Lords Sitting of 7 June 1972

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

LORD SEEBOHM
Sir Frederic Seebohm, Knight, having been created Baron Seebohm, of Hertford in the County of Hertford, for life—Was, in his robes, introduced between the Lord Sherfield and the Baroness Serota.
LORD WATKINS
Tudor Elwyn Watkins, Esquire, having been created Baron Watkins, of Glyntawe in the County of Brecknock, for life—Was, in his robes, introduced between the Lord Champion and the Lord Maelor.

MESSAGE FROM THE QUEEN
2.57 p.m.
LORD MACLEAN: My Lords, I have the honour to present to your Lordships a Message from Her Majesty the Queen, signed by her own hand. The Message is as follows:
"I thank you sincerely for your loyal and dutiful Address of sympathy on the occasion of the death of His Royal Highness The Duke of Windsor.
"I am glad to think that my Uncle's service to his country and to the British Empire is remembered with gratitude at this time.
"I am conveying the House's expression of sympathy to the Duchess of Windsor."

LONDON/PENZANCE ROAD AND HEAVY LORRY TRAFFIC
LORD CLIFFORD OF CHUDLEIGH: 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
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when the designated main route from London to the South-West (A.303, etc.) will have its proposed dual-carriageway system completed.
LORD MOWBRAY AND STOURTON: My Lords, my right honourable friend the Secretary of State for the Environment intends to complete the comprehensive improvement of the strategic route between London and Penzance by the early 1980s.
LORD CLIFFORD OF CHUDLEIGH: My Lords, while thanking the noble Lord for that Answer, may I ask him whether he is aware that East and West of Stourton the congestion is absolutely impossible at this time of year, and that with the proliferation of large vehicles it is practically impossible to move, and very dangerous because people become impatient and try to overtake? Would there be any opportunity or chance of the Government's making a rule whereby on non-dual carriageways these large vehicles are forced to keep at least 100 yards apart so as to avoid accidents?
LORD MOWBRAY AND STOURTON: My Lords, I take the noble Lord's point about my knowing the route in that part of the world. As I have said before in this House, my right honourable friend does not intend to bring in legislation about the spacing of heavy lorries. He thinks that this is a matter best left to the discretion and common sense of the drivers concerned. However, as he has indicated, in the case of larger lorries, with which we may or may not be involved in the future, he is considering designating special roads for these vehicles.
LORD CLIFFORD OF CHUDLEIGH: My Lords, could the noble Lord or the Government take one further step towards easing the situation? Would they ask the county councils concerned, of Wiltshire, Somerset and Devon, when they are carrying out small road improvements to make dual carriageways, instead of just one lane each way, so saving the extra time and expense of chopping up the road again to make a dual carriageway in a couple of years' time?
LORD MOWBRAY AND STOURTON: My Lords, as your Lordships will know, my right honourable friend has in this very month made announcements that

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over £350 million worth of improvements are in preparation or construction for Somerset, Devon and Cornwall, and where the traffic flow warrants it the noble Lord's suggestion is likely to be met.
LORD WYNNE-JONES: My Lords, does the noble Lord's answer mean that, so far as this highway is concerned, there will be no improvement for a period of ten years?
LORD MOWBRAY AND STOURTON: My Lords, I do not call £350 million worth of improvements in the counties of Somerset, Devon and Cornwall, nothing.
VISCOUNT THURSO: My Lords, was one to understand the noble Lord to say that the Government are considering designating special roads for large lorries? Can the noble Lord tell me why the Government do not make some attempt to encourage the goods carried by them to go on the railways which are already designated for them?
LORD MOWBRAY AND STOURTON: My Lords, that question is going rather wide of the Question on the Order Paper.
LORD SEGAL: My Lords, did the noble Lord really mean in his earlier reply "designating special roads"; or did he intend to use the words "designating special lanes"?
LORD MOWBRAY AND STOURTON: My Lords, I was answering a question of the noble Lord, Lord Clifford of Chudleigh, about whether lorries which caused congestion should be spaced apart. I said that where large lorries are concerned—and with the possibility of their becoming larger—my right honourable friend has announced that he is considering allowing them to go only on special roads which would be designated for that purpose.
LORD SHEPHERD: My Lords, in the light of a supplementary question and of what the noble Lord has just said, may I ask whether we are to take it that his right honourable friend is contemplating a further increase in the permitted size of loads of vehicles?
LORD MOWBRAY AND STOURTON: My Lords, I think the noble Lord is trying to twist my tail a little. He knows
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that my right honourable friend has under consideration the possibility that we may have to increase the size of lorries if our European partners in the future wish us to. He is only planning for the future.
LORD LEATHERLAND: My Lords, does this mean that if we go into the Common Market we shall have to indulge in this additional expenditure of building special highways for Common Market lorries?
LORD MOWBRAY AND STOURTON: No, my Lords; we are building roads for our own flow of traffic, and if these lorries happen to come to our country they will be kept to roads which can cope with them.
LORD DOUGLASS OF CLEVELAND: My Lords, does that answer mean that we are building these roads for our own traffic and that they will not be used by the Common Market traffic?
LORD MOWBRAY AND STOURTON: My Lords, the Common Market traffic will use our roads just as our traffic will use the Common Market roads.
LORD SOMERS: My Lords, is not the idea that it is best to leave these regulations to the good sense of the drivers rather foolish when they have no good sense: and is this not rather an excuse for just doing nothing?
LORD MOWBRAY AND STOURTON: My Lords, I do not accept the fact that heavy lorry drivers have no common sense. By and large I find them very good, and in any case education and example are what is needed.

EUROPEAN CONFERENCE ON SECURITY AND CO-OPERATION
3.4 p.m.
LORD BROCKWAY: 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 what is the nature of their consultations taking place with the Government of Finland regarding the projected European Conference on Security and Co-operation.
THE MINISTER OF STATE, FOREIGN AND COMMONWEALTH OFFICE (BARONESS TWEEDSMUIR OF BELHELVIE): My Lords, at their meeting in Bonn on May 30 and 31, Foreign Ministers of North Atlantic Treaty countries accepted the offer of the Finnish Government to provide facilities in Helsinki to prepare the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe. These and other decisions are recorded in the Final Communiqué which, with your Lordships' permission, I will circulate in the OFFICIAL REPORT.
Following is the Final Communiqué referred to:

FINAL COMMUNIQUE
The North Atlantic Council met in Ministerial Session in Bonn on 30th and 31st May, 1972.
2. Ministers reaffirmed that the purpose of the Alliance is to preserve the freedom and security of all its members. Defence and the relaxation of tension are inseparably linked. The solidarity of the Alliance is indispensable in this respect. Allied governments seek an improvement in their relations with the countries of Eastern Europe and aim at a just and durable peace which would overcome the division of Germany and foster security in Europe.
3. Ministers noted progress in relations between Western and Eastern countries, increasing contacts between the leaders of these countries, and the conclusion of important agreements and arrangements. They welcomed these developments flowing from major initiatives undertaken by their governments, which had full and timely consultations on these subjects. Such consultations will continue.
4. Ministers welcomed the signing by the United States and the U.S.S.R. of the Treaty on the Limitation of Anti-Ballistic Missile Systems and the interim agreement on Certain Measures with respect to the Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms. They believe these two agreements limiting the strategic arms of the United States and the U.S.S.R. will contribute to strategic stability, significantly strengthen international confidence, and reduce the danger of nuclear war. Ministers also welcomed the commitment by the United States and the U.S.S.R. actively to continue negotiations on limiting strategic arms. They expressed the hope that these two agreements will be the beginning of a new and promising era of negotiations in the arms control field.
5. Ministers noted with satisfaction that the treaty of 12th August, 1970, between the Federal Republic of Germany and the Soviet Union and the treaty of 7th December, 1970, between the Federal Republic of Germany and the Polish People's Republic are to enter into force in the near future. They reaffirmed their opinion that these treaties are important,
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both as. contributions towards the relaxation of tension in Europe and as elements of the modus vivendi which the Federal Republic of Germany wishes to establish with its Eastern neighbours. Ministers welcomed the declaration of 17th May, 1972, in which the Federal Republic of Germany confirmed its policy to this end and reaffirmed its loyalty to the Atlantic Alliance as the basis of its security and freedom. They noted that it remains the policy of the Federal Republic of Germany to work for circumstances of peace in Europe in which the German people, in free self-determination, can recover their unity; and that the existing treaties and agreements to which the Federal Republic of Germany is a party and the rights and responsibilities of the Four Powers relating to Berlin and Germany as a whole remain unaffected.
6. Ministers also welcomed the progress made since their last meeting in the talks between the Federal Republic of Germany and the GDR. They regard the conclusion of the agreements and arrangements between the competent German authorities, which supplement the Quadripartite Agreement on Berlin of 3rd September, 1971, as well as the signature of a Treaty on Questions of Traffic between the Federal Republic of Germany and the GDR, as important steps in the effort to improve the situation in Germany. They thus feel encouraged in the hope that, in further negotiations between the Federal Republic of Germany and the GDR, agreement might be reached on more comprehensive arrangements which would take into account the special situation in Germany.
7. Ministers noted with satisfaction that the governments of France, the United Kingdom, the United States and the Soviet Union have arranged to sign the Final Protocol to the Quadripartite Agreement. The entry into force of the entire Berlin Agreement being thus assured, the Ministers hope that a new era can begin for Berlin, free of the tension that has marked its history for the past quarter century.
8. In the light of these favourable developments, Ministers agreed to enter into multilateral conversations concerned with preparations for a Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe. They accepted with gratitude the proposal of the Finnish Government to act as host for such talks in Helsinkiat the level of Heads of Mission under the conditions set out in its aide-memoire of 24th November, 1970. Accordingly, they decided to work out with other interested governments the necessary arrangements for beginning the multilateral preparatory talks.
9. Ministers stated that the aim of Allied Governments at the multilateral preparatory talks would be to ensure that their proposals were full considered at a Conference and to establish that enough common ground existed among the participants to warrant reasonable expectations that a Conference would produce satisfactory results.
10. Prepared in this way, a Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe should constitute an important factor in the process

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of reducing tension. It should help to eliminate obstacles to closer relations and co-operation among the participants while maintaining the security of all. Allied governments look forward to a serious examination of the real problems at issue and to a Conference which would yield practical results.
11. Ministers considered that, in the interest of security, the examination at a CSCE of appropriate measures, including certain military measures, aimed at strengthening confidence and increasing stability would contribute to the process of reducing the dangers of military confrontation.
12. Ministers noted the Report of the Council in Permanent Session concerning a Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe. The Report examined the issues which might be included on the Agenda of a Conference as set forth in paragraph 13 of the Brussels Communique of 10th December, 1971, as well as the procedural questions relating to the convening of a Conference. Ministers directed the Council in Permanent Session to develop further its substantive and procedural studies in preparation for a Conference.
13. Ministers representing countries which participate in NATO's Integrated Defence Programme recalled the offers to discuss mutual and balanced force reductions which they had made at Reykjavik in 1968, at Rome in 1970, and subsequently reaffirmed.
14. These Ministers continue to aim at negotiations on mutual and balanced force reductions and related measures. They believe that these negotiations should be conducted on a multilateral basis and be preceded by suitable explorations. They regretted that the Soviet Government has failed to respond to the Allied offer of October 1971 to enter into exploratory talks. They therefore now propose that multilateral explorations on mutual and balanced force reductions be undertaken as soon as practicable, either before or in parallel with multilateral preparatory talks on a Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe.
15. These Ministers noted the studies conducted since their last meeting on political, military and technical aspects of mutual and balanced force reductions. They instructed the Permanent Representatives to continue this work in preparation for eventual negotiations.
16. These Ministers stated that the present military balance of forces in Europe does not allow a unilateral relaxation of the defence efforts of the Allies. Unilateral force reductions would detract from the Alliance's efforts to achieve greater stability and detente and would jeopardise the prospects for mutual and balanced force reductions.
17. Ministers took note of a Report by the Council in Permanent Session on the situation in the Mediterranean. They expressed their concern regarding the factors of instability in the area which could endanger the security of the members of the Alliance. They in structed the Council in Permanent Session to
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follow closely the evolution of the situation and to report to them at their next meeting.
18. The next Ministerial Session of the North Atlantic Council will be held in Brussels in December 1972.
19. Ministers requested the Foreign Minister of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg to transmit this Communique on their behalf through diplomatic channels to all other interested parties, including neutral and non-aligned governments.
LORD BROCKWAY: My Lords, while thanking the noble Baroness for that Answer, may I ask whether she remembers that in a reply on a former occasion she indicated that Her Majesty's Government were making contact with Helsinki? It was in that connection that I was asking this particular Question.
BARONESS TWEEDSMUIR OF BELHELVIE: My Lords, we have of course to work together with our Allies on his matter, which is what I hoped I implied.
LORD BROCKWAY: My Lords, in thanking the noble Baroness for that further reply may I ask her whether, in view of the agreement about Berlin and the Treaties between Western Germany, Moscow and Warsaw, it is not desirable that we should now put aside the rather lukewarm and cynical attitude that we have had towards the European Conference and give it constructive activisation?
BARONESS TWEEDSMUIR OF BELHELVIE: My Lords, I do not think it is the Allies who have been lukewarm towards the suggestion. Unfortunately the Warsaw Pact countries did not respond to the exploratory talks on this matter, which we hope to continue.
LORD BROCKWAY: My Lords, would the noble Baroness state whether this proposed preliminary conference in Helsinki is to be one of officials preparing the agenda for a Ministerial meeting in the autumn which would consider all the details of the proposed Conference?
BARONESS TWEEDSMUIR OF BELHELVIE: Yes, my Lords, this is a preparatory talk to see whether there is in fact enough common ground to have a Conference, not necessarily in Helsinki itself.

IMMIGRATION CONTROL: U.K. PASSPORT HOLDERS IN EAST AFRICA
LORD AVEBURY: 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 what action they have taken following the recommendation of the European Human Rights Commission that a friendly settlement be reached in the case of the United Kingdom passport holders from East Africa.
BARONESS YOUNG: My Lords, the Commission is in the process of seeking a friendly settlement with the parties to the applications, and there has been no recommendation as such. I cannot say more since dealings between the Commission and the parties are confidential.
LORD AVEBURY: My Lords, perhaps the noble Baroness would like to remind the House how long it is since the Commission asked the British Government and the litigants to reach a friendly settlement. Does she recall that the hearing was on September 30? Does she further recall that in answer to an Unstarred Question on December 14, the noble Lord, Lord Windlesham, said that there was a carefully laid down procedure for these matters and that some progress had been made in passing through the various stages? Can the noble Baroness now say why there has been this disgraceful prevarication on the part of the British Government; whether they intend to make any offer whatsoever and, if not, why they do not tell the European Commission that they are not prepared to effect a settlement? Can she further say how many meetings have taken place with the European Commission since the noble Lord, Lord Windlesham, replied to me on December 14?
BARONESS YOUNG: My Lords, I feel that I cannot go into all the details. I can only add that the matter is currently with the Commission and it is for the Commission to decide upon the next step. As I have already said, the dealings between the Commission and the parties are confidential.
LORD AVEBURY: My Lords, if the noble Baroness is not prepared to say anything about dealings with the Commission could she at least say how many meetings have taken place with the officials since the debate on December 14?
BARONESS YOUNG: My Lords, I am afraid that that information is not available but I will ask my noble friend to write to the noble Lord on that matter.
LORD BROCKWAY: My Lords, can the noble Baroness say whether there is likely to be an appeal from the Commission to the Vienna Court? Can she also say whether any agreement has now been reached with the Government of India by which a proportion of British Asians from Eastern Africa passing through India shall be allowed to come to this country?
BARONESS YOUNG: My Lords, the answer to the first part of the noble Lord's question is that this is a matter that would be considered after the present discussions have been concluded. In answer to his second point, I really think it is rather wide of the Question.

KENSINGTON AND CHELSEA CORPORATION BILL [H.L.]
Read 3a, and passed, and sent to the Commons.
MERSEY TUNNEL BILL
Read 3a, with an Amendment, and passed, and returned to the Commons.

CHEMICAL WEAPONS
3.11 p.m.
LORD CHALFONT LORD CHALFONT rose to call attention to the urgent need for an international convention prohibiting the possession, production and stockpiling of chemical weapons; and to move for Papers. The noble Lord said: My Lords, there is a relatively large number of speakers for a two-and-a-half hour debate. I notice also that there is one maiden speech scheduled. May I, in advance, wish the maiden speaker good fortune and good luck with his speech? I am sure that we shall listen to it with very great attention.
My Lords, it was a basic principle of Roman law that "Armis bella non venenis geri", which, being translated, means "War is waged with weapons not with poison". There may be many of my noble friends who believe that we should not wage war at all; but if it is unavoidable, as it has been over the centuries, certain weapons have always been looked upon with special repugnance. Even in the days of primitive warring between tribes the poisoning of wells was one of the few things that was not permitted in tribal warfare.
I do not want to go into the history of chemical warfare to-day but simply to point out that there is now I believe a need more urgent than there has ever been for us to come to some international agreement about this particular weapon of war. I am especially pleased that I have been fortunate enough to be able to introduce this debate before your Lordships' House to-day because we are presently seeing the beginnings of the great Conference in Stockholm on the Human Environment. And yet, while that Conference is going on, we are still stockpiling every day masses of these terrible weapons, not only weapons that can at a stroke annihilate hundreds of thousands of people but weapons that even now, to-day, are poisoning the environment in certain parts of the globe.
I am not going to discuss this afternoon some very obvious candidates for discussion, such as, for example, napalm, because that is not strictly speaking a chemical weapon; nor toxins. They are chemical weapons but they have been dealt with in the Biological Weapons Convention. Nor shall I deal with defoliants and herbicides which have their effect on vegetation and on the environment but not directly on human beings. Others may feel very strongly about those particular agents, and if they do I hope very much that we shall hear some views on them. I propose, however, to concentrate on the chemical weapons in their narrowest sense; that is to say, chemical weapons which are designed directly or indirectly to kill human beings. I want to be as constructive as possible and I propose to give a very brief outline of the kind of draft treaty which I think might meet with international approval.
But first I should like to examine for a very few moments why I
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believe this matter is of such very great urgency. The first reason is that I believe it is now time, in the whole context of international agreements and international negotiations, that we had some real disarmament. We have not yet had any real disarmament. We have had arms control and it is my view that this stricture applies even to the very important Convention on biological weapons. It has been said that it involves real measures of disarmament because it calls upon the signatories to destroy their existing stockpiles of biological weapons; but so far as we know only one nation had a stockpile of weapons: that was the United States of America, and they had unilaterally undertaken to destroy their stockpiles before the biological warfare Convention was signed.
Secondly, I believe that there is now a great drive and thrust of world opinion towards an agreement of this sort. There was the United Nations Resolution of January, 1972, which called upon all States to engage in urgent negotiations on the banning of chemical weapons. The Secretary-General in his message to the Committee on Disarmament in Geneva in February of this year made the same appeal, and he made it again in even stronger terms when he was welcoming the opening for signature of the biological warfare Convention, as recently as April of this year.
I mentioned the biological warfare Convention. That is another reason why I believe that this matter of chemical weapons has now become one of urgency, because Article IX of the biological warfare Convention states quite specifically that all its signatories undertake to continue negotiations in good faith with a view to reaching an early agreement on chemical weapons; and that solemn undertaking we, the Government of this country, have signed.
I come now to the dangers of the spread of these weapons, and not only their spread possibly to small nations which cannot afford to make nuclear weapons. Chemical weapons have been called the poor man's weapon of mass destruction, and there is no reason that I can see why small countries wishing to achieve a kind of international power to blackmail that is at present in the possession of the Great Powers, should not

