHOD OF CHOOSING SUBJECTS FOR WEDNESDAY SHORT DEBATES
On 16th December, 1971, the House debated the conclusions of the Procedure Committee on the Report of the Group on the Working of the House [Second Report, dated 9th December, 1971, item 2].
In the course of this debate, the Earl of Perth moved, and the House accepted, an amendment to refer back to the Procedure Committee for further consideration the recommendation that the subjects for the short debate on Wednesdays should be chosen by ballot.
In moving his amendment Lord Perth suggested as an alternative method of choice that the subjects for debate should be "chosen by four back-benchers who will be nominated by the Leader of the House, with the usual channels assisting them. This would be a rational way to choose the subjects". (Lords Hansard of 16th December, col. 1295).
In the subsequent debate there was support for such a method of reasoned choice and opposition to the idea of the ballot. Lord Perth's amendment to refer the matter back to the Procedure Committee for further consideration was accepted by the House without challenge.
Accordingly the Committee have reviewed the recommendation that they made in their Second Report in favour of the ballot; and they have also considered Lord Perth's suggested alternative of a Committee of four back-benchers, working in consultation with the usual channels to choose the subjects. Under both plans, the choice would lie between, and would be restricted to, Motions which had been tabled by Peers and were already on the Order Paper.
In favour of Lord Perth's suggestion it is argued that chance is an irrational and undiscriminating method of choosing subjects for debate; that the ballot is not necessary in the House of Lords which, unlike the Commons, does not suffer from a severe shortage of time; and that choice by back-benchers, after consultation with the usual channels, would give back-benchers a direct but limited part in the planning of the business of the House. On this view the use of the proposed back-bench committee, after consultation with the usual channels would provide, as a ballot would not, a measure of flexibility. It would, therefore, be better to build on the present system in the way proposed rather than to resort to the ballot.
The other view is that to set up a committee of four to choose the subjects would be a cumbersome way of proceeding, no more likely to produce acceptable results than a ballot. Such a body could not claim to be representative. On the other hand the ballot is manifestly fair and independent; it gives everybody the same chance and has proved successful in the Commons. The difficulty of choosing between subjects competing for Parliamentary time is such that it may be thought preferable to leave the decision to the ballot rather than set up complicated machinery to try and assess the value to the House of debating one subject rather than another.
While both alternatives before the Committee have some disadvantages, the Committee remain of the opinion that on balance the ballot is preferable to any other method of choosing subjects for the experimental Wednesday debates. They, therefore, reaffirm their original recommendation made to the House in the Second Report.
THE EARL OF LISTOWEL: I beg to move that this Report be agreed to. The Report which I am now moving is concerned purely with the question of how the subjects for the short Wednesday debates shall be chosen. Your Lordships will remember that this matter was debated in the House on December 16 last and referred back to the Procedure Committee on the Motion of the noble Earl, Lord Perth, who objected to the ballot

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as the method of choosing the subjects for the experimental Wednesday debates.
The Procedure Committee have accordingly reconsidered the arguments for and against the ballot and have also considered the alternative proposed by the noble Earl, Lord Perth; namely, that the subjects should be chosen by a small committee of Back-Benchers drawn from all sides of the House, after consultation with the usual channels. The Committee had the advantage of hearing Lord Perth in the course of their deliberations. Your Lordships will see from the last paragraph of the Report that they remain of the opinion that on balance the ballot is preferable to any other method of choosing subjects for the short Wednesday debates; and therefore they reaffirm their original recommendation to the House.
I would add only two points. The first is that the Report before your Lordships to-day is submitted in a form that gives not only the conclusion of the Committee but also the arguments in favour of the two alternative courses. The reason for this is the strong feeling of the Committee that this was essentially a matter for the House to decide, and that it might be of assistance to the House to have the arguments shortly and, as I hope noble Lords will agree, objectively set out in the Report.
The only other point is one that will be familiar to many of your Lordships. It is that there are a number of precedents for the House's declining to accept the recommendation of one of its Committees, including the Procedure Committee. I am sure I speak for the Committee when I say that, while they have registered their view in this Report, it would imply no disrespect for the Committee if the House were to reach a different conclusion. I beg to move.
Moved, That the Report be agreed to.—(The Earl of Listowel.)
3.29 p.m.
THE EARL OF PERTH THE EARL OF PERTH moved, as an Amendment to the Motion, after "Report", to insert, "except the last paragraph thereof". The noble Earl said: I beg to move the Amendment standing in my name. I must confess to your Lordships that I have put it down with some hesitation. After all, it is
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something to take on the wisdom and might of the Procedure Committee. But I recall my namesake, David, who slew Goliath—not that I am wanting to slay anybody; but also, more importantly, I recall how in our debate in the middle of December all noble Lords who spoke from the Back Benches spoke in favour of this Amendment, and, quite simply, I should have been betraying their wishes and faith if I had not gone on with this Amendment. I am only sorry that my sole advocacy at the Procedure Committee failed to persuade them. However, this is the reason why I am going on now.
May I just for a moment recall the history of this Amendment? When the Leader of the House asked for a small committee of four to help him on the working of the House, one of the recommendations of that small committee, of which I happened to have the honour of being a member, was that there should be these short debates once every month. It was further left in our Report that whether these should be chosen by ballot or by the Committee of Back-Benchers was for the House to decide. Therefore, in moving this Amendment to-day I am not suggesting something new; it is something that was in our original suggestions, it is something which was supported in the debate in December, and it is something on which I feel very strongly that your Lordships should have a chance to express your views further.
I say that with more conviction when I recall who were the Back-Benchers who supported me in our last debate. One was the noble Earl, Lord Swinton, who unfortunately, I am afraid, will not be here to-day, but who has asked me to say that he continues of the view that this is the right solution. Another was the noble Earl, Lord Selkirk, who, happily, will be able to speak to-day. There was the noble Earl, Lord Cromartie. There was also the noble Lord, Lord Robbins, who wrote me again saying that I should certainly advise your Lordships that he remained in favour, but unfortunately he had to be in Basic to-day and therefore could not attend here. There was the noble Lord, Lord Shinwell, who happily is here to-day, and I hope we may hear from him that he continues to believe in what I am advocating.
Lastly, there was the late Lord Crowther. He made a short speech in favour of the Amendment at that time. If your Lordships will allow me, I should like to pay a very short tribute to Lord Crowther. He was a very close personal friend of mine. He was indeed my twin; he was born on the same day in the same year, and we were very apt to celebrate our birthdays together, and so I want to take the chance of paying this tribute. As many of your Lordships will know, his was company which was always enjoyable, always full of fun, and always penetrating and amusing. He had the extraordinary gift of making complicated subjects, particularly on economic affairs, simple, straightforward, and also was able to propose solutions and see them through. He had the ability to get to the heart of matters.
Your Lordships may remember that, apart from this one short speech, he made an intervention in the Immigration Bill of a little while ago. He found in the Bill a flaw which was one particularly close to him, because he said:
"As I read the Bill it means that my wife, who has been my wife for 25 years or more and is of this country, may find herself an alien, and there are others in the same category."
Your Lordships will remember the wit and skill with which he introduced his Amendment. He had indeed found a flaw in the Bill as drafted, and he was successful in remedying it. That was typical of how he got to the heart of things. His service to his country is well know to all of you. I would only recall that he has been Chairman of three Government Commissions. One was on consumer credit, one on education, and the last was to be on the Constitution. Alas! we do not know what the final recommendation would have been under his chairmanship. One can only hope that what he had done already will prove, as I am sure it will, of great value and importance in what may be the final recommendation of that Commission. I am sure you will join with me in voicing our sorrow for his wife and his family, and in the loss that all of us have suffered.
As I have said, because of the support I had I felt I must press on with this Amendment. As the Chairman of Committees
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has said, the four Back-Benchers, if they are to operate, will, with the Leader, look at Part II of the "No Day Named" Motions, which are on the green Order Paper. There you will find, for example, that to-day there are no fewer than eight items listed. The question is whether out of those eight items the choice of two of them should be by ballot or should be by the Back-Benchers' Committee.
In the Report of the Procedure Committee will be seen the reasons why it is argued that we should go for a Select Committee. In case some of your Lordships have not got that Report before you, may I touch very briefly on those reasons? The first is that chance is an irrational and undiscriminating method of choosing subjects for debate. I strongly believe that. I do not believe that chance is appropriate here, although it may be in bingo halls. Secondly, it is said that a ballot is not necessary in the House of Lords which, unlike the Commons, does not suffer from a severe shortage of time. That is a polite way of saying that the House of Lords does not have 600 constituencies, and therefore the difficulty which would obviously arise if one had to select from a choice of debates which was really dictated by constituency reasons. Thirdly, it points out that if you have a Back-Benchers' Select Committee it would give the Back-Benchers a direct but limited part in the planning of the business of the House. I think that this is important. Perhaps a fourth reason, which is not put down here, is that if you have a rational choice then you can see that some of the debates listed may be topical and timely. Those would be the ones to go for at once. That situation could not arise, or would not necessarily arise, if we were to proceed by ballot.
Therefore, I hope that others who feel as I do will express their views in two ways: first, by speaking, and then by vote, should I find sufficient support to go to a Division, which I certainly have it in mind to do. I am comforted in taking this bold course against the Procedure Committee for the reasons that the Chairman of Committees has mentioned to your Lordships; namely, that it is not something which is not done. Indeed, he has almost encouraged us to do it. My Lords, I beg to move.
Moved, as an Amendment to the Motion, after ("Report"), to insert (",except the last paragraph thereof.")—(The Earl of Perth.)
3.39 p.m.
LORD SHACKLETON: My Lords, I do not think that this is the most earthshaking issue which will come before your Lordships' House, and I should like to make clear that whatever decision the House comes to I shall be perfectly content. I should indeed have been perfectly content with what was undoubtedly the overwhelming view of the Procedure Committee, whichever way it had gone. The fact that I do not support this Amendment—though I wish the noble Earl the best of luck, and if the House agrees with him then well and good—is essentially due to reasons of simplicity.
I should like to make one or two points. I should deplore—I do not think the noble Earl sought to make this point, but there was a slight implication—any suggestion that in some way he is a David battling against the powers of darkness contained in the noble Earl, Lord St. Aldwyn, my noble friend Lord Beswick and others. It is a well-established custom in this House that the Leader of the House, and indeed in this respect the Government and the Chief Whip, owe responsibilities to the House which they try to discharge perfectly fairly to everyone. I, for one, was never conscious of having deprived anybody when I was Leader of the House; indeed, under our Standing Orders one could not deprive anybody of the right to move anything. But it is a fact that there are some subjects which some people regard as more important than others—they press very hard and they chase the usual channels—and there are certain matters of Party political importance which the Parties themselves may press. I was also very conscious that there are a number of less obviously important subjects which are never debated at all; and I have in mind, in particular, the interest of the noble Lord, Lord Somers.
Under a process of selection, however it may be operated, these Motions will still remain unselected, whereas a ballot, which, after all, is a respectable and early form of democratic decision—because in adopting this we shall be following the Athenean democracy in this matter—is a
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good way to proceed in a House where we seek for as much fairness as is possible in this unfair world.
I should like to echo the noble Earl's very warmly expressed tributes to Lord Crowther. I shall not myself dwell further on that subject, beyond saying that we all share the noble Earl's views. My objection to a Committee of Back-Benchers is simply that somebody must take decisions in this House. It is difficult enough to get people together. It is difficult enough for the usual channels. It is sometimes even difficult for the Leader of the House to speak to his own Chief Whip, especially during Ascot Week. I may say that I have had complaints on the subject from this side. But to create a Committee of Back-Benchers seems to me to be taking a pretty large sledge-hammer, and I do not really think it is worth while appointing a Committee solely for this purpose. If the House had been in favour of a Committee of Back-Benchers for other purposes, then this is a duty which it might have discharged. But the House decided against it. I was not in favour, but I said that I was perfectly content to accept it.
I should be very sorry if it were thought that the usual channels were somehow unfair. I believe there are ample opportunities for making views known direct to leaders, for raising them in the House, for taking them to the Committees—in fact, for generally making views known. Therefore, although I see that there are arguments—and I do not deny this—for the noble Earl's point of view, and for the view that, for instance, we might select better Motions. I doubt whether it is worth while adopting this suggestion for this purpose. What we are considering is an experiment. It is going to be fairly difficult to operate, and I can see that Government Leaders will he involved. So let us run the experiment along the lines the Procedure Committee has suggested.
There is the interesting suggestion to be made later by my noble friend Lady White about dividing up, and choosing one debate by selection and one by ballot. If this goes very well, it may be that we shall find further time for this sort of experiment. But in terms of simplicity, I should have thought that the easiest course now was to adopt the recommendation

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of the Procedure Committee. Let everybody, whatever his interest, have an equal chance; let the ballot start in a fortnight's time as arranged, and in another two or three months' time we can look again to see whether there are better ways of following this experiment. So my view, though no doubt the House will take its own decision, is that we should stick to what has been proposed by the Select Committee.
EARL ST. ALDWYN: My Lords, I beg to move that the House resume.
Moved, That the House do now resume.—(Earl St. Aldwyn.)
On Question, Motion agreed to, and House resumed accordingly.

COAL STRIKE: FURTHER JOINT TALKS
3.46 p.m.
LORD DRUMALBYN: My Lords, I shall, with permission, now reply to the Private Notice Question put by the noble Lord, Lord Champion. I shall reply in the words of my right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Employment. This is the Answer:
"Yesterday morning I met, separately, representatives of the National Coal Board and the National Union of Mineworkers. After establishing that the positions of both parties remained unchanged, I suggested to each in turn that they might consider resuming talks on the basis that if a settlement ran for a period longer than twelve months this might provide a possibility for some improvement in the cash offer. I also suggested that if this were accepted, talks might be held in a joint meeting under my Department's chairmanship. The Board agreed to this suggestion as did the Union representatives after consulting their Executive.
"In the joint talks which followed yesterday evening, the Board said that for an 18-month agreement from the date of resumption of work they were prepared to offer an increase of £3 a week on the basic rate of all surface workers and £3·50 a week on the rate for those employed underground on the 1955 Day Wage Agreement. This means that the lowest paid worker
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underground would receive a minimum of £22·50 for a full week compared with £19 at the moment. In addition, a guaranteed minimum of £22 a week would be established for the lowest paid surface workers, which would have provided an increase of £4 a week on the present minimum of £18. For workers on the coal face and other 'task workers' as they are called, the Board proposed an increase of £2·75 a week, providing a new basic rate for face workers of £32·75 compared with £30 at the moment. The Board was also prepared to discuss adjustments of certain differentials.
"At the conclusion of these joint talks I again met the Board and the Union separately. The N.U.M. representatives told me that they would be reporting the Board's proposals to their Executive this morning and that they hoped that the Executive would agree to further joint discussions. The Board told me that they would certainly be ready to meet the Union again. This morning, I understand that the N.U.M. Executive rejected the Board's new proposals but agreed that further joint talks should be held with the Board, and these are now taking place at my Department."
My Lords, that completes the Answer.
3.50 p.m.
LORD CHAMPION: My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord for answering my Question by repeating the Answer that was given in another place. Although as a trade unionist I should not regard the N.C.B.'s offer of yesterday as one upon which a settlement appears to be at all likely, the last paragraph of the Statement makes it clear that this is very much in the nature of an interim statement. The last thing that I should wish to do would be to say anything from this Box that might have the effect of lessening the chance of a settlement on reasonable and honourable terms. My Lords, it seemed to me that the words used by Mr. Gormley last night, to the effect that it would be fatal to allow the talks to break down too soon, were statesmanlike. For myself, I hope they will not break down at all. But, as this is very much a matter in which the Government are closely implicated, I must appeal to them to refrain from adopting

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a too rigid position on the 7 per cent. to 8 per cent. which is generally regarded as the Government's unofficial guideline around which any settlement should be kept. I hope that the Government will recognise that the general public and most newspapers regard the miners' case as a very special one, and that they will act accordingly. I live in the very heart of a mining area and am married to the daughter of a miner who took care that none of his sons should go into the pit, because of the nature of the job. I appeal to the Government to recognise the devilish job that this is, and to ensure that the talks do not again break down.
LORD BYERS: My Lords, I should not wish to make any substantial comment while the joint discussions arc taking place, except to say how pleased we are that they are taking place and are continuing. Having listened to the Statement, I would only say from these Benches that, if we have got the matter correctly, it looks as though progress is being made towards a guaranteed minimum rate of earnings for the lower-paid workers in this industry. If that is so, we would welcome it very sincerely indeed. We feel that this is something which other industries require, but especially is this so in the case of the miners, where guaranteed minimum earnings for the lower-paid workers would be very much appreciated. I hope that this principle is incorporated in the final agreement.
VISCOUNT AMORY: My Lords, I rise only because I feel that it is important that from every part of the House we should welcome the Statement which has been made. I should like to say how deeply we in every part of the House hope that these talks will lead to a settlement.
LORD DRUMALBYN: My Lords, I should like to thank the two noble Lords opposite, and also my noble friend, for their comments here. Certainly I am sure that the noble Lord, Lord Champion, is absolutely right, with his long experience, in saying that it would be quite wrong for us here to lessen in any way the chance of a settlement on reasonable and honourable terms by anything we say at the present time. The noble Lord, Lord Champion, has made a
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moving appeal to me, which I shall pass on to my right honourable friend. I do not think the noble Lord would wish me to comment upon it. The noble Lord, Lord Byers, has spoken about the trend towards a guaranteed minimum rate of earnings for a full week's work. I am glad that the Statement, so far as it goes, has been welcomed in this way, and I am sure that all noble Lords will join with me in expressing the hope that the talks at present going on are successful.

