Lords Sitting of 10 December 1973

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

MIDDLE EAST: ISRAELI PRISONERS IN SYRIA
2.36 p.m.
LORD SHINWELL: My Lords, I beg leave to ask the Question which stands in my name on the Order Paper.
The Question was as follows:
To ask Her Majesty's Government whether they have approached the Government of Syria or the United Nations on the return of war prisoners who were captured in the recent conflict and the 1967 war.
EARL FERRERS: My Lords, we have been in touch with the Syrian Government on a number of occasions, and have made known our view that all parties to the conflict should honour their obligations under the Geneva Conventions unconditionally. However, the Syrian authorities have insisted on certain conditions, including action by Israel in connection with the Fourth Geneva Convention. We have asked the Israelis to clarify their attitude to this Convention.
LORD SHINWELL: My Lords, is the noble Earl aware that according to Press reports the only occasion on which our Ambassador asked the Syrian Government a question about the repatriation of prisoners was on November 12, and that since then, so far as I am aware, there has been no further consultation? Have Her Majesty's Government made representations to the United Nations and to the International Red Cross about this subject?
EARL FERRERS: My Lords, we feel that the best method of approaching this matter is for Governments to deal with Governments direct or through the International Red Cross. Her Majesty's Government take the view that it would be
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inappropriate to raise this question in the United Nations and to have public debate on it because this would merely harden people's attitudes.
LORD SHINWELL: My Lords, can the noble Earl say whether, when our Ambassador consulted the Syrian Government, any reference was made to the allegation that the Syrians had murdered or maltreated some of the Israeli prisoners, and that in fact they no longer hold prisoners—they have been disposed of?
EARL FERRERS: My Lords, I know that there have been reports of ill-treatment but as yet we have no evidence to corroborate the allegations. If we received such corroboration we should certainly make representations to the authorities concerned. Her Majesty's Government are very concerned that the Geneva Conventions should be upheld.
LORD WELLS-PESTELL: My Lords, may I ask the noble Earl the Minister whether he has seen photographs in the Press relating to what my noble friend has just said? And, in the light of the disquieting information which we read from day to day about Syria's treatment of Israeli prisoners, may I ask the Government whether they would now make a further representation direct to Syria?
EARL FERRERS: My Lords, we are concerned that both sides in this conflict should honour both the Third and the Fourth Geneva Conventions. As I explained in my original reply, we have been in contact with both sides about this, and we hope that these contacts will bear fruit.
LORD SHACKLETON: My Lords, while we are well aware of the "even handed" nature of the present Government in regard to this matter, may I ask whether the noble Earl is aware that, though we appreciate that the Government find it difficult to express clear-cut opinions, it is the feeling of, I am sure, all noble Lords that the treatment of Israeli prisoners on the Syrian front fills us with horror?
EARL FERRERS: My Lords, I will certainly see that the views of the noble Lord the Leader of the Opposition are drawn to the attention of my right honourable friend.
LORD BERNSTEIN: My Lords, is it not possible for your Lordships, through the Foreign Office and Her Majesty's Government, who I am quite sure have done their best, to send an all-Party Committee from this House to see whether the prisoners are in existence or not? Because that is what is worrying a great number of people.
EARL FERRERS: My Lords, while I respect the view of the noble Lord, Lord Bernstein, I do not think that that would really be the best way to set about this problem. Fundamentally, with regard to the Fourth Convention, this is a matter which pre-eminently refers to the International Red Cross. We believe that that is the best agency for dealing with the problem, and that a Government-to-Government basis is the best way to deal with the problem of negotiations. We wish to see this come about, but I do not believe that sending an all-Party delegation from this House would produce the ends which the noble Lord wishes.
LORD SHINWELL: My Lords, am I right to assume that the International Red Cross, among its multifarious and beneficent functions, has the responsibility and duty to make inquiries about the condition of all prisoners, and may I ask whether Her Majesty's Government have consulted the International Red Cross in this matter?
EARL FERRERS: My Lords, under the Third Convention a list of prisoners must be supplied to the International Red Cross, the Red Cross must be allowed to visit the prisoners and the countries involved must repatriate their prisoners after the cessation of hostilities. Under the Fourth Convention, which deals with the protection of civilians, if they are evacuated during a conflict they must be returned without delay at the end, and the Red Cross must be allowed to visit the occupied areas; and it is my understanding that this has not been allowed.
LORD POPPLEWELL: My Lords, will the noble Lord clarify what he means by
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his reference to "Government-to-Government"? Do we understand that Her Majesty's Government have made representations to the Syrian Government; and if not, why not?
EARL FERRERS: My Lords, as I explained in my original reply, we have been in touch with the Syrian Government.
LORD BERNSTEIN: My Lords, may I ask whether the noble Earl would consider the suggestion which I put forward? It is an easy answer to say, "We have done everything." Many Governments have said that they have done everything and, later on, when we read the diaries and biographies of people, we find that they have not done everything. Would the noble Earl reconsider this suggestion that Members of the other place, if not Members of your Lordships' House, might form an all-Party delegation to inspect the prisoners and see whether they are still alive?
EARL FERRERS: My Lords, there are international agencies to do precisely what the noble Lord has suggested. I suspect that if they do not have access, it would be extremely unlikely that an all-Party delegation from either House or both would have access.
LORD SHEPHERD: My Lords, would the noble Earl consider approaching his right honourable friend to ask whether he would call the Syrian Ambassador to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and express to him the concern of your Lordships' House and, I believe, the concern of people throughout the country, at the treatment of the prisoners of war? If the noble Earl would give that undertaking, some of the concern expressed in your Lordships' House might be mitigated.
EARL FERRERS: My Lords, I understand entirely the concern which has been expressed this afternoon. I shall be more than happy to accede to Lord Shepherd's request and draw the attention of my right honourable friend to what has been said in your Lordships' House.

COMMISSION OF HUMAN RIGHTS
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 whether they propose to renew the right of individuals to petition the European Commission of Human Rights when the present two-year period of acceptance of Article 25 ends in January, 1974.
THE LORD CHANCELLOR (LORD HAILSHAM OF SAINT MARYLEBONE): My Lords, Her Majesty's Government will renew their acceptance of Article 25 of the European Convention on Human Rights for a further period of two years from January 14, 1974. It is also the Government's intention to renew for a similar period their declaration under Article 46 of the Convention which provides for the acceptance of the compulsory jurisdiction of the European Court of Human Rights.
LORD BROCKWAY: My Lords, is the noble and learned Lord aware that on this unique occasion I have no supplementary question to ask?
THE LORD CHANCELLOR: My Lords, I am glad that we are breaking new ground.