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do it if they wish through the possession of chemical weapons. But there are other, and I think somewhat more sinister, implications here. It is the possibility that these weapons might even spread out of the hands of Governments and into the hands of private people. One has only to think of the appalling incident that recently took place at Lydda airport to realise that nowadays international terrorists will stop virtually at nothing. The chemical weapon is easily portable, cheaply made and easily used by people who are prepared first of all to protect themselves against its effects. I ask noble Lords to think seriously about the appalling danger that would be presented to international order and stability if international terrorists of the kind who carried out the shocking raid at Lydda airport were to decide to use, instead of the weapons that they used there, this kind of weapon of indiscriminate destruction. Stockpiles of these weapons exist all over the world, and we have only to look at terrorists in action at the moment anywhere in the world to realise that many of the weapons they use are stolen or otherwise acquired from existing military stockpiles. There is no reason that I can see why, if they wished, these people should not get their hands on the weapons of mass destruction.
If we look at what comprises these stockpiles, the picture is an appalling one. Let us look by way of example at the United States of America. This is only because we happen to know about the United States of America, for it is an open society and makes these things public. The United States of America has seven standard chemical agents, seven standard war gases. Two of them, called VX and GB are highly lethal gases of a kind that have not been seen before in the history of military engineering. I will mention some of their effects in a moment, but if we just take one small point about this agent VX. In a recent test of aircraft spraying over the Dugway proving ground in the United States of America a little of this VX agent escaped. It is fortunate that this area was occupied only by sheep because this small amount of VX gas spread immediately over an area of 200 square miles and killed instantly 7,000 sheep that occupied the
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area. As I say, we are only too grateful and thankful that they were sheep.
These agents are hundreds of times more powerful than even the deadly gases that were actually used in World War I, and they are only two that the United States possess. They possess HD, which is the old mustard gas and which now seems a rather cosy little weapon by comparison; BZ, an incapacitating gas not designed to kill but to put people out of action; DM, which used to be called—soldiers will recognise the term—Adamsite; CN, and finally the now well-known CS gas, which is a powerful tear gas, not lethal if used in open spaces, but of course nobody is quite sure what its effects would be if used in enclosed spaces. On this question of CS gas, I think it worth mentioning that in one year in Vietnam six million pounds of CS gas, in weight, were used, and much of this is what is called the improved CS gas, CS2. This is treated with a silicone compound so that having been used it remains dormant on the ground, either until a wind springs up, or there is a rainstorm, or until people walk through it; and it is then reactivated and begins to have its effect.
Although I said that this gas was not lethal, I think it is relevant and not unfair to quote to your Lordships a few words from the testimony of a man called Han Swyter, a United States military expert, at a conference on chemical and geological weapons held in the United States in the summer of 1969. He said:
"May I add that last year about three-quarters of the six million pounds of CS gas was used to kill people. It was used to make ordinary conventional bombs and artillery more effective."
I mention this simply to point out to your Lordships the danger and, to my mind, the unwisdom of trying to distinguish between chemical agents which are lethal and chemical agents which are not. It is not the agent which kills; it is the way in which it is used. With all these things go a whole range, a whole panoply, of weapons with which to deliver them—rockets, mortar bombs, mortar cartridges, aircraft bombs, bulk disseminators, artillery shells. Any of these can be used, are used and are stockpiled for delivering chemical lethal gas weapons if they should ever be used in war.
That is just the picture of the United States of America, used, as I say, not to point any finger at the United States but rather the contrary, to show that in an open society at least we know about these things. We can only guess what the stockpiles are likely to be in the Soviet Union. We know that in the 1940s and the 1950s they built up large stocks of these chemical weapons because they were afraid of the strength of the Allies in tactical nuclear weapons. The one thing about chemical weapons is that they last for ever. So we can be fairly certain that those large stockpiles built up by the Soviet Union are there to-day. Indeed, I suppose that one is safe in surmising that there are few armies in the world of any country of any importance that do not possess a large stockpile of lethal gases, lethal chemical weapons.
I said that I would mention briefly (although I am sure that these facts will be familiar to most of your Lordships) some of the effects of these gases. I mentioned VX, the most powerful V agent now in existence, so far as we know. To give you an idea of what its power is, I may say that the old mustard gas of World War I, which caused so many terrible casualties, was powerful enough—one whiff of it was enough to tear a man's lungs to pieces—but to kill a man through the skin 5,000 mgs. of it were needed. In World War II a nerve gas called Sarin was invented, although, thank God!, never used. It was able to kill a man through the skin by the application of 2,000 mgs., so things were getting more and more powerful, VX gas, the latest V agent, can kill a man with a drop on the skin of 5 mgs. So we are now in the situation in which a man's skin, in chemical warfare, is as vulnerable as his lungs used to be in the days of World War I. And any of your Lordships who served in that war—and I know there are some here—will recall what an appalling picture that was.
There are medical details of what this gas does to people, what any nerve gas does to people, when it is used in war. There have been clinical tests, there have been controlled tests and laboratory tests. In the report of the World Health Organisation, issued just over a year ago and called Health Aspects of Chemical and Biological Weapons, there was,
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although in very cold and controlled medical language, a clear indication that these weapons do not just kill; they kill horribly. There is a piece of prose in one of those reports which describes the progression of the suffering of a man attacked by a nerve gas. It starts quite harmlessly with giddiness, tension, anxiety, withdrawal, depression, nightmares, and then it progresses to what is called fasciculation. My noble friend on my left, I am sure, will correct me if I am wrong, but I understand that to mean a twitching of the nerves and muscles of the body wherever the gas has touched the skin. This is followed by coma, convulsions, dyspnoea, which is difficulty in breathing, involuntary activation of the bladder and bowels and eventual death. But we can do even better than that. There are new technological advances, I am sure you will be delighted to hear. My noble friend Lord Ritchie-Calder, who has made a study of these matters, will, I am sure, be able to tell us a little more about them when he speaks.
But if anybody is still in any doubt about the nature of these weapons, I hope we can finally destroy the canard, the fallacy, that has been put about that these are in some way humane weapons of war. It has been suggested that some of these weapons, especially the incapacitating gases, are used because if they were not used it would be necessary to use worse weapons. But, my Lords, they might also be used instead of using no weapons at all, or instead of using better weapons. The object, after all, of a nation at war is to kill its enemies, and if it is given a weapon that will kill them it will do so. I beg of any noble Lord who has not before done so to recognise that this plea that gas is a humane weapon is a piece of special pleading and should be regarded with the gravest suspicion.
My conclusion from this is that there is an urgent need to get rid of this dreadful weapon. Its appalling effects on the human body, its capacity for mass annihilation, the dangers of its spreading to criminals and terrorists, its awful not only physical but psychosocial effects, seem to me to indicate that it is a weapon that we should remove as quickly as we can from the military armour. Not even the soldiers want this weapon. For them

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it is simply a cumbersome addition to the military armament. If it were ever used it would require soldiers to wear cumbersome protective clothing before they used the gas. And if we have a weapon that is so terrible in its effect, so appalling in its destructive capacity, and not even the soldiers want it, surely it is time that it should go.
I suggest that there is now a clear indication for an initiative by Her Majesty's Government. I know that it is easy always to urge initiatives on Her Majesty's Government. Almost everybody does it at some time or another, but I believe that this is a special area in which we have a tradition of expertise. All the most important arms control agreements of recent years were brought about because initiatives were taken by the British Government. There was first of all the Partial Test Ban Treaty, the Moscow Treaty of 1963. The noble Baroness's right honourable friend the Minister of State at the Foreign Office was much involved in these negotiations, and had it not been for British pressure and initiative it is doubtful whether that treaty would ever have been signed. The Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty and the Biological Warfare Convention came to the table at the conference in Geneva at the instigation of the British Government.
But what is the present position about chemical weapons? I think it is a simple one, and my understanding (the noble Baroness will correct me if I am wrong) is that as soon as the Biological Weapons Convention had been opened for signature the Soviet Union tabled a draft treaty banning chemicals. It was tabled in April and was very similar, in fact almost identical, to the treaty banning biological weapons. But the West, which generally speaking in disarmament negotiations means the United States and the United Kingdom, were not prepared to accept this draft for very good reasons of their own apparently. The official British representative said on April 18, 1972:
"One must know what substances we are seeking to ban"
and he said that the treaty was not acceptable because it contained no provision for verification. He also said—and he might have left this unsaid:
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"The British delegation has reached no decision and is putting forward no proposals."
It seems to me, that he should have reached some decision and should have put forward some proposals.
But even when the right honourable gentleman the Minister of State at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office went to Geneva to make his speech he mentioned also the absence of verification and inspection in the draft treaty put forward by the Russians, and spoke of exploring the matter with experts. This seems to me to be a danger signal, and I beg of the Government not to waste any more time with committees of experts. Committees of experts have been at this matter for years. In 1969 the Secretary-General of the United Nations set up a study group. The noble Lord, Lord Zuckerman, then Chief Scientific Adviser to the Government, was a member of it. It also had Academician Reutov, of the Soviet Union, a distinguished scientist, and twelve other experts in this field from all over the world. Their report, which is available for all to read, examined the characteristics of chemical weapons the concepts of their use, methods of defence against them, physical effects and ecological effects, and their findings are there for all to read. They concluded, and I quote:
"All weapons of war are destructive of human life, but chemical and biological weapons stand in a class of their own in that they exercise their attack solely on living matter."
They ended their report with these words:
"Were these weapons ever to be used on a large scale no one could predict how enduring the effects might be or how they would affect the structure of society and the environment in which we live."
My Lords that is what the experts said in 1969, and that is what the experts will say if we ask them again.
Even if we are not prepared to accept that, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute has produced a study on the prevention of chemical and biological warfare. I have a copy of it here, but that is only one of six volumes. This study goes into all the matters of chemical and biological warfare, and it has 300 pages on the classification of chemical weapons, how they might be verified, the need for verification, tables, charts, percentages, statistics. It is all there. There is no need for any further

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investigation by experts, and I am convinced that if there is any further investigation by experts they will produce no knowledge that is not already available.
The reaction to the Western attitude in Geneva has been, as one might expect, one of disappointment. Those neutral countries that expect great things from us in disarmament negotiations have expressed disappointment at our negative approach so far to the matter of chemical weapons. The Soviet Union, as one might imagine, seized on this. This is what they hoped would happen when they put forward their Chemical Warfare Convention. It was a tactical move, and it worked; and they are now able to accuse us—and have done so—of obstruction and failing to observe our undertaking under Article 9 of the Biological Warfare Convention. Whether you accept that criticism or not, I can assure your Lordships' House that there are many neutral delegations in Geneva who do accept it and who now believe that it is we, the British and the Americans, who are holding up progress on the Chemical Weapons Treaty.
Various ideas are being put forward to circumvent this situation in Geneva. Some people say that we should start with a partial treaty covering only the lethal nerve gases. I earnestly counsel Her Majesty's Government not to fall for that one. If we do, we shall get into the old argument, "What is a lethal gas and what is a non-lethal gas?" and we shall be accused, rightly or wrongly, of fighting other people's battles for them. That is not what we should be doing in Geneva. So I ask Her Majesty's Government not to fall for this attractive gambit of the treaty that covers only the more lethal gases. Other people talk of a moratorium—that is to say, an undertaking on chemical weapons not amounting to an international agreement. We should be careful about that one, too. Whether we like it or not, the Americans will never look at it. In the United States in arms control agreement the word "moratorium" has been a dirty word ever since the famous test ban moratorium, which they accused the Soviet Union of breaking.
We ought now ourselves to take some action. The Conference reconvenes, unless there have been some changes in
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the planning, on June 20. I hope that Her Majesty's Government will be ready, and I hope that the noble Baroness is going to assure us that Her Majesty's Government are ready, to take some positive action when our delegation goes back for the opening meeting. I suggest that we should not be hypnotised by the question of verification and control. It is true that the joint Soviet-American statement on principles of disarmament calls for verification of measures of disarmament; it is true also that the Soviet Draft Treaty on General and Complete Disarmament includes provisions of verification. But we have had in recent years five perfectly good arms control treaties, in all of which the West started off by asking for some form of control and verification and all of which were eventually agreed to and signed by us without any measures of verification at all.
The Partial Test Ban Treaty, the Treaty on the Stationing of Nuclear Weapons in the Antarctic, the Treaty on the Stationing of Nuclear Weapons in Outer Space, the Biological Warfare Convention which we have just signed, and the famous—and perhaps the most important of them all—Non-Proliferation Treaty, which, although it has a carefully drafted safeguards and verification clause, does not apply these safeguards to the Nuclear Powers and so of course not to the Soviet Union.
Her Majesty's Government know as well as I do, if not better, that the Soviet Union will not sign a treaty which includes international inspection. That is a fact which we must get used to. So we must ask ourselves whether we intend to insist upon formal international verification or whether we will have a treaty without it—because we will not have a treaty with it. There are various suggestions which one can put forward. I do not want to go into the detail of it; I want only to ask Her Majesty's Government not to be hypnotised by this, and not to believe that a verification system must be 100 per cent. effective. All that you need for an arms control or disarmament control agreement is enough of a verification system to make it difficult, distasteful and unwise for anybody to break the treaty for fear of being found out. It does not need to be 100 per cent. water-tight and effective.

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In conclusion, I should like to put forward very briefly and very simply the kind of treaty which I think Her Majesty's Government could well put forward when the Conference convenes on the 20th of this month, which would gain a good deal of support—not universal support—would at least be a basis for negotiation, and would prevent people from saying that the British Government were dragging their feet over the banning of chemical weapons. It could be a very simple treaty to start with, with not many clauses, although the number of clauses always grows in the course of negotiation. Article I need only prevent the development, production, stockpiling and acquiring of chemical weapons. Article II would be an undertaking to destroy existing stocks, and Article III would forbid the transfer of chemical weapons from one country to another.
Article IV would be a verification article, and here I suggest that Her Majesty's Government examine the possibilities of some kind of verification by challenge, or some system of complaint to the Secretary-General or to the Security-Council of the United Nations—very much the same kind of thing, in fact, as we signed in the case of biological weapons. If we can sign it in the case of biological weapons, why are we not able at least to propose it now as a basis for negotiation? If we had a system of verification of that kind it would, in my view, be very effective. If any country, having signed the treaty, suspected that any other country was in breach of it, they would make a representation to the Security Council or the Secretary-General of the United Nations. If the United Nations found that there was a prima facie case of a breach of the treaty, then the country accused would be under an onus to make its installations available for inspection. It is a classic form of verification and I do not see why it should not be used in this case.
The other clauses of the treaty would of course have to deal with the classification of chemical weapons, with matters like review and withdrawal, and there would be many other consequential clauses as well. But all we need do at the moment is to put down something on the table which would include verification
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procedures which were satisfactory to us, and then we could at least negotiate instead of standing still. I believe that there is now a great opportunity for this. There is a new international climate brought about by the success of the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, by the slight melting of the ice between China and the United States of America, and a measure of real disarmament now might lead to very much greater achievements in this field.
I started by mentioning the Stockholm Conference. I believe that this aspect of international affairs is still at least as important as the cleaning up of the human environment which, in my view, is sometimes very much exaggerated. I think the "Doomwatchers" have gone a little too far. People are beginning to say that there is no point in having disarmament if we will all be killed by pollution and disease. I would suggest that it is equally no good cleaning up the world if we leave in it a danger of mass annihilation by weapons of this terrible kind; and if, after all these great conferences in Stockholm, we allow thousands of acres of the soil and vegetation of the innocent people of developing countries to be polluted and destroyed by herbicides and defoliants.
The right honourable gentleman the Minister for the Environment made a stirring speech in Stockholm, which was reported in one of the papers as "Britain leads fight against pollution". But nowhere in his speech did he mention this particular kind of pollution. It was left to Mr. Olof Palme of Sweden to do that. I urge Her Majesty's Government not, in this new-found glamour of environmental conservation, to forget or to ignore the less exciting but still, in my view, vital and important issues of arms control and disarmament, particularly this, to my mind, extremely important matter of the banning of chemical weapons. My Lords, I beg to move for Papers.
3.46 p.m.
THE LORD BISHOP OF CHICHESTER:
My Lords, I should first like to thank the noble Lord, Lord Chalfont, for pressing home this subject upon us from his own very great experience and knowledge. Secondly, I should like to acknowledge the initiatives which this

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country has already taken in the biological field, and to say that I hope it will respond to the opportunities now opening up in the chemical field. It is of course true that any ban seems to be a purely negative action, but the ban upon chemical and other destructive weapons is borne in upon us by the sheer necessity of bringing home to the Powers, and especially to the super-Powers, their responsiblity for restricting the degree of human evil which they are able to inflict upon one another. In this respect the present is unlike the past, for the past was reasonably static in its conflict between offensive and defensive weapons. In the present, the situation never stands still. Man's increasing powers of destruction are always being extended as his mastery of natural forces is extended. Therefore, unless we take positive action to restrict the power to kill, we shall not only be keeping our contemporary world in a situation of agonising and very costly suspicion, but will be sowing bitter dragon's teeth for the future and will reap a very harsh and grievous harvest from it.
But there is a positive side about any ban such as this. Your Lordships may recall a play by Charles Morgan called The Burning Glass, the theme of which was that a scientist has discovered a devastating secret weapon which the Government of the day were pressing him to reveal to them. At the end of the play he refused to reveal it, whereupon the Prime Minister replied:
"To see an evil power not exercised gives me some hope for the future of the world."
If the nations can demonstrate their power to control themselves and to discipline the resources that are at their disposal by deliberate agreement, that is a positive step forward in the cause of humanity. History might not then have to record, as it might otherwise have to do, that in this strange century of ours, for the furtherance of life and for the development and safety of humanity, we gave with one hand and took away with the other.
I am not competent to discuss most aspects of chemical weapons or the problems they reveal or the kind of arguments which they may provoke, and in view of the many speakers still to come I do not wish to do so. It is quite natural for some of us to say—and I have no
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doubt that the noble Lord, Lord Soper, will remind us of this—that the ultimate ban is the ban on war itself. But there are always others who will say that all weapons are designed to kill, and therefore it is illogical to choose between those which kill more effectively and those which kill less effectively. Your Lordships may recall that far back, at the end of the First War—and it was a very prophetic statement at the time—the International Red Cross warned mankind that wars would soon be all-destroying and without mercy. In that phrase they raised instinctively two forms of weapon which we ought to look at very closely. The first is the "all-destroying" weapon;
that is to say, we now have at our disposal weapons of indiscriminate power of destruction, either directly or, in the event of their being used, in the powers of escalation which they may reveal. This is one factor which nations ought to face in their responsibilities. When you come to try to decide between different degrees of discrimination or the opposite, of course there are bound to be anomalies. High explosives can be indiscriminate, and we hope that in time the public conscience will be more aroused to that fact. But chemical warfare, to some extent at least, like biological warfare, is more likely to be indiscriminate, and equally it is more likely to be capable of definition. Therefore, it presents itself as an area of destructive power to which we ought to address ourselves now along the lines it is suggested that the Government should do so. That is one aspect of weapons.
The other aspect—what the International Red Cross calls "wars without mercy "—clearly refers to the fact that some weapons are more beastly than others, unnecessarily more beastly than others. As far back as 1868 there was a Declaration in St. Petersburg which prohibited the use of weapons which caused unnecessary suffering. I have no doubt that they had not the slightest idea then of the kind of world to which they would be speaking a century later. It might seem strange, in the days of very sophisticated weapons, to think that this covers such things as "dum-dum" bullets, but the principle is clearly the same: is there a distinction to be drawn somewhere between weapons which cause unnecessary destruction and unnecessary suffering as opposed to others?