PROCEDURE OF THE HOUSE
3.54 p.m.
House again in Committee.
THE EARL OF ARRAN: I rise to support the noble Earl, Lord Perth, in his Amendment. I do not quite know what the fuss is all about. In the last ten years I have had the honour of introducing five Wednesday Motions in your Lordships' House, and I cannot say that I have experienced any difficulty in obtaining a day through the usual channels. I have been allowed to introduce Motions on Leisure, on Christian Unity (the only occasion, I think, on which this subject was ever discussed in a Parliamentary assembly), on the Press (on two occasions), and on the first Report of the Royal College of Physicians on Smoking. The only time on which some doubt was expressed about the subject of the debate was when, in an excess of zeal, which Talleyrand warned us against, I suggested we should talk about happiness. The noble and learned Lord who sits on the Woolsack and who was at that time Leader of the House seemingly did not think—he may have forgotten this—that the Government had a contribution to make, though if the purpose of Government is not to make the electorate happy, then I do not know what it is.
Recently, I have become much less enthusiastic about our Wednesday conversations, if only because almost nobody except ourselves pays any attention to them. In passing, I may perhaps add that it is for the same reason that some of our industrialist Peers do not address your Lordships. If they have something to say, a paragraph in The Times is a thin substitute for a Press conference or a message to the Press Association. That does not mean that they should

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not speak—indeed, their non-attendance is pretty disgraceful. It is nice to be a Lord, especially if you have earned it; and they should show their gratitude.
But, to return to the subject of the discussion, if we are to establish a procedure I favour the noble Earl's Amendment, possibly because I have never been lucky in the pools. I do not believe in the goddess of chance. Moreover, I know from experience how disheartening it is to wait for the right number to turn up. After your Lordships' passed the Sexual Offences Bill I had to wait for the result of the ballot in the other place; and invariably the lucky ones were excellent hut elderly trade unionists; or Mr. Duncan Sandys. In neither case was it their "thing". But a personal appearance, of course, is not the thing that matters; it is the principle involved. If there is going to be competition—and I hope there will be competition—then surely the subject for debate should not be a matter of throwing the dice. It should be the decision of a responsible, if junior, body, such as the noble Earl suggests.
I am not over-keen on committees, but I prefer committees to casinos. I simply cannot understand the objections to the noble Earl's proposal. It is sensible; it is practical; it is non-political; it is democratic, and it in no way detracts from the authority of the Front Benches—unless they should be afraid of this. I would strongly contest the Select Committee's claim, although admittedly I am prejudiced, that the ballot system had proved successful in the Commons. To talk about "complicated machinery" and "cumbersome procedure" is so much poppycock. A committee, especially a small committee—and let us not forget that it may never be asked to sit; frankly, I do not foresee an ugly rush to the House—can make its decisions quickly and easily. It will be assisted—the word is "assisted"—by the usual channels, but not influenced by them. Why not give the Back Benches an opportunity to make their own choice? Why not? Let us not stand in fear of our leaders. I say, "To hell with them!" Let us Back-Benchers get on our hind feet and vote—and vote in favour of the Amendment.
3.59 p.m.
VISCOUNT DILHORNE: It is a long time since I have ventured to address your Lordships, and I hope I may be allowed to say a few words in relation to the Motion moved by the noble Earl, Lord Perth. I am also glad to have the opportunity of following the noble Earl, Lord Arran, confused though I thought his theme was. I hope very much that the Amendment will be rejected. I speak here not as a Cross-Bencher, not as a Front-Bencher, but merely as a member of the Cross-Benches; and I speak entirely from that point of view, as a former member of the Procedure Committee but no longer of that body. I hope I have not inconvenienced the noble Baroness, Lady White, in speaking before she speaks. I will not say anything about her Amendment except that it appears to me to be a compromise between both points of view and to get the worst of both worlds. Apart from that, it seems to me that it would make the procedure even more complicated and more cumbrous for dealing with what is, after all, a pretty simple matter.
Inherent in the Amendment of the noble Earl, Lord Perth (it was shown by his speech to-day and, it seems to me, it was shown by the noble Earl, Lord Arran, in his speech), is a feeling that this is a case of the Back-Benchers against the rest—the Cross-Benchers being included with the Back-Benchers—and that the Front-Benchers should be nowhere about and should be left behind. That is not the issue. For myself I should like to say, not having sat on a Front Bench for many years. that I have thought throughout that the way in which the business of this House has been arranged, no matter what Party has been in power, has really been most satisfactory and is hardly capable of improvement. But now it is said by the noble Earl, Lord Arran, that the Back-Benchers should have a chance to make decisions; and the noble Earl, Lord Perth, said, if I have his words aright, "Give the Back-Benchers a direct but limited function in arranging the business of the House". Lord Perth's suggestion does not do anything of the sort. That is my objection to it. It deprives those Back-Benchers who are not on this Select Committee of Back-Benchers of some of the rights that they

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now have. It does not give those Back-Benchers who are not selected after consultation through the usual channels any say in the matter at all. It may well act—
THE EARL OF ARRAN: Now that the lights have gone out we cannot see the noble Viscount; but I am sure we can all hear him.
VISCOUNT DILHORNE: I am obliged to the noble Earl. I am in the danger that if I provoke him too much he may speak again. But I must confess that I see no advantages but a number of disadvantages in what is proposed. My main objection to the selection of these Motions for short debates on Wednesdays by a Committee of four (or it may be more) selected Back-Benchers who do not represent other Back-Benchers at all, in consultation, it is now said, with the Leader of the House, is that I think it involves a restriction on the rights of individual Peers, a restriction which I hope will be rejected.
Any one of us on the Back-Benches or on the Cross-Benches may table a Motion for a short Wednesday debate. We can say on what day we should like it to be taken. If there are a number of Motions down for a particular day—there are eight down at the moment, I understand—no one can object if the Motions to be debated are selected by ballot and the Peer who has been unsuccessful has no grievance if he has been unlucky. We are not talking about balloting for Bills in another place. The noble Earl, Lord Arran, may have been unfortunate in this respect; but I seem to remember that some of his Bills got on to the Statute Books although some of us wish they had not. But it is quite a different thing here if a Peer's Motion for a short Wednesday debate does not win in the ballot. He cannot have any grievance against any other Peer; he cannot think he has been obstructed. I suppose that any member of the Committee of Back-Benchers, however the Motions are chosen, will have the right to say that a Motion chosen by another Peer shall not be debated. Some of us are more popular than others; some of us speak better than others; some may put down more interesting Motions than others. What are the criteria to be applied by this Committee in determining what Motions to
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select? The noble Earl, Lord Perth, said not a word about that. The noble Earl, Lord Arran, said not a word about that.
THE EARL OF ARRAN: May I interrupt the noble and learned Viscount? What are the criteria laid down by the normal channels?
VISCOUNT DILHORNE: I am not and I have never been a "normal channel", so I cannot tell the noble Earl. Nor, if I may say so, have I ever been a "usual channel"—which I think is the usual way of referring to it. But so far as this is concerned, is it seriously to be suggested that a few Back-Bench Members of this House shall have the choice of what should be debated in this House—at their complete discretion—without giving any reasons and without any responsibility to the other Members of the House? That is what is proposed. Supposing that this Committee think that a Motion in the name of the noble Earl, Lord Arran, is really a very uninteresting one, that he has been speaking a lot recently and for one reason or another his Motion is not selected. I think that he might well feel a far greater grievance if those were the grounds than if he were just unlucky in the ballot. The Motion might be put down for next time and it may go on and on not getting selected—
THE EARL OF ARRAN THE EARL OF ARRAN rose—
VISCOUNT DILHORNE: We are in Committee. The noble Earl cannot, I know, ever be kept sitting for long; but perhaps he will restrain himself for a little while.
This process might go on and on; and if this Amendment is passed in the sense of putting that power in the hands of that Committee then what we are doing—I am not saying that it will be done—is giving that Committee the power to prevent a Motion by an unpopular Peer or on an unpopular subject from ever being discussed in this House. That I think would be very wrong. Let each Peer take the chances of the ballot.
I come back to this. This is not a question of deciding between the Back Benches and the Front Benches. There is no issue of that kind. It is a simple question as to whether the Motion shall be selected by chance—everyone having the same chance—or whether it shall be

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selected by a body which does not represent anyone, which has no authority over anyone and which exercises a power which may give rise to very great feelings. Supposing that a Peer's Motion is not selected. He will be told it is not selected. He may want to know why. The answer will be, "We are not bound to give any reason and do not propose to do so." Is that not going to be very unsatisfactory, and will it not perhaps leave a number of Peers with a real sense of grievance? I cannot think that it would be right to accept an Amendment which, to my mind, would amount to a restriction on the rights of individual Members of this House.
VISCOUNT AMORY: If my noble and learned friend Lord Dilhorne had happened to speak after me instead of before me, he would have found my theme even more confusing; because before all the lights went out I had some notes of what I wanted to say. Now that the lights have come on again I seem to have a completely different set of papers. Therefore I shall be very brief. I wanted to say that on the previous occasion when the noble Earl, Lord Perth, advocated this view I was very impressed. I was again impressed with the reasons he gave to-day. The noble Earl, Lord Perth, and the noble Lord, Lord Shackleton, advised us that this was not a subject that we need approach in a spirit of deep passion. I agree with that. After careful examination, I can find no signs of any passion welling up in my breast at the moment. I was simply impressed with the points made by the noble Earl, Lord Perth, and by other speakers. I remember the ballot in another place. I think that sometimes it worked well and sometimes it did not work quite so well. Personally, I have great confidence in a Committee and if it did not work out we could always fall back on the ballot. But I have not the slightest dissatisfaction in any way with the present procedure of this House, which I find always extremely fair.
The noble Lord, Lord Shackleton, suggested that we might follow the example of the Athenean democracy but I hope that we shall not do that in all respects; they were rather long-winded and on
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occasions debated a subject from sunrise to sunset. It may be that the view I have expressed is due to some subconscious memory that, with the exception of one occasion, I cannot remember having won either a raffle or a ballot. On the one occasion when I did win there were 19 gifts to be distributed and 20 possible recipients. I won that ballot.
4.12 p.m.
BARONESS WHITE: The noble and learned Viscount, Lord Dilhorne, suggested that the Amendments to which I put my name at a later stage would mean the worst of both worlds. I would respectfully suggest that they would possibly mean the best. I support the Amendment now before your Lordships because it is a necessary paving Amendment to the other suggestions which come later on the Order Paper.
I put down my own Amendments because it seems to me that there are strong arguments on both sides. It is quite true that a ballot is simple, and the Report of the Committee says that it is manifestly fair and independent. It would also avoid the kind of heartburning from which the noble and learned Viscount, Lord Dilhorne, imagines that his fellow members might suffer if they did not win. But, of course, the disadvantage of a ballot is that it is also blind, and if there should be a subject on the Order Paper for possible selection for one of these short debates in respect of which time, if not the essence, is at least relevant, the ballot cannot possibly take account of that. I am particularly concerned with foreign affairs and overseas matters, about which a debate at the appropriate time makes sense. If the debate does not come within a reasonable period, it loses all relevance.
I am not now speaking of instant topicality in the way one regards it in another place. I do not think that is the function of your Lordships' House. But there are matters which arise from time to time, and if one is to discuss them at all the discussion must take place within a reasonable period. For that reason, I think one should at least see whether one can have a method of selection which would bring that into account. As I understand it, we are being asked to agree to an experimental period from now until Whitsun. I would only suggest that, if

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we are to experiment, we may as well experiment comprehensively and try both ways to see how they work out.
I apprehend that we shall have to look at the matter again after the experimental period and decide which method we like, or whether we wish to go on with it at all. I am not very strongly wedded to be notion of a Back Bench Committee. I find that, with reasonably organised pressure, the usual channels will generally do what one wants—but perhaps I have been more successful than others. It seems to me that there are two possible matters of principle here: do we leave it entirely to the chance of the ballot, or do we as was suggested in the debate on December 16, think that at least there is something to be said for examining the list of subjects and deciding whether there are some which, if they are to be debated at all, ought to be debated in the fairly near future? That seems to me the great advantage of having some process of selection which is not entirely blind. Both methods have been used in another place and I believe that they are still used. In another place one has the advantage of having Mr. Speaker. Here we do not have a Speaker in that sense and therefore we cannot rely on that method. But if we are going to experiment, it seems to me that we should try to see how it works; and if we are to have two debates on each occasion, I suggest that one should be by one method and the other by the other, and at the end of the period we could decide which we liked better.
4.18 p.m.
LORD SHINWELL: The noble and learned Viscount, Lord Dilhorne, speaks with exceptional authority, but his principal argument appears to me to be fallacious. What was that argument? It was that the Committee suggested by the noble Earl, Lord Perth, would not represent the opinion of all Back-Benchers. But there is not a single Committee appointed by your Lordships' House that represents the direct and specific opinion of Back-Benchers. So that argument goes by the board. And if it does not, it is completely irrelevant.
This debate is a continuation of the age-long conflict between Back-Benchers in the Parliamentary arena and the Establishment. We have had several examples of it in your Lordships' House. I want
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to address myself to what I believe is the substantial element in this discussion. It is this. What is the essential quality of your Lordships' House'? It is not the legislation which is introduced by the instructions of the Government of the day; nor is it the legislation which emerges from the other place. It is the opportunity to present ideas which make a profound impact on the public mind, either on national or international issues. If noble Lords will glance at the Order Paper and direct their attention to the great variety of Motions for which no day is named, they will agree that many of the Motions are of little or no consequence. They are the product of noble Lords who have theories about this or that, or are concerned about some local, minor issue. That is not the essential function of your Lordships' House. It is, as I have already said, to deal with matters of some profundity, of some quality, directing attention to what is the primary concern of every thinking person in our land; namely, what is our purpose and how are we to achieve it?
That is what I think your Lordships' House should direct its attention to. What about the position at present? There is no ballot. The decision as to the kind of debate which is to take place derives first of all from a number of Motions that appear on the Order Paper which may or may not be selected by the Government. That is a gamble in itself. The Back Benchers have no right or part in the selection. Individual Members of your Lordships' House may make an approach to the Establishment and plead for consideration and ask that their Motions be placed on the Order Paper in a direct fashion for the purpose of an early debate. Whether they succeed or not, I am unable to say. Otherwise, what is the position? It is that the Front Bench on the Opposition side of your Lordships' House decide to approach the Government with a view to having a debate on some topic. The Government may or may not agree to it. Here again, the Front Bench on the Opposition side of your Lordships' House may or may not consult the Back Benchers on this side of the House, or at any rate consult only a few of them. So Back Benchers have no privilege as regards a decision on the kind of Motions that should be debated in your Lordships' House.

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How are we to correct the position? Should it be by ballot; by a gamble; by chance; by permutations, or something of that kind; or by asking a few Members of your Lordships' House, selected because of their experience of this Assembly, because of their erudition, or whatever it may be, to examine all the Motions on the Order Paper, or be approachable by Members of your Lordships' House on any particular topic which seems to be worthy of a debate, and come to a decision? That gives the Back Benchers a chance. In my submission to your Lordships' House, as things are in this Assembly the Back Benchers are a mere cipher: but they can of course take part in debates.
Take, for example, what happens at Question Time. A Question may be asked by a Member of your Lordships' House, and the representative of the Government is ready to answer. The questioner is permitted, only in the interrogative form, to put one or two, or perhaps three, supplementary questions, but not to make a speech. But it is quite different so far as the Front Bench is concerned. When it comes to the Establishment, they can get up one after the other and make prolonged speeches, some of them quite irrelevant. Why the difference between the Back Benchers and those who sit on the Front Bench? Of course, on the Government side those on the Front Bench are selected by the Prime Minister, and Back Benchers have no say in their selection. There is nothing democratic about that; but I am not suggesting that we should inject democracy into the selection of Government Members. But who selects Front Benchers on the Opposition side? Perhaps it is the Leader, the Deputy Leader or the Chief Whip. They are all fine people of excellent quality (I could write a book about their qualities and virtues, and forget all about their vices, if they have any), but who selects them?
Now and again I come into your Lordships' House and look at the Front Bench—I happen to occupy a position of advantage, and I can look down on them—and I find somebody there whom I have not seen there before. I do not indulge in any unnecessary queries, but I ask myself the question: Why is he there? And I cannot furnish myself with an answer. Is it because the person
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whom I see on the Front Bench for the first time has had some experience, coupled with length of service, in the other place? I ask your Lordships to understand that the last thing I ever want to do is to sit on the Front Bench I have sat there too often, to my disadvantage. But when it comes to experience, then obviously I should have been the first person to be asked to sit there. Who decides this? Where is the democracy? Or is there a ballot for this purpose? Of course not. This is completely anti-democratic. I accept that.
But when it comes to a decision about the kind of Motion that ought to be debated in this Assembly—and I again return to what I said about the essential function of your Lordships' House—then it is a matter upon which a number of selected Back-Benchers (they would not be elected by the great body of Members of your Lordships' House; they would be selected through the usual channels, and we should have to accept that), with their erudition, wisdom, knowledge and experience, could decide. This is what we are asking for, and it is all that the noble Earl, Lord Perth. is asking for. So I reject the gamble: I reject the games of chance and permutations.
Lastly, I suggest that it is not a bad thing, even in an age-long Assembly of this character, with all its qualities and great traditions, occasionally to indulge in an innovation: it may be a minor one. My noble friend Lord Shackleton, the Leader of the Opposition, said that this was not an issue that was worth while troubling about. Of course it is not a vital issue like the Emergency Powers, Ulster, or some important international issue; but it is a matter of how we conduct our affairs and how we satisfy Back-Benchers and provide them with the privileges to which they are entitled. Therefore, because of that and a great many other ideas that I have in my head but which I will refrain from mentioning, I support the noble Earl's Amendment.
4.27 p.m.
LORD LEATHERLAND: My Lords, I do not intend to join my noble friend Lord Shinwell in the class war he has embarked upon between the Back-Benchers and what he calls the Establishment, but I think that in the middle part of his speech he seemed to be arguing

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from back to front. He cited the case of noble Lords who may have Motions on the Order Paper. He suggested that perhaps because of prejudice or antipathy the Establishment (whatever that may be) would not give them an opportunity to bring their Motions forward. I venture to suggest to my noble friend that, if they had the opportunity of a ballot and the chance of their Motions being discussed through the exercise of that ballot, they would be better off than they are at the present moment.
There is no Motion standing in my name on the Order Paper, and I do not suppose there is likely to be one for some time to come. Therefore I have no personal interest to declare: I speak almost from the borderline of virginity. The noble Earl, Lord Perth, showed us that there are two sides to almost any question. He was most persuasive, almost seductive. But I hope he will not take it amiss if I say that I stand where I stood before; that is to say, I am a supporter of the ballot. We all know—and those great ethical authorities the noble Earl, Lord Arran, and my noble friend Lord Shinwell have reminded us—that anything which has in it an element of chance, an element of the sweepstake, is fundamentally wicked. But, at the same time, there has been a tendency for that kind of thing to spread itself over many of our everyday activities of life. I am not concerned only with horse racing and football pools, but with respectable things such as the stock market and Mr. Harold Macmillan's premium bonds. It may well be that we should be rather disgusted at the extent to which games of chance have spread in our community, and that we should eschew any inclination to join any "rat race". But there is another point of view. The casting of lots, of ballots, has stood the test of time. The pages of Holy Writ, to which I sometimes refer when I seek moral guidance, abound with examples of where the casting of lots has been used to settle controversial issues. There was the occasion when Joshua cast lots to decide how the land should be distributed among the tribes of Israel. I sometimes wish that the leaders of Egypt and Israel could adopt that form of settlement today, because they do not seem able to settle matters in any other way. Then there was the case of Jonah who, as
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a result of the casting of lots was thrown overboard; and that seemed to end happily, ultimately. Then there was the case when Mathias was elevated into what we might call the aldermanic ranks—those of the Apostles—again as the result of the casting of lots. So the casting of lots is something which is quite common in every branch of our everyday activities and it has stood the test of time.
We are asked to-day to decide between two systems. The noble Earl, Lord Perth, has suggested that we should have a Committee of four Members. Those four Members are not to be elected, but are to be appointed. They are not to be representatives of the whole House; they are to be chosen by a select few. It seems to me that they would in due course constitute themselves into a body which would become "second-class Whips". We should be endowing ourselves with two sets of bosses—the official Whips and the auxiliary Whips. Who is to say that those two groups might not sometimes quarrel and disagree about the kind of Motions that should be put upon the Order Paper of this House? We have no guarantee that the particular Motions which the Committee of four suggested should be debated on the Floor of the House would be those which would appeal generally to Members of this House.
What will be the upshot of that? We are going to find certain noble Lords disappointed because their Motions were not accepted, and they are going to cultivate a sense of grievance, which could ultimately translate itself into a spirit of ill-will that would pervade the House, whereas at the moment we have nothing but harmony and amity. Surely a much fairer way would be to have a ballot for these Motions. It would eliminate entirely any suggestion of favouritism. It would do away with the idea that certain noble Lords are regarded as sacred cows. Under the ballot all Members would have an equal right to have their Motions brought before the House, and if they were unsuccessful in finding a place in the draw they would have nobody to blame.
It is not as though this system is untried. It has been tried in many branches of our ordinary life. In the financial sphere we find many kinds of bonds and