BRUCELLOSIS ERADICATION SCHEME
2.45 p.m.
BARONESS SUMMERSKILL: My Lords, I beg leave to ask the Question which stands in my name on the Order Paper.
The Question was as follows:
To ask Her Majesty's Government whether the slow progress of the brucellosis eradication scheme is attributable to the undermanned state of the Veterinary Service; and what action is being taken to improve the position.
EARL FERRERS: My Lords, while good progress continues to be made in the eradication of brucellosis, the rate of future progress must depend largely on the availability of whole-time veterinary staff and the other demands made upon their time. The Ministry of Agriculture,
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Fisheries and Food is continuing its efforts to increase the strength of the State Veterinary Service.
BARONESS SUMMERSKILL: My Lords, in view of the fact that the noble Lord has said that progress depends on the State Veterinary Service, may I ask whether he is aware that quite recently the President of the British Veterinary Association said that the position was so grave that if an epidemic of any cattle disease occurred in this country—I hope that it will not—the present Service would probably be unable to deal with it? What are the Government doing about increasing the Service? Is the noble Earl aware that the President also stated that the position has been worsening for years; that the Government have been approached by the Service time after time and that the Government have shown complete indifference?
EARL FERRERS: My Lords, I would not accept the last part of the noble Baroness's supplementary question. I do not think that the Government have been indifferent over this matter. As I explained in my Answer, we are concerned to strengthen the State Veterinary Service. Action has been and is being taken to do this and to encourage new recruits into the Service. The noble Baroness says that there is a likelihood of the Service breaking down because there are not enough people in it. I accept that there are problems when an unexpected outbreak of a disease occurs, but I would remind the noble Baroness that a Committee is sitting under Professor Swann which is looking into the position with regard to the Veterinary Service as a whole.
BARONESS SUMMERSKILL: My Lords, is the noble Earl aware that I am not quoting my own opinion, and that I would not presume to know enough about the agriculture industry to do so? I was quoting the President of the British Veterinary Association who made this statement on the radio last week. May I ask the noble Earl whether he is aware that the President said that the great majority of men in the Veterinary Service are over 45? I should like to know what the Government have done in the last few years—the President said that they had done nothing—to recruit young men and women into the Veterinary Service.
EARL FERRERS: My Lords, it was the allegation that I was refuting. I was not suggesting that it had been made by the noble Baroness and not the President of the British Veterinary Association. As the noble Baroness may know, there have been difficulties about the ability to advertise for new recruits. We are concerned about this matter and we do advertise for new recruits into the Service. That is producting results, albeit not as quickly as we should wish.
BARONESS SUMMERSKILL: My Lords, I am sorry to have to put another supplementary question, but may I ask this in order to help the Government? Is the noble Earl aware that it is no use advertising in newspapers. One should go to the schools. We want students, boys and girls who are wondering what their future career should be. That is where the Department should be tackling the problem, not waiting until these young people have other jobs.
EARL FERRERS: My Lords, I accept the point made by the noble Baroness. My noble friend Lord Balerno has an Unstarred Question down for debate on Wednesday of this week, and possibly we can then go into the matter in more detail. I accept the noble Baroness's concern. We equally are concerned. But I do not think that one should infer from this that the State Veterinary Service is likely to break down or that the brucellosis scheme is not going ahead as quickly as it should, because in fact it is.
LORD WIGG: My Lords, if the Minister is telling the House that the Government are doing all they can to improve and widen the Veterinary Service, and as their proposals include cutting down the six existing veterinary schools to four and curtaining the number of students entering the schools, would he tell the House what the Government would be doing if they were not in favour of improving the Service?
EARL FERRERS: My Lords, if the Government were not in favour of improving the Veterinary Service, they would not be doing all they can to strengthen the Service, which is what they are doing.
LORD SLATER: My Lords the noble Earl referred to a Committee that had been set up. May I ask when the Com
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mittee was set up and whether the noble Earl could inform the House when it is expected that the Committee will be able to give its Report?
EARL FERRERS: My Lords, a Committee of Inquiry was set up under Sir Michael Swann. It is expected that its Report will be published during the summer of 1974.
THE EARL OF MAR: My Lords, can the noble Earl say how many vets have had brucellosis, or have it now?—because I think a considerable number of them have.
EARL FERRERS: My Lords, if the noble Earl will be good enough to put down a specific Question on that point, I will find out the specific Answer.
LORD ROWALLAN: My Lords, is the noble Lord aware that for six years now we have been stressing the importance of keeping the veterinary medical services at a high level? Is he also aware that during those six years practically nothing has been done, and that the Government are not making themselves very popular with farmers, who, frankly, are disgusted with the way in which they have been treated? Is the noble Earl futher aware that there are many ways in which the veterinary services could be better used than they are now? For instance, one is—I hope your Lordships will excuse me for going on—that animals—
SEVERAL NOBLE LORDS: Question!
EARL FERRERS: My Lords, I did not think this question would go by without the noble Lord, Lord Rowallan, making an interjection on the position of the State Veterinary Service. The fact is that there have been increasing demands over the last ten years on the veterinary profession, whether State or private. Of course this has caused problems. With respect to the noble Lord, I would not agree that farmers are disgusted with the way that they have been treated by the State Veterinary Service, because the State Veterinary Service has done an extremely good job in all fields of health control. I would say only this to the noble Lord—that the conclusion of the brucellosis scheme is likely to be within the next decade, which is in line with the forecast that we made originally when the scheme started.
LORD BERNSTEIN: My Lords, can the noble Earl say whether he thinks Professor Swann, now that he is the Chairman of the B.B.C. Governors, has too much to do to enable this Report to be issued before the middle of 1974?
EARL FERRERS: My Lords, I do not think Professor Swann has too much on his plate to cope with this Report. In fact, they are going into the whole position in detail. I suggest that we should wait for their Report to find out exactly what the situation is.