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I should like to limit myself very briefly to one small corner of this subject. The noble Lord, Lord Chalfont, mentioned it as one that he was not going to discuss, but I hope he will not mind if I do so. It is simply—for it is a practical one—the use of napalm bombs and kindred weapons. This is a known use; we have seen it happen. It is a chemical use. Such bombs are no doubt very easy to produce and therefore not liable to be stockpiled, but still they are a weapon of chemical warfare, and perhaps it may be for that reason that napalm has been brushed aside. In this respect, I should like to ask, since we know what it can do, why it is not thought to be included in the field of chemical warfare. Why is it not thought to be included, for instance,
in the terms of the Geneva Protocol of 1925, which, alongside "asphyxiating and poisonous and other gases", includes "all analogous liquids, materials and devices"? This is clearly something that can be used, and has been used, in a comparatively indiscriminate way. But, what is more, why should not this certainly he looked at along that other line—that is, as a weapon that causes unnecessary suffering?
I looked up the word "napalm" in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and to cover my point it describes it as:
"a sticky syrup used in chemical warfare".
It also goes on to say:
"It was used with telling effect in Vietnam."
How telling the effect was might be deduced from a little quotation I should like to make from a certain William Pepper, of the Institute for Advanced Study and Research at, significantly, Mercy College in New York. This is based on his own experiences in Vietnam:
"Napalm and its more horrible companion, white phosphorus, provide for the children of Vietnam fates more horrible to the civilised conscience than stilling of life. Young flesh is seared, liquidised and carved into grotesque forms. The finished products are often scarcely human in appearance, and develop after an experience of unimaginable pain and suffering. One cannot be confronted with the monstrous effects of the burning without being totally shaken."
Does this come within the description of "unnecessary cruelty or suffering"? It is high time that such weapons were included, if they are not going to be included, in any proposed ban on chemical warfare.
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It is not surprising that a study group has been set up by the Secretary-General of the United Nations as a result of the Swedish proposal passed in the last United Nation Assembly. I do not know where we as a Government stand in this, but I understand that our own Manual of Military Law states that napalm bombs are lawful only against buildings and non-human targets, and that their use has not been contemplated by this country. Thank goodness for that! That may be one reason why we are not taking them perhaps quite as seriously as I should hope we would. But I think it also puts us in a very strong position for supporting any serious study of this kind of weapon, and the degrees to which it merits some action or prohibition among the nations.
My Lords, in the whole field that deals with the kind of gases which Lord Chalfont has reported, this is only a very small corner, but it is an important one because it is already a known weapon. We are not speaking here of potential weapons, the use of which has not yet been contemplated and therefore the banning of which may not seem quite so difficult to achieve. We are dealing with something which has actually been in use, and therefore something which demands some immediate restriction on our part—a small ban, if you like, within the whole, but a positive step; a little measure of that hope for humanity which any restriction in the destructive powers of man will achieve. Therefore, when we hear from the spokesman for the Government how they react to the questions put by the noble Lord, Lord Chalfont, I hope we shall hear that they are prepared to take this weapon into consideration.
3.58 p.m.
LORD LYELL: My Lords, as I rise to speak for the first time in your Lordships' House I bear in mind that it is customary on such an occasion to be both brief and uncontroversial. Chemical warfare presents, as we have just heard, a really terrifying risk to the world—as great a risk as nuclear or conventional war, to which we have been accustomed so far. It is for this reason that I am glad to add my support to the efforts at present being made in Geneva at the confererence of the Committee on Disarmament. But, indeed, a Protocol was signed in 1925 forbidding the use in war of asphyxiating and poisonous gases which

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were known at that time. The Protocol covered all choking, blister and nerve gases. But, of course, much progress has been made in the 47 years which have since passed.
Similar progress has been made in researches connected with biological warfare. As recently as May 10 of this year, a Convention was signed simultaneously in London, Washington and Moscow. Among other provisions, the signatory nations undertook to destroy all existing stocks of such weapons, together with their means of delivery, within nine months of the entry into force of the Convention. But it seems that Articles 6 and 9 of the Convention are of crucial importance, and they are most relevant to the problems of chemical weapons. These two Articles are concerned with the problems of inspection, verification and production of such weapons.
Article 6 provides for complaints to the Security Council when a breach of the Convention has been committed by any of the signatories. Then there is the question of evidence; and it is this which causes the greatest obstacle to verification. Signatories have expressed fears that means to carry out such inspection and verification could be used for the purposes of espionage. There will be political differences between signatories and, as we have heard from my noble friend, a more open society exists in some of the signatory countries as opposed to the closed society which is in evidence in others. It is for the reason of evidence that I am pleased to note that Article 9 of the Convention says that signatories should continue to negotiate in good faith for satisfactory methods of banning the production of chemical weapons.
There is still the problem of new weapons being discovered as scientific progress continues, particularly when we see the use of CS and other gases and their derivatives in these countries. My noble friend possibly was not aware of the fact that CS gas has been used in closed, confined spaces. Less than two years ago the Members of another place unwillingly sampled this product. I believe that the problem of chemical warfare can be reduced in scale, given continuing negotiation. The question of verification and inspection is not easily answered. Methods will require more
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sophistication than those used in the inspection of nuclear and biological warfare. My Lords, in conclusion, I am grateful for the opportunity of adding my support for a Convention on chemical warfare, and I am also grateful to your Lordships for your kindness and forbearance.
4.3 p.m.
LORD WYNNE-JONES: My Lords, it is with pleasure that I am able to congratulate the noble Lord on his maiden speech. He is the son of one who won great distinction and achieved the highest award for gallantry before he was killed in Italy. We are very proud to have the noble Lord here with us; he has demonstrated to us this afternoon the debt that older Members of this House always owe to the younger Members who come along here and are able to keep us fresh. We hope he will continue to enliven our debates and to keep us up to the standards he will set.
I suppose that this afternoon I should be standing "in the dock" because I am a chemist by training. Chemical warfare would not be possible without chemists, so all chemists have some responsibility in this matter; but I would assure your Lordships that although chemists have played their part in developing weapons they have also shown great conscience in analysing the effects. Indeed, much of the publication which has taken place and much of the information which has been produced about the effects of these weapons has come from publicly-spirited chemists who have wanted the world to know about them. It is impossible for anyone who is concerned as a chemist himself to stop the manufacture of these weapons. It is impossible for us, as individual chemists, to stop their use; but we can at least alert the rest of mankind to the perils, and hope that the rest of mankind may take action.
My noble friend Lord Chalfont, in a very interesting speech, has given us in detail some of the effects of chemicals used in warfare. I must admit that I am not myself immediately terrified by chemical weapons. Perhaps when one has worked in a laboratory one has become somewhat used to the effects of these chemicals long before they were treated as weapons. I remember when I was a boy at school learning chemistry—I still have the mark on my finger to remind me—when some white phosphorus

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fell on the bench and, not knowing any better at the time, I swept it off with my hand. I had a burn on this finger which lasted for something like two months. The finger became badly swollen. As our medical colleagues know, white phosphorus being soluble in fat can get through and into the bone. There is a considerable risk that it can do irreparable damage to bones. In other words, these chemicals are very dangerous things; they were dangerous long before they were used as weapons. As weapons, most of them—not all—do not kill any more effectively than do high explosives. One must remember that all weapons of war are designed to kill and all weapons of war are designed to act against the individual; and their effects can be very terrible indeed. So my noble friend Lord Chalfont will forgive me if I do not entirely follow him simply in emphasising these appalling effects.
The right reverend Prelate pointed to another reason for banning these weapons—to me the most important reason. It is their indiscriminate nature. Three years ago we had in this House a debate initiated by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St. Albans. It was on chemical and biological warfare. A number of speeches were made; and I regret that I myself took part in that debate. At that time I suggested—and I hope your Lordships will forgive my referring to this—that the weapons of war which we ought to ban were the indiscriminate weapons, the nuclear weapons, the biological weapons and the chemical weapons. These are the ones which should be banned long before we try to ban war altogether.
Obviously, we should all like to ban war. We cannot do that by any form of ordinary agreement; but we can at least try to ban those weapons which are indiscriminate in their action and are therefore of deadly peril to the whole human race. This is the crucial matter. It is not so much the weapon that kills the particular individual at which it is aimed; it is not merely those used to annihilate armies—these are terrible things but they are legitimate objectives of war. It is against the weapons whose repercussions are unpredictable, the weapons which spread and whose effects are so wide-ranging that all mankind runs a terrible risk, that we, as responsible
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people, should take action in order to stop their use.
It will be argued, as it has always been argued, that we cannot get absolute certainty that such weapons will not be used. My noble friend Lord Chalfont pointed out, rightly, that we must do many things without absolute certainty. It is better to take a risk which at least gives us a hope rather than run a risk that we know will lead to destruction. Therefore, my Lords, we must surely ask Her Majesty's Government—who, I am confident, are anxious to do their best in this matter—to take steps now to see that one more weapon of an indiscriminate nature is banned: nuclear first, then biological and now let us move to the chemical one. So it is with very great pleasure that I support the noble Lord, Lord Chalfont.
4.10 p.m.
LORD SOPER: My Lords I should like immediately to add my felicitations to those already expressed to the noble Lord, Lord Lyell, on his maiden speech, alike for its contents and the prospects which he so hopefully envisaged; and, if he will allow me, I would congratulate him most of all on being a young man in a world of such dubious heritage from some of us elders. I hope very much that his ideals will not be diminished as time goes by, and that he will be able even more effectively to express them in your Lordships' House.
I should have thought, my Lords, that from what ever standpoint this Motion is conceived—and I look at it from the standpoint of a pacifist—it must attract the enthusiastic support in principle of all right-minded people. I hold the conviction that ultimately we have to outlaw war itself, but I am not churlish enough to believe that in a "holier than thou" attitude, we must hold to that general proposition and ignore the various stages by which it may be more effectively attained. Therefore I welcome any move in the general direction of disarmament, and not least in this particular field.
I approach this problem with a curious reflection on the way in which the whole concept of Apocalypse has been transferred from the ecclesiastical to the political and social field. There was a time when the only people who professed to know when the end of the world was

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coming were those who were on a "hot line" to infinity. We were careful enough not precisely to announce the date, but nevertheless we felt that this was a matter in Divine hands. To-day it seems there are not a few who believe that we can do it ourselves without any reference to supernatural aid. Though it is a matter of conjecture, the very fact that this prospect is canvassed is I think of momentous importance, and some of the comforts with which we cosset ourselves seem to me to be singularly free of any substantial merit. It rather reminds me of the octogenarian who, on being asked how he thought he had managed to live so long, said he noticed that if he got through February he always lived to the end of the year. We have got through a number of Februaries, but there is no outworn creed so completely fallacious as the assumption that what has been will necessarily persist. Though I do not regard people like Koestler and Dr. Rotblat as necessarily fifth or sixth writers within the same category as the writers in the New Testament about what is going to happen, I believe there is at least the prospect, the possibility, that we have fast approached a point of no return; and that this is particularly true in the field of chemical warfare.
This particular project also has the advantage of being specifically a project of disarmament in a world where there is still. I think, a fading but still conspicuous belief in the virtues of the balance of power. The present arrangements which have been arrived at in Moscow seem to me to create a balance of power rather than assure any real measure of disarmament. And, historically, balances of power have built into themselves the unfortunate prediction of causing the next general conflagration. For these general reasons, surely it is only right and proper that we should endeavour to diminish the threat which comes to us through these particular weapons, in a world which is altogether too violent anyhow and for that general reason I most heartily support what my noble friend has been saying about chemical warfare.
Yet, my Lords, there seem to me to be two particular areas in which this reference to chemical warfare is suigeneris and not perhaps, if I may break
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a gentle lance with my ecclesiastical friend, on the question of unnecessary suffering. I find myself unable to make much sense of that, for from the standpoint of pure theology it does not seem to me that one can discriminate between the various degrees of evil in an exercise which is in itself intrinsically evil. I was brought up, until I saw the light, on a document called With the Flag to Pretoria. I remember that in that most curious and entrancing document I was invited to believe that there was nothing so wicked as the use of a dum-dum, soft-nosed bullet which caused unnecessary suffering as compared with the hard-nosed bullet with which 'gentlemen from these shores were acquitting themselves so poorly. I do not find that there is any principle in pure theology that distinguishes between, shall we say, a cannon ball and a shrapnel shell. What I do find is that whereas some of the weapons of yesterday could be circumscribed by time, like the flight of an arrow, many of the weapons of to-day arc not so circumscribed and are more accurately described as conditions. It is this to which reference has already been made so eloquently in the debate hitherto. We are confronted in the world of to-day with the kind of weapon which does not cease when its velocity ends and is not complete when its particular objective is achieved, but produces a condition that may last, as my noble friend has said, in some cases in chemical matters permanently—whatever that may mean. But it is for a very long time, anyway. It is this particular characteristic of the chemical weapon that singles it out, as I see it, for particular treatment, and as immediate treatment as is possible.
Furthermore, may I underline what my noble friend has said about the possibility, in this world of anarchic terrorism, of the use of a weapon which may be secreted in a handbag, made of rubber and used as a squirt, to create conditions of general mayhem even as terrible as what happened—and perhaps more terrible—at Lydda airport only last week. If these weapons are created and produced, it is incontestable that they will leak. They will not he confined to the channels of stockpiling they will leak into other hands less able to use them appropriately—if, indeed, anyone can use such weapons appropriately. And

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it is this peril which I think is ever increasing.
May I, without impudence, wonder whether you have come into direct contact with some of these dedicated anarchists. I use the word "dedicated" not too pejoratively because they really believe some of the Communist doctrines, specified by Lenin, on the road to insurrection and of the necessity for violent terror as a necessary midwife of the kind of society which will come by no other means. I sometimes wish that our Communist friends were a little more honest in recognising that this is part of their tactic, and it is perfectly true that it is part of their tactic; that is, idealogically. If that is agreed, then we must not, I think, deny to some of these young men, these Japanese for instance, a sense of dedication and commitment in which a total flight from what we would call reason is accompanied by an equally fervent concept of their duty to the society in which they live, or to its reformation; or indeed, its destruction. I believe this is a continuing evil; it is a continuing threat, and nothing, it seems to me, would make it more easy for this threat to be put into terrible use than the proliferation of the kind of chemical which is now not only under construction, but also is stockpiled in so many places on this earth.
One other fact, my Lords. I am immensely impressed by the argument that, if we or Her Majesty's Government make the excuse of saying that the resistance, the recalcitrance—indeed, the obduracy, of the Soviet Union to any principle of inspection should prohibit our initiation of such projects, in the United Nations or elsewhere, it is perfectly true that in so many respects this particular insistence when not made a matter of ultimate principle has not—as my noble friend has said so eloquently—prevented many an agreement being signed; and so far as we know more or less honestly carried out. It is cynical for me to suggest that perhaps the reason for which Her Majesty's Government hitherto may have been unwilling to take the initiative is that our American allies are, or have been, committed to the use of chemical weapons in South Vietnam; and, so far as I know, are still committed to that use—certainly to the use of napalm, to the use of CS gas and defoliation in its various forms. May it not be that, were we not the
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junior partner in what in this matter is an unholy alliance, we should be freer to make our own contribution to the prospect of general disarmament?
This is a short debate, my Lords, and I do not intend to prolong it by an unduly long speech. I am impressed, as I think your Lordships all are, by the fact that at the moment at which a hostile act has been perpetrated by one of the great super Powers, that same super Power has found it possible, alongside the one against which the act was perpetrated, to enter into consultations and to arrive at agreements. This has lifted a little of the gloom and the cynicism which has rested on so many people's hearts and minds. If we are prepared to embark upon programmes which do not merely recall the past, and deplore it, but take risks in the interests of peace comparable with the risks hitherto taken in the interests of war, then there is a reasonable hope in many hearts and minds to-day, I think, that this is the psychological moment to improve on that and to stimulate and increase that sense of opportunity.
Ultimately what matters is not what happens, but what people think and believe has happened. Ecclesiastically. I believe in salvation by faith as a prelude to salvation by works. That is a good Protestant doctrine, and even Bernard Shaw approved of it. It is a proposition which I think has immense practical value at this moment. I do not believe, with Mr. Nixon, that we have at this moment achieved a breakthrough. But if enough people believe it is a breakthrough, then it will so become. One of the ways in which that belief can be stimulated is by the adventure of Her Majesty's Government in proceeding upon disagreement and turning what at the moment is an acceptance of a balance of power into the prospect of a very real and progressive programme of disarmament. It is for that reason that I most ardently hope that Her Majesty's Government will feel able to sponsor this particular Motion; to make it effective, and to take the risk of saying in the interests of general peace: "We will reject totally and entirely, and invite our friends and our enemies so to do, one of the more ghastly and terrible accompaniments of the programme of violence to which we have been so long committed."
4.23 p.m.
LORD ORR-EWING: My Lords, I should like to add my congratulations to the noble Lord who initiated this debate, and also to the noble Lord who made such a good maiden speech. I feel that it is a very good service that Lord Chalfont has done to this House in initiating a debate at such an appropriate moment on such an important subject. I do not have to repeat, because they were so vividly outlined, the terrible effects of these weapons. I think there would not be one person in your Lordships' House who would not endorse everything that the noble Lord said in opening this debate. I have only one disagreement, and that is on the question of verification. Therefore I should like to pay the greatest attention to that point in the few minutes that I wish to detain the House.
Had I been a member of the Labour Party at the end of the 'fifties I should have been a voracious militant Gaitskellite; and I suspect that the noble Lord would have been, too, if he had not been at that time embracing other professions. I would have "fought, fought and fought again" against Britain taking unilateral action on nuclear disarmament. I have a feeling that if open societies (I like the term the noble Lord used) do not ask for some substantial form of vertification—and I immediately acknowledge that the noble Lord did not take that position; he thought that complete (verification was impossible, but partial verification might be sufficient—then open societies may be unilaterally disarming in an important field of warfare; that is, chemical warfare.
I note that the General Assembly dealt with verification when this matter was discussed. I quote from a Press release dated September 10, 1971, reporting on the General Assembly agenda. It says:
"Verification, which is important, should be based on a combination of national and international measures which would complement and supplement each other and thereby provide an acceptable system that would ensure effective implementation of the prohibition."
That is my view. The noble Lord, Lord Chalfont, said, and I think with some substance, that there were five instances or agreements in the field of disarmament where verification had been less than perfect. I think in the cases of the three or
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four which concern nuclear matters it is true to say that the scientific development of much more sensitive seismic instruments, and to some extent the spies in the sky, have made it easier to verify the maldoers than it was twenty years ago. That is why I supported at that stage this form of disarmament convention in these areas, albeit imperfectly monitored.
The noble Lord said that the U.S.S.R. would never agree. Surely, then, one must be a little suspicious of the motives of the U.S.S.R. if they will never agree to a form of verification against these terrible weapons. After all, they now have a surplus of atomic weapons—there is no question about that—they have a surplus of conventional arms, tanks and other weapons of warfare; they certainly have a substantial surplus even over the United States of America of military trained men and reservists; and in view of the fact that they are undertaking such enormous trouble in training and equipping their troops in Europe against chemical warfare, I suspect that at this moment they have a surplus of chemical weapons as well.
I am sure your Lordships will remember that we suffered grievously, particularly in the naval sphere, from cheating on arms agreements. We had the AngloGerman Naval Agreement in the mid-
'thirties by which Germany agreed that she would never in any circumstances build battleships or capital ships larger than 10,000 tons. It was only discovered at our great cost during the war that the pocket battleships were not of 10,000 tons, but of 26,000 tons. If you can cheat on conventional armaments in a closed society, in a dictatorship, and create great havoc as a result, how much more important that cheating should not be permissible or possible on such vital matters as chemical warfare.
It has been said that in a democracy, with our newspapers and every other means of communication, it is impossible to disobey. I do not raise this with your Lordships in any Party way, but I think one has to remember that 25 years ago Mr. Attlee undertook what I thought was a very courageous and right move in building the first atomic bomb and allotting £100 million of the taxpayers' money to so doing. This was not known to anyone in this country—certainly not

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to anyone on my side of the House, and I suspect not to many on his own side of the House, because otherwise I feel sure that they would not have been fighting that particular Election on "Whose finger on the trigger?" So even in a democracy it was possible fairly recently to undertake clandestine operations of immense complexity and cost. So I say it is easier in a dictatorship, but it is not impossible in a democracy: and we are ready, as the United States are, to allow people to verify whether we are manufacturing and stockpiling chemical weapons. I think it is only reasonable that the U.S.S.R. should do the same.
I think it is worth quoting in this respect, in case there is any misunderstanding about it, the reply of the Parliamentary Secretary to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office to a Question on February 14 in another place, when he said:
"At the same time, it is a fact that this country does not possess, and is not engaged in the production of, these weapons."
The United Kingdom is not—although may be doing some research for defence reasons—manufacturing or stockpiling these weapons. I support the idea that we should have—
LORD CHALFONT: My Lords, I am sorry to interrupt during such a short debate, but is the noble Lord sure that he is talking about chemical weapons in that answer? I believe that refers to biological weapons, and I can assure him that we are manufacturing and stockpiling chemical weapons.
LORD ORR-EWING: My Lords, I am sorry. I can read the whole quotation from Hansard Written Answers, 14/2/72, column 10, by Mr. Royle, the Secretary of State for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. He said:
"…it is our policy to seek an adequately verified prohibition of the possession of chemical weapons."
Then he continued with the piece that I have quoted. If that was inaccurate, I can only say that I have been quoting in good faith.
LORD CHALFONT: My Lords, I simply want to try to put the record straight. There is clearly some misunderstanding. We are not only manufacturing but using CS gas, which is a chemical weapon.
LORD ORR-EWING: My Lords, I do not know what the interpretation would be, but, as he rightly acknowledged, there is a spectrum of chemical weapons, and obviously in this context CS gas is not a lethal weapon: he may have been using the term "chemical weapons" in the context of "killing weapons". But in drawing attention to that, which I thought ought to be put on record, I do not wish in any way to dissociate myself from the desire on this side of the House to pursue an initiative and see whether we can obtain a response. I believe absolutely that discussions of this sort in international assemblies which try to achieve an acceptable degree of verification are highly desirable. I hope that Her Majesty's Government will continue on this tack.
4.32 p.m.
LORD BROCKWAY: My Lords, in view of the fact that this debate must conclude in little more than an hour and that we have six speakers still to address us, many of whom we should like to hear, I have "scrubbed" my speech and I propose only to contribute what I hope may be a constructive conclusion to it. We are now in the situation where the Soviet Union has tabled a draft convention for the abolition of chemical weapons. The response of the Government of the United States has been to suggest exploration of the idea. I regret that so far—and I hope it may be remedied this afternoon—Her Majesty's Government has not only done nothing but has said at Geneva that it is doing nothing. The criticism of the convention introduced by the Soviet Union is that it omits any provision for verification. I should like to draw attention to the fact that the Convention on Biological Weapons did include the final right of inspection. It said that any nation suspecting violation could complain to the Security Council and the Secretary-General would then institute an investigation on the spot. I should like to support the proposal which has been made by my noble friend, Lord Chalfont, that Her Majesty's Government should take the initiative in drafting and putting before the Disarmament Conference a convention which includes a clause similar to that contained in the Convention on Biological Weapons. The Soviet Union accepted such a clause then, and signed it in April. There would seem to be no doubt that the Soviet Union would also