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securities which are repaid to certain holders from time to time, purely as a result of a ballot which is held. We have new issues which are overstagged, and the lucky people receiving those shares are those who are drawn by ballot. In local government elections we sometimes have a dead-heat between candidates, and the successful man is elected by the spin of a coin. And in the Mother of Parliaments, in the other place, we have perhaps the bulk of Private Members' time determined by ballot. Even in the realm of sport we have a ballot to decide which teams shall meet each other in the cup tie; we have the rival football captains tossing up to decide which one shall have the better end of the field; and in cricket we have the rival captains tossing up to see which one shall take advantage of the climatic conditions of the day. If it is good enough for cricket, I think it is a good enough principle for the whole of our English conduct. We shall be benefiting ourselves and contributing to the good will of the House if we have a scheme whereby the disappointed people are not in a position to blame anyone else. Let us have a ballot—an impersonal, fair and independent scheme. I think that would contribute very considerably to the good will of this House, which is one of its most pleasing features.
I must say one word about the Amendment suggested by my noble friend Lady White, although I believe she is not going to press it to a Division. It is a compromise: as the noble and learned Viscount, Lord Dilhorne, said, it is making the worst of both worlds—and I emphasise the worst of both worlds. I do not like compromises unless I am forced into a corner and have to accept them. Compromises are like instructing an Ulster Protestant that he must attend Mass every Sunday and then compromising by telling him that he need only go on alternate Sundays and that the intervening Sundays he can spend singing hymns for Mr. Paisley. I do not think the compromise would work. If we find that the present suggestion of a ballot does not work satisfactorily, and that it is introducing too hidebound a system, then in the next Session we can consider the suggestion of my noble friend Lady White. In the meantime, may I say that I believed in
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the ballot at the beginning and I shall believe in it to the end.
4.36 p.m.
LORD BALFOUR OF INCHRYE: My Lords, I hope that we shall reject the Amendment of my noble friend Lord Perth, for the reasons very powerfully put forward by the noble and learned Viscount, Lord Dilhorne, because this Committee of "Four Wise Men" will be appointed by whom we do not know; they will work to criteria that we do not know, and apparently there is to be no appeal by those who feel they have been unfairly treated. I believe the ballot is the fairest means of selecting the subjects to be debated. But the noble Baroness, Lady White, has proposed a compromise which has been labelled by her as "a highly desirable one" and by two noble Lords as "getting the worst of both worlds". I think that the noble Baroness, Lady White, had one good point in her objective, but not in her method of attaining it; namely, that any system we have should enable urgent matters to be debated at very short notice. I believe the ballot system could adapt itself to this end.
We are conducting an experiment now. but nevertheless we are exploring the guidelines for a system of mini-debates in this House, for which many of us have felt the need over a long period. We have four Wednesdays now put down which will accommodate eight debates. I hope these debates will be the start of a Wednesday series in the future. For that reason I want to put to the Procedure Committee this thought: if Part II becomes popular there will be many Motions put down for it; but the more Motions there are the less chance individual Members have of their own Motion being successful in a ballot. I believe that at the moment we have down nine Motions. Suppose that we allocated four Wednesdays and there were a large number of Motions, the chances of individual Members being successful would be small. Perhaps it could be so arranged that directly there were a specified number of Motions down for a particular Wednesday (and we have four Wednesdays set down) the guillotine should fall and no further Motions would be accepted for those four Wednesdays. Assuming for the moment that 16 Motions were down for four Wednesdays

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—that is, eight debates—every noble Lord would then have a two to one chance. If the maximum number allowed to be put down were 12, every noble Lord would have a one and a half chance. Then, when the next four Wednesdays were reserved for these mini-debates, there would be another 16 names put down with a carry-over of those who had been unsuccessful in the first period. In that way noble Lords would have a better chance in each set of four Wednesdays. If some particularly urgent matter of public interest came forward, the usual channels—the much abused usual channels, whom I as a Back-Bencher have always found to be courteous and helpful on all sides—would ask the noble Lord who had on the Order Paper one of the Motions for debate on the next Wednesday whether he would postpone it and then offer him one of the preferential positions in the carry-over for the next four Wednesdays.
The only reason I put forward this suggestion is a desire to see that the ballot is limited in numbers so that each noble Lord has a fair chance of getting a Motion brought forward, and at the same time the House has a means of debating urgent public affairs. It is for that reason that I support the ballot, and with great humility suggest for consideration the guillotine procedure on Motions on the Order Paper.
4.41 p.m.
EARL WALDEGRAVE: May I intervene briefly and say that the reasons why I wish to support the noble Earl, Lord Perth, in his method of deciding who shall have the honour of introducing these small debates against the ballot are these: I do not like unnecessary change, and the basis now of finding out who has the honour to introduce a Motion for debate is that one puts one's name down on the green Order Paper and I believe that the normal or usual channels finally decide whether you shall speak or not. The alternative to that course was very cogently put by the noble and learned Viscount, Lord Dilhorne, and it seemed to be so very strange to come from a lawyer. He said: "People may object to your decision. Why not always have a ballot?" I wonder whether he would take that thought into the law courts. It must offend somebody very much when he loses a case. It would be so much
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simpler to say, "But I have just tossed a penny and I am afraid you are out".
All that the noble Earl, Lord Perth, is saying is that here are some short—and I hope we emphasise "short"—Back-Bench debates and would it not be wise to have a small committee to assist the usual channels? That is all this committee would do; it is not going to be the tremendous dictatorial concern that the noble and learned Viscount, Lord Dilhorne, fears. It is to be a small committee to assist the usual channels and perhaps to be able to lower them from their Olympian heights to tell them in what ways Back-Benchers think, hope and believe. It is so reasonable and so sensible. What could be wrong with that? Although he is apparently going to vote in the right lobby, I am afraid that I do not want to follow the noble Lord, Lord Shinwell, or to vote with him because I hope and believe that this is not a symptom of the war between men and women, the war between Back-Bench and Front-Bench. I trust it is not that at all.
I hope that its utter reasonableness will enable Lord Perth's Amendment to be carried, or if it is not carried, that, second best, Lady White's Amendment will be carried, so that we have one Motion selected by each method. The one Motion which is not on the Order Paper, and which I hope will not be carried, is that of the noble Lord, Lord Balfour of Inchrye: it seems to be an eloquent plea for a rigged ballot, which is neither here nor there.
4.45 p.m.
LORD MAYBRAY-KING: I wish to support with brevity and diffidence the Procedure Committee's recommendation and oppose the noble Earl's Amendment. It is only fair to point out, in view of what my dear friend Lord Shinwell has said, that whichever way this debate goes the House is proceeding to give new advantages to the Back-Benchers by the mini-debate system which mathematically doubles the opportunities for Back-Benchers to initiate debates on topics in which they are interested. I pay tribute to the noble Earl, Lord Perth, for the work he did in initiating this particular reform. In any case, we are taking from the usual channels the initiative of selecting topics for the mini-debates. I have

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from some experience a great deal of confidence in the usual channels, tempered with the natural suspicion of one who was a Back-Bencher for 15 years in the other place and is now a Back-Bencher in this place.
I am not sure that the setting up of a new Committee would be free from any of the ills that are alleged of the usual channels. There would still be the dissatisfaction of the noble Lord or Lady whose subject was not chosen for debate. If we accept the Report of the Procedure Committee there is no question of blame; nobody is to blame but God or fate. If a noble Lord's topic is not chosen by ballot for a debate, nobody's pride is hurt. It has been pointed out that there might be pressure put on the Committee of Selection; there will certainly be grumbles at whatever they do. I believe that the neatest way of tackling this is by ballot. It will not be pro-Government; it will not be pro-Opposition; it will not be pro-Cross-Bench and it will not be a pro-Front Bench or pro-Back Bench.
I hesitate to mention the other place, hut in that other place selection of the right of a Private Member to introduce a new law—quite a significant right—or to put down a Motion for a debate on a Friday is decided by ballot. Selection for four out of five of the week's adjournment debates are by ballot. Selection for Motions on various allotted half days during the Session are by ballot, and now selection for the topics and the order in which topics can be discussed on the most important Back-Benchers' day of all in the other place, debates on the Consolidated Fund, is decided also by ballot. These work very well and without complaint.
I am quite certain that if the other place tried to tackle those topics and the arranging of such debates by small committees, there would be plenty of grumbling. One cannot complain against the Almighty; one must just trust him. The Report sets out fairly both sides of the argument. It comes down—rightly I believe—in favour of the ballot. It sums up the case against the ballot as being "irrational and undiscriminating". It sums up the case for the ballot as being "fair and independent". It is that fair-
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ness and utter independence which commends itself to me.
4.48 p.m.
LORD ALPORT: I did not take part in the previous debate on this subject so I hope that I may be allowed to speak briefly in favour of the Amendment put forward by my noble friend Lord Perth. There are one or two points which seem to be misunderstood about the proposal that the noble Earl has propounded to the Committee. My noble and learned friend Lord Dilhorne has said that the Committee of Four would be unrepresentative. It may well be that it would work out that way, but there is no reason why it should be—
VISCOUNT DILHORNE: Perhaps the noble Lord—
LORD ALPORT: Perhaps the noble Lord will allow me to continue. There is no reason why it should be unrepresentative. It would be possible, if it were agreed by the House, for the responsibility for nominating a representative from the Conservative side to be in the hands, through the usual channels, of the I.U.P. In the case of the Labour Party, the Labour Party Parliamentary meeting, I know, would be available to do that. The same would apply to the Liberal Party, and the same would apply to the Group over which the noble Lord, Lord Strang, is Chairman.
VISCOUNT DILHORNE: My Lords, if the noble Lord will give way to me for one moment. I would say that he has missed the point completely. I do not want to be represented by him or by any other Back-Bencher.
LORD ALPORT: My Lords, I have a very easy return to that, but I am not going to make it because the noble and learned Viscount is a great controversialist, and a formidable one, and not always the most courteous.
SEVERAL NOBLE LORDS: Oh!
LORD SHACKLETON: My Lords, may I interrupt the noble Lord on a point of fact? Of course, the Leader, the Deputy Leader, the Chief Whip and one other member of the Front Bench of the Labour Party are at the moment elected every year.
LORD ALPORT: Then, my Lords, in addition it would be possible to elect a representative to this Committee.
The point really is this. Although I understand the case put forward by the noble Lord, Lord Maybray-King, that we should introduce and carry out here in this House the same customs as they have in another place, the reason why so much of the business of private Members in another place is conducted and regulated by ballot is simply the strong competition between the Parties and also between individuals to obtain scarce Parliamentary time. As the noble Earl, Lord Perth, said, this does not apply in this House. There is a second reason why we are quite different from the other place. It is because we have an increasing number of noble Lords who come to this House without belonging to any of the three Parties in this House but are representatives of the Cross-Benches.
We who belong to Parties talk of the facilities that are available to us to have access to the Leaders of our Parties through the usual channels, and that is perfectly true. The noble Baroness, Lady White, has said that, by bringing pressure, and charm no doubt, upon her end of the usual channels, so to speak, she can get, or could in due course get, the time she required for any Motion that she felt was important and was supported, no doubt, by other members of her Party. But the same is not true of a large number of Cross-Bench Peers. One of the problems which I, at any rate, have always thought was the main problem your Lordships' House had to face was how we could make it easier for them to take a more active part in the work of this House. It is not easy—and I know this to be true—for someone who has had no Parliamentary or House of Commons experience, who does not belong to any organised Party organisation within this House, is not identified with any political point of view, to come into this Chamber and make the contribution which his experience and abilities render quite possible and which would be of great value to your Lordships in the conduct of our business.
I have been asked by the noble and learned Viscount, Lord Dilhorne, what were the criteria that would be used by the Committee. There is one factor in
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another place which has some advantage, and that is that Members there are able to associate themselves with Motions. Consideration is given to the amount of support that is given to any particular Motion as a result of the number of names that have been added to those of the original movers to show support. I have often wanted in this House to be able to identify myself with a Motion on the Order Paper. I should have thought that, so far as Cross-Benchers are concerned, as they look through the Motions they will note some that they would particularly wish to see debated. They have no "usual channels"—except the services which I am sure the noble Lord, Lord Strang, gives in the representations he may make—to make certain that those Motions are considered by the House at an early date. If there was a member of their own body, of the Cross-Bench Peers, who would, in my submission, rightly be made the Chairman of this small Committee, then automatically they would not only have somebody to represent them there but have somebody of influence to whom they could go and who they would realise—
VISCOUNT DILHORNE: Will the noble Lord forgive me?
LORD ALPORT: I have already given way once to the noble Viscount.
NOBLE LORDS: Give way!
VISCOUNT DILHORNE: I was only going to ask the noble Lord this question. He is making a speech as if he were speaking for the Cross-Benchers. I wonder what authority he has for doing that. I am a Cross-Bencher and I sit with other Cross-Benchers. I do not want anyone to represent me, and I am sure that many of my colleagues who sit on these Benches feel the same way. If I want to make any representations to the usual channels I have no difficulty at all in doing it myself. The noble Lord's argument seems to suggest that the Cross-Benchers should constitute a third Party in this House; and I would think that very deplorable.
LORD ALPORT: My noble and learned friend Lord Dilhorne is, quite rightly, sitting on the Cross-Benches because of the high Judicial position which

1303
he holds. But he has been for a long time, and is, associated with the Conservative Party—we know that perfectly well—and he has ready access to the usual channels, which is perfectly understandable. I am not speaking for him; I am speaking to the best of my ability only for myself, because no Peer in this House has a right to speak for anybody except for himself. In speaking for myself in this matter, I am merely giving views as they appear to me, as an observer of your Lordships' House over the last ten years, as something which is of importance and of value to this House in the conduct of its business. It is not insignificant that it is the noble Earl, Lord Perth, a Cross-Bencher, who is moving this particular Amendment.
If I may turn to my original argument before I was interrupted, the ability to be able to associate oneself with a Motion, and therefore have the fact that there is support for a Motion taken into consideration by a Committee, would enable the House, through the Committee, to give proper weight to the wishes of individuals. It would also enable many who do not want to take an active part in the debate to feel that at any rate they have had an opportunity of so influencing the procedure of the House and the order of business of the House that tile subjects which they thought should be aired and debated have been aired and debated as a result to some degree—perhaps only fractional—of their own efforts. I think this is very important.
As the noble Lord, Lord Shackleton, said, this is a very small matter. I am sorry to find the noble Lord, who in a previous Parliament was a great reformer of your Lordships' House—at any rate an aspirant reformer— now on the side of preserving the status quo. I had hoped that we should have his support for this small change. I also hope, quite seriously, that your Lordships will not allow arguments which I do not believe are of value, such as have been put forward by my noble and learned friend Lord Dilhorne, to influence you to prevent something which is an experiment so far as Whitsun only, and which after that we can judge again. I hope that you will be willing to try something that is new; something that is not simply a reproduction of the procedures of the House of
1304
Commons, and something which will, I think, bring at any rate some advantage to a number of very important Members of your Lordships' House on the Cross-Benches.
LORD ABERDARE: I beg your Lordships' pardon for intervening. I do not wish to stop anybody who wishes to speak from doing so, but I think it right to draw attention to the fact that we have some rather important other business to deal with to-day, and that we have taken up a good deal of time on what, although a very important matter, is not of earth-shaking importance. It is only an experiment. I would hope that your Lordships might feel able fairly shortly to come to a decision.
My noble friend the Leader of the House, who unfortunately cannot be here to-day, told me that, so far as he was concerned, he was quite prepared to operate any system on which your Lordships might decide. And I hope that perhaps your Lordships will so decide fairly soon.
4.59 p.m.
LORD CONESFORD: My Lords, I promise to be very brief indeed. I speak only to say that I think the noble Lord the Leader of the Opposition is entitled to some support from one of the very great number of members of the Procedure Committee who agreed with him. I believe I am right in saying that no other member of the Procedure Committee has spoken in this debate. As is fairly well known, I do not agree in politics with the noble Lord the Leader of the Opposition. Nevertheless, I think his argument is right. What astonishes me are some of the accusations brought against him. My noble friend Lord Alport said that he was standing for the status quo; everybody else has complained that the ballot is an innovation. We cannot have it both ways and we had better try to make up our minds which we mean. The noble Lord, Lord Shinwell, asked. "Why not have an innovation?" Well, whichever view we adopt this afternoon it will be an innovation: the Committee of Four is an innovation and the ballot is an innovation, and the question is which is the better innovation. Another correction I feel bound to make is to my noble friend Lord Waldegrave, who seemed to think that the usual channels

1305
would have something to do with this. The usual channels will be consulted on the selection of the four Back-Benchers, but it will be for the four Back-Benchers to select the subject of the debate. My noble friend only has to read the Motion on the Order Paper to see that that is true.
What I think we have to consider (I speak as a Back-Bencher and one who has always been a Back-Bencher in this House), is the position of a noble Lord who has on the Order Paper a Motion which he wishes to be debated. He believes in the importance of his subject and he wants to bring it before the House. At this point may I say how confusing it may be to bring in the experience of the House of Commons in using the ballot, either for selecting those who are going to move Motions or those who are going to introduce legislation. The ballot that we are proposing couples the Peer with his Motion, so that, whichever method we adopt, we are selecting both. Let us consider the point of view of the man who wants to have his Motion debated. At the present moment, without any of these new proposals, he can go to the Leader of the House, who we always know is accessible whichever Party is in power, or he can go to the Whip of his Party. Heaven knows to whom he goes if he is a Cross-Bencher, because the whole essence of the Cross-Benchers is that there is nobody to represent them. To have a representative Cross-Bencher is a contradiction in terms, as those who have any sense of logic will realise. To turn to these four selected Back-Benchers, my noble friend Lord Alport asked why they should not be representative. They may think they are representative but they have no claim whatsoever to represent any other Back-Bencher.
What comfort is it to a man who wants to have his Motion debated to know that it has been turned down, not by the usual channels, but by a body of four who have no claim whatsoever to represent him? I agree entirely with my noble and learned friend Lord Dilhorne, and, if I may say so, the most cogent argument of the man with the greatest experience, the noble Lord, Lord Maybray-King, seems to be overwhelming.
LORD DOUGLAS OF BARLOCH: May I beg your Lordships to consider
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what is on the Order Paper? There is upon the Order Paper a proposal by the noble Earl, Lord Perth, to leave out the last paragraph of the Report of the Committee on Procedure. That was the part of the Report which recommended that a decision upon the selection of these topics for debate should be made by ballot. There is in addition a totally independent Motion that a certain procedure of selection of these topics shall be adopted, but it does not follow that if the first Motion is agreed to the second one should be, or that the Amendment proposed by my noble friend Lady White should be agreed to either. If the first Motion is carried and this paragraph is not accepted by the Committee, the position, as I understand it, will simply be that the arrangement of the Order Paper will continue to be as it is at present; namely, that in effect it is arranged by the usual channels. So far as I am concerned, I am perfectly happy with that.
I do not want to have a matter of this kind decided by the great goddess, chance. It may be a very fine thing in football pools or premium bonds or matters of that kind, in which in fact there is no other possible method; but this is not a case in which there is no other possible method. It may be a good thing in deciding which side shall go in to bat first, or something of that kind, because it saves somebody the responsibility and the invidiousness of having to make the decision. A great many people would like to be relieved of that responsibility, but I do not want to relieve the usual channels of it. In my opinion experience has proved over many years that when people are put into that position of trust, in which the whole House confides their trust in them, they behave responsibly, sensibly and acceptably. I want to leave the matter like that. Therefore I am quite prepared to leave out this paragraph but I am not prepared to vote for anything else.
THE EARL OF SELKIRK: I should like to say a few words before we take the vote. There is a curious view that the usual channels and the Whips are most satisfactory but that any Committee of Back-Benchers would be quite irresponsible. I believe this to be quite untrue; but if it were true then the sooner the Back-Benchers gain some experience and responsibility in managing

1307
the House the better. As the noble Earl, Lord Perth, has said, it would be extremely valuable experience for them. I believe there are two objections to the course which the Committee have recommended. The first is the one put by the noble Baroness, Lady White, which cuts out one of the main purposes of the mini-debate; namely, that there may be a subject of real urgency. If we have a ballot that is right out; and, with respect to my noble friend Lord Balfour, I must tell him that I really could not follow at all his argument on that point.
The other point, as the noble Lord, Lord Conesford, has said, is that we are selecting not only the Peer but also the subject. That is completely inflexible, and if for any reason something were to happen the day before, such as a change of policy, so far as I can see there is no means of changing the subject for debate. It is for those reasons that I think the proposal made by my noble friend Lord Perth is very much better for providing for what I think is important—a balanced subject for debate. I am afraid I do not much care if a few Peers are disappointed. That is a minor matter compared with having a proper subject for debate in this House.
LORD SHACKLETON: May I also now support the Deputy Leader of the House? I think I have reached the stage where I do not really mind what is decided. Without being too partial, may I say that this is one of the reasons why I would stick to the Report of the Procedure Committee?
THE EARL OF PERTH: Would it be in order for me to say one or two words before my Amendment is put? In the first place, I want to assure the Committee that in what I have suggested there is no thought of disrespect for the usual channels—indeed the opposite. Although

CONTENTS

Alport, L.

Garner, L.

Loudoun, C.

Amory, V.

Garnsworthy, L.

Lyell, L.

Ardwick, L.

Gore-Booth, L.

Lytton, E.

Balogh, L.

Hankey, L.

Macleod of Borve, Bs.

Beswick, L.

Hanworth, V.

Morrison, L.

Birdwood, L.