PETROL SUPPLIES IN INNER LONDON
2.53 p.m.
LORD DERWENT: My Lords, although the actual wording of the Question standing in my name on the Order Paper is very slightly out of date, I still beg leave to ask it.
The Question was as follows:
To ask Her Majesty's Government why, if Ministers say that at the present time there are adequate supplies of petrol, it is almost impossible to obtain petrol in the Inner London Area.
THE MINISTER WITHOUT PORTFOLIO (LORD DRUMALBYN): My Lords, petrol supplies to garages in the period November 19 to December 12 are based on the total amounts delivered in the corresponding period in 1972 less 10 per cent., apportioned on the basis of deliveries made to particular garages in September, 1973. This should suffice if motorists observe the requests for economies that have been made. Demand has been artificially increased because many motorists have been topping up their tanks at every available opportunity. It now appears that motorists are heeding the Government's appeals, and the situation seems to be improving.
LORD DERWENT: My Lords, if Her Majesty's Government have evidence that topping-up has been one of the principal troubles, would they not consider adopting the policy which many weeks ago was suggested in The Times, of asking garages not to sell petrol in amounts of less than four gallons for a small car and six gallons for a large car, which would go a long way towards stopping this topping-up nonsense?
LORD DRUMALBYN: My Lords, I am aware that some garages are already doing this; but it is of course up to them to allocate as they see fit.
LORD DERWENT: My Lords, I am sorry to say that my noble friend has not answered my question. The suggestion in The Times was that Her Majesty's Government should ask garages to do this. Is there anything against their asking them to do it?
LORD DRUMALBYN: My Lords, not at all, except that it would go through the Oil Industry Emergency Committee. I will draw this point to the attention of my right honourable friend.
LORD SLATER: My Lords, can the noble Lord say whether any export is taking place at the moment by the oil companies, particularly Shell, to another country?
LORD DRUMALBYN: My Lords, that seems to be rather a different question from the one on the Order Paper.
LORD DOUGLASS OF CLEVELAND: My Lords, may I ask whether the suggestion of the noble Lord, Lord Derwent —which has great merit—that no car should be able to get less than, say, four gallons, would not impinge on those smaller garages whose supplies seem to be restricted and who are trying to share it out by allowing a maximum of two gallons per customer?
LORD DRUMALBYN: Yes, my Lords; I think it must depend on the individual circumstances of the garages. I thought my noble friend was indicating that this was a suggestion that might be made; it certainly would not be mandatory.
LORD SHINWELL: My Lords, would the noble Lord, Lord Drumalbyn, take serious objection to my repeating a question which I put to him when we were debating the Emergency Powers? He will recall the occasion when I asked him about the assurances Her Majesty's Government had obtained from the Arab States for a plentiful supply of petrol and oil products. Does he recall that on that occasion he said he was unable either to give me an assurance or to deny that there were assurances? Could he qualify the situation now?
LORD DRUMALBYN: My Lords, I do not think I ought to do so now, because it is a question that is quite outside what I have been asked. I think the House is fully aware of the general situation, and I need not repeat what has been said elsewhere.
LORD SHEPHERD: My Lords, in the light of the noble Lord's reference to garages using their expertise in this matter, can the noble Lord say anything in regard to those garages which are now charging 50p for a gallon of petrol? What is the view of Her Majesty's Government about this? Does not the noble Lord recognise that garages with a much lower turnover can clearly now charge 50p per gallon and still be within the Prices Code? In the light of what could be a major inflationary consequence, can the noble Lord say whether the Government will take steps to bring prices back to their original level?
LORD DRUMALBYN: My Lords, the noble Lord will be aware that there are two controls here. One is the margin control, and the other is the overall profit control. If they are charging 50p they are certainly not within the margin control. If the noble Lord, or any other noble Lord, can bring to my attention cases of this, I shall be glad to hear of them.
LORD SHEPHERD: My Lords, the noble Lord may be aware that a member of the Price Commission has said that it was lawful to charge 50p a gallon so long as it was within the overall profit limit. That is the point that I was seeking to make and as to which I was asking whether the noble Lord could express a view.
LORD DRUMALBYN: My Lords, I do not think I ought to express a view on what the Price Commission have said. I was not aware that they had said this, but, in any case, I do not think I ought to express an opinion upon it. Of course if it is lawful to be done just now, the question then is whether it is expedient that it should be done, and that is another question that we should have to examine.
LORD SHEPHERD: My Lords, but is it right that garages should be making these increased profits as a consequence of the hardship to the public?
LORD DRUMALBYN: My Lords, I understood the noble Lord was saying that the Price Commission had said that it was lawful because they were not making very much increased profit. If it is on the profit control, that is a different matter which would have to be looked at in a wider context.
LORD PEDDIE: My Lords, in the light of the comments which have just been made, may I ask whether or not the Government or the Price Commission can exercise any control at all over the individual prices charged for the individual gallon of petrol?
LORD DRUMALBYN: My Lords, the Government could exercise such a control under the Act that we have just passed, namely, the Fuel and Electricity (Control) Act, if they thought it necessary.
LORD BELHAVEN AND STENTON: My Lords, can my noble friend say whether it is the Government's opinion that this situation which has hit us over the last week or two is going to continue or not, or is it getting better? There are people, such as car hire firms, whose livelihood have been very hard hit in the last ten days, and I think they would like to know.
LORD DRUMALBYN: What I said was that the situation at the pumps was getting better. I was not making a general statement about the oil situation.
LORD THOMAS: My Lords, would the noble Lord not agree that if the motorists in the Inner London area exercised more patience and less greed in this matter of topping up their tanks, the situation would be self-resolving?
LORD DRUMALBYN: My Lords, I am bound to agree with my noble friend, but I think that is already happening. It was not so much that they were greedy, but they were frightened that they would not get supplies. Now they have much less need to be frightened.
LORD ARWYN: My Lords, is the Minister aware that the price of £1, which was charged by one garage for 2½ gallons, represents a price of 40p a gallon. Yet other garages are charging nearer 35p for the same quality of petrol. Who authorises these prices? That is what happened to me yesterday on the M4.
LORD DRUMALBYN: My Lords, I think noble Lords will know the situation under the counter-inflation system, and if they have reason to believe that in individual cases the regulations here are being infringed, then they should bring the matter to the attention of the Government.

COUNCIL OF IRELAND
EARL ST. ALDWYN: My Lords, with the leave of the House, my noble friend the Leader of the House will be making a statement on Northern Ireland at a convenient moment after 3.30.
My Lords, may I inform your Lordships that in view of the very large number of speakers on both the Bills this afternoon, dinners will be available.

PROTECTION OF MINORS BILL [H.L.]
3.2 p.m.
BARONESS WOOTTON OF ABINGER: My Lords, I beg to move that this Bill be now read a second time. Its primary purpose is to put an end to the practice of corporal punishment of children in schools and similar institutions, or indeed anywhere, by anybody, except their parents. The Bill does not interfere in any way with the existing rights of parents to administer reasonable chastisement to their own children. And I think that in the present circumstances I ought perhaps to emphasise the word "reasonable", in view of certain tragic happenings that sometimes occur. Punishments which amount to cruelty or aggravated assaults, by parents or anyone else, are of course subject to serious charges under other Statutes and are not the concern of this particular Bill. I would commend this Bill to your Lordships on grounds of principle and expediency. I hope to show that it has been demonstrated sporadically in this country, and more widely elsewhere, that corporal punishment is both unnecessary and ineffective in the training of children. I hope also to convince your Lordships that the introduction of this Bill at the present moment is timely.
In principle, I regard the use of corporal punishment on children in school as wholly out of keeping with modern educational methods. It can hardly foster a love of learning, and if it induces respect
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for the teacher, it is respect of might and not of right. I find it also anonialaus that the law which forbids adults to assault one another should give less, rather than more, protection to children. I find it even more anomalous that in this respect the penal system is ahead of the educational system. Corporal punishment in all types of penal institutions—and this includes borstals—was abolished after it had been demonstrated that it was ineffective in the light of the subsequent records of those who had been subjected to it. It follows, that, whereas an unruly boy of 15 or 16 may be caned in school, if he gets himself into more serious trouble and ends up in borstal, no such treatment is permitted. Strangest of all, my Lords, do I find the implication for our social values, in that apparently in this country at the present time the only people who can wield a cane with impunity, in the exercise of their professional activities, are teachers and prostitutes.
I am well aware that public opinion, both among teachers and in the community at large, is divided on this issue. I have had a fair amount of correspondence from members of the public and from teachers. I have had 176 letters, of which 155 were in favour and 21 were against this Bill. Some come from parents, a few come from schoolchildren, but the overwhelming majority come from teachers. Among those that come from teachers the proportion in favour of this Bill is 20 to one. I am very well aware that this is not a representative sample, but I have quoted these figures because, as one who has often taken up causes before they were popular, I find that generally the community is more disposed to take up its pen to protest than to commend. Such a favourable balance is, at least in my experience, entirely unique.
Those who oppose the Bill mostly do so because they take the view that the use of physical force is the only argument that a certain proportion of young people can be made to understand. I find this thesis not supported among my correspondents by very much concrete evidence, though it is often well flavoured with personal abuse. The validity of the thesis is open to challenge inasmuch as indiscipline, and occasional violence, persist in schools where corporal punishment is used habitually. A very common