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accept this in a convention dealing with chemical weapons.
I had not intended to say it, but in view of what the noble Lord, Lord Orr-Ewing, has said, I hope very much that the Minister in her reply will clear up this issue. We have had the ex-Minister of Disarmament, who has knowledge, saying to this House that chemical weapons are still being produced and stockpiled in this country. I put a question—I am not sure whether it was to him or to the Ministry of Defence—it was to the noble Lord, Lord Shepherd; and his reply was that in accordance with the provisions of the Convention on Biological Weapons we were not making or stockpiling any chemical weapons. I think it quite possible that there may have been a mistake, either of speech or of recording, which applied this to chemical weapons. I ask the Minister in her reply to clear up this point, because I think it is very doubtful indeed that it is not true. We are still continuing to make chemical weapons and are indeed stockpiling them. The great hope of the Biological Convention was that it was a real act of disarmament. America has already destroyed its anti-personnel biological weapons and has undertaken to destroy within six months all its biological weapons of an anti-crop character. Perhaps the Minister could say whether, if we do still retain chemical weapons and a Convention of this character were agreed upon, we would be prepared to go so far. I hope very much that the Minister will consider the constructive proposal that I have tried to put forward, which seems to me to meet the needs of the present situation.
4.37 p.m.
LORD DAVIES OF LEEK: My Lords, I hope to follow the excellent example given by previous speakers and keep my speech very short. As an introduction I should also like to say how much I enjoyed the maiden speech given this afternoon from the Benches opposite, and how delighted I was to find that we can look forward to further speeches from the noble Lord. They will contribute at least, whatever other views he may have, towards a humanitarian point of view, the armamentarium and the chemistry of war.
I am not now going into this in depth but I intended to quote one or two words from this blue book—Sir Harold Ains
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worth's blue book, which ensued from a request by the late Labour Government to look into the toxicity of CS gas which is now being made and stockpiled. This may be a matter of bandying words and of saying that it is only being used for civil purposes and riots; but this gas and the derivatives from it can be used in wartime. I hope we shall get that matter pompous, but what I am beginning to discover is that here in this House is another Chamber where, without trying to grind our Party axes—we have all ground them so well that there is now no longer any temper in the steel—there is an opportunity to discuss calmly, and I hope without too much bias, these massive problems that are confronting our country, and indeed civilisation itself, at the present moment.
I was delighted to note the philosophic and even metaphysical approach of my noble and dear friend Lord Soper as he compared Bernard Shaw's approach to religion and evolution, and when he said that if we get enough people who believe that President Nixon's visits to the Soviet Union and China have created a breakthrough, then there is no doubt that faith can work wonders. That was the nucleus of Bernard Shaw's phrase "creative evolution". That was the nub. If we can get enough enthusiasm and enough people believing that something is possible then it is possible. if there are scoffers let me say that at one time when this nation was alone, in the days of Dunkirk—and all of us in this House can show the scars and have suffered as a result of the two world wars, either with our families or by ourselves—everything was grey, but we believed in ourselves; we believed that we would win—and at a time when neither America nor the Soviet Union were in the war. We broke through and achieved victory in the end despite the gloom. One may not consider that this is dealing with facts; it is dealing with much more important things: the philosophy of truth and the anatomy of truth. If we believe these things we can break through.
I should like to ask a question which has been so far unanswered. Why is it that in World War II not one person died as a result of chemical warfare? We did not use the impedimenta of chemical warfare in World War II. Why is it that

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mankind has been driven to use these indiscriminate weapons? A bullet kills cleanly, and when there was hand-to-hand fighting it was man against man. It is a terrible phrase to use, but there was a cleanliness about the fighting. There was not the evil salacity that there is about the nuclear destruction of people. People may have seen those who still suffer from radiation in Japan; or, as has been nobly expressed to-day, people may have seen the results of napalm (and the right reverend Prelate described this) on a child in Vietnam. Unless they are inhuman, people could not help but at least concentrate their efforts in trying to prevent the use of chemical warfare.
I am glad that napalm as such was mentioned. Chemical warfare has brought a new dimension to war. It may be that because it does not destroy property it is looked upon by some with a certain amount of respect. There are some people who may not know it and subconsciously they believe that the destruction of property is a greater sin than the destruction of life. I have no time to go into this matter, but why is there the use of chemical warfare now when, after the 1925 Geneva protocol, we refused to use it? In 1968 the United States of America demanded the retention of herbicides and some chemical warfare usages. They were supported only by Australia and Portugal. Portugal supported them because they are using chemical warfare in Angola. That is one of the silent wars of the world that nobody bothers to write about. We have had many constructive approaches to the limitation of chemical warfare, and I was delighted that my noble friend who initiated this debate quoted the Stockholm research. I am glad that he said, "Do not let us have another group of scientists looking into this." This has been going on for 20 years; we have six volumes—and my noble friend quoted from one of them—which have been produced by the Institute for Peaceful Research in Stockholm. There are many who are qualified in chemistry in this House, and we have had the pleasure of listening to an ex-professor who had a chair in this subject. In the six volumes there are suggestions as to how we may find a method of verifying our approach to the limitation of chemical warfare.
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I would not like to sit down without mentioning what I consider to be the most evil of all chemical warfare which was developed on the greatest equation in the world: radioactivity. Here we have something—again a new dimension—where the weapon destroys the unborn because of the genetic effect. I remember that the Lancet published a marvellous verse which was rather cyncial and horrible. An expert on the genetic effects of radioactivity wrote a piece of doggerel:
"The nuclear boffins, God bless them all!
Have calculated the fall-out to a decimal,
But my nephew and niece,
Have five legs a-piece,
And their intellect's infinitesimal."
That was rather a gruesome way of describing the genetic effect upon the unborn. When I was in Tonga some two years ago I came across a professor of zoology who had been working on the Japanese research ships that are still studying radioactivity in the Pacific Ocean. Oriental man has nothing to thank the Occident for in using his ocean as an experimental area for exploding bombs. I am glad that this nation, with both Conservative and Labour Governments, has taken some initiatives in a breakthrough in a ban on testing. Irrespective of to whom we give the credit, the British people can claim there a breakthrough.
Filially, I want to say one word about herbicides. I do not think that 99 per cent. of people who talk about herbicides know the territological effects of herbicides: I am referring to the genetic effects. Some 6 million acres of territory in Vietnam have been devastated. It will take generations to grow the forests and the crops. Soil has been eroded; people who drink the water from parts of this area are producing children that show these territological effects upon their births. This is against God himself. Without being too sentimental or emotional about it, although we in Britain as a great Power no longer have the great Empire, there is another greater empire and that is to try to dominate a part of the empire of upright, human and humanitarian thinking. I should like to think that whether we go into the Common Market or not we shall keep the lead in protesting about the use of these indiscriminate weapons in modern war. Consequently, I want to thank my noble friend for having raised this interesting debate to-day. My only

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wish is that we could have a couple of days to discuss this vital problem.
4.49 p.m.
LORD RITCHIE-CALDER: My Lords, I want to add to what has already been said in welcoming to the House the noble Lord, Lord Lyell, and say how much I appreciated the sentiments that he expressed. In wholeheartedly supporting my noble friend's Motion, I intend to confine myself to discussing the nature of these weapons. It is important that we should say what we mean and mean what we say. It is far too easy to find excuses or make exceptions which in fact would make a nonsense of any convention. I do not want to be recriminatory, and I speak with the greatest of sympathy for my noble friends, Lord Chalfont and Lord Shepherd, when I recall the difficulties that we had in this House over the use of CS gas. The fact that we were trapped by our own predicament at that moment was a dilemma not only stupid but hypocritical.
The fact was that the British refinement of CS was being used as a military weapon in Vietnam for purposes of death-dealing in lethal concentrations in the case of bunkers where people did die of CS gas, or to force people out to be shot down by gunfire. At that time it was quite clear—and I think all of us now admit it—that this was against the Geneva Protocol to which we were signatories, even if the Americans were not. But we could not condemn the military use because we were reserving it, or indeed using it, if you like, in reduced concentrations, as a tear gas in civil disturbances. So we had the not very creditable attempt, if I may say so, to define it as a smoke and not as a gas. What I am really saying is: do not let us get caught with the gobbledygook of this thing, because these things are damnable, and we might as well be quite clear of the categories of what we are talking about, and not find escape hatches or redefinitions and call the thing "smoke" when we know that it is gas, or whatever it is.
While I applauded the initiative of the Labour Government in dealing with biological weapons and getting it discussed at the Disarmament Conference, and indeed ultimately in the area in which we have secured the agreement to renounce
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these weapons, I regretted the separation of biological and chemical weapons. I think I was possibly wrong. Probably you have to accept the stark politics that if you do separate, as we did, the biological from the chemical then perhaps progressively you can get agreement. But biological in my terminology, and I think also in the terminology of anyone who handles such words, is certainly not confined to bacteriology or the generation of man-made epidemics. It should include the defoliants which act through the biology of the plants and which we know, to our dismay and disgust, as my noble friend has just said, have destroyed forests and food plants in Vietnam over 6 million acres.
Let me just point out what I am trying to emphasise here. Two types of defoliant, 2,4D and 2,45T, accelerate the process of Nature (which is why they are called biological), and indeed produce the equivalent of a plant cancer. It is like the indiscriminate use of the selective hormone weed killers that we use on our lawns, but that are disastrous wholesale. Another of these defoliants is an organic arsenic-containing compound which was used to destroy elephant grass and rice. It is manifestly toxic to humans and to animals because it is consumed in foodstuffs, water and milk. Let me point out what my noble friend Lord Davies of Leek was saying: that the deferred, and indeed transferred, effects of these can be enormously dangerous. It is not just the immediate effects that are relevant. For 2,45T not only persists in the soil, in its existing form, damaging though that is, but is transformed into other compounds which are toxic to plants in subsequent generations. Another herbicide destroys the humus in the soil and reduces it over vast areas to an impervious desert laterite. You have not only destroyed the plants at present, as of now, the things supposed to be hiding the people you are looking for; you in fact turn an area into a deliberately conceived desert, and positively non-regenerative—an irreversible process. Let us ensure that somewhere between biological and chemical we do not overlook this kind of ecological destruction. I would follow the right reverend Prelate in his point about napalm. If we get these things simply reduced or redefined or recategorised, we shall find ourselves with

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whole areas in which we have overlooked some of the most damnable things we are talking about.
In the vocabulary of chemical warfare we have a wonderful—I repeat, wonderful—classification: G-Agents, blood and nettle gases, vomiting and choking gases, lachrymators, tear gases, and vesicants. The G-Agents, to which my noble friend Lord Chalfont referred (and I will not enlarge on them), are the nerve gases which were stockpiled, but never used, by the Germans. In fact, there were 12,000 tons of one such gas. As has been pointed out, these gases were not used in the war—not even by the Germans. I may add here, just in case anyone has any misunderstanding about this, that both sides were quite prepared; they had stockpiles to use. But in fact they were not used. In spite of the enemy we were up against, because of the horrible nature of these things and the conscience we had about them we did not use them. Since the German agents, tarun, sarin and soman, which were very powerful, were developed during the war, human ingenuity has produced even more devilish forms of nerve gases, including the V-gases, which I may point out were a British discovery round about 1955. The V-agents are a refinement of the G-gases. An invisible fraction, as Lord Chalfont has pointed out, about 5 milligrammes, of one of these on the skin is fatal. I just want to reinforce what he says: that these agents have a tremendously powerful effect in a very tiny concentration.
In the sick humour of American chemical warfare we have what are called "off the rocker" and "on the floor" agents—a jocose way of describing psychochemicals which unhinge people's minds and the paralysers. And, of course, if the people affected will not stay on the floor, there are lethal gases to make sure they do. The psychochemicals include psychodelics such as LSD, which, in the euphemism of the literature, "expands consciousness" or "enriches the mind and expands the vision". Whatever it is, the agent is supposed to make you incapable of seeing the target you are aiming at. The trouble with such agents, as has been demonstrated in their "below the counter" use in Vietnam, is that one's own troops become the addicts. So it has a back-kick effect.
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There are such drugs to produce hallucinations and also massive brain-washing which makes soldiers incapable of obeying orders and compel them to submit. The difficulty is that not all people respond to the psychotropic drugs in the same way, and it is possible by them to induce positive homicidal tendencies: in fact, you make more vicious soldiers and enemies out of the very people you are trying to reduce. Therefore it is not a very good idea to use such drugs. But then, all army and military people will agree that these are in any circumstances very inefficient weapons.
But what we have really to beware of—and this is the point that I particularly want to emphasise—is that such drugs, psychodelics, psychotropics, hallucinators, and tranquillisers, are drugs which are described as "humane". Humane, my Lords! They do not kill outright but they may have permanent mental and emotional effects. Pro. tem., they are supposed to quieten people into submission. I warn your Lordships that we may have specious arguments (one has waited for them and in fact they have been used in America already) for their uses in a civil disturbance—riot quellers. My Lords, imagine the mass use of something like LSD!
The Motion, with my approval, seeks to ban possession, production and stockpiling. Possession includes, I hope, testing. That, too, comes under circumspection; not inspection but circumspection. We shall have difficulty with that because it is contended that if you are to protect yourself from "the other fellow" you have to think up the kind of thing that he is thinking, in order that you protect yourself against the kind of thing he may be thinking about. And of course you turn up things he never thought of; and then we are on the old treadmill again and we are in fact creating new weapons, chemical and biological.
Production and stockpiling produce persistent hazards, a long way short of their deliberate use in war. The trouble is that these weapons are difficult to dispose of. If a chemist puts a great deal of ingenuity into constructing a molecule of such devilishness it takes as much effort, and maybe as much money, to unstitch those molecules and render them safe. That is what we saw two years ago

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in the United States of America, when they had all those tons of leaking poison gases. In order to get rid of the damaged or leaking weapons—and they were weapons—the Americans had to ship them across the continent at great hazard and dump them, without the permission of anyone but themselves, in our oceans off the Bahamas. This was because there was no way in which these weapons could be disposed of with safety anywhere near their own people.
I want to reinforce what has been said about the danger of urban guerrillas getting access to these things. Let us determine as a nation, looking to no one else—and in this case I believe there is a great demand on us to be unilateral in our convictions—and through the international initiatives that we as a nation promote, that we shall get rid of these things. The Geneva Protocol was until recent times a pretty effective deterrent. The fact is that the Americans were not signatories. It was accepted and to some extent controlled our behaviour, and became "customary international law" even among those who did not ratify or who, like ourselves, insisted on reciprocation—in other words, the right to use it if the other fellow did. I sincerely believe—and I do not think I am entirely naïve—that at this moment in time (and I accept what my noble friend said about the Stockholm Conference at least expressing the profound concern that all of us ought to have, and that apparently many people do have, about the totality of our environment), no matter where this mischief is let loose it is in the ultimate a threat to our total environment and—much worse—a threat to our whole moral attitude towards the future of mankind.
5.3 p.m.
LORD ARWYN: My Lords, time is running out and I must be brief, but I hope there will be time enough to support my noble friend Lord Chalfont in his appeal to call the attention of the Government to the urgent need for an international convention prohibiting the possession, production and stockpiling of chemical weapons. The Germans in the First World War were the real instigators of this terrible use of poison, which until then had been banned during the whole history of warfare. I think that any move to establish the prohibition of any
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form of chemical warfare should have strong support from the Germans of today, so many of whom are aware of the sins of their fathers and would welcome an opportunity to refute any connection with the older generations' horrifying attitudes in the First War.
My Lords, those few of us left who experienced the early gas attacks, and later, mustard gas, can never obliterate from our memories those gruesome spectacles of our close friends and comrades dying in such terrifying agony. I was lucky; I made sure that I had an efficient gas mask. I had a greater awareness of danger than many because before I joined the Army I was a mining student. I was more aware of lethal gases and their consequences than were other people, but the small dose I had was sufficient to generate bronchial trouble for over fifty years. In modern chemical warfare there would be no "small doses".
We should know from experience that it will take years for some of the countries to agree to independent inspection of the various kinds of weaponry, but if the majority of the other countries in the world agree to prohibit the manufacture of these terrible chemical weapons the others will be put in an awkward spot and world opinion will be against them. They will be labelled as deliberate dissenters. Therefore I think it is up to the Government and to the members of NATO to start the ball rolling. Those of us who have had actual experience of this type of horror are becoming almost extinct. All my old comrades who suffered are dead and their voices cannot be heard. It is the duty of everyone, and especially of the few of us who are left who have had the experience, to support and campaign with all our strength for action by the Government in view of the urgency of the matter, as emphasised by my noble friend Lord Chalfont and other speakers. This danger must be treated as one of the very first priorities or else we shall be in danger of the terrible horrors catalogued by my noble friend Lord Ritchie-Calder.
5.6 p.m.
LORD SHEPHERD: My Lords, I should like first to add my congratulations to the noble Lord, Lord Lyell, on his maiden speech. I hope that he will take it as being of some significance from one of the few hereditary Peers

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who have the pleasure of sitting on this side of the House, to a new hereditary Peer, when I express the hope that he will find as much comfort and, I hope, success as I like to feel that I have found in your Lordships' House.
I should like to congratulate my noble friend on his success in the ballot and also for raising this very important subject. In many respects the subject is so complex that if it were properly dealt with it would need a much longer period of time. I hope that with the experience of this debate, and bearing in mind the importance of the subject, it may be possible through the usual channels in the next Session to get a full afternoon in which to debate this very important matter. I say this particularly to the noble Baroness who is to reply. I promise that I will be as short as I can possibly be in order to give her ample time to reply, because when I had to deal with this matter in 1969 I spoke for 45 minutes, and I well remember throwing out mountains of material that had been provided, and even then I believe that I did not deal with all the questions that had been raised.
I agree with my noble friend Lord Chalfont about these evil weapons and the urgency for the States of this world to reach an early convention, not only for the abolition of the use of these weapons but also for their final destruction. The only difficulty in regard to their destruction is that we shall never he able to remove from our scientists and technologists the knowledge and the capability of making these weapons, since much of the material that is used in them is also used in civil industrial products. I agree with my noble friend that verification is of great importance, but as I said in the debate in 1969, when we were dealing with biological weapons, if we were to insist on verification as it is understood in the military sense, then the real chances of progress would be remote, if not impossible. Therefore, when one is at a point of decision, one must seek to take a balance on the risk of whether the extent of verification is sufficient. Clearly, in the case of biological weapons the Government—the Labour Government and the Conservative Government—felt that what had been done was right, since the Conservative Government signed that Convention.
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My Lords, in regard to this country and chemical weapons, I have looked up my own words in that debate. I hope that in the not too far distant future some noble Lords on this side of the House will be over there on the Government Front Bench and will be called upon to reply and therefore it is not merely for consistency's sake that I speak in this way. I did say on that occasion:
"We do not manufacture or stockpile chemical weapons ourselves",
but I think that if one took that speech as a whole one would recognise that Her Majesty's Government did possess CS gas. I accept that it is a chemical weapon but it was not being treated in the terms of the Geneva Protocol. That is where the difficulty may have arisen and one should make it quite clear because of the way in which the news media may well use what was said by my noble friend. If it were accepted in that way, then what I say and what other Ministers have said and what present Ministers are saying could be in dispute. I then went on in that speech to refer to the evidence that was given by the Defence Secretary, Mr. Denis Healey, in the Select Committee on Science and Technology in July, 1968. If my memory is right—and I say this to my noble friend Lord Chalfont—I think I spoke on his behalf on that occasion because he was out of the country. To the best of my knowledge, my noble friend never corrected me upon the accuracy of what I said in this House and, in particular, in reply to my noble friend Lord Brockway.
My Lords, the question of verification is very difficult indeed. For ourselves, who do not possess these weapons, then of course the matter is relatively easy. I see our role at these conferences, therefore, if I may say so to the noble Baroness, Lady Tweedsmuir, as a friendly and leading ally with the United States, using our influence, our experience and our ingenuity in trying to bridge the gap. One must understand the United States' view, because chemical weapons are not on their own; they are an integral part; they in fact stand side by side with nuclear weapons. Therefore one can understand the United States Government's view that if they arc to disarm in nuclear weapons and in chemical weapons there should he a reciprocal