Hood, V.

Moyle, L.

Burgh, L.

Howard of Glossop, L.

Noel-Buxton, L.

Douglas of Barloch, L.

Hylton-Foster, Bs.

Perth, E. [Teller.]

Effingham, E.

Lauderdale, E.

Redesdale, L.

Faringdon, L.

Lloyd of Hampstead, L.

Roberthall, L.

a comma may be wrong in the interpretation which the noble Lord, Lord Conesford, has put on my words. I am not suggesting that the usual channels should choose the Select Committee. I am suggesting—and it appears quite clearly in the Report of the Procedure Committee—that the four members chosen should decide, after consultation with the usual channels. So please let it be understood that I am in favour of working with the usual channels and that there is no disrespect to them.
My second point is this: the noble and learned Viscount, Lord Dilhorne, said that I had mixed my criteria, as though I had funkcd it or found it too difficult. That is not the case. My criteria are quite straightforward; they arc very much the same as would be employed by the usual channels: that is to say, common sense, fairness and, above all, their duty to the House, their duty to your Lordships. And do let us remember that those people who are chosen by the Leader on the sort of method outlined by Lord Alport would only have their role to play for one year. That is my suggestion. At the end of the year their term is over and some new ones come into play. Lastly, we heard the noble Lord, Lord Balfour of Inchrye, making some suggestion on how the ballot could be changed. That is exactly the reason why one should use the method I have suggested. So I hope your Lordships will not only give serious attention to this matter but indeed go into the Lobby in favour of what I have suggested—that is, to insert the words, "except the last paragraph thereof."
5.12 p.m.
On Question, Whether the said Amendment shall be agreed to?
Their Lordships divided: Contents, 43; Not-Contents, 104.

St. Just. L.

Somers, L.

Wells-Pestell, L.

Segal, L.

Stamp, L.

White, Bs.

Selkirk, E. [Teller.]

Trevelyan, L.

Wootton of Abinger, Bs.

Shinwell, L.

Waldegrave, E.

Wynne-Jones, L.

Younger of Leekie, V.

THE DEPUTY CHAIRMAN OF COMMITTEES (LORD STRANG): The Question is that the Fourth Report from the Select Committee on the Procedure of the House be agreed to.
House resumed; Report received.

ROYAL ASSENT
5.20 p.m.
THE LORD CHANCELLOR (LORD HAILSHAM OF ST. MARYLEBONE): My Lords, I have to notify the House, in accordance with the Royal Assent Act 1967, that the Queen has signified Her Royal Assent to the following Acts and Measures:

Sierra Leone Republic Act,

Island of Rockall Act,

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Ministerial and other Salaries Act, National Insurance Regulations (Validation) Act,

Local Employment Act,

Summer Time Act,

Clyde Port Authority Order Confirmation Act,

Admission to Holy Communion Measure,

Repair of Benefice Buildings Measure,

Benefices Measure.

TRANSPORT HOLDING COMPANY BILL
5.22 p.m.
THE PARLIAMENTARY UNDER SECRETARY OF STATE, DEPARTMENT OF THE ENVIRONMENT (LORD SANDFORD): My Lords, I beg to move that this Bill be now read a second time. It establishes the power of the Transport Holding Company to sell

1311
Thomas Cook's, and the power of the Secretary of State to dissolve the Transport Holding Company thereafter. The previous Administration recognised that the continuation of the Transport Holding Company after its major assets had been transferred under the 1968 Transport Act to other nationalised undertakings was an anomaly. We agree. They made provision in Section 53 of that Act for its remaining assets (of which Cook's was by far the largest) to be transferred elsewhere in the public sector and for the Holding Company to be dissolved thereafter. There is, however, in our view no general reason of public policy for Her Majesty's Government to be involved in the travel agency business; that is, for Cook's to remain in the public sector. But we are advised that there is some doubt whether Cook's could, as the law stands, be sold to the private sector or the Transport Holding Company to be wound up thereafter.
My Lords, Clause 1(1) therefore puts beyond doubt the Holding Company's power to sell Cook's, subject to the consent of my right honourable friend. Clause 1(2) enables directions to be given if required about the method of sale. The arrangements for the sale which I will outline briefly have been designed by the Transport Holding Company and their merchant bankers, Schroder Wagg & Co., Ltd., in agreement with my right honourable friend (who has hail the benefit of the advice of the Bank of England) in order to obtain the highest price from a bidder acceptable to both the Government and the Transport Holding Company. The prospectus which was issued in mid-December provides a full account of the company, of its assets based on a full valuation by independent valuers, and of its recent record. Copies have been placed in the Library. The prospectus of course makes it clear that the sale is subject to passage of the Bill and my right honourable friend's consent.
Prospective purchasers were required to submit by January 28 a brief memorandum describing their experience in relevant industries and a summary of their intentions with regard to the Group, setting out in particular the minimum period for which they are willing to undertake to hold the shares in the Com-
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pany; whether they intend to dispose of any major part of the Group's undertaking; and their plans affecting the staff. With the memorandum, prospective purchasers could submit any questions seeking elucidation or explanation of any statement in the prospectus. The Transport Holding Company have received memoranda from 16 individuals or groups and are preparing answers to their questions. Firm bids have been asked for by April 6 from all who submitted memoranda. Thereafter, detailed negotiations will be undertaken with selected bidders, and the Holding Company will seek the Secretary of State's consent to the sale to a successful bidder.
My Lords, my right honourable friend made it clear in another place that there is no question of selling Cook's to anyone who would destroy it or is unable or unwilling to maintain its high reputation. In deciding whether or not to authorise a sale to a particular purchaser, full account will be taken not only of the price but also of the financial standing of the purchasers; their ability and intention to carry on the business and maintain confidence, particularly in the banking side; any possible implications for the balance of payments (and, as I explained to your Lordships just over a year ago, bids by foreign concerns for a share of Cook's are not unwelcome, but the Government consider it desirable that the firm should remain under British control); the willingness of the purchasers to co-operate in safeuarding the interests of the staff, including in particular the overseas staff to whom some of the statutory protection available to United Kingdom staff under Clause 2 cannot be appropriately extended. Clause 2 is devoted to protecting the interests of the staff.
On pensions, the purchaser will be required by the contract of sale either to maintain the existing pension schemes or to institute other schemes which are no less favourable. But the Government will supplement the provisions in the contract of sale by means of orders made under Clause 2 of the Bill. These will both provide additional safeguards for existing pension rights and enable us to deal with the special problems presented by the interavailability of pension arrangements inside the nationalised transport sector under which some of the present staff are

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employed. On the theme of the interchangeability of pensions, it has been possible for some years past for an employee who transferred from one body in that sector to another to remain in membership of his existing pension scheme. It will therefore be necessary to bring into Cook's schemes certain of their employees who are now in other public sector pension schemes, and to transfer out of Cook's schemes a number of people who are no longer employed in the group but are employed elsewhere in the public sector.
The regulations to be made under Clause 2(4) of the Bill to provide compensation for loss of employment or loss of pay or pensions, or worsening of position, will be based on the established Code, which has been evolved in the public sector since the last war. While the Transport Holding Company and its successors will be responsible for paying compensation to anyone covered by the regulations, it also intends to require the purchaser, as part of the sale arrangements, to undertake to indemnify the Holding Company against any expenditure so incurred. In this way the cost of any rationalisation and redundancy will fall, as I think your Lordships will agree it should, on the employers who take the decisions, but the staff's right to compensation is fully safeguarded.
The Government are in close touch with the union principally concerned: the Transport Salaried Staffs Association. The provisions of the Bill I have outlined are generally acceptable to them but the Department will of course be consulting them further on the detailed provisions of the orders and regulations to be made under the Bill. I believe that this Bill is in the best interest of Cook's, of its staff and of the public. We all want to see the company prosper, and I believe that this is the best way of ensuring it. My Lords, I beg to move that the Bill be now read a second time.
Moved, That the Bill be now read 2a. —(Lord Sandford.)
LORD DIAMOND: My Lords, I am in a little procedural difficulty to which I am not accustomed, being a comparatively "new boy" in your Lordships' House. I was hoping to have the pleasure of listening to the noble Lord, Lord Hurcomb, and of hearing his comments on the Bill.
LORD SANDFORD: My Lords, if I may intervene for a moment, I think the difficulty which the noble Lord, Lord Diamond, finds himself in arises from the fact that his noble friend Lord Popplewell has had to leave to catch a train, and possibly the noble Lord, Lord Hurcomb, was not aware of that fact. I think that now, having been made aware of that fact, he may care to step in and precede the noble Lord, Lord Diamond.
5.32 p.m.
LORD HURCOMB: My Lords, 25 years ago I was personally largely responsible for the process, though not of course for the policy, of bringing Cook's into being as an integral part of the nationalised transport fabric. I therefore feel that I ought to say one or two words about this Bill of which the operative effect, as the noble Lord has pointed out, is to enable Cook's to be sold. I do not doubt that the Secretary of State, with all the expert advice he has, will do his very best to get a proper price. On the other hand, there are people who wonder whether, when once you have proclaimed to all and sundry that you want to be rid of something, you are in fact going to got that proper price.
The other point that arises concerning the actual conditions is whose hands this undertaking is going to get into, and how will the Secretary of State and the Government be able to safeguard for the future that, once let into private hands, this large international business, which also has a national prestige, will be kept together indefinitely. I do not know whether the noble Lord can be a little more specific about how this point is to be dealt with. I noticed that he said the Government do not want to sell it to anyone who is going to destroy it. The present business of Cook's—and, in this respect, I do not think it has altered very much since my time—includes an enormous business in the sale of travellers' cheques, which I should have thought could hardly be conducted successfully except by one of the great banks, or by some consortium of which they are a part. When one has to start afresh and sell to a lot of unknown people, how is that business to be combined successfully with the ordinary travel agency business? The noble Lord may have answers on that point. It must have been thought about, and the way may be

1315
seen clearly ahead. But I do not think everybody feels entirely satisfied about that.
The point I should like to make to your Lordships, as briefly as I can, is this. There has been a great deal of criticism about the competence of the higher management of Cook's. That denigration, which has been going on for months, and indeed for two or three years, comes largely from people who have an obvious interest in crying "stinking fish!", in the hope that they may be able to pick up at cheap rates some of what they decried. As I have said, I trust the Minister entirely to frustrate any attempts of that sort. The only point I would make is that though the managment of Cook's (which came within the scope of the Labour Government's nationalising policy largely as an accident of the war) presented to the newly formed Transport Commission an obvious problem, we found no difficulty in solving it.
Fortunately, the Transport Act 1947, which was not wholly misconceived, did not try to tell the Commission exactly what it was to do in such circumstances. More fortunately still, we enjoyed in the then Minister of Transport, Mr. Alfred Barnes, a wise and extremely sensible man who, having given people his confidence, did not try constantly to direct or supervise what they were doing. It seemed to me. and indeed to my colleagues, that this travel agency business could not well be left with the railways into whose hands the circumstances of the war had, as a matter of convenience, brought it. The business of Cook's was to serve the general public and to earn their commissions by dealing with all agencies of transport—not merely the railways, but ships and, notably, the air; and, of course, road interests in many parts of the world. It therefore seemed to us that the simple plan was to treat it as if it were a holding company, leaving it the utmost degree of commercial freedom. I therefore asked Mr. Stanley Adams. who was then the General Manager of the company, to see me. I told him that we should like him to carry on, that he would have our full confidence in the conduct of the business if he agreed to do so, and that he would not be interfered with in detail.
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To my own knowledge, those arrangements worked during the first five or six years of the Commission perfectly smoothly, I think very efficiently, and certainly very profitably. I wonder why it is thought that those arrangements. which in fact, as I have said, continued for twenty-five years, should now be altered, except that here is something that can be got rid of—and admittedly it is one of the easiest bits of the transport complex to hive off. But it has been efficiently and profitably conducted, and though in recent years some transactions, like the acquisition of Lunn-Poly, may have turned out contrary to expectations. that had nothing to do with the senior management of Cook's. That was part of the machinery, which we did not find necessary in our day. What I want to say on that is that those criticisms, which I am sure are unjustified, have been bitterly resented by the higher management of Cook's, who were in no way responsible. They must have been bad for morale, and they must have been had for business. I hope that before this change of status finally takes place the Minister, or some representative of the Government, will say something to acknowledge that they realise that the senior management of Cook's are not fair objects of those criticisms.
I would add only this. I noted that the noble Lord repeated what the Minister said in another place, that just getting rid of the concern into private hands and away from public hands must be good for the company, must be good for the taxpayer and must be good for the staff. I cannot feel really convinced about that; and the glow of euphoria which ought to be spreading over me, and probably over many of your Lordships. I just do not feel. What the noble Lord said may be so, but it will not be due to the change of ownership; it will be due to changes of circumstance. which in this very fluctuating business can be rapid and marked. But I feel it is only fair that the people who, as I say, have for 25 years successfully conducted Cook's business should be relieved of the feeling which they now have, that the Government at any rate accept the criticisms which many of their supporters have made. I think they wonder, in particular, why they should be accused of having been back-

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ward in extending the package tour business.
I would myself agree that in my day the management of Cook's was cautious, but it was not static or half-asleep; and why they should be criticised now for not having rushed into this hectic state of travel abroad and for not starting to sell "places in the sun", in hotels which have got no roofs on and which lack drains, I do not know. I feel that it is a little unfair, and I am sure that if they had had proper support they would have found a wise, and eventually profitable, line to take, even in that rather tricky business. I am convinced that the ordinary citizen and his family who want to have a holiday abroad and who want to go to someone with national prestige and reliability behind them—someone who will not sell them something that they will not in fact get—will have far more cause to regret the sale of Cook's than to believe that it is going to be a great boon and blessing to the nation.
5.45 p.m.
BARONESS ELLIOT OF HARWOOD: My Lords, I intervene just for a moment only because I have long experience as a customer of Cook's. I was a customer of Cook's when it was a private company, and, of course, I have been one since it became a nationalised company. I knew Mr. Stanley Adams; and I have always been a supporter of this agency. I do not hold very strong views as to whether it should be a nationalised service or an independent service, and therefore I am not speaking against the Bill; but I want to make one or two comments which I am sure the Minister will agree with, and about which he has in fact already given some reassurance. First of all, I hope that this company will remain under British control. I hope it will not be sold to a foreign company. I think it has a reputation all over the world; and when one travels with Cook's travellers' cheques, one knows perfectly well that they will be honoured anywhere; and that is a great consolation when one is in foreign climes.
But what I really want to say is that here in this House of Parliament we have a service from Cook's which I think is absolutely marvellous. I have been using it ever since I became a Member of your Lordships' House; but before that, when my husband was a Member of Parliament
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for 40 years, he always used it. Those of us who live, as I do, in the North, in Scotland, and travel twice a week either by sleeper or by air travel know perfectly well that we can get the most marvellous service from those people down in the basement of the House of Commons. I should like to pay my tribute to all those young people and the managers there who have served us, not only now but in years past, because I honestly think that for Members of Parliament, and certainly for me as a Member of the House of Lords, to be able to get such service from our own Cook's office makes more difference to the comfort and to the easiness of a rather complicated life, if you happen to live in the North, than anything I can imagine. I should like to put on record how grateful I am personally for the service I receive; and I am quite sure that other Members of your Lordships' House, and certainly Members of the House of Commons, feel the same.
I hope that this service will remain a very personal one. I agree with Lord Hurcomb in what he said about many of the travel agencies which are now starting up. I remember that when I was Chairman of the Consumer Council people were continually writing in and complaining of package tours sold without any real reference to or understanding of the facilities which they were selling. As Lord Hurcomb has just said, "Travel to the sun", or something of that kind, was put on the brochure; people were taken in by this and then complained bitterly afterwards. There is very tough competition in the travel business, and I think it is most important that any travel agency should have at heart the personal interests of the purchaser of the ticket. I can say of Cook's that, anyway so far as I am concerned, and I am sure in the case of anybody who has used their services, they have always dealt very honestly with us. They have not sold us package deals that were in any sense dishonest; and I think I can also say that, of all the complaints we got at the Consumer Council while I was there about fraudulent travel package tours being sold to the public, I cannot remember one concerning Cook's. That is a reputation which I am sure the Government will want to see continue when they agree to whatever company is going to take the company over. This personal

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service to the public is most valuable, and I hope that it will be regarded in that way.
I am certain that the Government want this facility and this company to be treated in that way. I hope they will not be tempted by offers of high prices, but will look very closely indeed into the background of the people who are offering high prices, to ensure that this concern remains in the hands of reputable companies or people who will look after the interests of the consumer. If that happens, there is no reason why it should not be just as good as it was 25 years ago, before it was taken over by the Government; it was then very good. It was run skilfully by the nationalized transport service and the noble Lord, Lord Hurcomb, is no doubt as responsible as anybody for the fact that it was so efficiently run and one can pay a great tribute to it. Let us be sure that in the future it is going to be as good as it has been in the past. I want again to say how grateful I am to all the people who serve us in the Cook's office in Parliament because they make life very much easier, certainly for those Members like myself who are continually in the trains.
5.50 p.m.
LORD DIAMOND: My Lords, I am sure that we should all like to echo what the noble Baroness has said in our tributes to those who look after our travel arrangements—they looked after mine similarly for a great number of years—with such kindly and attentive service, and to echo her hope that in the future the service of Cook's will be as good as it is now. We are all grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Hurcomb, who I suppose (other noble Lords will forgive me if I am wrong) speaks with greater authority on this topic than any other Member of the House, having regard to the part he played in the organisation of the nationalised company at the time and the part he played later in running that organisation. Therefore what he has had to say has been most informative and extremely authoritative.
It is now my pleasant duty to congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Sandford, on his speech. I can do that for several reasons. First, he avoided all the awkward parts to which I shall shortly
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come. That is always a wise thing in this House, especially at this time on a Thursday; it tends to keep the temperature down. I will endeavour to maintain the temperature by informing those of your Lordships who do not know the whole of this story (the number, I expect, is very few) a little more than the Minister thought appropriate to inform us at first telling. It may be that it occurred to him that he would have an easier passage if he kept it to the last telling, by which time none of us, on this side of the House at least, could have a further word to say. I shall give him the opportunity to do so by asking a number of questions.
Secondly, I want to congratulate him on having done the wisest thing that anyone speaking from either Box can do: that of asking a question and immediately answering it, long before anybody else can give a different answer. He asked himself, "Why should the Government be concerned with Cook's?" That, in fact, was his sole reason, his sole justification, for this Bill. He did not see why the Government should be concerned with Cook's. He then went on, as the wise man he is, to give several very powerful reasons. He made it clear that the Government were not going to allow Cook's to be run in such a way that the Government did not concern themselves with the running of Cook's. It was, for example, not going to be run (though he expressed it in a rather confused phrase) by foreign interests. He wanted to be absolutely sure that that was the case. He was going to be absolutely sure that the Minister who had charge of it should personally consent to whoever it was who were going to acquire it. Why? So that the intentions could be seen to be perfectly honourable. No doubt he will explain to us later, as Lord Hurcomb is as interested in this as I am, how the Government intend that these honourable intentions should be fulfilled throughout time and not merely for the next week or two. So the noble Lord in this way —and we all heard his speech—answered his own question and made it perfectly clear that this was an area of activity in which the Government were concerned. The noble Lord. Lord Hurcomb, made clear that which has always been more than clear to me: that where you have nationalised industries operating almost