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experience is that the same children are over and over again punished by cane.
Those who support the Bill mostly do so on grounds of moral principle and educational method. They regard the finding of the Plowden Committee in relation to primary schools as applicable to all ages: I mean the finding that the right relationship between child and teacher cannot be build up in an atmosphere in which the infliction of physical pain is regarded as a normal sanction. Teachers also write to me about the frequency, in some schools, of physical punishment for trivial offences: small children being caned for coming to school with dirty knees, girls for giggling, or boys for snowballing or not wearing the school cap. Others quote examples of excessive severity: I have some recent eye-witness records of these, but I prefer not to quote from them. I do not think this Bill needs to be supported by horror stories or by exceptional occurrences; and I am quite certain that such incidents are exceptional. Nevertheless, I would say that, so long as any kind of physical punishment is permitted in schools, somebody, some time, will carry this practice to excess. Also disturbing are the reports of not infrequent unrecorded, and unsanctioned, punishments by way of slap-pings and beatings, and sometimes quite serious assaults. Also, it is disturbing to learn of the survival of the practice in some schools of caning children who have truanted, improbable though it seems that this will have the effect of inducing the truant to return to school.
My Lords, I turn now from the comments that I have received from various sources to a rather broader view of the situation as it is to-day, in so far as one can ascertain the facts. First as to the law, this can hardly be said to be a model of clarity. From the 1860s onwards, sporadic judicial decisions have formulated the doctrine that when the parent sends his child to school he, by implication, transfer his parental rights so that the teacher is for the time being in loco parentis. This doctrine, however, dates from before the introduction of compulsory education to the time when a parent, if he disliked what went on in a school, could withdraw his child. In present circumstances, where schooling is compulsory and the parent often has but limited freedom to send his child to the
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school of his choice, it might be more realistic to say that he is deprived of his rights rather than that he voluntarily transfers them. The parent to-day who does not wish to delegate his right to punish may find that he can avoid doing so only by withdrawing the child from school and thus breaking the compulsory attendance law and depriving his child of education altogether.
Some authorities hold that in the case of a conflict between the parent and school, the parent's wishes must prevail. Yet the teacher enjoys further statutory protection under Section 1(7) of the Children and Young Persons Act 1933, which expressly provides that nothing in that Act shall affect the teacher's right to administer punishment (incidentally of an unspecified nature) to any child in his care. This Bill would repeal that provision and would also override any assumed or explicit transfer of the parent's right to the teacher or to anybody else.
To turn from law to practice, I find that a surprising number of well-informed people regard the Bill as unnecessary because they believe that corporal punishment has already been abolished, at any rate in the State schools. Unfortunately, statistics from the punishment books are not published: I do not think they are even nationally recorded. If they were, they would undoubtedly be incomplete, but I have equally no doubt that they would be sufficient to dispel any illusion of that kind. So far as I know, only one local education authority has imposed a total ban on corporal punishment which is effective at the present time, and that is Great Yarmouth. That ban took effect only last October, so that to date there is not much experience of its working. Recently the Oxford City Education Committee proposed a similar total ban, to take effect from the beginning of next year. But as from April, 1974, the Oxford City Council will be swallowed up in the larger county authority and it is likely that the matter will have to be reviewed at that stage. Some months ago, Liverpool took courage and proposed a total ban, but second thoughts presently prevailed —largely, I think, because the council were already meeting opposition to their policy on comprehensive education, and they decided that it might be more prudent to proceed gradually. Finally, as many of your Lordships

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will know, the Inner London Education Authority have prohibited corporal punishment altogether, but only in their primary schools, as from the beginning of this current year. After only one term of this experience, the Inner London Teachers' Association, through their Education Committee, passed a resolution calling for the extension of this to schools of all ages. Meanwhile, three or four other smaller authorities have also banned corporal punishment in their primary schools.
Apart from these exceptions, education authorities generally either make precise rules or leave the matter to the discretion of individual staffs. The rules make very macabre reading, laying down the circumstances in which and by whom corporal punishment may be administered, and the precise degree of permissible severity. The policy of leaving it to the staffs is often welcomed by teachers, on the ground that this is a matter within their professional competence and they are specially qualified, as professionals, to determine when it is and when it is not proper to employ the cane. I find this a very odd conception of professionalism, and I should very much like to know what instruction on this matter is given to prospective teachers in the course of their training. I should have thought that the question of when it is legitimate to hit another person was essentially a moral issue and one that could be described as professional only in the sense that some professional bodies do lay down ethical codes to which they require all their members to conform. To allow that a teacher is professionally qualified to decide when a cane should be used seems to me to be analogous to substituting for the rule that doctors must not indulge in sexual intercourse with their patients a provision that their professional training would allow them to determine in what circumstances it would be right and proper to do so.
However, whether rules are prescribed or not, there is a great diversity of practice in this country. At one end of the scale stands the City of Edinburgh, where I am officially informed that in the spring term of this year 9,326 instances of corporal punishment occurred in regard to boys, and 1,663 instances in regard to girls, making a total of just short of 11,000 cases of corporal punishment in the
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Corporations's 20-odd secondary and 90-odd primary schools in a single term. It is fair to add that, perhaps on account of these facts having come to light. I understand that some phasing-out of corporal punishment is now on the Corporation's agenda. At the other end of the scale, up and down the country there are schools in which corporal punishment has been totally abolished. I have records of a number of these. Typically, the initiative comes from a headmaster, very often newly appointed, who manages to persuade a sometimes reluctant staff. Typically also, I have subsequent reports of greatly improved relationships between staff and students after abolition has been in force for some time. In one comprehensive school in a somewhat depressed area in the North of the country this was referred to as "an inestimable gain", and from areas where there are tough children and deprived-area environments one gets the same story.
I should like to refer to one London comprehensive which proceeded rather differently. It was agreed by the staff that they would not abolish the cane immediately but that every time an occasion arose when it might be used they would consider what alternative could be substituted. The result was that alternatives were found and caning gradually disappeared. After a term had gone by with no cases at all, the practice of corporal punishment was totally abandoned. This confirms the view that I have received from two other headmasters, one of whom says that:
"…until such time as the cane disappears we shall go on 'kidding' ourselves that it is effective";
and the other of whom asks for abolition by law of corporal punishment because it would accelerate the rethinking of educational methods. Independent schools, of course, are a law unto themselves, or have been until now. Recently, the author of The Times Diary conducted a survey of seven named major public schools. He found—and I quote his own words—that parents no longer
"spend fortunes sending their sons to schools where, as recently as the 'sixties they were savagely beaten".
While all these establishments have reduced what he elegantly calls the practice of "beating their privileged bottoms", in only one case has the practice been abandoned altogether—yet in no case was