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reduction by the Soviet Union. Therefore I see our role in the Geneva Committee as that of seeking to bridge the gap between these two sides, using all our ingenuity and recognising the great difficulties with which both the Soviet Government and the United States Government are confronted.
My noble friend referred to the stockpiles of the United States. I do not think this is any secret, but I remember seeing not so long ago a paper to the effect that the Soviet Union's possible stockpile is some seven or ten times greater than that of the United States. Perhaps, therefore, a move in this direction may for the Soviet Union be of even greater difficulty than for the United States. I hope that we shall use our ingenuity and our experience at this Conference. But I am bound to say to the noble Baroness that we on this side of the House do not think that Her Majesty's Government attach the same degree of importance to the whole field of disarmament as we on this side of the House wish to see them have. I do not think it is just a question of lack of interest; I have a feeling that it is not quite as high on their list of priorities as it should be. I well remember in the Defence Debate of this year—or was it last year?—that I was rather critical of the Government White Paper on Defence. It had a passing reference to disarmament, and on not one occasion in the speech that was delivered by the noble Lord, Lord Carrington, the Minister of Defence, did he use the word "disarmament".
The point I would put to the noble Lady is this: that overseas Governments look with great attention at what is said and also at the personal influence of Ministers. The noble Lady went to the UNCTAD Conference the other day. She represented Her Majesty's Government and, if my memory is right, it was only within a few weeks, if not days. of her taking up her office in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. She was there for only a very brief time. That we all understand, and I do not criticise her, but it was misunderstood by those at that Conference. They felt that Her Majesty's Government, the Ministers, did not have a real feeling towards that Conference. It is no good just going there and making speeches. The real work, the real gain, is made by the personal contact in the
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corridors, in the tea-rooms, even over a glass of whisky. I hope, therefore, that the Government will recognise that it is not just what is said or what is intended but it is by showing a real, personal and continuing interest in the subject that the two sides are in the end brought together.
My Lords, I cannot help but feel that in the Committee on Disarmament there has not been quite the same attention at ministerial level as there was during the period of Labour Government, particularly when my noble friend Lord Chalfont was Minister with special responsibility for disarmament, and also my friend Mr. Mulley. It may be that officials can deliver the thoughts of Her Majesty's Government, but if there is to be any significance in it those words are best delivered by the political masters or mistresses—Ministers like the noble Baroness. So I hope that the Government will feel that Ministers ought to attend these meetings much more often.
My noble friend Lord Chalfont quoted a particular phrase—I think an unfortunate phrase—of Mr. Hainworth, when he said that the British Government had come with no decisions and no proposals. My Lords, I do not believe that the noble Baroness would have accepted that in her speech if it had been given by an official. Quite rightly it would have been cut out. That being read clearly shows that Her Majesty's Government really have very little interest in the subject, have given very little thought to it and have, therefore, very little to contribute. I do not believe that to be the case. So I do come back to my plea to Her Majesty's Government that at these Conferences, where good can be done by personal contact, Ministers should be present and remain there for sufficient time for good to come as a consequence of it.
My Lords, I hope that the Government will accept what my noble friend has said, that there is a real case of urgency in this matter. Proliferation is possible. I do not know how far these weapons are to-day possessed outside the United States or the Soviet Union. Possessed they may be, but whether they can be delivered is another matter. But with the passing of time—and I fear with tensions increasing as opposed to decreasing—I hope that the Government will recognise that these weapons could

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spread and that the best way of preventing that is to give assurance to the Medium-sized countries (because these are the countries which are more likely to acquire these weapons) that if there is a convention in existence and all their neighbours are signatories to it, and if there is a degree of verification (this verification perhaps under the Secretary-General of the United Nations) then their chances of finding a neighbour possessing weapons which they have denied to themselves, are infinitely remote. I think this is the way in which the proliferation of these weapons can be prevented.
Therefore, there is a real case of urgency. I hope that this will be the watchword of Her Majesty's Government in this field. If it is not, I hope that the noble Baroness will take from this House this message, because I believe this is the spirit of the House, certainly of the debate of 1969, that this is a matter of urgency; that it is the responsibility of Her Majesty's Government to take initiatives, and, even if they are rebuffed, to continue to take initiatives to seek ways and means of bringing the two big Powers together in order to bring about an international convention to abolish these dreadful and evil weapons, which in turn perhaps would lead us to another convention which may ultimately lead to the abolition of all offensive weapons.
5.22 p.m.
THE MINISTER OF STATE, FOREIGN AND COMMONWEALTH OFFICE (BARONESS TWEEDSMUIR OF BELIIELVIE): My Lords, I am sure that we are all very glad that the noble Lord, Lord Chalfont, has raised what is without doubt a very important subject, and we know that he has himself made notable contributions to the work of arms control and disarmament. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Shepherd, that there has been a feeling throughout this House of the urgency of the matter under discussion. First, may I join with all those noble Lords who have congratulated my noble friend on his maiden speech. It gives me particular pleasure to do so because, of course, he is a fellow Scot, and I am very glad that he should choose what is a difficult and complex debate but one which I think arouses a great deal of human anxiety. May I
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say that I hope he will often contribute to our discussions, and it is particularly good that he should have spoken on this particular matter.
In calling your Lordships' attention, as the noble Lord, Lord Chalfont, did, to the urgent need for an international convention to prohibit the possession, production and stockpiling of chemical weapons in all countries, I think the House will agree that he gave us a very chilling description of some of the substances that are now in use. I felt it was rather impressive, too, that the noble Lord, Lord Arwyn, has still survived to be able to tell us of his personal experiences in gas warfare. It of course gives the Government an opportunity to try to describe to the House the problems that are before us in seeking this convention, and the methods by which we believe we can get some lasting progress. I had the honour to attend the signing of the Biological Weapons Convention, which was about two months ago, although, of course, all the work on this had been done by my noble friend Lord Lothian. I should just like to say to the noble Lord, Lord Shepherd, that my noble friend must have attended the conference on the subject at least five times, and now that the responsibility has been taken over by my right honourable friend the Minister of State in another place, he has already visited the Conference in Geneva. I should like it to be made clear that the Government share the concern of the House as a whole, but at the same time we must realise what are the kinds of problems that we have to face.
The Biological Weapons Convention carries a commitment to continue negotiations in good faith for a ban on the possession of chemical weapons, and we accept that commitment. For over forty years we have had a ban on the use of chemical weapons resting upon the 1925 Geneva Protocol. By trying to ban the possession of chemical weapons, we shall, of course, remove the power to retaliate in kind. Therefore, we have to ensure that all States will have adequate confidence that there is no likelihood of concealed stockpiles being kept or of secret production being undertaken. Because, my Lords, however much we may care about the horrors of contemporary chemical weapons, they are a military reality. We know that the Soviet Union

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possesses a very considerable chemical warfare capability, and although they are very reticent on the subject they have never denied that they have these weapons. The United States also has these weapons, and they consider that they should continue to keep a retaliatory capability as a deterrent against chemical attack. But I think it should also be said that since 1969 the United States Army has not acquired or produced any lethal or incapacitating biological or chemical warfare agents other than in research quantities. I think we should be aware in this House that this gesture has yet to be matched by the Soviet Union.
As was said clearly in an exchange across the Floor of the House, the United Kingdom does not possess any stocks of lethal chemical weapons of its own. We did in fact hold a retaliatory capability during the Second World War, as did the other principal Allied Powers, and we believe it did in fact deter the enemy at that time from starting gas warfare, but we allowed this retaliatory capability to lapse in the 1950s.
I was asked specifically by the noble Lords, Lord Chalfont, Lord Shepherd and Lord Brockway, whether in fact we have any chemical weapons as such. The answer as given in another place was perfectly correct, but, of course, it did not include the riot control agent CS, which has been referred to by several noble Lords, which we do manufacture and stockpile in, I am happy to say, relatively small quantities.
LORD BROCKWAY: My Lords, is the noble Baroness able to confirm the statement that Great Britain has no chemical weapons for war purposes other than CS gas? That is the only weapon we have?
BARONESS TWEEDSMUIR OF BELHELVIE: My Lords, that is exactly what I was trying to make clear to the House. We do not have, we do not make, or produce, or stockpile lethal chemical weapons. The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Chichester asked me about the whole question of napalm and why it was not being considered at this particular conference in the Committee on Disarmament. I listened to what he said with very great interest. It has not been included. It is considered an incendiary device. However, the United Nations
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Secretary-General is engaged in a separate study of napalm in the context of what has been called by some noble Lords, "causing unnecessary suffering," and when this is completed, we shall of course see whether there is anything practical that can be done.
There was also a point raised, I think by the noble Lord, Lord Ritchie-Calder, about defoliants. We do not possess these weapons at all ourselves, and I understand that the United States has phased out the use of anti-crop weapons in Vietnam. It is of course common knowledge that any country with a modern chemical industry can produce chemical weapons, quite possibly in conditions of secrecy. This will be very well known to the chemist in our ranks, the noble Lord, Lord Wynne-Jones. Therefore the technical problems in reaching agreement on the CW Convention—if I may call it by its initials as it takes so much less time—are very difficult indeed.
One also has to consider the need to define the chemical agents which are relevant to chemical warfare on which controls are needed, and those chemical agents and their manufacturing processes which could be converted to chemical weapon production, although they are relevant also to peaceful industrial and medical activities. Therefore we have to consider not only the agents but the industrial processes which could be relevant to a ban on CW. When these have been identified we have to consider three main things: how to give assurances that the production and possession of chemical weapons has been completely stopped; how to place obstacles in the way of a secret programme of CW rearmament which would make it both difficult and expensive; and, thirdly, how to give early warning of any unlawful production or possession of CW.
These questions involve a careful examination of the processes involved in the production programme and a practical system of verification to which many noble Lords in particular have referred. My noble friend Lord Orr-Ewing suggested some of the technical processes which might help verification and we have had suggestions for satellite observation, remote sensors, exchanges of economic and other data, but we have not yet reached agreement on how these

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systems could work or whether they would give what is a very necessary assurance. If we do achieve a system of verification of a ban on CW we have to devise an effective and acceptable system for its enforcement and the protection of those who observe it in good faith.
It was for this reason, despite what has been said about it, that we have called for a meeting of experts on these difficult technical questions next month. The noble Lord, Lord Chalfont, said, "Surely everything is already known ", and this was echoed by the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Leek. But as I understand it the work of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute did not deal in adequate detail with the methods of verification of chemical disarmament. They reviewed the various possibilities and suggested those which might appear promising, but it is the detailed examination of some of these verification possibilities which we feel needs the attention of experts on a matter of such vital importance, particularly, if I may say so, to this country which tries to observe any undertaking which it gives. During this meeting of experts we hope to continue discussion on how to define the classes of the most dangerous and lethal agents that we could ban. We also expect to put a Paper to this meeting which will examine in detail some aspects of surveillance. This is in order to identify which technical methods would offer practical control and verification.
Of course, one of the essential matters that we still have to do in this meeting is to ensure a wide enough acceptance by the Soviet bloc as well as by the West of the need for really adequate verification methods. The noble Lord, Lord Soper, said, "Why do we not take a risk?", and I thought, if I may say so, that that question was rather echoed by the noble Lord who opened this debate. But as I knew that he was such an expert on these matters, I looked up some of the matters which he has raised on the subject of verification and I note that the noble Lord, Lord Chalfont, said as recently as April 30, 1970:
"Before we can decide on what represents an adequate level of certainty in a particular case we must know what reliance we can place on the technical methods of verification available to us."
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I can only say that I entirely agree with that remark, and this is what we are trying to do. We consider that the Working Paper tabled by the United States delegation in Geneva on March 20 has shown a great many detailed questions that still need to be resolved, particularly as regards the definition of what chemical substances can and should be banned.
There are two main possibilities. First, we should perhaps try to cover all possible CW agents in a comprehensive ban. That would be very difficult because some chemicals that have lethal properties in war, chlorine and phosgene for instance, are also of basic importance in industry and civilian life, which is why the subject is of such interest to laymen. The alternative is to concentrate on the extremely lethal or super toxic agents, as the Swedes call them, which are primarily the nerve gases. But there does arise the question of where to draw the line, what degree of toxicity has to be regarded as the lower limit. And there is also the complication of the binary weapon, which, as the House knows, is a weapon in which two non-lethal chemical substances arc combined at the final stage of delivery to form a toxic gas. The Swedish Government have strongly favoured the second approach and we think the Americans seem inclined also to follow this line. We believe that that may offer a practical solution, and we are therefore making a careful study of this matter; but I take the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Chalfont, when he said, "Do not fall for the partial approach".
My Lords, a week after the presentation of the American work programme the Soviet Union and its allies tabled a draft convention which reproduced almost exactly the provisions of the BW Convention. We thought it necessary to criticise the Soviet draft on the grounds that it does not offer an adequate basis for negotiation. The noble Lord, Lord Brockway, seemed rather keen on this draft, but we felt that it was inadequate for two main reasons: first, it does not deal with the identification and definition of the relevant chemical agents and their production processes and. secondly, is intended to be a proposal for a comprehensive prohibition; but it contains practically no proposal for the necessary security assurances and in essence reverts to the

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1968 position. The Soviet Union claims that we can deal with CW in the same way as BW. The noble Lord, Lord Chalfont, will know why we decided that it was not possible to deal with it in exactly the same way.
As Ambassador Hainworth has been so much quoted in this debate I feel it only fair to point out what was said on this matter in his speech. He said that if you looked at the Soviet draft, because of the special nature of biological weapons and the current stage of their development and deployment it was possible to conclude an agreement immediately banning their production and stockpiling without any verification, and it was possible in the unique case of biological weapons to rely on the complaints procedure to deter any would-be violators. But a complaints procedure is not verification, nor is there provision for consultation between States. That is exactly what was said by the Swedish representative, Mrs. Myrdal.
I know that the noble Lord has to have two minutes in which to reply to this debate. Therefore I would only say in conclusion that we have not ourselves put forward proposals because we feel that we must do this detailed work first. This is the approach supported by the Western members and by some of the leading non-aligned countries. We shall go on trying, with great patience and with persistence to try and reach an agreement which is acceptable to all concerned.
5.40 p.m.
LORD CHALFONT: My Lords, very briefly, with the leave of the House, I wish to express my gratitude for the chance to initiate this debate. I congratulate the maiden speaker on a speech which was brief, good-humoured and impressively well-informed. May I also thank all other noble Lords for the interest which they have shown in this important subject. I should like to apologise if, perhaps in an excessive search for accuracy, I created any confusion in the minds of your Lordships about chemical weapons in this country. I am of course fully aware that we do not manufacture lethal chemical weapons. In conclusion, I should like to thank the noble Baroness for the courtesy and fullness of her reply in a comparatively short space of time, and to express my good
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wishes to her and to the delegation in Geneva for their future success. My Lords, I beg leave to withdraw my Motion.
Motion for Papers, by leave, withdrawn.

OIL AND NATURAL GAS: RETURNS AND DEVELOPMENT
5.41 p.m.
LORD BALOGH LORD BALOGH rose to call attention to the failure of Her Majesty's Government to assure the maximum benefit for the country from the discovery of oil and natural gas in and around the British Continental Shelf; and to move for Papers. The noble Lord said: My Lords, the discovery of oil and gas in our part of the Continental Shelf has certainly been a dramatic turn of events. After sixty years of unsuccessful search, and after the discovery of the Gröningen field in Holland, we have at last succeeded in discovering oil and gas in vast quantities in our part of the Continental Shelf. In order to give your Lordships an idea of the quantities and the values involved, I must beg for some patience. It is a dreary subject, but a very important one. Also, I must point out that the estimates are still growing daily so far as natural gas is concerned, enormously enhanced by the new fact that gas will be produced not merely as a primary production from the gasfields in the South, but also as an ancillary effect of the working of the oilfields themselves. Indeed, it is probable that these discoveries might be of the same order of magnitude as the gasfields in the South.
The estimates for the gasfields have been improving from year to year. In 1965–66, they amounted to between 1,000 million and 1,500 million cubic feet per day. That was then somewhere between one-third and one-half of the gas consumption. The output is now estimated at 4,000 million cubic feet per day assured, and it is likely to rise to 6,000 million cubic feet per day or more, especially if the gas from the Norwegian gasfields, from the Ekofisk and the ancillary fields there, also has to be landed in Britain. This under-estimate of the gas discovery is vitally important, because at the lower level the gas could have been sold on the domestic market for cooking and heating, whereas at the

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higher level, and especially at the future higher level the gas must be sold in mass markets. The figure of 6,000 million cubic feet per day is equivalent to some 80 million tons of coal and its value, at the most recently fixed price of 1½p per therm, is some £300 million per annum, which is equivalent to £6,000 million over the estimated life of the field. I must say that I think these estimates about the life of the field are generally under-estimates. As I shall show, this has been proved not only here but in other parts of the world.
The oil discovery is even more startling. British Petroleum, according to the Sunday Times of May 14, 1972, puts the likely production in the 1980s at 150 million tons per annum. Philips has made a somewhat lower estimate of 100 million tons, and the Department, as usual, has filed lower figures, and these departmental figures must be strictly disregarded. On the other estimates that I have quoted the discovery is worth between £800 million and £1,200 million per annum at present prices, but if the Middle Eastern countries continue to squeeze us they will be worth proportionately more. Taking a duration of 20 years, which is a conservative estimate, we are here concerned with a total natural resource of between £16,000 million and £24,000 million. All experience suggests, moreover, that gas and oil fields of this importance grow rather than diminish when they are explored. That was the case in Texas, in Louisiana, in Venezuela and in the Arab countries.
These totals need to be put in perspective. In 1971, our total imports of oil amounted to 108 million tons; that is to say, just above the figure given by Philips and somewhat below the figure given by B.P. They were valued at £960 million. That represented one-ninth of our total imports, and there was a troublesome high rate of increase in oil imports. It is therefore not astonishing that a colossal hubbub and hullabaloo followed, especially in the popular Press, even though the Department and the oil companies for a very long time played it not merely cool but frozen. There has been much written about the bonanzas under the sea; about the Eldorados about to be opened for Britain, but more especially for Scotland.
The B.B.C. showed a television programme about three weeks ago—and a very misleading picture it gave, too. They are at it again to-night. The extraordinary physical feats of rigs moving about and withstanding fearful seas in the mist-covered wastes of the North Atlantic: who can find a better theme to glorify? The dangers to which the men on the seas are exposed obviously made punctilious analysis of the consequences distasteful. Yet little, if any, effect, save for land speculators in Aberdeen, followed; and until very recently—perhaps stimulated to some extent by my persistence in asking troublesome Questions in this House—very little attention was paid to the ways and means by which the treasure would be handled by the Government, and to the advantages which would be reaped by this country.
What, then, are the ways by which this country can benefit? There are three distinct ways of gaining. In the first place, there is a possibility of securing a cheaper price for energy than our competitors. This would be of very great help indeed to energy-intensive industries, for these mostly heavy industries have been suffering from grave competitive pressures from abroad. Secondly, there is the benefit to the British taxpayer through payments of taxes and royalties, or through the direct participation of the State or some public sector board in the operation and in its profits. All this would be the more important as it would represent, if home-produced oil were substituted for oil produced abroad, and if the value of the oil remained at home and was not remitted abroad, a great saving in the balance of payments, which is under constant threat. Thirdly, and finally, there could be benefits from secondary activities directly or indirectly caused by the discovery and landing in Britain of oil and gas, either to sustain the production of oil through building rigs, oil pipes, and supplying the needs of everybody manning the oil rigs, or as cheap raw material for the first category; that is to say, in order to make prices in the petrochemical industries cheaper.
So far as the first of these gains is concerned—cheap price—we can rule out oil, except, perhaps, for those local regions like Aberdeen. which might benefit from a shift of oil refinery locations and of some ancillary petrochemical

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industry. Generally speaking, the price of oil in Britain will continue to be determined by the Persian Gulf prices and the cost of shipment from the Gulf, because the demand of the Western European countries cannot be met by the North Sea gas and oil. Thus, any increase in the price of Persian or Iraqi oil, or of gas from Algeria, et cetera, will increase the North Sea gas and oil prices. Hence, any advantage to be gained from oil as against gas can be and must be only through British participation. This is a topic to which we shall return in a minute.
So far as gas is concerned, the story is very different. Here, the Continental Shelf Act, probably as a result of the heritage of the more earthy Victorian monopoly condition, makes it obligatory for the producer to offer all gas except that used for chemical foodstocks to the Gas Council, provided the latter offers a reasonable price (Section 9(2) and (3), and especially Section 9(3)(a) of the Continental Shelf Act 1964). In case of disagreement the Minister has the power of arbitration. This is indeed a formidable power. It implies, among other things, the right to ask, as the American Federal Power Commission does in its automatic routine procedure—because they are so anti-capitalist—and as both the Danes and the Norwegians contemplate, for an opening of the books as a proof of costs, to see how those costs, risks and profits work out at the proposed price.
This statutory power by implication would seem to me to make it the duty of the Minister to ascertain these facts and account accordingly. This duty does not seem to have been carried out by any recent Minister, as we heard in Answers to a number of Questions posed by me in this House. The Minister admitted that these elementary data, which all countries, from the smallest Arab sheikhdom down and up to the United States of America, get as of right, seem not to be available here. In fact, the Minister does not seem to have been involved in the latest price determination, which jumped the price from 2·875 old pence per therm to 3·6 old pence per therm. This, I think, is a clear dereliction of duty. What is even more astonishing is that the petroleum department of the Ministry of Power, now the
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Department of Trade and Industry, dared to assert through the Minister that they cannot get these figures, when they know that everybody knows that the Coal Board and the Gas Council are partners in various consortia, and that those consortia, being under American control, have indeed most excellent accountancy facilities. Still, at 2·875 old pence the oil companies had made great concessions, and even at 3·6 old pence per therm the supplies are at a slightly lower price than arc the supplies at the disposal of many other countries—but not all. For instance, Russia gets its oil at a much cheaper price. I shall presently try to show what this means, nevertheless, in terms of profits for the oil companies and their impact on the balance of payments.
How about royalties and taxes? The oil companies are expected to pay 12½ per cent. royalty on oil and gas. This is superficially in line with the conditions enforced in the OPEC countries, and this fact has been pointed out by Mr. MacFadzean, the chairman-elect of Shell, who. however, omitted to say that so far as the Arab countries and Venezuela are concerned this was the least important of the provisions. Through the fixing of the posted price above what is claimed to be the actual transfer or selling price, by having direct taxes and participation, the OPEC countries exact a share of profit between 75 and 85 per cent., not 12½ per cent. The OPEC countries discovered the complexity of the problems involved with vertically integrated multinational companies, when British-trained economists took over. They have not yet taken over in the Department. They made effective a posted price more in line with the world situation. Indeed, the oil companies complain that the price is now higher than would be compatible with a legitimate return on downstream operations, though they do not mention the fact that the insensate oligopolistic competition, which takes the form, as we only too well know, of the wasteful proliferation of vastly costly retail points in garages, et cetera, is probably as much to blame as the Arabs.
An early recovery from this situation is very difficult to foresee. Existing United Kingdom petroleum regulations are hopelessly inadequate, in respect both to rent and to the surrender of the licence.