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exclusively over the whole of the transport area—British Rail, the airlines, the National Freight Corporation—it was natural and sensible that the travel agency should form part of that general complex by putting it in the same ownership. It came into that ownership and it has remained in that ownership.
My Lords, I want to pursue the question which lay behind both the speeches we have heard this afternoon: why is it now being transferred? The noble Lord said, with respect, half of one sentence and then proceeded to answer it, so he will acquit me of discourtesy if I immediately turn my mind to the real reason why it is being transferred. In the other place the reason put forward was bad management. The noble Lord, Lord Hurcomb, speaks with more restraint and greater courtesy than I could ever summon to my aid: he said that he thought it was the duty of the Government to make plain the other side of the story. He said that it was not the Government who were criticising the management; it was the Back-Benchers and so on, in another place. Well, the sorry truth is, and I suspect Lord Hurcomb knew it but did not want to put it in so many words, that the Government, through its senior Ministers (and I say "Ministers" in the plural) have criticised this company in a most disgraceful way—and I have Hansard here. Why do I say "disgraceful"? Because every Minister for every nationalised industry throughout the period since 1945, while I have had the privilege of being a Member of one or the other House, has always regarded it as his responsibility to stand up at one or the other Box and say, "Yes, there are these criticisms. Now I give the other side of the story. "Why? Because the nationalised industry itself cannot do that job. Therefore the Government have to do it for it.
What have we heard with regard to this company, the business of which the Government wishes to denigrate?—nothing but criticism. Not one word from any Minister giving even the other side of the story, giving a balanced picture. I can, if your Lordships wish, read many quotations from both Ministers' speeches in the other place running down Cook's recent management. I do not think that it will be very profitable to do so; it is already on record. I expected the
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noble Lord, Lord Sandford, to open his speech by again referring to the same thing. He was a good deal wiser than were his colleagues in another place; he knew that the argument could not be sustained.
In case he proposes to return to this argument in his winding-up speech I am bound to deal with it. Not only does the noble Baroness say that the service is good; so, too, do others whom I trust she will not mind my putting together with her. Among them I include the United Nations Association, UNESCO, the World Health Organisation, the International Monetary Fund. It is very difficult to think of a first-class international organisation of top repute which does not use Cook's services. So I think there is not much disagreement but that its record stands very high. I am most grateful to the noble Baroness for saying, out of her great experience on the Consumer Council—which experience, I may say, without embarrassing her, I am sorry has come to an end—that from her own knowledge, though there had been many complaints about those who suffered as (for want of an appropriate term) "package tourists", not one was made about Cook's. And so there is no doubt that in the public mind and esteem, nationally, domestically and internationally, this company's reputation stands very high indeed.
There is no doubt that the company has been nationalised for a very long time. The Bill was in 1947 and I imagine that 1948 was the date of effective national ownership. That is virtually a quarter of a century. I understand that in the last year it has not been so profitable, but over a very long period the company has been very profitable. So why are there now these criticisms of the management? And if there are these criticisms, why do not the Government, who have the power and the responsibility, do the normal thing about it? And how can that be said, if Cook's has been so successful as not to incite any action by the Conservative Government which held power between 1951 and 1964 — 13 years of inactivity so far as Cook's was concerned—13 years when the then Government might have done what the present Government are now proposing to do but refrained from doing because they were satisfied about Cook's?
LORD JACQUES: The other Government was a better Government.
LORD DIAMOND: Well, my Lords, we know the reason full well. The noble Viscount, Lord Blakenham, for example, sitting opposite, was an adornment of that Government, and I am sure that he would not have let his colleagues do such a stupid thing—but perhaps I should not bring him into the discussion. The answer is that the company was carrying on perfectly satisfactorily during those 13 years.
What I am putting seriously to your Lordships is that the story about ill-management is not supported in your Lordships' House, is denied by those concerned and there is no evidence to substantiate it, if there were, what on earth is the relationship between management and the ownership? If the company, as was alleged by both Ministers in another place, has been badly managed, why is that an argument for a change of ownership? Are the Government suggesting that whenever a single firm in the private sector fails, the next Labour Government should automatically nationalise it because the only way to deal with a management difficulty is to change the form of ownership from the private to the public sector or the reverse? Of course not. In neither House have the Government put up the slightest justification for changing the ownership from the private to the public sector as being a solution for management difficulties—if there are management difficulties.
I wish to turn in particular to the nationalised airlines about which, if the Minister will forgive me for reminding him, I did have a quick word immediately before the debate. I wish to ask specifically, are the Government satisfied about the management of the two nationalised airlines? I assume they are, because if not, as an effective and competent Government, they would be doing something about it. So I assume that they are satisfied with the management of those two airlines. If they are satisfied, why are the Government putting shackles on the possibility of those airlines owning Cook's, as would be a very reasonable and natural thing—so retaining in its appropriate sphere, the travel sphere, this well-managed, enormous, inter-
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national business of high repute? It is a business whose credit needs to be good and needs to have all the authority possible behind it, in order to continue its financial business; and the financial business alone of this company runs into something like £100 million a year. So I am saying that if the airlines are well managed why should not they be allowed to take over Cook's and enable the Governent to do what they want to do; namely, dissolve the Transport Holding Company?
The Government could just as easily and, in my view, a lot more beneficially to the economy and the country, transfer the ownership of this firm to a firm in the public sector as to a firm in the private sector. So I ask the noble Lord, Lord Sandford, to be good enough to deal specifically with that point. Perhaps I had better refresh his memory about what his colleague said in another place when dealing with this point. Mr. Eldon Griffiths, the Under-Secretary of State for the Environment said:
"My right honourable friend by no means rules out the participation of other nationalised concerns but this would have to be justified in terms of their existing main-line activities and would also have to depend on their financial position."
Well. my Lords, the financial position of the two airlines is pretty sound and it is well within their activities. They are concerned with the business already. The Minister went on to say:
"I would not expect nationalised concerns would take more than a comparatively small holding, because anything other would be inconsistent with the purposes of the Bill."— [OFFICIAL REPORT, Commons, 24/11/71; col. 1431.]
There is the cat well and truly right outside the bag, making it perfectly clear—as the noble Lord, Lord Sandford, did not attempt to disguise, although he did not clarify it—that the reason for this transfer has nothing whatever to do with management; nothing whatever to do with the record of Cook's; nothing whatever to do with whether it is appropriate or efficient that Cook's should remain in the public sector; nothing whatever to do with the points raised by the noble Lord, Lord Hurcomb, and, regrettably, nothing to do with any condition about whether Cook's should continue to serve the noble Baroness and others as well and as helpfully as in the past. It is to do with one thing only, with the Conservative Annual

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Conference where a promise was given to hive off bits of public industry. This is what is happening, and whether it is to the detriment or the benefit of the economy could not concern the Government less.
My Lords, the noble Lord asked, why should the Government be concerned? I repeat that he answered most of that question himself by what he immediately went on to say; and I have given further reasons for it. May I. therefore, go on to say shortly why I think it would be extremely damaging for the nation and the economy; why this policy of hiving off, which is the sole justification for this maltreatment of Cook's, is highly damaging.
First of all, I think—and I do not think I am exaggerating what the noble Lord, Lord Hurcomb, said about this; he and I both agree—that such activity must be highly demoralising for staff and management. People are in business to make the business prosperous, to expand their activities and to see ever-widening horizons. Because of this clamping down which is going on as a result of Government activities, not one nationalised board knows where the chopper will fall next; top level management is concerned to spend far too much time protecting themselves against the Government instead of getting on with their business of expanding, knowing that if they do expand, their expansion may be taken back next week and hived off by the Government. That is totally demoralising to the principle of enterprise which we want to see in every public and private enterprise firm. It is demoralising; it is a denial of their business opportunities.
In terms of the Coal Board we have had this problem already, and we are suffering from it to-day. It makes it absolutely impossible for any board to run a balanced business because if it were running a business which contained a main activity which is running down, not a board in the country would not try to balance that by diversifying into activities it thought were likely to grow. So far as the Coal Board are concerned, that is denied. Hiving-off is taking place, or being prepared, for the Coal Board, as a result of which the noble Lord, Lord Robens, as he made perfectly clear on the radio not long ago, refused to
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continue his appointment there. I myself am quite convinced that the troubles from which we suffer as we sit here are partly due to the feeling of the miners that they are no longer engaged in an industry which has a fair chance; they no longer have a Chairman who understands, as nobody but the noble Lord, Lord Robens, could understand, their needs and desires. I am sure that the present coal strike is in a measure due to that very hiving-off policy, of which we are seeing another example in this Bill.
As the noble Lord, Lord Hurcomb, said, the inevitability of a policy like this is that you are being careless of the public purse: I think that is the best way of putting it. I should have thought that that was an interest which joined all of us; namely, anxiety to protect the public purse. As everybody knows, when you want to sell a business you do not go along and say: "Please come and buy this business. Please buy it before April 2"—or whatever the date is— "because we have a severe deadline. Please relieve us, the Government, of the responsibility we have, because, as you know, we do not want it any longer." You do not do that unless you are proposing to give the business away for a comparative song. I am saying to the noble Lord that the Government are being careless of their responsibilities to the public purse in the way they are advertising their desire to sell off bits of public industries; in the way they are making clear that it will not be a deal as between a willing seller and a willing buyer, but it will be a deal as between a seller who is compelled to sell and a buyer who can buy in his own time, as is happening here, by a fixed date, as the Minister has just made clear; and that, as a result, the assets will go for a much lesser value than they would otherwise achieve. It is quite impossible that that should not be the result and that the taxpayer and the public purse should not be the worse off in consequence.
There is a further aspect to which I must refer in the Government's policy of hiving-off. The worst aspect is their inclination—which they have acted upon at least once, in the case of the Air Corporation's £6 million worth of airlines—to deprive a nationalised industry of one of its assets without any compensation whatsoever. That is an unfortunate

1327
tendency and an even more unfortunate precedent. It encourages people to think of tit-for-tat. I would therefore invite the Government to have second thoughts upon the policy of denying to a nationalised industry the right to carry on with certain of its assets and goodwill which produce income and profits, without giving them any compensation whatever.
So I am saying that this is a Bill which sells Cook's from the public to the private sector, notwithstanding its high reputation, notwithstanding its achievements, certainly since 1947, notwithstanding that your Lordships have spoken highly of its reputation, for the simple reason that the Conservative Party are determined to hive off bits of nationalised industry irrespective of the nation's welfare. For those reasons it stands condemned. I must explain that, despite that, it is not our intention to divide the House, because this is a Second Reading of a Bill which has come from another place, and we have no difficulty in deciding what our duty is in those cases. However, I want to make it absolutely clear that we disagree utterly and profoundly with the irresponsibility of the Government in their proposed action.
6.15 p.m.
LORD SANDFORD: My Lords, I think the whole House would agree that in a debate on the Second Reading of a Bill to transfer Cook's from the Transport Holding Company in the public sector into the private sector, which is the intention of the Government, it would be hopeless for me to spend any time attempting to bridge the gap on the whole question of nationalisation which clearly exists between the Party for which I speak and the Party for which the noble Lord, Lord Diamond, speaks. He and his Party take one view; I and my Party take another. Whether we are looking at the matter of the Coal Board, B.O.A.C., B.E.A., Cook's or any other sector, we have this basic difference of approach. All we are considering at the moment is the transfer of Cook's from the Transport Holding Company in the public sector into the private sector.
I will, if I may, stick to the debate in this House rather than the debate in another place. It is our custom to have our own debate and to deal with the
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points made from each side of this House rather than with points made by others in another place. I said nothing about the management of Cook's, and I do not think it is for me at this stage to express any further view in detail on the strengths or weaknesses, past or future, of Cook's, because all that falls now to be judged from all the details set out in the prospectus: the whole picture is there. But I am only too pleased, in response to the noble Lord, Lord Hurcomb, in particular, to affirm my view that Cook's is indeed a great firm with a long and distinguished history. As I said in my opening speech, and I repeat, we want to see the company prosper; but we see no need to have it in the public sector, and want to see it transferred in order that it should prosper in the private sector.
The noble Lord, Lord Diamond, asked me two specific questions about how we ensure the future of Cook's. Of course there is no way of ensuring in all detail and for all time how Cook's will be run by the purchaser of the firm, although it is possible to safeguard the special interests of the staff, which in this particular case must be specially safeguarded. It is for that reason that the greater part of the Bill is required and all the details are set down, as they are in Clause 2. The noble Lord did not ask me any questions about that.
LORD DIAMOND: My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord for allowing me to interrupt. I did not ask him any questions. He now gives me the opportunity of saying that I merely forgot to say, as one does on these occasions, not having had much opportunity to prepare remarks, that I am grateful to him for what he said, which covers all the points perfectly satisfactorily from the point of view of Second Reading, and if any minor point arises we can deal with it in Committee.
LORD SANDFORD: I look forward to that. The further specific question asked by the noble Lord, Lord Diamond, after ranging rather widely, if I may say so, into the National Coal Board, B.O.A.C. and B.E.A., was this: Are we putting shackles on B.O.A.C. and B.E.A.? Well, we are not doing that, but I confirm the terms of what my right honourable friend said in another place— the noble Lord has

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quoted his words, and I will not repeat them. It is not our intention to divulge the details of the negotiations now going on between the Transport Holding Company and the potential bidders, because much of the information involved in that is confidential, but it does so happen that a consortium which includes B.O.A.C. and B.E.A. have published the fact that they are among the bidders, and I can confirm that B.O.A.C. and B.E.A. are associated in these particular transactions in that way at this moment.
My noble friend Lady Elliot of Harwood hoped that Cook's will remain under British control, and we hope so too. I am grateful to my noble friend Lady Elliot of Harwood for the compliment she paid to that particular branch of Cook's which serves us all so well here in the Palace of Westminster. I see no reason why these facilities which we have all enjoyed for so long should come to an end as a result of the sale provided for by this Bill. I hope that has answered all the points raised by noble Lords. I see no prospect at all of converting the noble Lord, Lord Diamond, to the views of my Party on nationalisation and I feel it would take considerable time if I were to attempt it. Having said that, my Lords, I hope your Lordships will now agree to give the Bill a Second Reading.
On Question, Bill read 2a, and committed to a Committee of the Whole House.

CODE OF INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS PRACTICE
6.21 p.m.
LORD DRUMALBYN: My Lords, I beg to move that the Draft Code of Industrial Relations Practice, laid before the House on January 19 last, be approved. In asking your Lordships to approve this Draft Code I should like to start with two observations. I do not think that any debate on any facet of industrial relations in this House at this time could start without an expression of our sorrow at the death of Lord Donovan. Not only did he win the respect and affection of your Lordships but, having been invited to preside over the Royal Commission on Trade Unions and Employers' Associations in 1965, he applied his intellect and his humanity to this immense task for over three years
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in addition to his duties as a Lord of Appeal in Ordinary. His contribution to the improvement of industrial relations is inestimable. Greatly as it is appreciated now, I believe it will come to be valued more and more as the years go by. It may well have shortened his life, but he has certainly left behind him a study bearing his name which will be a lasting memorial to the work of himself and his colleagues. All of us mourn his death and offer our deep sympathy to his widow and family.
My second observation relates to this debate. When I initiated the debate on the Consultative Document there was no need for me to go into any detail on its provisions, and I was able to be brief. To-day I hope your Lordships will bear with me if I speak for rather longer, so that I may give some account of the process and results of the consultation that has taken place.
The debate we had on the Consultative Document last June was critical but constructive. It took place on the eve of our embarking on the Report stage of the Industrial Relations Bill. In contrast to the Bill, the Code was welcomed on both sides of the House, though the noble Lord, Lord Byers, thought it needed deflating and strengthening. Even the noble Lord, Lord Diamond, could not forbear to give it a welcome, albeit, as he said, a muted one. There were suggestions and criticisms and even commendations. As I promised, all the views expressed were carefully studied alongside the comments received from industrial, commercial and local organisations, professional bodies and individuals concerned with industrial relations during the four months after the Consultative Document was published. The sets of considered comments exceeded 200. They went into great detail. Clearly the Document was widely considered and discussed. By the end of the year over 370,000 copies had been distributed.
I am bound to say that relatively little comment was received by the Department of Employment from the trade union movement. That was a disappointment. The T.U.C. did not send their observations to the Secretary of State but they did issue their own booklet, Good Industrial Relations—a Guide for Negotiation. Whether that booklet owed anything to the Consultative Document, I

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would not presume to say. It may well have done. Certainly there is much common ground in the two documents. At any rate, the revised Draft Code that is now before us certainly owes something to the booklet, so that in a real sense it was possible to treat the booklet as the T.U.C.'s observations on the Code. Indeed, Paragraph 133 (v) of the Code was taken directly from it. That is the paragraph which says:
"… no disciplinary action should be taken against a shop steward until the circumstances of the case have been discussed with a full-time official of the union concerned."
Also the passage in the Code dealing with independent arbitration as the final stage in the disciplinary procedure was modified, and the passage dealing with facilities for shop stewards was amplified to take account of the booklet's recommendations.
The House will forgive me, I hope, if I first remind your Lordships briefly of the purpose of the Code, which is to give practical guidance for promoting good industrial relations. It does so in accordance with the four general principles set out in Part I of the Industrial Relations Act, which the Introduction summarises thus: freely conducted collective bargaining, orderly procedures for settling disputes, free association of workers and employers, and freedom and security for workers.
In the debate on the Consultative Document the Foreword received a good deal of praise. Noble Lords may wonder why it has been rewritten and called an Introduction. Quite simply, the reason is that it was felt that the Foreword had so much that was valuable that it ought to be incorporated in the Code in the form of an Introduction, so that notice would be taken of it in the interpretation and implementation of the Code itself. This Introduction also includes new points arising out of comments received. Most of all, the Introduction declares the two main themes that pervade the Code: first, the vital role of collective bargaining, and second, the importance of human relations between employers and employees. It also declares that the Code applies wherever people are employed—not just in industry. Having said that, it states the corollary—and it needs stating—that since circumstances vary so
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widely between different forms of employment, even within industry, not to men tion other forms of employment, some of the provisions may need to be adapted to suit particular circumstances. But it goes on to say that any adaptations that are made should be consistent with the Code's general intentions.
Undoubtedly the primary responsibility for the promotion of good industrial relations lies with management, and that means their taking the initiative in formulating adequate industrial relations policies and procedures. But as the revised Introduction stresses, good industrial relations are a joint responsibility, and they need the continuing co-operation of all concerned. This means that management should give employees the opportunity to co-operate; they should invite them to do so and should consult them. I can illustrate this by referring to the Section of the Code on Employ ment Policies. Paragraph 25, in the introduction to that section, reads:
"Management should initiate and accept primary responsibility for these policies. But they should be developed in consultation or negotiation, as appropriate, with employee representatives."
This reference to the need to consult or negotiate, as appropriate, with employee representatives applies, of course, to all the subsequent parts of the section: planning and use of manpower; recruitment and selection; training; payment systems; status and security; redundancy; working conditions—the lot. In particular, paragraph 45 meets the point of the noble Lord, Lord Diamond, on redundancies. The noble Lord also said that management should work out with employees what the disciplinary pro visions should be. Parapraph 130 says:
"Management should ensure that fair and effective arrangements exist for dealing with disciplinary matters. These should be agreed with employee representatives or employees concerned."
On status quo we have not felt it right to go quite so Car as the two noble Lords would have liked. The Code does not refer to status quo as such. What the Code does say is that:
"Major changes in working arrangements should not be made by management without prior discussion with employees or their representatives."
I hope nobody will ask me what changes are major. If so, I shall be bound to ask them, how long is a piece of string?