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it reported that sparing the "privileged bottom" had spoiled the discipline.
I will not weary your Lordships with more individual examples. I will only say that, alike in independent schools and in the State system, I find the same story over and over again. Where corporal punishment has been abolished or greatly reduced, the improvement in relations between the child and the teacher is constantly emphasised. This in turn, in the words of one head teacher,
"strengthens the child's ability to learn, and consequently reduces violence."
Again and again it is demonstrated that there are no enemies of indiscipline comparable with mutual understanding and the awakening of pupil interest. The unruly child is the frustrated and bored child.
I said just now that the Bill was timely. Opponents will argue, on the contrary, that the moment when a minority of young people take too freely to violence is quite the wrong moment at which to abolish corporal punishment. This implies of course, what I have already disputed, that the method is effective. But I would rather turn the argument upside down. I would submit that the greater the prevalence of undisciplined behaviour, the less is it opportune to give implicit official endorsement to the doctrine that in the last resort the way to enforce your will is by physical assault. As one head teacher has put it,
"children often learn from us a lesson we are not intending to teach."
But the Bill is timely for other reasons. Britain is rapidly getting to be out on a limb in this matter. In Europe outside the E.E.C. corporal punishment is forbidden in the schools of Iceland, Norway, Finland and Sweden, as it is also in a great many non-European countries and I am not sure that the list is complete. Of our partners within the Community, France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Denmark and Italy have all prohibited it. Italy have denied they have ever abolished it because they say it never existed. I am officially told that in Holland it is generally unknown and that any teacher who resorts to it is liable to be, and sometimes is, reprimanded. In Germany it is allowed only in primary schools, but there is an element of provincial discretion and I
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understand that in some areas further steps have been taken towards abolition. Within the Community only in Ireland and the United Kingdom is corporal punishment both legal and frequently used. Now that movements towards uniformity are afoot in so many matters of the European Community, such as, for example, the qualifications required for various professions or the control of juggernauts, may it not be only a question of time before we are required to abandon a practice which has been discarded by so many of our partners—indeed the great majority of them—as archaic, if not barbaric? Would it not be more dignified to fall into line of our own volition without waiting to he told?
I turn now to summarise shortly the text of the Bill. It applies throughout to England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. Clause 1 creates a new offence of wilful assault on a minor by any person (including any teacher) who has the custody, care or charge of him, while expressly safeguarding the parents or legal guardians and their spouses against being found guilty of an offence under the Bill, parental liability at common law and under other enactments being, of course, unaffected. This clause also declares that "reasonable chastisement" shall not be an acceptable defence to a prosecution for the offence created by the Bill. Clause 1 further prescribes the penalties that may be imposed for the new offence. Here I must apologise to your Lordships for an oversight in the printing of the Bill, as a result of which the penalties appear to be fixed fines or terms of imprisonment. Actually, as is usual in our Statutes, they should be maxima, and should in every case be preceded by the words "not exceeding". If your Lordships give this Bill a Second Reading, undertake to move an Amendment in Committee to put this right.
The penalties proposed for summary conviction are well below those that may be imposed by magistrates for many other offences. In so fixing them I have had in mind that very serious assaults by teachers or anybody else are dealt with under existing legislation, and that this Bill applies only to the kinds of assault which may at present be inflicted upon the children by their teachers with impunity. The

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maximum sentence of imprisonment on summary conviction of four months has been deliberately inserted so that an accused person may have the opportunity of trial in the Crown Court by jury.
Clause 2 gives protection against double jeopardy by providing that no one can be charged both with the new offence and with an offence of aggravated assault under previous legislation. It does, however, allow a person charged with such an aggravated assault to be alternatively found guilty of the less serious offence created by the Bill, just as a person charged with dangerous driving may be convicted of the lesser offence of driving without due care. Clause 3 abolishes the defence of "reasonable chastisement" (except for parents and legal guardians and their spouses) in civil actions or prosecutions for aggravated assault.
Clause 4 repeals the section of the Children and Young Persons Act 1933, to which I have already referred, which expressly allows any teacher to administer unspecified punishment to a child. This clause also prohibits the use of corporal punishment in any institution in which children may reside by order of a court or local authority, including those cases in which a local authority has by resolution assumed parental rights under the Children Act 1948. Clause 5 is interpretive but contains also a provision binding the Crown. The remaining clauses provide that the Bill may, by Order in Council, be extended to the Isle of Man or the Channel Islands, and that it should come into force on January 1, 1975.
Britain prides itself upon a reputation for sportsmanship, and I have always understood that the first rule of sportsmanship is that a person may not hit someone who is not of his own size, and least of all hit someone who cannot hit back. Is it not therefore strange that the law which forbids us to strike our equals should make one exception—those who by definition, are not, at any rate in status, our own size and who have no right or opportunity of retaliation? Is it really credible that British children are so much more unruly than French, Italian, Norwegian, Danish, Dutch, Belgian or Swedish children, or literally millions of others throughout the world, that our children, and our children alone, can only be
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educated with the assistance of punitive assaults? I myself have no doubt at all that the day will come when some of the scenes enacted in our schools today will be looked upon as we now look upon tales from Dickens. If in fact that is what those scenes are, why do we not recognise the reality immediately and act accordingly? I beg to move.
Moved, That the Bill be now read 2a.—(Baroness Wootton of Abinger.)
3.28 p.m.
LORD AMULREE: My Lords, I should like briefly to support the noble Baroness in the Second Reading of this Bill, which she has moved so cogently and well. I shall be extremely brief in view of the large number of speakers who have put down their names to speak. I do not think a great deal of harm is done to children who are caned, and I do not think a great deal of harm can be suffered by the person who canes. I think the tale of the sadistic schoolmaster has been rather overdone. There are some forms of corporal punishment which are dangerous. There is a nasty thing called the "tawse" which was common in Scotland at one time. I think it is used in some parts of the country whereby you are beaten on the palm of your hand by a leather thong which is unattractive and uncomfortable and not very good for the person being beaten.
There are two things I dislike: first, the solemn ritual of the corporal punishment which occurs in many places; and, secondly—and if this occurs at all now it is mainly in the independent schools—I do not like the idea of little boys being beaten by bigger boys; and, in the same way, I do not like the idea of masters beating little boys. As the noble Baroness has explained, it does not seem logical. If we give the Bill a Second Reading. we shall certainly be following the example of a large number of European countries. So far as I am aware, no country in Eastern Europe now has corporal punishment. They may have other things which are equally unattractive, but they do not have that form of punishment. I think that Poland, for example, abolished physical punishment in the year 1783, which is going back quite a long time. Admittedly, it did not do the poor Poles much good, because they were absorbed with the Russians fairly shortly after. But I am

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pleased to see that in the one country in the Western Economic Union which retains it—West Germany—the practice is becoming more uncommon and many administrative areas have banned it entirely.
I think it is in the decline in this country and is largely confined now to beating boys of middle age groups; but that does not put it in any better state. One has read that one day in the 1950s a master in a school in Durham beat 200 boys in one day. I do not think that that kind of thing would occur now but it is a possibility. I was shocked to be told what the Edinburgh education authority found in their schools; I think that what the noble Baroness told us in that connection was a shocking and horrifying tale. It would be very good if we were to follow the example of our European colleagues and not wait until it is forced upon us. I am sure it is something that Her Majesty's Government are keen to do, as the noble Baroness, Lady Burton of Coventry, could bear witness to, when one thinks of the attempts she has made to resist the enforcing of the practice they have in many European countries with regard to buses at the London Air Terrninal. My Lords, I am quite aware that a large number of teachers in Great Britain object to the removal of corporal punishment, but I am bound to say that I share the view of the noble Baroness, Lady Wootton. I cannot really think that the children of Great Britain are so much more wicked, so much more evil, so much more requiring punishment, than the children in most of the countries of Europe. If this Bill goes to a vote, I shall certainly support it.