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The rent rises from £25 per square kilometre to £290 per square kilometre. All this is derisory when profits are in the hundreds of millions. It is true that 15 blocks were auctioned and yielded £37 million, but this only highlights the lost opportunities; and, of course, these auctions have been discontinued, and they did not really claw back the whole of the profits. It is true that the companies must surrender half their territory after six years, but the relevant regulations are so lax as to enable the retention by the companies of the valuable territories. A recovery from our mistakes is therefore only possible if there were a complete change of attitude on the part of the Government.
There is, of course, the corporation tax, at 40 per cent. That does not sound little. In reality, double tax agreements, plus the fact that profit participation, royalty tax, and so on, paid to foreign Governments are expendable against British taxation, result in the oil companies having to pay very little tax here, although the introduction of the corporation tax by Mr. Callaghan and Mr. Kaldor has at least prevented the scandal that repayments of income tax paid by the oil companies to the Arabs were made to the British shareholders by the British Treasury. The profits of the North Sea are, therefore, pure gold to most of them.
There was therefore from the outset an overwhelming case for some sort of State participation in the operation. 'This has been increasingly done in Europe. It is being done in Holland and France; it is about to be done in Norway and Denmark. How is this to be managed? I leave aside, of course, confiscation without or with only insufficient compensation. The State could physically obtain part of the output and sell it itself. It could participate in the direct profits. This would have to be policed both as to price and as to costs, because arm's length sales, sales in the open market, are a rarity in the oil business. It could finally obtain a share in the syndicate or go into the business itself. All these forms have, at one time or another, been practised in Europe and outside.
In this country the Gas Council and the National Coal Board had, until the
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change of Government in 1970, an increasing share in the syndicates. This was accomplished only under the most tremendous pressure by the central economic Departments, the Treasury, the D.E.A. and the Cabinet Office, on the Petroleum Department, which was forced to permit the participation of the Coal Board in a few of these consortia—the process is described by the noble Lord, Lord Robens—and the Gas Board has also been a member of the consortia. This participation started, so far as the Gas Board is concerned, at 31 per cent. in the case of the Leman Bank, and it increased to 50 per cent. in the face of the indefatigable consortia. Later on the Irish Sea was completely reserved for the public hand, and generally preference given to consortia having at least 50 per cent. participation by the British public hand. Although some of the new licences in the most interesting Northern territories have British participation and even British public board participation, the British share of the total has lamentably fallen and the condition that all consortia have participation has been tacitly waived.
What was the consequence of these hesitations confounded by amateurishness? The first contract of 5 old pence per therm for a field which was very advantageously situated in the case of B.P. was at least excusable by lack of practice and lack of knowledge; and anyway it was half recovered by the B.P. being half owned by the public hand. It also had a re-negotiation clause which has disappeared from the rest of the contracts. This fact is very important because if, as the oil companies assert, they were doubtful about the size of the fields, they would not have shown such bitter resistance against short-term contracts allowing re-negotiation of the price. As the cost of production is far higher on small fields than it is on the large fields, if indeed they had expected very small fields they would obviously have opted for short-term contracts in order to re-negotiate the contracts at a higher price. They seem to have been very optimistic indeed about the prospects and, as usual, rightly so.
The oil companies, secondly, assert that the investment is very heavy and therefore they cannot give up part of the profits or accept price regulation for

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gas as has been laid down. In particular, Mr. MacFadzean refers to a one-in-twenty ratio of the number of successful wells out of the total number of wells. Yet the Petroleum Handbook published by his own corporation in 1959—that is to say. when the technique was very much less developed—states on pages 71–72:
"…no scientific exploration successful, ratio one in thirty; geological and geophysical exploration successful, ratio one in five."
These are based on U.S. figures. If those from the world outside, and particularly the Middle East, were available they would put modern exploration ratios in an even more favourable light.
The share prospectus of Oil Exploration (Holdings) Limited, of which we shall hear more in a minute, says:
"The U.K. sector of the North Sea is now regarded by the oil companies as one of the most attractive and promising areas in the world."
And rightly so! The Conoco Company published two weeks ago a success ratio of 6 out of 9 wells. This is very different from 1 in 20. In my recollection the total success ratio, certainly at the time when I knew the figures, was below 1 in 10.
All experts outside the charmed circle suspected that even the Labour Government's price for North Sea gas would yield exorbitant profits payable mostly in foreign exchange to foreign companies. But both the Labour and the Conservative Governments have successfully resisted efforts to obtain precise information. Lately, however, there have been two indications which confirmed the suspicions of those who were sceptical. Lord Robens in his autobiography, which I have already quoted, boasted that the Coal Board, on its half share of the Conoco Consortium, stands to gain £200 million over 25 years on what then was stated to be a one-sixth share of the supply. This means that the total profits over 25 years on the Conoco basis for the whole country at the lower rate of supply will amount to profits of £2,600 million—and this on an investment which has never been stated to be higher than £200 million! These figures are confirmed by the prospectus of Oil Exploration (Holdings) Limited which I am not going to quote.
So far as oil is concerned, the situation is worse. Sir David Barran, the retiring Chairman of Shell, estimated that as much as £2,500 million would be spent in a decade, £of which £1,000 million will be in operating expenses, for the total of the oil field. This sounds formidable. If we take his more detailed break-down, things look different. The total investment for a decade for a field of 12·5 million tons per annum (250,000 barrels per day), a field much like the Forties (but Forties might become very much bigger) represents £250 million, of which £100 million is in platforms and production facilities, £70 million in production wells, £65 million in off-shore trunk lines and £15 million in shore facilities—Scotland please note!
It is likely that the cost will fall as experience increases and output grows. But if you look at the value of the output of this sort of field which cost £250 million to develop in the first decade, it is between £80 million and £120 million per annum. On a 20-year basis—and of course in the second decade the whole investment would not have to be repeated—it would mean something like £1,600 to £2,400 million; which, I must say, on £250 million invested is not bad going. It will certainly last much more than a decade. The end result is that the investment will be amortised in a very small period indeed; and we do not yet know whether in one way or another some of the investment will not be paid out by the Government in terms of grants. The whole capital expenditure, needless to say, is completely free of tax and new proposals for the reform of corporation tax will mean the distribution of profit will be encouraged rather than the "plough back".
Mr. Waddams, who was with Shell and then was a successful advisor on oil questions, estimates that on a production of a billion barrels a year, Government revenue in Britain will be between £80 million as against the £800 million which would be exacted by Libya under the same conditions. I think from what I have said before on the basis of balance figures, that this is an underestimate.
I do not have to emphasise that a very large part of this minimum saving of £700 million per annum will be exported to America, thus reducing the saving on the

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import of oil as a result of the discovery of oil in our own territory to very modest proportions indeed. Thus doubts about the future of our British balance of payments and the desire by Britain to receive from this splendid gift of Nature as much as possible, and certainly as much as politically unstable sheikhdoms were able to obtain, cannot be laughed off (as Mr. MacFadzean has done in an article) as an attack of xenophobia. In any case, I am a "xenos" I cannot hate myself; and I do not.
In the case of these, mostly North American, oil companies, the old saying that what is good for General Motors is good for the country, applies even less. What is regrettable is that Mr. MacFadzean's assertion was not generally greeted with the Homeric derision evoked by the more justifiable comments of Engine Charley Wilson, the President of General Motors, who became Defence Secretary, when he made this heroic statement.
What about the consequential boom; this terrific boom? Up to the end of 1970 (we do not have any figures after 1970) 26 platforms involving 60,000 tons of steel were placed in the North Sea. Of these, 96 per cent. had been fabricated in the Netherlands and 4 per cent. in Germany. Of these, U.S. contractors erected 74 per cent., Italians 15 per cent. and Dutch 11 per cent. There were 177 miles of pipeline laid—mostly 30 inches in diameter—weighing 75,500 tons. Here again, the contractors were 95 per cent. United States and 4½ per cent. Netherlands; 83 per cent. of the pipe was manufactured in Japan and came round the world 9½ per cent. manufactured in Germany; 7½ per cent. in France. The total investment amounted to £375 million, of which the United Kingdom share was insignificant. These melancholy figures have been given by the Society of Underwater Technologists and they have never been contradicted.
My Lords, to end, I do not believe that this happened as a result of wickedness or corruption. In a way, I wish that it had. We could then find a quick, if radical, remedy. No; it happened as the result of the wrong organisation of the Government; as a result of ignorance and a desire to please. Civil servants have been called on to perform duties for which they were not trained and which would have
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made their relations with the industry with which they are supposed to work very difficult. They have chosen on each occasion the wrong way, because it was the easy way out. They hoped to give a good example to OPEC and we lost out both to the Arabs and also to the Americans. The system of frequently changing Ministers is a second great obstacle to progress. These are complicated matters, not learned in a few weeks. They are also deep-seated matters, and very unlikely to be remedied in the short-run. I must therefore, my Lords, sorrowfully conclude that the outlook for our prosperity, for our balance of payments, is indeed sombre; and if any of your Lordships has any doubts about the ultimate causes of this unpleasing state of affairs, I fear that I have none. My Lords, I beg to move for Papers.
6.12 p.m.
LORD TANLAW: My Lords, I must welcome this opportunity given by the noble Lord, Lord Balogh, to speak in this debate. It is quite difficult to follow the noble Lord because of the technical knowledge and expertise that he has in his subject. It is a bit easier for me, because I am going to speak on only one aspect of the matter: regional development and its effects following the new discoveries of oil and natural gas round the British Continental Shelf. The noble Lord, Lord Balogh. mentioned Scotland. I think that everyone in Scotland is conscious of what is going on and what is about to happen. He also raised a 64,000-dollar question—or is it a 64 million dollar question? The Government must now be in a position to clarify some of the issues he raised and everyone in Scotland, regardless of political affiliation, is waiting for the answer.
As has been said by the noble Lord. Lord Balogh, the discovery of oil and natural gas in and around the British Continental Shelf is one of the most important economic factors to be considered when anticipating the future prosperity of our nation. Let us not lose this golden opportunity. A great deal has been spoken in your Lordships' House and outside it about the future of Scottish development with this new source of potential wealth. There was the debate last November initiated by the noble Lord, Lord Polwarth, on the Scottish economy and the conference on

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oil and Scotland's future held at Aviemore this year, when the subject was covered adequately. Men, dedicated men, working through Government bodies, the Scottish Council, the Highlands and Islands Development Board—all have plans by the basketload awaiting the go-ahead, although the dust may already be beginning to settle on some of them, such as the Hunterston and Oceanspan projects.
Hunterston emerged only briefly to-day from the gloom of uncertainty which surrounds it, with the publication of the long-awaited Interim Report. This was referred to in your Lordships' House during the debate on the Scottish economy. Unfortunately, this Report, about which I have seen only a brief newspaper article, appears to raise more questions than it solves. I wonder why? Can it be that the anticipated revenue might be debatable, or might not be as large as the Government have initially indicated. I hope not. And assuming for the moment that this is not the case, there is no definite commitment yet by the Government to improve the infrastructure to match the investment by the oil companies in Scotland. Port facilities on the East Coast remain inadequate and the deep water terminal at the Greenfield site is still a dream. New airports are still unbuilt and traffic north of Perth is governed by the pace of the slowest caravan trailer, as anyone knows who has been on those roads. And there are still the unemployed.
It does not add up, my Lords. There is a huge unfulfilled public works programme to provide work and a huge source of revenue to pay for and exploit it. Yet nothing appears to be happening. The only practical reason that comes to mind is that besides the apparent lack of resources to finance these projects there is a lack of communication between the various Government Departments involved in them, due to the centralised policy pursued by Whitehall. If I may, I should like to give one or two examples. Perhaps they are well known to your Lordships.
Scottish policy for infrastructure is mainly governed by the Scottish Office, which, in turn, is limited by the annual allocation of funds from the Treasury and the Department of Trade and Industry.
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Manufacturing companies and oil companies have to rely on the Department of Trade and Industry for financial and other aid. Investment in improved port facilities depends upon the Department of the Environment, with help and advice from the National Ports Council. Investment in airports rests with the British Airports Authority, but the regulation of air services with the new Civil Aviation Authority. Research and development is through the Department of Trade and Industry; training and employment is with the Department of Employment and its various advisory bodies. There are more examples. In every case they look at Scotland and other under-privileged areas through the eyes of their own Departments.
This is not to say that nothing is happening. Far from it. It is rather that, when dealing with the regions, Government Departments can mistake activity for achievement. This frame of mind is often brought about in Government or commercial organisations when there is not enough money to implement the projects on which they are working.
I believe that the remedy for this misapplication of effort and control must lie first with the Government who should recognise the need for decentralisation; and secondly, that regions such as Scotland should have their own development authorities, with powers from the various Ministries concerned, to implement policies for infrastructure and an integrated regional development programme. Some of your Lordships may recall that Dr. W. S. Robertson of the Scottish Council called for just such a body in his excellent Paper, entitled Issues for Scotland, at the Second Industrial Forum at Aviemore, discussing the theme which I mentioned earlier, oil and Scotland's future. Mr. Russell Johnston, the Liberal M.P. for Inverness, followed up this suggestion at the same Conference when he urged the need for a development bank to finance these projects managed by the development authority. This also has been established Liberal policy for a considerable time.
Finally, my Lords, I doubt whether the Government are as blind to these opportunities as they like to appear. Surely they have not forgotten the "Declaration of Perth" made by the Prime Minister of the day in 1967; or

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the promise of a White Paper on the subject during this Parliamentary Session. I would quote Russell Johnston again. At the Scottish Liberal Conference last weekend he called for support from all political Parties, and also the Scottish T.U.C., for a Scottish Movement, the aim of which would be to attain a Scottish Legislative Parliament which could deal with all the items I have mentioned, and especially the position of the foreign oil companies operating from Scottish bases. As recently as to-day, forward-looking Tory Members of Parliament have published a booklet advocating a policy of decentralisation. and they conclude by saying that the regions will never thrive if they have to depend on Whitehall for stimulus.
There is still hope that something will be done soon. I think that the appointment of the noble Lord, Lord Polwarth, must be an encouragement to all, regardless of Party, who are interested in the future welfare of Scotland. The views that he expressed in a memorable speech in a debate on the Scottish economy in your Lordships' House last November must be the guideline of a policy which he is now in a position to implement, be it on the application of oil revenues or Scottish regional development. If he finds himself powerless to bring this about because of Whitehall control, I trust that he will say so, and I think he may find new friends from many quarters in Scotland if he does.
In conclusion, my Lords, only by calling for integrated regional development can the maximum benefit be derived from these new discoveries of oil and gas off our shores. It is not parochialism to say so, nor is it sterile nationalism: it is just plain economic sense.
6.20 p.m.
THE EARL OF LAUDERDALE: My Lords, in following the noble Lord, Lord Tanlaw, I should like just to reply to him on this one point. So far, no oil royalties have been earned. Some £6 million or so has been earned by way of royalties on gas delivered to this country. It may therefore be a minute or two premature to attempt to spend in advance the oil royalties to which we look forward. I would only make the point to the noble Lord before passing
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on that if we are going to press the Government to make an allocation of oil royalties for development, the prudent thing would be to do this on a United Kingdom basis. We do not yet know where all the oil is to be found. There is the Celtic Sea to be considered, and there are other areas to be considered which have not so far been explored at all. I would only press for this to be regarded on a United Kingdom development area basis rather than on a purely Scottish basis.
I should like to join the noble Lord, Lord Tanlaw, in thanking the noble Lord, Lord Balogh, for introducing this Motion. I congratulate Lord Balogh on his success in the ballot, and say how much I enjoyed his speech, based on such wide experience. I know the noble Lord will forgive me if I say that on one or two points I could not quite follow his figures. He quoted a figure from the Continental Oil Company for the number of dry wells found out of the total number drilled. I can only say that that is a quite different figure from the one I was given when I visited their jack-up drilling rig, the "Off-Shore Mercury", a few weeks ago. Be that as it may, surely the real issue is whether the oil industry is to be treated as a goose fat enough for the roasting, or whether it is to face a strenuous diet to build up its strength and that of the energy-hungry economy around it.
I begin by drawing attention to the Hougardy Report to the European Parliament's Committee for Energy Research and Nuclear Questions, which was accepted by the European Parliament in April. It concludes:
"Governments should be concerned more with obtaining maximum performance from the oil companies than in maximising tax receipts."
Even in the British sector there have not been a great many takers for the blocks that have been on offer. Of the total areas offered for licence, covering about 250,000 square miles, only one-fifth—some 50,000 or 60,000 square miles—are being operated under licences that are now in effect.
There are three alternative approaches to licensing. The first method, widely canvassed, is by auction. This was tried on 15 blocks to test the market last summer, and one hopes, for reasons

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which will become clear in a moment, that that auction will not be repeated. The auction system gives the auctioneer no control over subsequent operations. It provides no check on the worthiness of the highest bidder. It provides no check on subsequent sub-letting or re-sale. It provides no check on the sheer financial speculation that could arise—for example, some Middle East sheikhdom buying into North Sea oil as into the London property market. Above all, the auction system provides no means of coercing the major companies into exploring the less attractive areas, although this is a long-established method in British administration, applied, for example, in the public transport and airlines licensing. Finally, the auction system syphons off capital which it is in the British interest to see invested in exploration.
The second method that can be used, and which I understand has been advocated by the noble Lord, Lord Balogh, is to impose, or at any rate very strongly induce, nationalised industry participation. This was tried out in rounds 2 and 3 of the licence issues in 1965 and 1970. In round 2, in which the Liverpool Bay figured largely, nationalised industry participation was made an absolute requirement. The result was that, for lack of applicants, little more than one-tenth of the area on offer could be licensed. There were 1,106 blocks; there were no more than 21 applicants. In the end, 127 blocks went, which works out at about 10 per cent. of the area on offer. That is at least one consequence, I submit, of imposing the condition of nationalised industry participation. In round 3, when this condition had been relaxed somewhat, there were a few more applicants willing to have a go. This time there were 157 blocks available. Some 34 applicants appeared, as against 21 previously—that is to say, half as many again—and in the end 106 blocks were licensed, which comes to more than 60 per cent. of the area on offer.
It has been suggested here and there in the Press, and also (I believe I did not mishear him) by the noble Lord, Lord Balogh, that this requirement of nationalised industry participation was in some way quietly dropped by the Government. Not a bit! The criteria have been pub
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1lished for each round. In round 4, with that requirement dropped overtly and openly there have been 92 applicants, instead of 21 or 34, and something like half of the 42,000 square miles offered has in fact been licensed.
That builds up the case for the third method, which is licensing by discretion against known defined criteria. The objective—and surely this will be common ground—is that Britain should aim at a spread of interest to bring technology and finance to the United Kingdom; that it should be a British interest to impose a work programme to secure maximum exploration; that it should be a British interest to exclude mere speculators, and a British interest to obtain a reasonable British involvement. The noble Lord, Lord Balogh, just now made a reference to the system by which licences, or parts of them, must be surrendered after six years; and he remarked, as I understood him, that this enabled the exploring companies to hold on to the best hits. But, my Lords, that is the purpose of the surrender provision: it is to make it worth while for companies to explore their area thoroughly so as to decide which are in their interest the best bits to surrender and which are not.
The accomplishment of the British policy of discretion compares very well with that of our neighbours who have chosen to press for national public sector participation. Out of more than 500 holes drilled in the North Sea no fewer than 380, or 76 per cent., have been drilled in the British sector; no more than 70 have been driven in the Norwegian sector, despite the very attractive geological conditions. No more than 70 in the Dutch; no more than half a dozen in the German, and fewer than half a dozen in the Danish. These figures may not tally exactly, because they may be taken at points in time which are separated by a month or two, but they are approximately correct.
Thanks to the extensive exploration which has been encouraged by British policy in the last six years, at least 20 offshore geological structures have been identified. No fewer than six oil or oil and gas fields have been delimited in Northern waters, quite apart from the gasfields off the East Anglian coast. The orders of magnitude have been referred to and hardly need restressing, but it