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The answer will vary from case to case and from establishment to establishment. It is essentially a matter for settlement between the parties.
Indeed, this brings me to the need for flexibility of application in the Code which has to cover a huge variety of needs and circumstances over the very wide field it covers. On the whole, it was urged in the last debate from the Opposition and the Liberal Benches that the Code should be more precise. But the weight of criticism from outside Parliament was in the opposite sense—that some of the detailed provisions of the Consultative Document were inappropriate or unnecessary for small firms; that different enterprises were at different stages in the development of industrial relations and could not be expected to implement the whole of the Code right away; that one has to have regard to what is practicable at any one time—for example, as to equalisation of conditions and status of those exercising comparable responsibilities, desirable as that is; that it was wrong to alter procedures that were working well and were in keeping with the general intentions of the Code, whether those procedures were procedures between trade unions and employers, or between representatives of other sorts, employees and employers.
For example, the proposals in the Consultative Document about consultative machinery in establishments with more than 250 employees were quite precise. These were examined critically by the noble Lords, Lord Byers and Lord Brown. In the revised draft the section has been almost entirely re-written. On consultation in establishments with over 250 employees, it says that there should be systematic arrangements for consultation, but that consultation between management and employees, or their representatives, about operational and other day-to-day matters is necessary in all establishments, whatever their size—and please note the word "between"; this is a two-way process. It is left to individual establishments to agree on what arrangements suit them best, always pro vided, as paragraph 67 says, the arrangements are not used to by-pass or discourage trade unions. The main thing, as paragraph 68 seeks to ensure, is that consultation should be meaningful, comprehensive and effective. It is of the
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essence of good industrial relations that managements should know what employees are thinking, and that employees should have the opportunity to express their views. I draw attention to the definition of "consultation" in paragraph 65.
One change that has been made will not please everybody, I refer to A17 of the Consultative Document which related to professional employees and reads:
"An employee who belongs to a profession with a recognised Code of conduct has an obligation to comply with that Code. He should not be called upon by his employer or by any trade union of which he is a member to take any action which would be contrary to it."
Professional bodies strongly endorsed it. But others, including both unions and employers, no less strongly criticised its assumption that professional should always take precedence over other obligations. Moreover, they said, it gave professional bodies a free hand to define the obligations of their members in ways which could prove divisive and disruptive to the established negotiating machinery in local government and elsewhere.
It is common ground that there are particular kinds of situations in which professional obligations should always be paramount. Paragraph 22 seeks to de fine those circumstances in terms of public health and safety, and the health or well being of an individual needing medical or other treatment or care through the personal social services. But there are other circumstances in which professional obligations may conflict with other obligations but cannot be automatically assumed to over-ride them. Paragraph 23 therefore enjoins professional associations, employers and trade unions to co operate in preventing and resolving such conflicts. This covers professional associations in general and not only those whose members might be affected by paragraph 22.
The thinking behind these provisions in the Code is that anyone has a right not to belong to a trade union. If, there fore, taking into account his prior obligations to his professional body—prior in time, at least—he chooses to belong to a union, he voluntarily accepts the obligations attaching to membership of that union: obligations which ought not to be lightly set aside. The Code cannot lay

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down a general rule reflecting all conflicts of obligations that may arise. In short this is essentially a matter for the parties to settle among themselves.
During the last debate several noble Lords hankered after a Code which would be entirely separate from and independent of the Industrial Relations Act. Their view seemed to be that if only the Act were not implemented, the Code, by and large, would be fine. But Codes need some sanction to be effective, and the more apt the sanction the more effective they are. The sanction of this Code lies in Section 4 of the Act which provides that
"in any proceedings before the Industrial Court or an industrial tribunal under this Act

(a) any such Code of Practice shall be admissible in evidence, and

(b) any provision of such a Code of Practice which appears to the Court or tribunal to be relevant to any question in the proceedings shall be taken into account by the Court or tribunal in determining that question."

But important as it may be to have a sanction, most people do not adhere to a Code because of the sanction, but because its content is in tune with what they know to be right and necessary. The Code is to serve as a guide to good industrial relations practice in the hands of the ordinary practitioner on both sides of industry. There is a good deal of evidence that managements have already been studying the Consultative Document with a view to bringing their practices into line with its provisions and so promoting good industrial relations.
Several noble Lords in the last debate expressed the view that though the Consultative Document had the merit of being in plain English, it was not peremptory enough and not sufficiently reformatory: it was, according to the noble Lord, Lord Byers, flatulent and wishy-washy. However, the Introduction makes it plain that those who at present fall short of the standards set in the Code are expected to make reasonable and continuing progress towards achieving those standards. The standards are those that are currently recognised as together representing existing good industrial relations practice. Whether one is concerned with standards with which industrial Roods should conform, or standards with which industrial relations should con-
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form, the aim should always be to raise those standards. The same applies to health and safety. There is nothing to prevent particular producers setting them selves higher standards and trying out new refinements or developments. It is even more important that such improvement should be attempted in industrial relations than in goods and services; the objective in both cases is a dual one: greater efficiency and greater satisfaction, but in the case of industrial relations it is job satisfaction and happiness in one's work.
My Lords, it would not be possible to be more peremptory or more precise without at the same time being less flexible and less humane. After all, these improvements are going to conic about by two sides sitting down together and agreeing on the ways in which the Code is going to be applied in their establishment, their undertaking or their industry. What need to be precise are those agreements. The Code must be clear, but it is bound to be in more general terms. And the Code can be changed, as the agreements can be changed. Indeed, the Code will have to be changed because it is as yet in a sense incomplete.
The Section dealing with disclosure of information cannot be completed yet, be cause the C.I.R. has not yet reported on the remit given to it by the last Administration. I say that not in criticism, for the subject is as difficult as it is important. I shall merely add that when the C.I.R. has reported, and when their report has been considered I after consultation with interested organisations probably by means of a consultative document, the Section will be amended in a revised Code which will require an Affirmative Resolution in each House and will, if approved, be brought into effect at the same time as Section 56 of the Act, which deals with disclosure of information by employers in all stages of collective bargaining. In the meantime, the practical guidance which the Secretary of State is obliged by Section 2 of the Act to give in the Code with respect to disclosure of in formation is. I admit, brief, but it is none the less explicit and important. It says in paragraph 97:
"Management should aim to meet all reasonable requests from trade unions for information which is relevant to the negotiations in hand. In particular, it should make

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available, in the most convenient form, the information which is supplied to shareholders or published in annual reports."
No doubt as industrial relations evolve and improve, further amendments to the Code will he needed from time to time.
I turn now briefly to the changes that have been made in the Code to meet comments and criticisms, especially those made in this House, and to changes that were advocated but have not been made. Apart from the Introduction, the only other change in the structure of the Code is to bring together the guidance on grievance and on disputes procedures into a single chapter. The procedures are similar and there are often close links between disputes and grievances—if the noble Lord, Lord Brown, will pardon the expression. The two major criticisms of the noble Lord, Lord Diamond, may be summed up in the words "paternalism" and "ambivalence"—the ambivalent attitude of the Government towards the trade unions. He would have liked the Code to proclaim that it is one of the responsibilities of management to encourage trade unions. On the other hand, I have been told often enough by noble friends of his in the past 12 months that the trade unions are well able to look after themselves. What the Code does is to emphasise in the Introduction the need for strong representative trade unions, and where unions are recognised for the purposes of negotiation to require managements to make clear to employees that they welcome their membership of an appropriate union and their participation in the union's activities. There is no ambivalence at all about the Government's attitude. The Government want every employer to develop effective industrial relations policies which command the confidence of the employees. It is for the employees to choose whether to belong to trade unions, or to form a trade union for themselves, and be represented by them. It is for particular trade unions to convince the employees that their interests are best promoted by them and to attract them by the opportunities for participation that they offer. It is not for Government or Parliament to tell managers or employees what trade unions to recognise or belong to. The new wording in the Code removes any ambivalence there may have been.
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On the other hand, I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Diamond, and the noble Lord, Lord Delacourt-Smith, no longer feel that the revised Draft Code has the ring of paternalism, or that it plays down the role of trade unions in industrial relations. The emphasis throughout the Code is on joint responsibilities—of unions, managements, individuals and employers' associations; it is also on negotiation, consultation and agreement before action.
Finally, my Lords, a word about arbitration. Paragraph D 25(d) of the Consultative Document stated that disputes procedures should include arbitration as a final stage. On the other hand, the T.U.C. Guide and other critics argued that if at the end of the day there was the certain prospect of arbitration, the standards of collective bargaining at the earlier stages would suffer and negotiation would become less meaningful. The Government considered that there was force in that argument, and the Draft Code now confines the use of the Indus trial Arbitration Board or other independent arbitrators to circumstances where both parties agree that they should be used. That is paragraph 29. The paragraph adds that arbitration can be used to settle all types of disputes, especially disputes of right, and that where it is used the parties should undertake to be bound by the award. Independent conciliation, of course, is also available as a means of enabling the parties to reach agreement.
My Lords, it would not be possible for me to go in detail into all the various other amplifications that have been made on consultation, shop stewards, and the like. But I hope I have convinced your Lordships that the Government not only have paid attention to what was said in our debate on the Consultative Document, but have profited by it to amend the Document in some at least of the ways which your Lordships advocated. The Draft Code now reflects to a large extent a consensus on industrial relations. I believe it will do what it is intended to do; namely, to make an important contribution to better industrial and human relations in this country. My Lords, I commend it to the House and I beg to move.
Moved, That the Draft Code of Industrial Relations Practice, laid before the

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House on January 19 last, be approved. —(Lord Drumalbyn.)
6.46 p.m.
LORD BROWN: My Lords, before making my contribution to this debate I am constrained to comment that selection of priorities by those responsible for arranging the order of debates in this House seems to have gone awry to-day. We have a very important Motion in front of us, and I am sure many share with me the view that to relegate this Motion to this hour of the evening, after spending two hours on Amendments to a mechanism for controlling a temporary, new form of debate in the House, really was a shocking, ill-selection of priorities.
Before I come to the Motion, I should like to join with the noble Lord, Lord Drumalbyn, in paying a very deep and sincere tribute to the late Lord Donovan for his enormous contribution to the whole subject of industrial relations, particularly through the Donovan Report.
My Lords, this Motion is not capable of amendment, as we all realise, but Section 2 of the Industrial Relations Act allows the Secretary of State to amend the Code at appropriate times, and so my remarks are made not as carping criticism of the Code—I have no wish to do that—but to put on record certain views which may perhaps be taken into account when the time comes for revision, which I hope will not be too far into the future. The first point I want to make is with regard to the general case for attaching to the Code a number of appendices, which could set out in exemplary form procedures which might be adopted by companies who were attempting to follow the Code. There is a very good precedent for doing this. In the Companies Act 1948, Schedule 1 includes Tables A, B, C and D, which set out model Articles of Association for companies that have not the skill to draft their own or do not wish to go to the expense of doing so. These are not obligatory on companies, but failure to produce Articles means that a company has to adopt Table A, or one of the other tables. There will be literally thousands of firms, some of them not so skilled, trying to devise procedures for negotiation and for hearing appeals, and all the other aspects of the matter
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referred to in this Code. Some of them are going to be very bad—although some may be very good—and it would have been helpful if there had been appendices attached. I hope that this point may be taken note of for future editions of the Code, because it would save a tremend ous amount of work and would get some uniformity into procedures, which I be lieve would be highly salutary.
The second point concerns this whole question of agreement of policies. There is reference in paragraph 25 of the Code concerning policies, as follows:
"But they should be developed in consultation or negotiation, as appropriate, with employee representatives.…"
Then in paragraph 52 it is stated:
"Major changes in working arrangements should not he made by management without prior discussion".
I would have hoped that this Code could have grasped the nettle. I welcome the pressure put on firms to negotiate and to consult with employees before making changes; but I should have thought it would be recognised by now that if there is strong resistance after negotiation and after consultation it is not open to management to impose changes on employees. If they seek to do so there may be a strike, but eventually compromises are reached which are in the form of an agreement. So it would have been much better if the Code had pointed out the impossibility of the imposition by management of new policies. One might have hoped, as happened in my experience, that there would be a quid pro quo in that shop stewards and other representatives would adopt the same attitude and refuse to use their power to impose their will on management.
That would be a highly desirable out come of a Code which drew attention to these facts of life as they exist in industry, and I hope that this will be taken note of in a second edition. That is the civilised way of going about matters in industry. The cost to our society if one side or the other seeks to impose its will on the other in a highly unsocial and uncivilised manner is enormous, and we have to learn to sit down and go on with discussions until, as a result of a compromise on the part of both parties, there is agreement, albeit after the strike instead of before it.

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The third point I should like to make may sound rather trivial. In paragraph 37(ii) there is a reference to the fact that payment systems should be,
"based on some form of work measurement where payment is linked to performance;"
This is a semantic point, but it is important. In the last report of the Prices and Incomes Board, about methods of payment, reference was continually made to measuring the time allowances and prices under piece-work schemes. It may be news to many Members of this House that consistent researches into the work of rate fixers (and I do not care what sort of modern methods they use) to establish piece-work prices vary over the samples taken. There have been many notable pieces of research carried out by universities which have varied by plus or minus 40 per cent. If anyone is going to refer to that as measurement he will simply be leading everybody up the gar den path. When one turns away—and, thank God! people are turning away from so-called piece rates on to day rates—it has become common to refer to these as "measured day rates". There is no measurement in it at all. I wish we could come to reality like disciplined thinkers and stop using inappropriate terms. It leads to a great deal of trouble in industry when people believe that, because a price varies and they are unable to earn the money they used to earn, or somebody is earning far more than he expected, it is a fault on the part of management because it is faulty measurement, whereas if it is known to be a matter of pure judgment one can discuss it on a much more rational basis. So I should avoid the term "measurement" wherever it is clear that measurement is not possible.
My fourth point refers to the false dichotomy that continues in this document between supervisors and managers. There are in industry different roles which should be referred to properly: on the one hand, "supervisors" and on the other, "managers". It is quite easy to define a manager: the manager has responsibility for the work of his subordinates and he must have the authority to veto an appointment in a role subordinate to him. He must be able to make differential judgments of his subordinates and he must be able, if necessary, and subject to appeal, to have them removed
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from those roles if they cannot do the part of the work that he has to give them to do. Then there are people who assist managers, and these are supervisors. It is quite easy to define the super visor as an employee who assists his manager by assigning work to those members of his manager's team of subordinates who are allocated to him by his manager, and seeing that those subordinates get that work done.
This Code confuses the whole issue. It has a footnote on page 5 which says:
"In this code ' supervisor' means a member of the first line of management. who is responsible for his work group to a higher level of management."
If he is a member of the first line of management then he is a manager. So why confuse the issue by calling him a supervisor? It seems to me to be a great pity because there is need for both terms, "supervisor" and "manager". Where the Industrial Court has to deter mine some of the disputes that will arise then, believe me, it will have trouble on these grounds because it will not know whether the supervisor is supposed to have behaved in a certain way or not, according to whether or not it dubs him to be a manager. This seems to me to be a pity.
I remember an occasion of a B.B.C. broadcast when I was approached to take part. The subject of the broadcast was, "Is a supervisor a member of the management team?" I said that I would take part if I was first allowed to define the term 'manager'. They said, "That is too technical for us", and so I said, "Well, you can go away and have an absurd broadcast if you like but you are not having it with me unless I can define the term 'manager'. They went away and came back and said that it would be nice to have a definition after all, so would I take part? So I did take part and I defined the term. The programme was done on tape in the usual way, but when the broadcast was relayed they left out my definition. At the end of the debate the man who was summing up said:" We have had a very interesting debate but somewhat confused, because this is a very confusing subject". It was an absolute lie. The confusion was introduced by the B.B.C. owing to a complete failure on their part to define their terms, and I

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am sorry that this Code fails in the same way. This is a matter of some importance which I hope will be cleared up in a further revision.
Under the question of appeals procedures, I am glad to see several references to rights of employees to appeal when they feel aggrieved, and that employees should be told how they can do so. I feel quite strongly that this is a case for the sort of appendix to which I referred, because there are many firms to-day who would say, "Of course our employees have the right of appeal". Your Lord ships know the managing director who says, "My office door is always open", but we know very well that the employee who takes advantage of that offer is taking a very risky course of action. There is a need for a proper procedure, properly worked out, and there are several available that could have been included as examples. Paragraph 132(iii) says:
"provide for a right of appeal, wherever practicable, to a level of management not previously involved".
That is where a man has been disciplined. I think that stands open to criticism. A man must always have a right of appeal and the words, "where practicable" are surely a rather unfortunate intrusion.
I have made a number of points and I do not want it to be thought that they are made in a carping manner. I disagree with some aspects of the Industrial Relations Act, but certainly one of the excellent by-products is this Code. I believe it is an extremely important act to write a Code and to give it this indirect sanction which it receives when it is meshed with the Industrial Relations Act. I give credit to the Government for improving a great deal on its original draft, but I think it could be improved still further without too much deep thinking, and I hope that on a future occasion, when the Secretary of State comes to consider revision, some of the points I have made will be taken into account.
6.58 p.m.
BARONESS SEEAR: My Lords, if my noble friend Lord Byers were here tonight I am sure that he would not be using the rather unflattering adjectives that he applied to the previous edition of the Code. There is no doubt at all that
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the Code as we now have it is a great improvement on the Consultative Document. I suppose that is one of the purposes of having consultative documents. We on these Benches certainly received this Code with what I fear I must describe as tepid enthusiasm; tepid for reasons that I shall go on to explain, but the enthusiasm is certainly there. As the noble Lord, Lord Brown, has said, the Code provides very valuable guidance indeed. It is an extremely useful check list for employers and trade unions up and down the country who are now seriously bending their minds to an improvement in their industrial relations policies and practices, and I am sure that we shall see this Code on the desks not only of middle managers but, much more important, on the desks of directors and board members who have to see that the Act is implemented, and implemented in the spirit as well as in the letter. It is undoubtedly, then, a useful document.
Why did I say that our enthusiasm was tepid? Because I think that the drafters of this Code have had a very good stab at an impossible job. It is not in fact possible to provide a Code which can be applied to the whole of employment in this country, to vastly different kinds of enterprise in which people work, without a great deal of generalisation, over simplification, and inevitably the writing of cliché, and this is no criticism of the drafters of the Code; it is inherent in the task with which they were presented. However, we have got it, and it certainly adds greatly to the value of the Industrial Relations Act, an Act about which we, as your Lordships know, had very serious reservations indeed. Of the two documents there is no question that the Code is far more valuable than the Act. We could, of course, have had the Code without having any Act; but that is another matter.
We have now spent about two years getting the Industrial Relations Act and the Code of Practice through the two Houses of Parliament. Can we now put this behind us? It is there. The Government gave us to understand that it was to be a framework within which good industrial relations were to develop. Can we, now that it is on the Statute Book, turn once more to the recommendations of the late Lord Donovan, which, in the view of many of us, were too much overlooked

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at the time the Industrial Relations Bill was being passed? Your Lordships will remember that Lord Donovan, in his recommendations, stressed again and again that the real place that matters in industrial relations is the company, the factory. Perhaps it was inevitable, but that finds little place in the Act, and some place, but inevitably not enough, because of the nature of the document, inside the Code. It is the factory, the company, that matters. That, after all, is the place where the work is done, the money earned, profits gained, the disputes break out and are ultimately settled. It is what happens there, and the people inside the place of work who are going to determine whether in fact we have good industrial relations in this country or whether we do not. The bureaucrats and academics who stand on the outside giving good advice —and in practice it sometimes is—to the people trying to make the thing work inside, have about 5 per cent. to con tribute to the real job to be done. Can we not now start thinking again about the way in which we can refashion the institutions at the level of the plant, as Lord Donovan urged us to do, and about what new procedures and practices and devices we need in order that this can take place?
From the Liberal Party we have been urging for a very long while that the time has come in this country when we, like many other countries in Europe, need a Works Councils Act. We need to institutionalise the procedures at the level of the factory. We need to recognise the power groups, the interests of the different elements which have a contribution to make in the running of the enterprise, and we believe that this will only be done if we legislate for works councils and give them proper legal powers. We have been much impressed by the way in which the Germans have developed practices of this kind. We do not say that it is necessary—it is probably not right—to imitate the German practice just as it stands, or to copy here the procedures which have apparently worked with considerable success in that country. It is not necessary, although it may in the long run prove to be advantageous, at the beginning, at any rate, to contemplate introducing the device of the supervisory board. But as we move into Europe we
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are going to find that practices of this kind are widely developed inside Europe. We are likely to find that the European company statute is going to make suggestions along these lines, and I should like to urge the Government now, in con junction with the C.B.I. and the T.U.C., perhaps working through the procedure of N.E.D.C., to start threshing out what kind of legislation for works councils could best be adopted in this country to bring our thinking into line with the best European thinking and our practices into line with the best practices there.
There are examples of great interest which have been introduced on a voluntary scale. The noble Lord, Lord Brown, was too modest to point to the great experiments which have been made in his company. That is only one example, but a very important one, of the way in which policies of this kind could develop over industry in this country as a whole, and this seems to me to be an urgent next step to which we should devote our attention straight away.
May I, before sitting down, make one other much more general point. As I have said, what really matters is not the legislation outside: it is not what the civil servants and the academics say to the people in industry: it is what the managers, the trade unionists, the shop stewards, the rank and file do and what sort of relations they form. We suffer grievously in this country for a basic lack of respect for what these men of all grades do. If you asked me why we lag so steadily behind in this country in many areas of economic development, I would say because here the task of a manager, the job of a manager, is not held in high regard. On the other side of the Atlantic, in Germany, in France, the title "engineer" ranks very high. It is not true in the United Kingdom. There is an unholy alliance between the extreme Right and the extreme Left; the old social prejudices and attitudes of the extreme Right, which play down the importance of management and give it less than the status that it ought to have, and the attitude of the extreme Left, which still sees the manager as the capitalist grinder of the faces of the poor. Until we get rid of these attitudes and see the tremendous social value of the job which is being done by managers we shall not progress. But if we think for