COUNCIL OF IRELAND
3.32 p.m.
THE LORD PRIVY SEAL (LORD WINDLESHAM): My Lords, this may be a convenient moment for me to repeat the Prime Minister's Statement on Northern Ireland and the agreement to set up a Council of Ireland. The Statement reads as follows:
"Mr. Speaker, I will with permission make a Statement about the tripartite Conference at Sunningdale between the British and Irish Governments and the parties involved in the Northern Ireland Executive. The House will know that the Conference was brought to a successful conclusion and that an agreed Communiqué was issued last night. Copies of it have been made available in the Vote Office, and it will be circulated in the OFFICIAL REPORT.
"The House will not wish me to repeat the details which are recorded in the Communiqué. The outcome of the Conference has shown that the existence of apparently incompatible political aspirations has not prevented Her Majesty's Government, the Irish Government and the Northern Ireland Executive designate from working together for the benefit of both parts of Ireland.
"The Communiqué sets out for the first time parallel declarations by the British and Irish Governments that the status of Northern Ireland cannot be changed until a majority of the people of Northern Ireland so desire. These declarations will be incorporated in a formal agreement which will be registered at the United Nations.
"The Conference agreed on the establishment of a Council of Ireland which will have both executive and harmonising functions and a consultative role. The Council will have equal representation from both North and South with safeguards for the British Government's interests and will act on the basis of unanimity. There will also be a consultative Assembly, with equal representation from the Dail and the Northern Ireland Assembly. The Communiqué also sets out fresh proposals for dealing with politically motivated violence throughout Ireland.

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"The way is now open for the appointment of the Northern Ireland Executive, and, subject to the approval of Parliament, for the devolution of powers to the Northern Ireland Executive and the Northern Ireland Assembly. The necessary legislation and instruments will be brought before Parliament later this week.
"It was agreed that a formal Conference should be held early in the New Year in which the British and Irish Governments and the Northern Ireland Executive can meet together to consider reports on the studies which are being commissioned and to sign the agreement reached.
"The agreement has immense significance for the future of Ireland. The fact that such an agreement has been reached is due to the constructive and realistic attitude taken in the talks both by the Irish Government and by those parties in Northern Ireland who will now come together in a Northern Ireland Executive. It now remains for us all to implement the agreement for the benefit of the people of Ireland as a whole."
My Lords, that concludes the Prime Minister's Statement.
Following is the Communiqué referred to:

AGREED COMMUNIQUE
1. The Conference between the British and Irish Governments and the parties involved in the Northern Ireland Executive (designate) met at Sunningdale on 6, 7, 8 and 9 December, 1973.
2. During the Conference, each delegation stated their position on the status of Northern Ireland.
3. The Taoiseach said that the basic principle of the Conference was that the participants had tried to see what measure of agreement of benefit to all the people concerned could be secured. In doing so, all had reached accommodation with one another on practical arrangements. But none had compromised, and none had asked others to compromise, in relation to basic aspirations. The people of the Republic, together with a minority in Northern Ireland as represented by the S.D.L.P. delegation, continued to uphold the aspiration towards a united Ireland. The only unity they wanted to see was a unity established by consent.
4. Mr. Brian Faulkner said that delegates from Northern Ireland came to the Conference as representatives of apparently incompatible sets of political aspirations who had found it possible to reach agreement to join together
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in government because each accepted that in doing so they were not sacrificing principles or aspirations. The desire of the majority of the people of Northern Ireland to remain part of the United Kingdom, as represented by the Unionist and Alliance delegations, remained firm.

5. The Irish Government fully accepted and solemnly declared that there could be no change in the status of Northern Ireland until a majority of the people of Northern Ireland desired a change in that status.

The British Government solemnly declared that it was, and would remain, their policy to support the wishes of the majority of the people of Northern Ireland. The present status of Northern Ireland is that it is part of the United Kingdom. If in the future the majority of the people of Northern Ireland should indicate a wish to become part of a united Ireland, the British Government would support that wish.

6. The Conference agreed that a formal agreement incorporating the declarations of the British and Irish Governments would be signed at the formal stage of the Conference and registered at the United Nations.
7. The Conference agreed that a Council of Ireland would be set up. It would be confined to representatives of the two parts of Ireland, with appropriate safeguards for the British Government's financial and other interests. It would comprise a Council of Ministers with executive and harmonising functions and a consultative role, and a Consultative Assembly with advisory and review functions. The Council of Ministers would act by unanimity, and would comprise a core of seven members of the Irish Government and an equal number of members of the Northern Ireland Executive with provision for the participation of other non-voting members of the Irish Government and the Northern Ireland) Executive or Administration when matters within their departmental competence were discussed. The Council of Ministers would control the functions of the Council. The Chairmanship would rotate on an agreed basis between representatives of the Irish Government and of the Northern Ireland Executive. Arrangements would be made for the location of the first meeting, and the location of subsequent meetings would be determined by the Council of Ministers. The Consultative Assembly would consist of 60 members, 30 members from Dail Eireann chosen by the Dail on the basis of proportional representation by the single transferable vote, and 30 members from the Northern Ireland Assembly chosen by that Assembly and also on that basis. The members of the Consultative Assembly would be paid allowances. There would be a Secretariat to the Council, which would be kept as small as might be commensurate with efficiency in the operation of the Council. The Secretariat would service the institutions on the Council and would, under the Council

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of Ministers, supervise the carrying out of the executive and harmonising functions and the consultative role of the Council. The Secretariat would be headed by a Secretary-General. Following the appointment of a Northern Ireland Executive, the Irish Government and the Northern Ireland Executive would nominate their representatives to a Council of Ministers. The Council of Ministers would then appoint a Secretary-General and decide upon the location of its permanent headquarters. The Secretary-General would be directed to proceed with the drawing up of plans for such headquarters. The Council of Ministers would also make arrangements for the recruitment of the staff of the Secretariat in a manner and on conditions which would, as far as is practicable, be consistent with those applying to public servants in the two administrations.
8. In the context of its harmonising functions and consultative role, the Council of Ireland would undertake important work relating, for instance, to the impact of EEC membership. As for executive functions, the first step would be to define and agree these in detail. The Conference therefore decided that, in view of the administrative complexities involved, studies would at once be set in hand to identify and, prior to the formal stage of the conference, report on areas of common interest in relation to which a Council of Ireland would take executive decisions, and, in appropriate cases, be responsible for carrying those decisions into effect. In carrying out these studies, and also in determining what should be done by the Council in terms of harmonisation, the objectives to be borne in mind would include the following:

(1) to achieve the best utilisation of scarce skills, expertise and resources;

(2) to avoid, in the interests of economy and efficiency, unnecessary duplication of effort; and

(3) to ensure complementary rather than competitive effort where this is to the advantage of agriculture, commerce and industry.