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may be worthwhile to illustate by saying that a jack-up mobile drilling rig for exploration of gas, off East Anglia—which is easier because the water is shallower—is about half the size of a small London square when your helicopter lands on top of it. Its legs are each about equal to the girth of a church tower and the multi-well development platform is substantially larger. The production and the manifolding platform is as large as a very large London Square and about twice the size of the Square in which I live. They stand in about 100 feet of water; they stand about 100 feet above the water, and they may be on piles going anything up to 100 feet into the seabed. That, my Lords, is in the gasfield off East Anglia, which is relatively easy.
In the Northern reaches of the North Sea where oil is to be found, a production platform will be taller than the Post Office Tower and will contain about as much steel as almost two spans of the Forth Bridge. It will cost the best part of £10 million. Much of the investment is abortive. Whether or not the figure is one or eight dry holes out of ten, I have not the technical knowledge to say, but I am told by a number of different oil companies, oil men and drillers alike, that the average is about eight dry holes out of ten. Each hole needs anything from three to nine weeks to drill and will cost anything up to a million pounds. To develop a single field is not just a question of finding one prolific well: many trial and development wells are required, and to secure the balanced use of a field it may be that half a dozen production platforms, each with a dozen wells, may be needed, to say nothing of the central platform and point for collecting the oil. Quite a number of holes, although oil-bearing, have been sealed up, pending the discovery of other and sufficient reserves nearby to justify a common-user pipeline ashore.
Going back for a moment to the figures quoted by the noble Lord, Lord Balogh (which came, I think, from Sir David Barran), if one is thinking that a field is going to cost something in the order of £250 million to develop, that is about the price of one moon shot. The scale is so great. When one speaks of £1,500 million over ten years and another £1,000 million—not £100 million, as he suggested—for
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development and exploitation, even nationalised industries under a Socialist Government might quail. The scale is so vast that traditional competitors have been forced to combine.
The taxpayer comes out remarkably well. His only cost is the long familiar practice of allowing United Kingdom losses to be set off against overseas profits. There is the same enjoyment of investment allowances, and so on, as other industries have, and all this at no extra direct cost to the taxpayer. In return, a major resource is unearthed and a potential £400 million a year saving on the balance of payments is uncovered; and even if the oil is exported, that will still ease the balance of payments. A whole new range of industrial development is opened up. To take one case at Nigg Bay, in Scotland, at the Brown & Root site there 700 Highlanders are being trained as riggers, fitters and welders and in skills which they could never before have had a chance of learning. There is the development whereby Marathon is coming into U.C.S. to develop a completely new kind of shipbuilding—if "shipbuilding" is the word.
I believe that successive Governments deserve congratulation on a sophisticated and imaginative policy which is already within sight of bringing great advantages to Britain. I believe that one should name a retired civil servant who has so far gone unsung. He has master-minded a great deal of this from the start; his impartiality has been recognised by all the oil companies that I have spoken to and that have competed with one another for his attention. He is a man whose single aim has been the national advantage. I refer to Mr. Angus Beckett, of the former Ministry of Power. One trusts that his services will be well recognised in due time.
My Lords, one or two constructive interrogatives. Do the Government yet have a policy which will have regard to the possibility of developing common user pipelines on the North Sea bed? When will the report of the study by the International Marine Engineering Group, into the reasons why British industry has been slow to hitch on to the oil opportunity, be published? I should also like like to ask: can outside bodies such as the Scottish Council or the Council of Manufacturers of Petroleum Industry

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Equipment help or provide information in any way, and will the IMEG report be published? I could not give my noble friend advance notice of this question. and no doubt he will let me know later if he is unable to answer me now. Some members of the Society of Underwater Technology have been complaining that the Committee on Marine Technology suffer from too restricted resources—a quarter of a million pounds over the whole field in three years. Will the Government get in touch with the Society and consider any representations that they have to make? Finally, will the Government take a look at the quite widely expressed need of short-term finance for many small firms which are trying to get in on the supply business and which inevitably find the N.R.D.C. machinery cumbersome and slow?
Once more, my Lords, I believe that we should thank the noble Lord, Lord Balogh. for introducing the subject to us this afternoon. I suggest that his approach is a challenge to common sense. I would say:
"To its own impulse every creature stirs. Live by thy right and Earth will live by hers"
6.37 p.m.
LORD SHACKLETON: My Lords, I think this debate has justified quite strikingly the system of mini-debates which was one of the recommendations of the Committee of which, I think, the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, was a member. This is a classic occasion. There is not a very full House at the moment, but certainly all noble Lords have listened with the greatest interest to my noble friend Lord Balogh, and to the noble Lord, Lord Tanlaw, who declined to associate himself with any deep knowledge of the subject. Let me hastily associate myself with that lack also, because I am quite sure that he knows much more than I do. Of course we have listened to the noble Earl, Lord Lauderdale, who is always formidably briefed. But I would especially congratulate my noble friend Lord Balogh, because I think his speech represented a great deal of very detailed research. His mastery of his subject and his persistence in pursuing Ministers in search of information has now led to a debate in which the Government, as a result, have a lot of questions to answer. We have at least another
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hour—I shall be only five or ten minutes—so the noble Earl will have all the time in the world to answer every point that has been made. To help him, I should like to pick out certain points, and I should be most interested to hear what he says about these. This, however, certainly does not remove from him the obligation of answering all the points of my noble friend.
The basic question—indeed, this was fundamental to the Motion—is: have the British had the best possible deal or have successive Governments (whether the Labour Government or the present Government for that matter) failed to look after the interests of the British people in an area which can reasonably be called the public domain, an area in which licences are granted and in which clearly, if enterprise, be it private or public, is to operate, we have to be satisfied that the right return will be attained? I acknowledge that Governments have experimented in their ways of dealing with this issue. I was very interested in what the noble Earl, Lord Lauderdale, had to say about the system of auctioning, though I do not quite see why, even with auctioning, it is not possible to impose conditions. But I myself would not dream of advocating any particular approach to this matter, because I simply do not know enough about it. The noble Earl, Lord Limerick, I have no doubt will be entirely sincere and honest in what he says and will probably claim that we have had as good a bargain as could be reasonably achieved. I hope he will be able to substantiate this claim by giving answers to some of the specific points.
I should like to deal with some of the figures mentioned by my noble friend, particularly in relation to the return on capital. In listening to what was, if I may say so, a difficult and complicated speech, I had no time when listening to my noble friend—I am no economist—to work out what the right d.c.f. return over the period should have been. I would be interested to know whether the Government have views on the return because my noble friend produced evidence, which needs to be accepted or controverted, that we are doing a lot less well than the Libyans. I sense that one of the reasons for this is that we have been trying to set a good example to the rest of the world. If that is really so, quite frankly

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Governments have not been pursuing the national interest. I do not believe that our setting a good example is necessarily going to improve our position with regard to the OPEC countries, and certainly not with certain of the North African and Middle Eastern countries. We would he interested to know what the return is and how it compares with that of other countries.
This leads me to another point of interest, one which is sensitive. My noble friend questioned whether the Minister has been operating his discretion. As I understand it, this would be in finally arbitrating with regard to the price that is paid for the product. My noble friend asked whether he has been doing this with full access to all information that is available. In particular my noble friend pointed out that even in the United States, as well as other countries, the operating companies are required to open their books. My noble friend implied that where American companies are concerned their accountancy was so much better that it would be particularly worth opening their books. I would not necessarily accept that the accountancy is not adequate: but is it a fact that books are normally opened in other countries? The noble Earl, with a great deal o! experience as a banker, is particularly well qualified to comment on this, as he is on the appropriate returns from investment. If my noble friend's figures are correct—and they seem to me to be impressive—the return has been higher than is warranted and the return to the British taxpayer has been lower than it should have been. That is very much the burden of what he said and it is clearly important that we should get answers on this. I will not go into the matter of taxation, partly because I tend to get lost in overseas profits but it would be interesting if the noble Earl would comment on this particular matter.
The noble Earl, Lord Lauderdale, suggested that the British system of licensing and less emphasis on State participation has led to a much greater degree of exploitation than has been achieved by other countries. Considering that State participation had, as I understand it, been obligatory at certain stages, I am not sure whether his figures are justified. But the question still remains
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as to whether it was right to press ahead in this way. There are many possible explanations. It may be that the noble Earl has the answers as to why there has been heavier exploitation in the British sectors. The noble Lord, Lord Tanlaw, made the point that we have gone rapidly ahead, but in order to do so a great deal of the capital equipment had to be purchased from abroad. This was another point which my noble friend Lord Balogh made. The Norwegians have deliberately followed a different policy in this matter. I will quote from Mr. Gulnes. They decided not to have a speedy exploration, "as the British authorities had decided to do". They have sufficient petroleum to cover their needs from one find and they think that it is
"more important for Norway now to gain experience to try to educate our own industry as soon as possible so that they can take an active part in the further development, and because of this, and because we want to have sufficient experience before we go on to a new round, we have decided that we should work slowly".
Then he goes on to say,
"Coming now to Government participation, we have decided that this is the best way to get know-how for Norway as to the way the Norwegian industry can best benefit from this."
This is the idea behind direct participation. It is not enough just to boast that there has been a greater expansion in the British sector. It may well be that there ought to have been greater stimulus. Perhaps now the Government arc taking a more rational approach to the support of industry, and have got over some of their earlier doctrinaire ideas in this matter and British industry will be able to play a bigger part.
THE EARL OF LAUDERDALE: My Lords, I am much obliged to the noble Lord for giving way. Would he agree that, first, the case for most rapid development has been made very effectively by the European Parliament whose authority I know he will regard highly—probably more highly than I do myself? Secondly. would he also agree that, having accepted that as a reasonable policy, right or wrong—and others think it is reasonable—the necessity to go overseas for equipment, and so on, is because the equipment is not available here? But now it is becoming available, and this is a new industry that we are hastening to develop.
LORD SHACKLETON: My Lords, since the noble Earl quotes the European Parliament, I must say that I do not necessarily regard them as the authority on what is at this moment a national question. My noble friend's question related to whether at this moment the British were getting the best advantage.
The Norwegians have tried to stimulate Norwegian industry to take part in service activities. They have in fact asked for a gentlemen's agreement. But it is no use asking for a gentlemen's agreement if you are not in fact at that moment producing the equipment. This brings me back to the point that the noble Lord, Lord Tanlaw, was making. It is a fact that Mr. Reid, in Upper Clyde Shipbuilders, the chief shop steward, has probably done more to try to lead to a development of this kind than anything the Government have done in the matter. And it is a fact—the figures were given, and this is a subsidiary argument of my noble friend—that British industry has not benefited as much as it should have. I am not going to criticise either the previous Government or this Government on these particular terms, but there are questions that need to be answered. I am making this argument in reply to the arguments of the noble Earl, Lord Lauderdale. As he knows, I always take his arguments extremely seriously; he is always very well informed in these matters, but I do not think his argument on this particular occasion is necessarily a decisive justification of Government policy.
There has been some criticism of Departments and civil servants in this matter. I am always myself slightly sensitive when noble Lords such as the noble Lord, Lord Tanlaw, speak about Whitehall control. I do not doubt that there are some good Ministers in this Government—I am told that the noble Earl is a most promising Minister—but I do slightly object to it all somehow being blamed on the Civil Service. We ask the Civil Service of this country to undertake the most astonishing range of subjects. They do so and it is quite miraculous how well they do when sometimes they are in fact unprofessional in these matters. Of course, a lot is going on and I do not propose, tempting though it is after hearing my noble friend Lord Balogh, to go into the
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whole question of the structure of Government. We might have another mini-debate on that subject another day. But there is no doubt that the civil servants—and I acknowledge the tribute that the noble Earl, Lord Lauderdale, paid to one senior civil servant—undertake a wide range of tasks. It is true that we do not know what their performance is, but one of the things that struck me when I was a Minister was the astonishing responsibilities that comparatively small numbers of civil servants carry in a particular area.
LORD TANLAW: My Lords, I was not criticising the Civil Service as such. I was perhaps suggesting that there were not enough Scottish civil servants.
LORD SHACKLETON: All I can say is, my Lords, that when I first became a Minister in London I was surrounded by Scottish civil servants—my Permanent Secretary, my private secretary—and I wonder how many English civil servants there are in St. Andrew's House. None the less, I take the point of the noble Lord, Lord Tanlaw, and I do not want to distract from the main question.
There is a case to answer here, and I am sure that the noble Earl, Lord Limerick, will make as convincing a reply as possible but at the end of it (and I am not prejudging what he will say) I suspect that because of the time available there will be questions left unanswered. I am wondering whether, in an issue of this kind, there is not something more we can do to bring the facts into complete clarity and away from possible political criticism. My noble friend Lord Balogh, although more critical of the present Government, did not allow the previous Government to go unscathed. I would ask in this connection why it is that the Government do not allow, as I understand it, or will not allow under new legislation, nationalised industries actually to market the oil if they are members of a consortium. I am told that there is a completely doctrinaire discrimination against nationalised industry. This always strikes me as quite extraordinary, if it is so. Why private and public enterprise cannot compete, I do not know.
Unless the Government are prepared to hire the noble Earl, Lord Lauderdale, actually to advise the Civil Service, or

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somebody from OPEC—it may be that we should ask them to come and help us on this—may I suggest that there is one factor the Minister might consider; that is, that some form of inquiry should be made. I am very nervous about Inquiries, especially after the V. and G. Inquiry, and I dislike intensely the idea of a tribunal approach. My noble friend made not the slightest criticism of the integrity of anybody who was dealing with this. But if we could have an Inquiry it would be easy enough to get a leading firm of accountants and assessors—Cooper Brothers—or merchant bankers, Kleinwort, Benson, and there are quite a number of others, to judge whether or not we had had a good deal. Alternatively, the time will come, I trust, when the Public Accounts Committee might look at this. I think this would be within their remit, at least with regard to the action of the Department. Perhaps they have already done so and it has escaped my notice.
My Lords, there are questions to be answered and now the noble Earl has plenty of time in which to answer them. My noble friend Lord Balogh will himself have a few minutes afterwards to answer the answers. Meanwhile, I congratulate him and I congratulate noble Lords on producing an interesting debate and on allowing someone who knows absolutely nothing about the subject to take part in it.
6.57 p.m.
THE PARLIAMENTARY UNDERSECRETARY OF STATE, DEPARTMENT OF TRADE AND INDUSTRY (THE EARL OF LIMERICK): My Lords, we indeed welcome the opportunity afforded by the Motion of the noble Lord, Lord Balogh, to debate this subject this afternoon. It has permitted many views to be expressed, ranging wide over the subject, and a broad spectrum of opinion. I have some reservations on the terms of the Motion itself and it is my task to seek to establish that the overall picture is by no means so bleak as the noble Lord, Lord Balogh, suggests. We pay the closest attention to what he says and what he writes. In an article in February he offered some criticism of the minuscule Ministerial complement at the Department of Trade and Industry. I can tell him, having taken note of his representations, that since that date we
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have increased it by no less than 28 per cent., and I stand here representing 14 per cent. of that increase.
LORD SHACKLETON: My Lords. could the noble Earl translate that into actual manpower? Is that a quarter?
THE EARL OF LIMERICK: Certainly, my Lords, we have added two Ministers to a team of seven.
I should like, if I may, to spend a few minutes in painting a general picture of the situation as it now stands and then to return to specific points which have been made in the course of this debate. I think the first thing we should remember is that we are talking about a very short span of time. All the matters which we are discussing this afternoon have happened in only eight years, since 1964, when the United Kingdom became the first North Sea coastal State to provide the legislative framework for operations on the Continental Shelf. The possibilities in 1964 were virtually unknown; the environment was difficult and a very large risk investment was then required. The guiding principle which was then adopted and agreed by successive British Governments was to achieve a rapid and a thorough exploration and development of potential resources. This was regarded as the priority task, and it so remains to-day.
I think we can say that this policy has been remarkably successful. Gas was discovered in the West Sole field in October, 1965, just over 12 months from the issue of the first production licences. Commercial production started in April, 1967. Four more major gas fields were discovered between 1965 and 1967. In October, 1970, oil was discovered in the B.P. Forties field, followed by an announcement in February this year that commercial quantities of oil had been found in Shell/Esso's Auk field. To date. there are recoverable reserves of gas of 32 trillion cubic feet—and to avoid any possible ambiguity that is 32 X 1012 cubic feet. Oil is expected to be produced at the rate of 25 million tons per annum by the mid 1970s, and could perhaps reach 75 million tons per annum by the mid 1980s. The benefits to the country are of great importance. Not only will our balance of payments be improved—to the extent of perhaps £500 million a year by the 1980s—but energy supplies will

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be made more secure by relieving our current overwhelming dependence on imported oil.
In order to achieve the main objective of rapid and thorough exploration, it was decided in 1964 that licences would be issued at Ministers' discretion rather than by the alternative method of selling them to the highest bidder. In some parts of the world, for example the United States of America, concession areas are often put up to auction. This has advantages, such as administrative simplicity, impartiality and financial return to the State whether or not petroleum is found. After study, it was decided that such a system would not be suitable for the United Kingdom on the Continental Shelf at that time. Under an auction system there could be no assurance of British participation, and we did not really want a situation where all the licences might be acquired by other countries. Moreover, North Sea potential was still unproven and could be tested only by imposing work programmes on licensees, which would be difficult to control under an auctioning system. For these reasons the allocation of licences by discretion was continued in the second and third rounds of licensing.
When we came to the fourth round, last year, it was decided, as in the case of earlier rounds, to abide by the discretionary system, placing greater importance on the rapid and thorough development of our Continental Shelf while reducing our dependence on Middle East and African oil, than on the immediate cash receipts to be had from auctioning. At the same time, it was recognised that the gas and oil discoveries which had already been made and were numbered were taking the Continental Shelf out of the initial exploratory phase and that an experiment in an alternative system of licensing could be tried out. It was decided, therefore, to carry out a limited tendering exercise to gain experience in this method for later rounds and to test the market by offering blocks which, though all in areas where hydrocarbons had been discovered, ranged from the superficially very attractive to the very indifferent. As there was a risk of a poor response which might have discredited the territory for the future, the number of blocks was kept down to
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15. The results of tendering were unpredictable but extremely interesting; one block was valued by the highest bidder at £21 million and in all a sum of £37 million was obtained for the 15 blocks, so that a total value of £16 million was placed on the other 14 blocks. This experience will of course be studied and taken into account in the planning of future rounds of licensing.
No doubt more cash could have been obtained by offering all or most of the blocks for tender, but it is impossible to say how much. Certainly we should have seen nothing as big as the Shell/Esso bid of £21 million, and many of the blocks where we are anxious to see exploration might well have gone entirely without bids. Instead, we have achieved comprehensive exploration programmes over a very wide area, involving the drilling of 220 new wells at a cost exceeding £200 million. Forty-three per cent. participation by British companies has been achieved, and we now have involved in the North Sea oil search almost every oil company of world standing.
With regard to revenues, thus far about £56 million has been paid into the Exchequer arising from royalties and rents derived from the exploration and exploitation of our gas and oil resources. Other benefits have accrued from activities on the United Kingdom Shelf: new industries will have to be created to cater for the oil companies' many needs. The oil industry will for the rest of this decade spend on the United Kingdom Continental Shelf probably as much as £300 million per annum.
British industry, which has not had an impressive record of securing orders for the plant and equipment associated with the development of the gas fields (mainly because a home market did not exist) is now becoming increasingly aware of the opportunities and should be able to play a significant role. For the development of the recent oil discoveries companies are developing sites in Scotland and the North of England on which the massive fixed platforms can be fabricated prior to floating out to the oil field. Offshore drilling operations require wide supporting services ranging from the supply of materials such as drilling mud and fuel and water for use on the rigs, to bulk catering supplies. And now that the operations