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a moment what a manager's job really is, of how the resources of men, money and materials are within his control, how the economic development of the country, the resources that we all need for better social development, depend on the way in which he does his job, then surely we shall begin to rate that task far more highly than at present. Men rise to the expectations that other people have of them. This is the point that I should like to leave in this debate: to say that we need urgently to think about ways in which at the level of the factory, within the company itself, the work can be more appreciated and the task done by all can receive the respect which is due to it.
7.9 p.m.
THE EARL OF HALSBURY: My Lords, 1 shall make a very brief intervention this evening, simply to express my disappointment at the softening of the Code in relation to the status of the professional man, to which the noble Lord, Lord Drumalbyn, referred in opening the debate. I have of course been concerned with this point from the start. I moved four Amendments to the Bill, of which the noble Lord accepted one on Report, which did at least mention in the Bill the status of the professional man. He may still be between the hammer and the anvil, but at least official cognisance has been taken that he exists.
We were promised that the matters I had hoped to include in the Bill would be attended to in the Code of Practice, but I thought that the original Consultative Document, at paragraph 17 in one clause, broadly drawn, dealt with the matter as satisfactorily as I could wish. But this has now been softened, and we have three narrowly drawn clauses in which the position of a professional man is slowly whittled away, and the noble Lord has told us why. Pressure has been brought to bear from the employers on the one side, and the unions on the other, saying how very inconvenient it would be to have special cases. Of course it would. Doing one's duty is inconvenient, but the whole point about the professional man is that he does not stand on his rights. The employer stands on his rights, the unions stand on their rights, but the professional man stands on his obligations and duties in relation to his clients, and it is this right to stand on that that I do not want to see whittled away.
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Paragraph 21 gives a recital, and refers to the existence of the professional man, but again it gets the sort of moral note quite wrong in referring to the professional man as being liable to incur penalties. The professions do not run kangaroo courts: that is done in other parts of the world. Nobody of course would impose a sanction on a professional man who violated his code under duress. No question of that arises. What they have done is to take on obligations over and above the obligations in law, which is the maximum that is imposed on their neighbours. I think it strikes a wrong note. At paragraph 22, of course (and this again shows where the pressure comes from) are recited the obligations which he has solemnly taker. on by joining the union, but there is no reference at all to the obligation to his clients or his employer—though this is again referred to in paragraph 23 where the employer and the union come in on level terms.
The best way of playing Russian mess ages (the little game we all remember from our childhood) is to tell a Parliamentary draftsman what you want, amend it in the House, and then get a court to construe it in due course; then all sorts of funny doctrines arise. Anybody who is going to construe paragraphs 21, 22 and 23 is going to think, why is the employer left out of paragraph 22 when he comes into paragraph 23? I should have liked to see them enter in on level terms. In other words, the position has been eroded.
I promised your Lordships a short speech, and I am not going to deal with the matter in greater detail except to make one point; namely, the recitation of public health and safety, the health of an individual, the wellbeing of an individual needing care through social service, are a quite inadequate recital of the matters which a professional man might look upon as obligations. May I, just very briefly, refer to an activity for which I was responsible some rather long years ago, namely, running a high temperature laboratory doing long-period endurance tests at high temperatures on steel, "creep" tests, fatigue tests, and so on, some of these running for 2,000 or 3,000 hours. I had to be in continuous attendance keeping the themostats in order, seeing that the instrumentation did not go wrong, that

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the temperature remained constant, and so on. Of course I could not work round the clock, but I had assistants to do it for me. The idea that I would have, as it were, sabotaged thousands of hours of my own handiwork to the prejudice of my employer just because some third party told me I had got to because, willy-nilly, I was involved in some wretched industrial dispute, would have been absolute anathema. This is just as much an obligation of the professional man in this regard as public health and the health or wellbeing of an individual from the social service point of view. This recital is, from my point of view, quite inadequate and unacceptable.
7.15 p.m.
LORD NELSON OF STAFFORD: My Lords, I fully support this Draft of the Code and the Motion which is before us. As my noble friend has already explained to us, it has been drawn up after a great deal of consideration of the points raised in the long debates in this House and elsewhere, and as a result of representations and views from many quarters. Therefore, it would not be appropriate, I am sure, to go over all this ground again to-night. I rise for only one purpose; that is, to support the views which the noble Earl, Lord Halsbury, has just expressed.
I must emphasise to my noble friend that among professional workers, those who are professionally qualified, there is a great deal of disappointment at the watering down of this paragraph origin ally paragraph 17 in the Consultative Document to which reference has already been made. I think the attention of your Lordships and also of the Government should be drawn to this situation. This clause was intended originally to allay the considerable anxieties which existed of the sort of position in which professional people could be placed. Most of them to-day do not see these fears allayed in this Draft Code put before us. Positions could arise when really serious divided loyalties could exist for the professionally qualified worker who is governed by a Code of Practice which itself is directed towards the protection of the public interest, and this is the purpose of his professional Code of Practice. He could well have divided loyalties between that Code on the one hand and his colleagues, his trade union or his employer, on the other. There
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is a very strong feeling among these workers, wherever they may be, that this present situation is not satisfactorily taken care of.
At this late hour I will not take up your Lordships' time in detailing the sort of situations which could arise, but those outlined in the present paragraph 22, referring to public health and safety, the health of an individual needing medical and other treatment, the wellbeing of an individual needing care through personal social services, important as they are in themselves, are by no means enough, and by no means, I would assure your Lord ships, do they cover all the cases which could well arise. I would merely, then, confine myself to expressing the hope that the Government will keep the position of the professionally qualified person under consideration in the months ahead while the Code of conduct is put into practice and we see how it works; and that when it comes up for review they will have this situation very much in mind. In the meantime, I am sure that it is the earnest hope of all your Lordships—it certainly is mine—that this Code, when put into practice by those who have the very difficult task of conducting industrial relations, whether as employers or employed, will prove to provide extremely valuable and helpful guidelines in an activity which is so important to us all.
7.18 p.m.
VISCOUNT AMORY: My Lords, the Industrial Relations Act set the legal framework for industrial relations, and this Code is a positive guide to conduct. As such, I think it will be heartily welcomed everywhere as a handbook that covers the ground well. The noble Earl, Lord Halsbury, raised the terrifying prospect that the lawyers might get their hands on it. I can only say that I hope that the lawyers will keep themselves a very long way away from this document, because it is not a document whose effectiveness depends on its legal interpretations. My noble friend Lord Drumalbyn has covered the ground with his usual skill and lucidity, and at this late hour I do not wish to refer to the details of the Code. It is disappointing, as he said, that the trade unions have not given it a warmer welcome—though it is encouraging that there is a great deal of common ground, in fact, between the trade union document and this Code.

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If I may, I should like merely to stress two or three rather obvious points. First of all, I always enjoy following the noble Lord, Lord Brown. At a certain point in what he says I always feel, "Now his feet have left the ground", and then immediately the noble Lord says, "I have practised this for 24 years, and it works". Invariably I come back to the same conclusion, that the noble Lord, Lord Brown, always speaks in these matters from first-hand experience, and very good first-hand experience, too.
I like his suggestion of the model rules, which might be of help to small firms which will not want to spend an enormous amount of time on drafting. I also like very much his recommendation of talking, talking and talking. It is almost always the right answer. Never break off talks, because if you do it means defeat for both sides. I think he touched a good point when he talked about the managing director's door always being open. It certainly touched me, because when I was a managing director I always thought that my door was open. But I was a little discouraged one day when somebody opened the door and said, "I have been trying to make up my mind for two years to come and see you." I then felt that there was not much point in saying, "But the door has always been open."
I should like to make three rather obvious points. First of all, good industrial relations cannot be achieved simply by following regulations, however conscientiously. They are a reflection of an attitude of mutual trust and respect, and mutual confidence which has to be earned by decent sensible conduct on the part of both parties. Industrial relations is a plant of slow growth which withers if it is not continuously tended, and when it is lost it takes a very long time to grow again. This Code is very valuable in providing sound guide-lines and in being something to check up on from time to time. But it is not a substitute for personal relations and personal responsibilities. You cannot really conduct industrial relations very well with the rule book in your hand all the time. Therefore, if this excellent Code is to succeed it must be personalised at all levels, and not just carried around in people's hands.
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Secondly, though management carries the first responsibility and should generally take the initiative, it must—if it has not already done so—shed those old-fashioned notions of prerogative and privilege which really do not fit very well to-day. Management, indeed both sides, must always be all the time trying to reconcile the interests of shareholders and employees, which conflict from time to time. Thirdly, in human relations the relative importance of an issue cannot be settled completely objectively. Whether it is important or not depends so much on the viewpoint and the situation of the individuals concerned. What may often seem trivial to management, may not be at all trivial to those immediately concerned.
My fourth point is one which I can never get out of my mind; that is, that bigness in so many industrial organisations to-day is a terrible handicap, be cause bigness breeds impersonal relation ships and, indirectly, reliance on the rule book. All I can say is that the bigger the organisation, the greater the efforts that are required to ensure personal relations and personal responsibility at all levels. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Brown, that a supervisor is part of management. Most people believe that it is easier to feel loyalty to small groups than to big ones, so large under takings must be broken down into small groups. The noble Baroness, Lady Seear, mentioned the factory and I agree with her. But we should go further than the factory, and should go down into departments and small groups which really mean something.
Finally, my Lords, let us discard as utterly false two allegations that are often, and perhaps increasingly, made. The first is that people are interested only in the money return that they get from their work. History and human experience prove that that is a dangerous illusion, and when it is true it is an indictment of the nature of the job. The second illusion that I want to ask your Lordships to reject is that happiness and satisfaction cannot nowadays be found in work, and must therefore be sought only in leisure. Again, one has only to check upon one's personal experience of those who seem to get the most out of life to prove the superficiality and shallowness of such an allegation. Pride

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in skill, the satisfaction that comes from meeting challenges, and achievements are the breath of human life. But some jobs, alas! —perhaps an increasing number—are of such a mechanical nature that it must be almost impossible to derive much personal satisfaction from them. The remedy in such cases is not to accept the fact, but to try in one way or another to enrich the nature of those occupations. This is a good and valuable document, although the practices it describes should, as I think my noble friend Lord Drumalbyn pointed out at the beginning of this debate, not he regarded as static or the final truth, but as a springboard to further progress.
7.27 p.m.
LORD HANKEY: My Lords, I should like to join those who have given a warm welcome to this draft Code of Practice. I thought at first that it would be exceedingly difficult to draft anything that really made sense and which applied generally throughout industry where conditions are so diverse, but I believe that this is an extremely good start to solving the problem, though we shall obviously have to amend it as we go along.
Many people are at present discouraged about our industrial relations. I do not think we ought to lose heart about them. Some of our difficulties are due to inflation, and even the Swedes and the Germans have had their troubles owing to that. Some of our difficulties, especially the redundancies, are due to a recession which is not only ours but fairly general. That will pass because, in the long run, we know how to deal with it. But it is obvious that we have to remove the grosser errors and mistakes on both sides of industry, which, unfortunately, characterise our industrial relations. I am sure that we shall never hold our own in the Common Market unless we do that. This is where the Code of Industrial Practice has a very important part to play. As the noble Viscount, Lord Amory, said, it is forward-looking, and what we need is something which is forward-looking and of practical assistance to industry. This means that we really must try to get it widely studied and widely applied. It may not be the only key to better industrial relations, but I certainly believe that it is the best key.
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I should like to draw attention to one or two detailed points. For instance, paragraphs 7 and 12 refer to the importance of training in industrial relations, both for management at all levels and for trade unions, and especially for shop stewards. I was very impressed in Sweden by the admirable training institution which the Swedish Confederation of Trade Unions (L.O.) has set up. It is really quite excellent. In this country we do this on a far smaller scale. I believe the time has come, now that we have a Code of Practice, to make sure that this deficiency is corrected. I believe it is time to draw in the universities, many of which now have sections dealing with industrial relations. I believe that universities all over the country should be prompted and moved to provide courses on industrial relations. My Lords, it is expensive to attend courses such as these; it means leaving work and devoting time to study. I think that the Government ought to consider a system of grants which would enable people to go to such courses which would he made less expensive. And, in case anybody should think that the Govern ment are on the side of the employers only, this system ought to be administered by "Neddy ", with the participation of the trade unions and with both sides of industry.
I should like to draw attention to paragraph 71 on collective bargaining, which recognises the need for due regard to be paid to the general interests of the community. This is a very important thought, because unless due regard is paid to the essential interests of the community the stronger organisations will always "down" the others. It is essential that the Government should continue to play the sort of role they now play, and preferably an enhanced role, because only the Government can really judge expertly what are the general interests of the community. Equally, my Lords, it is essential that in doing this the Government should carry both sides of industry with them; and here again I urge that this is a framework where "Neddy" could be exceedingly useful and where its influence might be developed still further.
Paragraph 121 recognises the need to settle disputes promptly. I do not think enough attention can he paid to this. It

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is when disputes drag on and on—they go from one instance to another, and higher up still; they bedevil relations at national or industrial level, and still are not settled—that the workers get into a state of complete despair and go in for un official disputes, or take other measures. Every possible effort ought to be made to speed up procedures and get disputes settled and out of the way.
My Lords, I have been greatly shocked by the act of the Yorkshire miners in stopping maintenance men from pre serving the mines—and, indeed, from preserving their own source of livelihood. This really is an incredible state of affairs. Why have the men been driven to take such action? I think it is extra ordinary that the British should not long ago have invented, applied and effectively enforced a less brutal, self-defeating and ridiculous method of settling industrial disputes. I hope that we shall take note of the appalling situation which has come about and that we shall use the occasion to get a great many people to study this Code of Practice and to apply it throughout industry. We certainly all have a far greater interest in restoring a reasonable degree of prosperity to our country and to our workpeople than in tolerating such futile industrial relations as these. In short, I hope everyone will help to get the Code studied and applied as widely and as effectively as possible.
7.34 p.m.
THE EARL OF COURTOWN: My Lords. I welcome the introduction of this Code, which may well become a landmark in industrial relations in this country. To those concerned in this field, both in management and in the unions, there are important principles in the Code which have never before seen re cognition in a Government publication. The noble Lord, Lord Drumalbyn, spoke of how much consultation had gone on before the production of this Code from the Consultative Document. I think that if your Lordships compare the two you will realise the extent to which this is so. There is hardly a sentence that has not been changed; and although in some cases it is difficult to detect the difference in meaning in the new edition, the Code has nevertheless, as a
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whole, undoubtedly been changed for the better.
In our previous debate on this subject I noted down three basic objections from noble Lords opposite: first, that it is paternalistic; second, that it does not recommend union and employee participation in management decisions; and, third, that it does not make employers responsible for urging employees to join unions before recognition. Reference has already been made to the paternalistic objection. I think it is difficult for any document which states general principles to avoid saying what may appear obvious to those steeped in the subject. But I would say that if it does appear paternalistic, it appears just as much so to wards management as towards unions and employees. There can, however, be few companies that can truthfully say, with their hands on their hearts, that they carry out faithfully and comprehensively all the principles and methods of operation recommended in this Code. though from my own experience I would say that enlightened management would find little to disagree with in the Code.
Let me move on to the second objection—that is, that the Code does not recommend union and employee participation in management decisions. As my noble friend Lord Drumalbyn has said, it goes a good deal further than the previous Consultative Document, and I do not believe we have yet reached the stage at which we can define satisfactorily the extent to which employees can be involved in management decisions. Over the last few years there have been great developments in management, union and employee relationships in certain firms. Management and employees have worked together to establish agreed manning of plants and ways of operating. There are, indeed, many decisions made in industry which would not be made without the concurrence of the employee representatives. But there are also many which have to be made by management after an appropriate amount of consultation. Management has to weigh factors and maintain a balance among the employees, shareholders, customers and the national interests of the country in which they are operating. I think it is almost impossible, at this stage, at any rate, to define the extent to which employees, through their elected representatives,

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should be involved in management decisions; but it is, I think, a subject for further study.
The third objection was in connection with urging employees to join unions where no unions were recognised. The new edition of the Code states:
"Where trade unions are recognised for negotiating purposes management should … make clear to employees that it welcomes their membership of an appropriate recognised union and their participation in the union's activities."
I believe that it is right not to go further than that at this stage. It must be remembered that there are a large number of small firms which have little or no union membership at present. The Bolton Report produces the fact that there are in this country 820,000 small firms employing 4·4 million people, and at present almost two-thirds of these have no union members on their payroll. On the whole, small firms have a good record of industrial relations, and few strikes, but little of the overhead, to which my noble friend Lord Amory referred, which a large firm has to have in relation to its personnel affairs. It is important not to overburden these small firms at this stage. I support the suggestion of the noble Lord, Lord Brown, of having appendices giving recommended ways of dealing with various aspects of this Code. I think that this would be particularly valuable to small firms.
My Lords, there are just two further points that I should like to make. One is in relation to the image of the unions. There is no doubt that, rightly or wrongly, the image of the unions is not always attractive to the so-called white-collar workers, and it affects their willing ness to join. It is these workers who tend to increase as a proportion of the working population; and if the unions are to maintain their proportionate strength they must be able to recruit them. Independent studies in certain companies have shown a clear antipathy among white-collar workers, and especially among women, to unions. It seems to me to be most important that the unions should seek to improve their own image to these potential recruits. It is dangerous for an individual like me to speculate on the reasons for this antipathy among thousands of people who might be union members. It is a subject for a wider objective study which I believe the unions could
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beneficially carry out for their own purposes.
The second point is in relation to the question of specialised activities and specialists, which is linked closely to the problem facing the noble Earl, Lord Halsbury. More and more people in industry consider themselves specialists. They learn specialism and move, possibly, from company to company, or from one part of a company to another, using the same or similar specialist skills. Whether or not many of these belong to a society of some sort with its own code of ethics, there must be hundreds who have these qualifications or professions. But there is no definition in the Industrial Relations Act of what is a professional man. Clearly, the references which have been quoted in this Code refer to very few professions. The noble Lord, Lord Nelson of Stafford, indicated this when he said that the list referred to in the Code is nothing like complete.
I think that there is some evidence, too, that specialised workers prefer to join a specialised trade union, rather than a general union. So with increasing unioni-sation we may find a number of unions represented in each company. This can lead to inter-union difficulties as particular skills and technologies change. I heard it said recently on the radio that one of the reasons for the good industrial relations and the lack of strikes in Germany was that there was only one union in each company. It also stated that this was imposed upon them after the last war by the Allies and particularly by the British representatives on the Allied Control Commission. This contrasts with the situation before the last war when, apparently, there were many unions with in each firm. I think it possible that this is a subject that will require further study, along with the position of the professions. The multiplicity of unions here may be a problem, but I believe it is possible to devise a compromise by which employees may have a relationship with two unions, one for their specialism and the other for their overall relationship with their employer. One of these unions might be a union of what they would call their profession.
In conclusion, I may say that I welcome this Code. Although some people may wish for further items to be included, I believe that there is general agreement that the