In particular, these studies would be directed to identifying, for the purposes of executive action by the Council of Ireland, suitable aspects of activities in the following broad fields.

(a) exploitation, conservation and develop-of natural resources and the environment;

(b) agricultural matters (including agricultural research, animal health and operational aspects of the Common Agriculture Policy), forestry and fisheries;

(c) co-operative ventures in the fields of trade and industry;

(d) electricity generation;

(e) tourism;

(f) roads and transport;

(g) advisory services in the field of public health;

(h) sport, culture and the arts.

It would be for the Oireachtas and the Northern Ireland Assembly to legislate from
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time to time as to the extent of functions to be devolved to the Council of Ireland. Where necessary, the British Government will co-operate in this devolution of functions. Initially, the functions to be vested would be those identified in accordance with the procedures set out above and decided, at the formal stage of the Conference, to be transferred.
9. (i) During the initial period following the establishment of the Council, the revenue of the Council would be provided by means of grants from the two administrations in Ireland towards agreed projects and budgets, according to the nature of the service involved.

(ii) It was also agreed that further studies would be put in hand forthwith and completed as soon as possible of methods of financing the Council after the initial period which would be consonant with the responsibilities and functions assigned to it.

(iii) It was agreed that the cost of the Secretariat of the Council of Ireland would be shared equally, and other services would be financed broadly in proportion to where expenditure or benefit accrues.

(iv) The amount of money required to finance the Council's activities will depend upon the functions assigned to it from time to time.

(v) While Britain continues to pay subsidies to Northern Ireland, such payments would not involve Britain participating in the Council, it being accepted nevertheless that it would be legitimate for Britain to safeguard in an appropriate way her financial involvement in Northern Ireland.

10. It was agreed by all parties that persons committing crimes of violence, however motivated, in any part of Ireland should be brought to trial irrespective of the part of Ireland in which they are located. The concern which large sections of the people of Northern Ireland felt about this problem was in particular forcefully expressed by the representatives of the Unionist and Alliance parties. The representatives of the Irish Government stated that they understood and fully shared this concern. Different ways of solving this problem were discussed; among them were the amendment of legislation operating in the two jurisdictions on extradition, the creation of a common law enforcement area in which an all-Ireland court would have jurisdiction, and the extension of the jurisdiction of domestic courts so as to enable them to try offences committed outside the jurisdiction. It was agreed that problems of considerable legal complexity were involved, and that the British and Irish Governments would jointly set up a commission to consider all the proposals put forward at the Conference and to recommend as a matter of extreme urgency the most effective means of dealing with those who commit these crimes. The Irish Government undertook to take immediate and effective legal steps so that persons coming within their jurisdiction and accused of murder, however motivated, committed in Northern Ireland will be brought to trial, and it was agreed that any similar reciprocal action that may be needed in Northern Ireland be taken by the appropriate authorities.
11. It was agreed that the Council would be invited to consider in what way the principles of the European Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms would be expressed in domestic legislation in each part of Ireland. It would recommend whether further legislation or the creation of other institutions, administrative or judicial, is required in either part or embracing the whole island to provide additional protection in the field of human rights. Such recommendations could include the functions of an Ombudsman or Commissioner for Complaints, or other arrangements of a similar nature which the Council of Ireland might think appropriate.
12. The Conference also discussed the question of policing and the need to ensure public support for and identification with the police service throughout the whole community. It was agreed that no single set of proposals would achieve these aims overnight, and that time would be necessary. The Conference expressed the hope that the wide range of agreement that had been reached, and the consequent formation of a power-sharing Executive, would make a major contribution to the creation of an atmosphere throughout the community where there would be widespread support for and identification with all the institutions of Northern Ireland.
13. It was broadly accepted that the two parts of Ireland are to a considerable extent interdependent in the whole field of law and order, and that the problems of political violence and identification with the police service cannot be solved without taking account of that fact.
14. Accordingly, the British Government stated that, as soon as the security problems were resolved and the new institutions were seen to be working effectively, they would wish to discuss the devolution of responsibility for normal policing and how this might be achieved with the Northern Ireland Executive and the Police.
15. With a view to improving policing throughout the island and developing community identification with and support for the police services, the governments concerned will co-operate under the auspices of a Council of Ireland through their respective police authorities. To this end, the Irish Government would set up a Police Authority, appointments to which would be made after consultation with the Council of Ministers of the Council of Ireland. In the case of the Northern Ireland Police Authority, appointments would be made after consultation with the Northern Ireland Executive, which would consult with the Council of Ministers of the Council of Ireland. When the two Police Authorities are constituted, they will make their own arrangements to achieve the objectives set out above.
16. An independent complaints procedure for dealing with complaints against the police will be set up.
17. The Secretary of State for Northern Ireland will set up an all-party committee from the Assembly to examine how best to introduce effective policing throughout Northern Ireland with particular reference to the need to achieve public identification with the police.
18. The Conference took note of a reaffirmation by the British Government of their firm commitment to bring detention to an end in Northern Ireland for all sections of the community as soon as the security situation permits, and noted also that the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland hopes to be able to bring into use his statutory powers of selective release in time for a number of detainees to be released before Christmas.
19. The British Government stated that, in the light of the decisions reached at the Conference, they would now seek the authority of Parliament to devolve full powers to the Northern Ireland Executive and Northern Ireland Assembly as soon as possible. The formal appointment of the Northern Ireland Executive would then be made.
20. The Conference agreed that a formal conference would be held early in the New Year at which the British and Irish Governments and the Northern Ireland Executive would meet together to consider reports on the studies which have been commissioned and to sign the agreement reached.
LORD SHACKLETON: My Lords, I am sure that the whole House unreservedly welcomes the Communiqué and the agreement which has been achieved, which is very remarkable in all the circumstances. It reflects the greatest credit on everybody, including members of Her Majesty's Government who took part in this Conference and those both from the Republic and from Northern Ireland. With 37 speakers to-day, it would be wrong if I were to start asking detailed questions. There are, obviously, a number of very difficult questions which have been raised in the Communiqué on which one would wish to know how Her Majesty's Government see matters working out. But I think we shall have an opportunity to deal with them (perhaps the noble Lord can tell us) probably on Tuesday of next week when both the Act and the Bill to amend the Constitution in relation to the size of the Executive, and the devolution Order, will come forward. Perhaps the noble Lord can say something as to whether legislation will be necessary in regard to the common law enforcement area, which is a complex and difficult matter. If so, this would be helpful. But, beyond that, all I can say is that I am sure everybody in this country, and the overwhelming majority of people in Ireland, North and South, now hope that both the subversive elements and the extremist Protestants will not wreck the best chance in centuries of peace for Northern Ireland.
LORD AMULREE: My Lords, I would briefly associate noble Lords on these Benches very warmly with the words of the noble Lord the Leader of the Opposition. It is no time for making long speeches or for asking questions. I merely hope, like him, that the people in Ireland will be able to take this chance, which is the best chance that has arisen in front of them for a very long time.
LORD WINDLESHAM: My Lords, I thank both noble Lords for their very generous comments. I will be as brief in my reply as they were in their comments, in view of the very long list of speakers we have for the two debates to-day. I can say to the noble Lord the Leader of the Opposition that we shall have an opportunity to discuss Northern Ireland on Tuesday week, December 18, when we shall have three Orders before us implementing the provisions of the Northern Ireland (Constitution) Act. Noble Lords will remember that these are needed to devolve powers to the Northern Ireland Executive. Also, there will be one amending Bill, amending the Northern Ireland (Constitution) Act in one respect: that is, the size of the Executive.
THE EARL OF LONGFORD: My Lords, will the noble Lord allow one who has been concerned with this issue for so many years to add to what has been so finely said by the noble Lord the Leader of the Opposition, and express heartfelt tribute to all concerned?