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are extending to other parts of the North Sea the scale of the operations is increasing.
In short, the exploration and development of North Sea hydrocarbon resources has provided a stimulus to various sectors of the economy and, through displacement of imported fuels, will be of very great benefit to the balance of payments. The policy adopted by successive Governments has meant that in the short space of eight years, working in the hostile environment of the North Sea and with no assurance at the outset of any commercial quantities of oil or gas whatever, we have already found enough gas to supply over 90 per cent. of our needs and are well on the way also to meeting a substantial part of our oil needs. Attempts to achieve early gains for the Exchequer by imposing very high licence fees, or by offering territory to tender, would in the Government's view have slowed down this process, and thus frustrated our main objective. Though we are confident about North Sea oil resources, the actual oil fields will be discovered only by intense and sustained exploration efforts and by an immense commitment of risk capital. The foundations have been well laid.
I now turn to the points that have been raised, and I shall do my best to satisfy those who have raised them. I think I face here a formidable task because so much expertise has been displayed. If I deal inadequately with any of these points, I assure you that they will be most carefully studied after this debate, and if there is anything to follow up we shall do our utmost to follow it up. Perhaps I migh0.t take first some of the points raised by the noble Lord, Lord Balogh, in his opening speech. He suggested that the size of these oil fields has been underplayed—perhaps deliberately underplayed—by industry. Mentioning gas first, I think the size of the gas fields is not in dispute. The Government and the oil industry itself, and the Gas Council, all agree that the recoverable reserves of gas to date stand at just over the figure which I mentioned of 32 trillion cubic feet. In the case of oil it is too early to be definite about discoveries or potential. We only have one field currently being developed—the Forties field—and here production is not due until late in 1974. As I mentioned earlier, production has been estimated at 25 million tons rising, we hope,
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to 75 million tons by 1980; but of course the latter figure is highly speculative and will remain so at least until the end of this year's drilling.
The noble Lord, Lord Balogh, also mentioned the exploration success ratio and questioned the figure of 1 to 20. I am no expert and I should hate to bandy figures here; but I wonder whether in quoting 1 to 5, he was referring to all hydrocarbon discoveries during drilling operations. The ratio of 1 to 20 is, I believe, generally accepted as a confident ratio of discoveries which are commercially worth exploiting, and we might remember that it costs just as much—or perhaps more—to drill a hole which reveals insufficient oil or gas as it does to drill a dry hole.
LORD BALOGH: My Lords, can the Minister give the precise numbers of holes that were drilled and how many were commercially viable? Unfortunately, I think the Minister seems to be misinformed if he says that in the case of the North Sea complex the ratio is 1 to 20. That is very high. It is certainly surprisingly high. There was no suggestion whatsoever of that sort of figure in the recent literature about the subject.
THE EARL OF LIMERICK: My Lords, without notice, I am afraid I cannot give the precise number. I was not suggesting that that figure applied particularly to the North Sea. It was quoted, I think, as a general figure. I will, however, make a point of looking into this matter and letting the noble Lord know.
The noble Lord's next point concerned public-sector participation, and I think he referred particularly to the Irish Sea. On the third round of licensing the criteria were that applicants for blocks in the Irish Sea should offer participations—here the percentages have not been quoted—to the National Coal Board or to the Gas Council. The Irish Sea was not reserved for public corporations although the Gas Council, as it turned out, were granted one exclusive licence, and they or the National Coal Board were participants in all the licences granted. This, of course, did not affect the Gas Council participation in the North Sea gasfields, a point that had been suggested; and the public-sector participation now is approximately equal to

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2l per cent. of known gas reserves—that would include the shares held by the National Coal Board, the Gas Council and through the Government shareholding in British Petroleum.
The noble Lord also raised a question—which was repeated by the noble Lord, Lord Shackleton—about the examination of accounts and the requirement to keep accounts. There is no legal requirement for this because the licensee does not dispose of the petroleum, the gas or the oil to Her Majesty's Government. The Government may intervene in the matter of price only when there is a dispute between the licensee and the Gas Council as to whether gas is being offered at a reasonable price for industrial purposes. The basic philosophy that has been followed by three successive Governments has been that they arc content to !cave the negotiations to the Gas Council without checking on the profits made specifically in their North Sea operations. There is, of course, the overall check on all their activities in the accounts they produce for the purposes of their shareholders and the Inland Revenue, but this is not broken down to identify the figures. This is a philosophical point which has been taken by all the Governments. I understand that the Gas Council have shown themselves to be pretty tough negotiators, but so far agreement has been reached in all cases on the appropriate price of gas and no cases have gone to arbitration.
On the question of whether the price is too high it is always difficult to be dogmatic. The Gas Council, as I say, are reckoned to have driven a hard bargain. They are a monopoly buyer with a first-hand knowledge of costs of producing gas on the Continental Shelf through their participation in some of the syndicates. The noble Lord in another context has expressed some complaint that gas prices were fixed by a contract for a term of years. Again this is something that could cut either way; but against a background of steadily rising prices—not only generally rising prices, but rising prices of gas throughout the world—the fact that we have had a fixed price for a number of years is surely more a matter for congratulation by the consumer, although possibly a matter of regret for the producer.
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We then come to the question of the returns that may be expected on these investments. My Lords, I find this an extremely difficult question. I speak here as one who years ago was an accountant. It is difficult to measure these returns; but even more, it is extremely difficult to decide what one would regard as a proper return in planning the way these areas are handled. You start with a position where nothing is known to exist at all. You invite people to come and search for it. They are putting a great deal of money at risk. If we try to relate a profit which a company makes in a given year on a single successful borehole to the capital which has been invested in that particular operation, this does not produce anything like a reasonable computation of what would be a fair profit for the industry; what they would need to induce them to undertake the exploration which we want them to undertake, always remembering that our first priority has been to persuade the concessionaires to get on with the job. I should be very wary, therefore, of bandying figures. Only the market place will show what is the right level here.
I am not aware of any evidence that these exorbitant profits have yet been earned. It is possible to extrapolate figures and to show that there is the prospect of very large profits. Here I should like to look with some attention at the figures quoted by the noble Lord when I have a chance to read the debate. He will forgive me if I do not comment in detail now on his figures. I might just say that one case has been fairly widely cited. One of the oil-exploration companies put out a prospectus. They were a small company who happened to strike lucky first time and sought capital to develop this find. It was suggested that this showed on the forecast of earnings that they would make a very high rate of return on their capital. I think they would expect in the circumstances to make a reasonable rate of return on their capital, but to attempt to relate that forecast profit, as attempts have been made, to the nominal or initial paid-up capital of the company without having regard to the very large sums that will be required to bring the oil ashore and market it, are highly misleading, and to say that there would be a profit of 70 per cent.—or any other

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Figure—on paid capital at the time the prospectus was issued really would have no more meaning than saying that shares purchased in the market carry a rate of dividend of 70 per cent., or 200 per cent., or any other figure, on their nominal value without having regard to the price of purchase. I do not want to seem to duck this issue, but it is almost impossible to say that we think the right rate of return is 10 per cent. or 15 per cent. before or after tax—whatever you take as your criterion. If we accept this point that our main object is to get on with the job, then we have to plan our strategy to fulfil that aim.
My Lords, I turn now to the contribution of the noble Lord, Lord Tanlaw, who made some most interesting points about Scotland. I shall be referring later to several specific benefits to the Scottish economy from exploration and exploitation which is shortly to take place. If he will forgive me for saying so, the noble Lord strayed a bit far at times from oil and gas, and I will not follow him in all he said. But, of course, careful note will be taken of his remarks.
In his reference to a Scottish development fund, if I heard him aright, he suggested that there should be some direct diversion of revenues to this fund. This is a difficult question and, if I may say so, a double-sided question. It is very much a matter of where everything comes ashore. It is also a matter of the amount of pre-investment needed in order to achieve these benefits. I should be inclined to doubt at least the initial solvency of any such fund were it to be examined.
LORD TANLAW: My Lords, may I interrupt the noble Lord? I did not say "fund". He may have misheard me. It was a development bank that I was referring to. The funds for the development authority could be found through the establishment of a development bank. I did not suggest a development fund. There may have been some misunderstanding.
THE EARL OF LIMERICK: I am sorry if I misunderstood the noble Lord. I will certainly look carefully at what he said.
I listened with great attention, indeed admiration, to the speech of the noble
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Earl, Lord Lauderdale, who showed himself to be, if I may say so, a master of this question. His contribution was an extremely valuable one and one which I very much enjoyed. I followed him particularly in two arguments, one of which I think he made so well that I need not repeat it, which was the argument in favour of allocation rather than auction of licences. I do not think one can accept that argument, although it was most persuasively put, as being necessarily of universal validity. Therefore there was a limited experiment on what is known as the fourth round of licensing in auctioning a part of the blocks which were on offer, and the results of that will be most carefully analysed. He also dealt most skilfully with the objects of the surrender provisions. I should like to add one remark to what he said. which I think reinforces the object of this policy. Several areas have already been returned under the six-year rule from the first round of concessions granted in 1964. Some of these have subsequently been relet. and one of those which has been relet has in the hands of another concessionaire shown a gas find, which I think is quite a vindication of the procedure.
The noble Earl fired a number of specific questions at me and I shall be able to answer two of them specifically. He asked about common use of pipelines. This matter is certainly under study. Secondly, he was interested in the timing of the study report which, as announced on May 26, is being undertaken by an international management and engineering group. It has been asked that this report shall be completed by the autumn. We certainly take note of his questions about the other bodies with whom we might be in touch and will examine them.
The noble Lord, Lord Shackleton, then asked me a number of questions, and I am aghast at the prospect of the time that I should have to fill if I took up his invitation to deal with them all exhaustively. I will do my best in a limited way. The first question he raised was the return on capital, and I think I have covered that in an earlier reply to the noble Lord, Lord Balogh, and also his point about access to information. He raised an interesting question as to why it was that we had more exploitation in

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the United Kingdom sectors than elsewhere in the North Sea. I think the explanation is probably that this has been our policy and it has been successful. We have placed a different priority on this policy than have some of the other countries bordering the North Sea, and are looking at the resources to be found there. Particularly he asked about the Norwegians. I am in a position only to hazard an uninformed opinion on this matter and that opinion is that the Norwegians have only a fraction of our domestic demand for power, so their incentive to accelerate the rate at which it is brought ashore is much less strong than ours. We are looking at the balance of payments question, on which we take an overall view, and we are also seeking—and I think events in the last few months, indeed the last few days, have shown the relevance of this—to reduce our dependence on petroleum imported from Middle Eastern sources. The noble Lord asked some other questions which, in so far as I have not dealt with them earlier on, I will certainly look at carefully.
What I should like to do in conclusion, having started with a statement of where we stand now, is to show what we see happening at present and in the future. It was, of course, not until gas was first discovered in Holland, as recently as 1959, that the potential of petroleum on our shelf was recognised at all, and only recently has the technology of underwater exploration been developed. We in this country have developed a licensing arrangement, and this represents, as I have already said, a deliberate selection of priorities designed as a compromise to achieve two main objectives, the first being the rapid and thorough exploration, under control and with adequate British representation, of the area which showed this potential, and the second to achieve a reasonable price for the end product. This applies to gas only, and B.P., acting on their own, were the first to find gas and the first to bring it ashore. They were also, which is very good fortune, the first to find oil, and deliveries here will start from the Forties field at the end of 1974. So I think it is fair to say that the whole operation has been an exercise in discretion, balancing long and short term considerations against those
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two objectives. I concede at once that it would be possible to increase the short-term benefit to the balance of payments by going out more to auction than by the allocation of licences in the future when another round comes along. I think it would need very careful consideration whether this, which is in our short-term interest, is in our long-term interest. But, as I say, the experience which has been gained on the earlier rounds and the discoveries since May will be evaluated in arriving at that decision.
This whole exercise has been conducted with the public interest well in mind, so that the benefits will accrue to the economy as a whole, without frustrating the effort by both public and private enterprise in an entirely new venture. As regards the acreages, there are about 45,000 square miles currently under licence out of the 170,000 square miles which are designated for the purpose. The fourth round has stimulated activity, and the best measure I can give of that is that whereas earlier in the year there were three mobile drilling platforms operating offshore there are now 13 in operation, in this very short period of months, and by late summer the number should have gone up to 20.
There are other benefits accruing to the economy, both direct and indirect, and I can give a few examples of these. A number of them relate specifically to what is going on in Scotland. First, the capacity of the Grangemouth refinery is to be redoubled to deal with oil expected from the Forties field. Secondly, new oil loading facilities are being created in the Forth and pipelines are being laid from offshore to Grangemouth. There are developments to Peterhead, Aberdeen, Dundee and other ports on the Scottish mainland and in the Shetlands. On the Clyde, Marathon have built mobile platforms, as others have done before. The noble Earl, Lord Lauderdale, referred to the size of these platforms. I would remind the House of their cost. The fixed platforms, of which two are being fabricated in Scotland for the Forties field, cost up to £25 million each—I am sorry; one of these is being made in the North East. With all this activity comes increased demand for ancillary oil drilling equipment, supply vessels, electronic equipment, helicopters, pipe, cement. chemicals; and British industry has thus

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been encouraged to enter the market by a big increase in the demand arising from this acivity on the United Kingdom shelf.
The Government place so much importance on the economic implications of all this that they have just commissioned a consultant study, already referred to by the noble Earl, which was announced only a fortnight ago, to assess in detail the scale of the industrial opportunities which will arise and the ability of British industry to meet them. Just in the last few days, or few weeks, we have seen the discoverey of an extension of the major Frigg field, gas field, which exends from Norwegian into United Kingdom waters. This is likely to make a significant contribution to our gas reserves. We now see a situation where well over 200 companies are engaged in the search for oil and gas on the Continental Shelf. Ranger Oil have discovered gas in a southern basin block which was recently reallocated after surrender in 1969.
My Lords, as I say, so many points were raised that I am afraid I may not have dealt adequately with all of them, but I will look at them carefully when I have the record of this debate. I hope I have said enough to show that the Government attach great importance to this subject, as previous Governments have done; that the policy is consistently directed to achieving a rapid exploitation of these most important resources, and that this policy is being most carefully and reasonably carried out.
7.32 p.m.
LORD BALOGH: My Lords, in winding up this debate I thank the Minister for his reply and would also express my thanks to noble Lords for their participation. I must confess, however, that I feel a kind of disappointment. The House of Lords always strikes me as being a mixture of idealism and realism which is unique. Idealism is mainly represented by hare coursing and ponies; and the realities of life by the great vested interests of the realms, and from Stormont, fishing to oil companies. It is certainly a good thing that we have a Chamber in which so many of the great vested interests are represented. provided those vested interests declare themselves.
I fear that, so far as the Minister's reply is concerned, I am awestruck at his capacity for stonewalling, which has not
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been paralleled since the noble Lord, Lord Butler, scored his triumphant defensive game in the far off days, which I remember but which the Minister probably does not, of the Spanish Civil War. It was the noble Earl's maiden effort in this respect and I must duly congratulate him because, as a maiden effort, it was masterly. I congratulate him also on his mastery of the mathematics of the powers of ten. I never know what a trillion means—a thousand million million or a million million—but I do not think we need to inquire into that too closely because it is of little importance and exhausion will only take place in our children's time.
I hope the Minister will forgive me if I say that he has not answered any of the questions, and I must also confess that I did not expect him to answer them. After all, when I was inside I could not get these Questions answered either, and as I was in Lord Rothschild's shoes in those days, that is something. All I think we are here concerned with is the part of bureaucracy which is extremely persuasive. The main explanation of why we followed this policy which minimises the advantage which Britain is going to derive from the oil may be the rapidity of development. This would be the case if home-produced oil could completely displace the mid-Eastern or Nigerian oil. This, unfortunately, is not the case. At no point shall we be less dependent—it is the margin of dependence which is important—on mid-Eastern oil than we are now. The logical fallacy which is involved is colossal, but it is persisting and I do not think that in this short reply I shall change it. I must, however, emphasise that anybody who has a clear view of the situation could not possibly put forward the view that because of the rapidity of the exploration we ought to give up the advantages—and of course we have given up the advantages.
Both the noble Earl, Lord Lauderdale, and the Minister were concerned about the options and about the safeguarding of British interests. British interests have been reduced—and this includes the B.P. interest—from 50 per cent. to 21 per cent., so where is the advantage? The Minister boasts that all oil companies are in the North Sea. But do we want them there? We do not want them there. My

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case against the Government was that all the oil companies there were not mainly British.
TILE EARL OF LIMERICK: My Lords, may I be permitted to come in on that figure? Twenty-one per cent. is the figure of the public sector participation in the proven gas reserves. The overall British share in the exploration in the North Sea is 43 per cent.
LORD BALOGH: I am glad to hear it, but that figure was not given. The Norwegians give preference to home supplies but we have no such provision.
LORD SHACKLETON: My Lords, in fairness to my noble friend, he perhaps did not hear the noble Earl. I do remember him saying 43 per cent. of British participation. I was interested in knowing how much of the public participation of 21 per cent. was B.P.—but perhaps I must let my noble friend go on.
LORD BALOGH: My Lords, the Minister says that platforms are going to be manufactured on the Clyde. That will mean an enormous subsidy to America again. The Minister said that the ratio is one in twenty. I quoted the figure from the oil handbook of the Shell Company, where it is said that the ratio for geophysical and geological investigations is one in five, so certainly his figure is not correct.
THE EARL OF LAUDERDALE: My Lords, I am sorry to interrupt. The noble Lord speaks of geophysical and geological exploration. That does not necessarily mean drilling.
LORD BALOGH: In point of fact I know that the figures were well below ten, and I have very good reason to believe they are still so. If there was no disagreement between the Gas Council and the licensees there was a dereliction of duty, because obviously the Gas Council ought to have disagreed with the licensees. A trade unionist who went home saying, "I have not disagreed with my employer" would be sacked. The Minister has not given us profit figures and returns. His argument that the Oil Exploration (Holding) company prospectus gives an unfair picture is not quite correct, because the Oil Exploration
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(Holding) company had a pro rata figure of profits on investment. Everything was on a pro rata basis of 2·4 per cent., or whatever the figure was—I do not remember now—so I cannot see how he can protest that 70 to 80 per cent. profit is not a very typical one.
If I were younger and still a tutor, I should regard 'the speech of the noble Earl, Lord Lauderdale, as a test for my pupils' capacity to spot non sequiturs. So far as Britain is concerned, the oil should not be exhausted as quickly as possible but should help our balance of payments as much as possible. The noble Earl pictured fatal consequences for auctions. Unfortunately, he mixed up the lack of regulations with the method of auctioneering. The fact that he mixed them up is shown by Alaska. Very strict regulations are imposed there in addition to there being auctions.
I now come to participation. The Norwegians are participating. When the noble Earl correlated the territory offered and the territory taken up to the amount of participation by the State or the public in the proceedings, he again mixed up geological knowledge of good areas with the problem of participation. Obviously, companies will be keen when good areas are offered, and those areas which have been offered on the last occasion have been known to he among the most promising. But perhaps the most interesting and least comprehensible of his objections against my case is this. No matter where the profits are remitted over the balance of payments, nevertheless the fact that oil imports go down visibly relieves the balance of payments. This is double-counting of a major order, which I should not want to follow. There is no doubt that there are people who have been led to believe that exploitation for exploitation's sake is the order of the day. I simply do not understand it.
Finally, I have carefully refrained from naming names, but the noble Earl, Lord Lauderdale, has done so and I shall with great diligence follow the future career of that individual. I ought to ask your Lordships to divide on this matter, because obviously the answers were completely unsatisfactory. This is a terrible problem for Britain and we have lost a large pact of our heritage. But I have been told by my elders and betters, or perhaps I should say my youngers and betters.

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that I should not do so. Therefore, my Lords, I beg leave to withdraw my Motion.
Motion for Papers, by leave, withdrawn.

COVENTRY CORPORATION BILL [H.L.]
Reported from the Select Committee, with Amendments.

TOWN AND COUNTRY PLANNING (SCOTLAND) BILL [H.L.]
Reported from the Joint Committee on Consolidation Bills with Amendments, and recommitted to a Committee of the Whole House: Bill to be printed as amended.
House adjourned at eighteen minutes before eight o'clock.