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document is a good one. The problem now (and this was referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Hankey) is how to put this over and into operation with both management and employees. There is clearly a need for training for all concerned. Whether or not the universities are the right place for this, I suggest that the polytechnics and the technical colleges may have much to contribute.
7.45 p.m.
LORD PLATT: My Lords, I apologise for speaking, I hope briefly, at this late hour. I very much agree with the noble Lord, Lord Brown, that this debate should not have come on at so late an hour; we spent most of the afternoon discussing something very much more trivial than that which we are now discussing in an almost empty house. But I have sought tile permission of the people concerned to say a few words. Before I do so, I should like to explain why my name is not on the list of speakers. It is purely due to a misunderstanding. I rang the office of the Government Chief Whip and, as always, received a most courteous reply. I inquired whether this was a case in which one could put down Amendments. As I expected, I was told that it was not. I said that I hoped that this would not preclude my making a few acid comments. The courteous lady to whom I was speaking said, "I am sure, Lord Platt, that you can make some acid comments." She evidently thought that these were going to be interjections, whereas I thought that she was going to put my name on the list. This is how the misunderstanding came about.
Your Lordships will be glad to know at this late hour that most of my acid comments have been made in a most wonder fully restrained way by the noble Earl, Lord Halsbury, and that it is not so necessary for me to make them. I would call attention once again, as I did during the long, tedious discussions on the Indus trial Relations Bill, to the fact that clearly it was written by and for people who are concerned in industry. It is called the Industrial Relations Act. The document we are now discussing is called the Indus trial Relations Code of Practice. In its Introduction we read:
"Good industrial relations are a joint responsibility. They need the continuing co operation of all concerned—managements, trade unions, employers' associations and
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individual employees—and the discussion of day-to-day problems as they occur."
Whoever wrote that had no idea that he was writing for professional people, people like those in my own profession, whose first obligation is to their patients and not to their trade union or to their employer. If the trade unions blame the professions for wanting different treatment, this is not the fault of the professions, it is the fault of the Government who forced us into this Bill which really does not apply to us at all.
Again, on page 7 of the Code we read:
"The individual employee has obligations to his employer, to his trade union if he belongs to one, and to his fellow employees."
There is no suggestion that a person may have other obligations which surmount all of these; in other words the Code is not written for us at all. So we start with a little prejudice against it. Nevertheless, I agree with those who welcome this Code of Practice. I think it is a great improvement on what has gone before. I think that the Industrial Relations Act, although I do not agree with it all, is tremendously necessary at the present time. But the people who have praised it have not seen if from the point of view of the professions.
The only specific point I should like to make is in reference to paragraph 22 on page 8, which concerns professional employees. Here a little concession has been made and, as the noble Earl has said, it has now been watered down in this new version of the Code of Practice. This has been endorsed from the Government Benches by the noble Lord, Lord Nelson of Stafford. As a result of this little concession the Code refers to, "the health of an individual needing medical or other treatment". It actually mentions the medical profession—quite wonderful! It is known to me that the British Medical Association has tried to get the Department of Employment simply to take away the words "needing medical care or treatment", but this has been refused. This seems to me to be carrying things too far. Under these words, "the health of an individual needing medical or other treatment", a doctor involved in some dispute, who happens to be a member of a trade union and so on, can give treatment to an individual who needs treatment; but he cannot give a child an injection against diphtheria because there

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is a diphtheria epidemic about as the child is not a person "needing medical or other treatment". That may seem petty, if you like, but it seems to me another example of a case where the advice of the profession has been ignored. But I welcome the Code so far as it applies to industry.
7.51 p.m.
LORD DELACOURT-SM1TH: My Lords, like other noble Lords who have spoken, I do not intend to detain your Lordships for long. I should like to begin, however, by associating myself most warmly with what was said by the noble Lord, Lord Drumalbyn, and echoed by the noble Baroness, Lady Seear, about the debt which we owe to Lord Donovan. I had the privilege of knowing Lord Donovan for something like 25 years, since the time when we were Members together in another place. I greatly admired not only the great intellectual ability with which he was endowed, but also the humanity and the wisdom which he was able to bring to every subject to which he gave consideration. My belief is, my Lords, that in due course we shall have to retrace some of the steps taken in recent months in respect of industrial relations and go back to the principles. and even more to the temper of mind, expressed in the Report of the Royal Commission over which Lord Donovan presided. He indeed rendered a great service, and the public life of this country is much poorer for his absence from it.
I wish that I could find it in my heart to join in the rather diminished and somewhat muted and qualified praise which has come from various quarters for this Code of Practice. If I could believe that it was going to serve the purpose of effecting some improvement in industrial relations I should be happy to give it a welcome, quite irrespective of the quarter from which it has come. But, my Lords, I am afraid that there are some of us who cannot feel that this Code, produced as it has been, is really going to serve a useful purpose. It may sound harsh to say that about this so amiable, palpably well-meaning, even if some what laboured in places, rather placid document. It may sound better to wish it well and hope for the best. But it is no good disguising or refusing to face the fact that this Code, whatever virtues it may have—and I shall try to show later
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that in my judgment its virtues are very qualified—is hopelessly prejudiced by its association with the Industrial Relations Act. And it has been greatly weakened by the circumstances in which it has been produced. By that, I mean those circum stances in which it has been impracticable for the major parties, the Government, the trade unions and the employers, to sit down in a real atmosphere of a round table conference and try to work out some principles which may assist to ameliorate industrial relations in this country.
That situation, that handling of this subject, has been quite impossible in the circumstances and atmosphere of the last 18 months. No one, I think, can deny that the main responsibility for the lack of an atmosphere in which there could be a real round table consideration of these problems must rest upon the shoulders of the Government. I believe now that members of the Government must them selves recognise how ill-advised was their action in the cursory way in which they treated the trade union movement at the time when they were starting to frame the Industrial Relations Act. No doubt, in part. it was imposed on those directly responsible by the desire of the Government to launch the long, lumbering procedure of this incredibly cumbersome and over-complex Act.
The Code of Industrial practice has been commended by Government supporters in a rather complacent way, even by the standards of complacency set by the present Government in their statements on industrial relations. I do not think that anyone would have judged from the debate that we have had, and from the introduction of this Code by the noble Lord, that we are seeing in facet after facet of our industrial relations to-day, not an improvement but an increasing confusion and increasing embitterment. It is the Government's policy in industrial relations which is giving rise to this confusion and embitterment. For example, one would not have thought that the trade union movement of this country, which has co-operated so readily in peace and in war with Governments of such different outlooks, is at the moment engaged in the most comprehensive and united programme of non-co-operation that it has ever been engaged in; and that this extends not

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only to a refusal or the greatest reluctance to register under the Act, but also to non-co-operation with the Commission on Industrial Relations because of the change in the character of that Commission to which the Industrial Relations Act has given rise. This non-co-operation with the Commission on Industrial Relations is already producing difficulties for the work of the Commission, and some of the reports which it has produced give clear indications of the handicaps under which it is now having to work because of the atmosphere which the Government have produced.
One would not have thought, after the perspective which the noble Lord set before us, that so far from having improving industrial relations, we had a year ago a long and bitter strike in an industry which, until then, had been marked by extremely good industrial relations. One would not think that at the moment we have what may be a long and bitter strike in the coal industry, the first national coal strike for almost half a century. When the Industrial Relations Bill was under discussion, some of us ventured to suggest that there was a possibility that we might find that, even though we might have fewer unofficial strikes, we should have more and more serious official strikes; and it looks as if that danger is becoming a reality, even before the Act is fully in operation. Already, as the end of February approaches, trade union representatives and, I expect, the employers, too, are finding themselves inevitably getting deeper and deeper into the morass of legalism to which the complexity and ambiguity of the Industrial Relations Act has given rise. Unhappily, energies which might be used for better and more constructive purposes are being diverted to dealing with what over very much of industry are the quite unreal legal problems which the Act forces upon the attention of those on the two sides of industry.
I said that I would be brief, and I want merely to mention one or two aspects of the Code as it has come before us. The noble Lord, Lord Drumalbyn, has referred to some of the changes that have been made in the Code in response to criticisms which have been made by noble Lords and in other
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quarters. I think I recall that I ventured when we were discussing the Consultative Document to praise the Secretary of State's Foreword, and to say that it was very much better than the Draft Code; that I wished to goodness the spirit of the Foreword could get into the Code; and I expressed the hope that I should not cause any embarrassment to anybody by saying this, or cause the removal of the Foreword at a later stage. Well, the Foreword that I saw has disappeared. The noble Lord assures us that it has appeared in a new form and taken on a new lease of life in the Introduction. But it is, unhappily, a slightly changed form in which it appears, for the phrase which I particularly admired and praised in the Foreword was
"the fundamental principle underlying the Code is that industrial relations in a free society are best conducted by collective bar gaining between employers and strong representative trade unions ".
That useful and rather important word "best" appears to me to have disappeared from the Foreword in the course of its transformation into an introduction. Collective bargaining, we are told, is of vital importance, but we are not told, as we ought to be told, that collective bargaining is the best way of conducting our industrial relations.
Then I regretted that the Code did not do more in the form in which it was then before us to effect a positive strengthening of the trade union movement. I cannot say that I think the document that we now have represents much of an advance in this regard. The Consultative Document did at least say that employers should encourage employees to join. Now the document merely says that they should welcome their joining. Perhaps that is not a very significant change, but it is certainly not a strengthening. I am bound to say that I still remain of the opinion which I formed in the course of our detailed discussions on the Bill, that there is nothing in the Act or on the Code which will get trade unions established in concerns where employers have hitherto resisted or have discouraged their establishment. That I believe is a great weakness.
Let me give a practical example of the sort of thing that is happening. I am acquainted with a concern which has for many years told new entrants in quite

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simple, clear and understandable terms that they are not merely allowed to join a trade union but are encouraged to do so: and the hope was expressed that they would play an active part in the trade union which they joined: excellent sentiments, clearly, humanly and understand ably expressed. I have now seen the legal document with which, at any rate at this stage—and I hope that perhaps they will have second thoughts—this particular concern are proposing to greet new entrants, and which will be substituted for the admirable, simple, straightforward and quite unexceptionable advice which I have quoted.
This elaborate legal document, based on Section 5 of the Act, first of all says that there is a right to join or not to join a union, unless of course it should be that an agency shop or an approved closed shop arrangement turns out to be established in the concern in question. It then goes on, provided the entrant has picked his way through the legal jargon so far, to say that if he joins a trade union he will be allowed at appropriate times to play a part in the trade union. Then this extraordinary document goes on to say: "'Appropriate time' means your own time." This is a great widening of freedom! It then continues: "If you are going to undertake any trade union activity during working time, it must be with the express approval of your super visor." I should have thought that in most large employments a fairly good set of arrangements had been worked out for providing facilities for workshop representatives during working hours; and everybody knows that in any enterprise of any scale this is an absolute necessity.
I have quoted that example from employers who have a reputation for being (shall I say?) at least as intelligent and progressive as the generality of employers, to show the kind of situation to which this legalism to which we are now subject is going to lead. We shall find employers telling men, in language which will be largely incomprehensible because of its careful legal preparation, that they are entitled to certain basic rights, casting doubt upon those additional rights which have been established by practice or negotiation in the past. There will be some employers who may do this because they think it is what the law requires them to do. I am afraid
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there will be other employers who will do it because they will be delighted to have a basis and a ground for removing some of the rights which have been acquired in practice, and the necessary facilities which have been won in practice over a period of time, and to necessitate the argument starting again from scratch.
This is exactly the sort of thing which some of us tried to indicate would happen under the Industrial Relations Act. It is a relatively small example, almost, from some points of view, a trivial one; but it is an example of the way in which a new spirit is going to be injected into the industrial relations of this country. I admired very much, as I always do, the observations of the noble Viscount, Lord Amory, on this subject, and I agree with him wholeheartedly when he says that good industrial relations are not built up quickly; they take time to develop, and once the basis of confidence is destroyed they take a long time to re-create or re-build.
When one looks at the point of difficulty to which the Code makes reference, I do not think one can avoid a sense of disappointment. The crucial issue of the status quo, the crucial issue of the conditions on which and the way in which changes should be made in industrial practice—in the layout of the workshop, the processes which affect men—is a weak and unsatisfactory one. Indeed, the noble Lord, Lord Drumalbyn, in saying that it was difficult to know what was a major change, underlined one of the difficulties about it. But the Code merely calls for consultation. Consultation can be very perfunctory. The issue is whether that consultation shall continue until either agreement has been reached or until all the processes of negotiation and consultation have been exhausted before the change is actually put into effect. This is one of the central issues which will dominate industrial relations in this decade: the degree to which workers are going to be given a real measure, a real share, in the control of the pattern of their working lives.
In many ways we are being left behind in this country by some of the countries on the Continent of Europe. Similarly, if one looks at paragraph 96 of the Code, one sees that the important question of information is still unsettled and that the provisions of Section 56 of the Industrial

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Relations Act have not yet been put into operation. I suspect that discussions upon them are proving rather difficult. As I said, nobody would be more delighted than I if I could really feel that in the Code before us to-night we had a document which was going to fulfil the expectations which some noble Lords, at any rate, have held out for it. If it does indeed do good, this will be welcome; but I am bound to say that, on the evidence now before us, and in the atmosphere and circumstances which exist, I really cannot believe that the Code will do much good—partly because of the weaknesses which it still has and partly because of the background against which it is produced.
8.12 p.m.
LORD DRUMALBYN: My Lords, the noble Lord, as he himself said, struck a rather discordant note, or at any rate a different note, in comparison with the speakers who preceded him. I do not think that your Lordships would wish me at this time of night to go through the very many valuable points that have been made if only because, as the noble Lord, Lord Brown, said in his own remarks, they were directed to the next Code rather than to this one. But there were one or two exceptions to this, and I should like to deal with them. I thought that the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Brown, were, as usual, very valuable, though I felt that he was perhaps a little hard on the definition of "supervisor" and the question of the "first level". After all, the first storey is the first one after the bottom, and why the first level of management should be the top one, as lie seemed to imply, rather than a single level, I could not make out.
LORD BROWN: My Lords, I do not want to prolong matters, but the point really is a very important one, and I should like to clarify it, in case I did not express myself clearly earlier. Managers on the floor do need managerial assistance from those who are not themselves full managers. They come between people who are working on the floor and their managers: people who have not access to management. It is necessary for them to be called "supervisors", but this Code has usurped the term "supervisor" and used the term "manager", because that footnote makes out that there is
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no difference between a manager and a supervisor. I am sorry to have delayed the noble Lord.
LORD DRUMALBYN: I quite take the noble Lord's point on this, but what we are really saying is that the super visor is part of the management system but throughout the document is distinguished quite clearly from the management. For one thing, if one takes the disciplinary provisions it is quite clear there where it says, in paragraph 132(i):
"specify who has the authority to take various forms of disciplinary action, and ensure that supervisors do not have the power to dismiss without reference to more senior management:"
This merely makes the point in really a few words that they are all part of the system of management but they are distinguished and distinguishable.
LORD BROWN: My Lords, the foot note on page 5 says:
"In this Code supervisor means a member of the first line of management …"
Now that can mean nothing else but that a supervisor is a manager. I must dispute this with the noble Lord. I am very grateful to the noble Lord for his courtesy in giving way, and I hope that he will bring this to the notice of those who have to look at this Code in the future.
LORD DRUMALBYN: My Lords, I am sure that everything the noble Lord, Lord Brown, says, will be carefully considered and closely examined; but I am bound to say that the way in which the Code is presented has not raised in my mind the same difficulty as it has raised in his.
I listened with great interest to the noble Baroness, Lady Seear, and as usual what she said deserves careful study also. She said that we must bring our thinking into line with the best of European thinking. I hope also that we shall take with us the best in our own thinking and that we shall align the two, because there is so much that is good in this country as well. I think that it would have been wrong to have attempted to bring the whole Code into line with those who are making new experiments. These have still to be worked out. What we have tried to do is to bring it into line with the best accepted practice and to go on, we hope, from there. I fully expected the more-in-sorrow-than-in anger speech of the noble Earl, Lord

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Halsbury. If I may say so, I think he expressed himself with great moderations in the circumstances. But I would put to him—and also to my noble friend Lord Nelson, and to the noble Lord, Lord Platt—this point. It would be a great pity if at this stage, when we are starting out to develop a new code of industrial relations, we were consciously to make an abrupt distinction between those employees who are recognised as putting their duties first and those employees who are not so recognised. By "duties" I mean here what has been referred to by my noble friend Lord Courtown, as well as what the noble Lord himself said, the duties to the public interest. I personally hope that we shall get to the stage when everyone in industry will put his duties to the public interest very high, if not first. It is very difficult, in this imperfect world, not to put our own interests very high; but at any rate I hope we shall get to the stage when everyone will put his duties to the public interest very high indeed. I fear that if at the present time we were to make too sharp a distinction it would tend to be divisive; and, as I said in my opening speech, I do not think it would be helpful to the development of industrial relations. After all, it is wrong to suggest that anyone who is involved in industrial relations has no regard to the public interest. This is a question of values, of education and of conscience, and altogether these things have to be amalgamated and developed, as we hope will happen once we have removed the initial frustrations in industrial relations.
LORD PLATT: My Lords, may I say that we have gone a long way towards agreeing with the noble Lord; but if you read the whole of the Introduction to this Code. you find that it does not recognise that there arc such people as professional people. If the noble Lord really feels—and I would go a long way towards agreeing with him—that every one who is employed, a worker of any kind, should have these loyalties to his job and to the things which he is doing to the public first, then the Code of Practice might have been written in those terms.
LORD DRUMALBYN: My Lords, there is always a danger in preaching to the converted, but perhaps here the Code has erred on the side of very obviously
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preaching to the unconverted. Obviously the noble Lord is perfectly right that the Department's manpower and productivity services have not been called in very often to deal with the professions. Quite obviously when they are writing a pamphlet of this sort they must have in mind what I call, for a short title, the big battalions, rather than those who pride themselves on their individual approach. We recognise this entirely. We want to get rid of these frustrations—and this was referred to by one of the speakers to-day. There is the attitude of management on the one side who feels that his job is being interfered with by the trade union; on the other hand there is the trade union representative who feels that management is standing in the way—I am not generalising, I am putting a point—of what he wants to achieve. If we can get rid of this idea that each is standing in the way of the other, and get them to work towards a common objective, accepting their differences in emphasis and differences in immediate interest and so forth, and the conflicts that are bound to arise, then we shall begin to make real progress. The code sets out to lay the foundations of this; it cannot do more than that.
I willingly accept what the noble Lord, Lord Delacourt-Smith, says, that we are faced with a massive non-co-operation at the present time. We deplore that very much. This is not carried right through to the shop floor; this is not a feature of industrial relations, properly speaking, in most of the factories of this country. They are going along perfectly well at the present time and are improving. In certain areas of acute economic difficulty there are plainly hesitations, if I may put it that way, if not to use the mildest possible word. One has to take this view quite firmly: one has to separate a political decision not to co-operate on the top level with the usual industrial relations that are going on all the time. We hope that with the passage of time wounds will be healed, and will be healed very soon.
The Government want nothing better than to be able to sit down once again with the T.U.C. and the employers and discuss the future together. In the mean time we are dealing with this Code of Industrial Relations. The noble Lord, Lord Delacourt-Smith, was less generous than he generally is—I quite understand

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his difficulties—for I think the consensus in the House to-day is that this is a good document. It is not a perfect document; we know that it will be improved. Even in the debates on the Industrial Relations Bill it was foreshadowed that this would be studied all the time; we debated how often the Code would be reviewed, and so forth. The answer is the old phrase: it is going to be under continuous review. We shall have to make alterations to it before very long to bring in the necessary detail about information.
The noble Lord, Lord Delacourt-Smith, was not right in saying that the discussions on Section 56 were proving rather difficult. We are awaiting the C.I.R. Report which was commissioned by his Government. We hope that will give us the necessary guidance on which to base a consultative document which will be considered and examined, and the necessary amendments to the Code will be brought before Parliament. I am not saying that these will be the only amendments that will be made. Obviously we shall be seeking every opportunity to improve the Code.
I am grateful not only to noble Lords who have spoken in this debate but to the enormous number of people who have taken a great deal of trouble to advise the Secretary of State on the form of the Code, advice to which he has responded by making extensive alterations to it. I am extremely grateful to all who have helped to make the Code what it is—
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the first and initial stage in trying to pro mote better industrial relations. Despite all that the noble Lord, Lord Delacourt Smith, has said tonight, I am sure that he has in his heart the desire to work together and along the lines of the Code —with all its blemishes as he would think—in order to get better industrial relations and improve the Code as and when we can. I am grateful to your Lordships for the help you have given on this occasion. You have given as good a baptism to this Code as we could possibly have expected.