PROTECTION OF MINORS BILL [H.L.]
3.39 p.m.
Debate resumed.
THE PARLIAMENTARY UNDERSECRETARY OF STATE, DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION AND SCIENCE (LORD SANDFORD): My Lords, it might be convenient and helpful if I were to intervene at this early juncture to give your Lordships some broad indication of the views of the Government up to now on the general question of corporal punishment, particularly in schools, and a brief account of the developments relevant to it which have taken place in recent years. At the end of the debate I will respond to the points that your Lordships make—or to some of the points
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that some of your Lordships make—in the course of the debate, and perhaps proffer some advice on the attitude that we might adopt to the Bill.
I think it is as well to recall the powers that my right honourable Friend the Secretary of State has in respect of corporal punishment in schools. The only stipulation which she makes which relates to corporal punishment is that a punishment book must be kept in schools by head teachers in which details of all cases of corporal punishment must be entered. The legal basis on which this provision rests is the right of the Secretary of State to call for returns and reports on this matter from local education authorities. While it is true that the Secretary of State does have powers to abolish corporal punishment by Regulation in special schools and direct grant schools, such powers do not extend to county or to voluntary maintained schools, which represent, as your Lordships know, the great majority of schools in this country; nor does it extend to independent schools. The attitude of the Government towards corporal punishment is quite simply and succinctly expressed in a reply given by my right honourable friend in another place on May 11, 1972, when she said:
"In my view this, like other questions of discipline in individual schools, is best left within the discretion of local education authorities, the managers of the schools and the teachers."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, Commons, Vol. 836. c. 1539.]
She and I are, of course, aware of the view of many, not least the bodies representative of the teachers themselves, that corporal punishment is not a particularly effective agent of education, and we welcome the fact that its use is on the decline.
Our impression—and I would remind your Lordships that we are, through Her Majesty's Inspectors, in close touch with what is going on in schools—is that teachers are nowadays using the cane less and less. There is good reason to expect that this trend will continue and that in due time we shall indeed see what the noble Baroness, Lady Wootton of Abinger, and her friends want to see; that is, the total disappearance of corporal punishment from schools. Certainly I would confirm what the noble Baroness has already said; that developments in

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teaching methods, in the social organisation of schools and in the design of school buildings are all contributing to encourage the emergence of warmer, more personal and more natural relationships between teachers and pupils. Furthermore, specific developments in remedial teaching and a significant growth in the schools' psychological service in many authorities are having a beneficial influence on the ways in which difficult children are handled.
In 1967 Lady Plowden, in her Report on Primary Education, recommended that while decisions on punishment should generally be left to the professional judgment of teachers, the infliction of pain as a method of punishment in primary schools should be forbidden. But (and this is a point I would like your Lordships to note in particular) she was by no means in favour of making caning a criminal offence—which is what this Bill does—nor was she in favour of proceeding by legislation, which of course is what the noble Baroness proposes to do. At the same time, as a result of a particular case attention was being focused on the possibility of abolishing corporal punishment in schools for handicapped children. There was also at this time considerable interest in the use of corporal punishment in approved schools and remand homes—and I shall say more about that later in the debate.
The then Secretary of State, Mr. Gordon Walker, issued a circular in January, 1968, in which he expressed the view —and presumably the view of the Government in which he served—that the practice of corporal punishment should disappear from schools, but he felt that the responsibility for achieving this was best left in the hands of local education authorities, governing bodies of schools and teachers, and I shall be interested to hear from the noble Lord, Lord Garnsworthy, who is shortly to follow me, whether in fact his Party still take that view or, if they have changed it, why they have changed it. A draft circular was discussed with local authority associations, in connection with the issue of that circular to which I have just referred, in the early months of 1968. In the discussions leading up to the issue of that circular, it became very clear that further action to restrict or abolish corporal punishment would not command general
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support in the educational world and no steps have been taken, either by this Government or by their predecessor, to change the law further in any wholesale way, and none is in contemplation.
However, as the noble Baroness has said, in the last year or so a number of local education authorities have taken steps, as they are quite entitled to do and have been encouraged to do by the two statements of policy which I have just discussed, to restrict the use of corporal punishment in various ways. One authority, to which the noble Baroness has already alluded, earlier this year banned its use altogether in all its schools. Another—namely, ILEA—has, again as she said, from the beginning of this year prohibited its use in its primary schools. The important point to note, of course, is the extensive consultation which they had with their teachers and those concerned with primary schools before bringing that prohibition into force. Many authorities, in regulations governing corporal punishment, make its use contingent on the express permission of the head teacher or actually restrict its use to head teachers or to senior staff. It is very common for such regulations to forbid the canning of girls by male teachers.
I now turn briefly to the legal position, which is important as the Bill is proposing to introduce a criminal offence. So far as the administration of punishment to pupils is concerned, the position in law at present is that the teacher stands in loco parentis, as the noble Baroness has said. He owes to the children entrusted to his care the same degree of supervision as the law requires of a good and reasonable parent, and in dealing with a badly behaved child he is allowed the same powers of "reasonable chastisement" as the law grants to such a parent. This common law review of the right of punishment of a minor has been strengthened by statute, first in the Prevention of Cruelty to Children Act 1904, and again in the Children and Young Persons Act 1933.
Still continuing with the legal position, your Lordships will have noticed that the Bill is intended to be applied to Northern Ireland; and it also provides for its extension by Order in Council to the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man. I want at this early stage, before advising the House about the Bill in general, to make it

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quite clear to your Lordships that the Government could not accept either of these particular provisions. So far as Northern Ireland is concerned, this is a matter which it is expected will be the responsibility of the new Assembly and Executive, once power has been devolved upon them. It will be for them to consider what legislation, if any, is desirable in this field in Northern Ireland. The wishes of the Island Governments in this matter are not yet known, but it is virtually certain that they will regard the inclusion of such a provision of a Bill of this nature as being contrary to normal constitutional practice, as indeed it is. Corporal punishment is essentially a matter domestic to the Islands and one which is fully within the competence of their own Legislatures. There is a principle that Parliament does not legislate for the Islands on such matters, and I draw the attention of your Lordships to the fact that this principle was recently endorsed by the Royal Commission on the Constitution in their recently published Report.
BARONESS WOOTTON or ABINGER: My Lords, before the noble Lord leaves that subject would he clarify the position about Scotland, which he did not mention?
LORD SANDFORD: My Lords, what I have been saying about Northern Ireland and the Islands does not apply with the same force to Scotland or to Wales. I say "with the same force", but I do not want to develop that part extensively now because if possible I want to reflect upon what your Lordships have to say. It is the sweeping nature of these changes, their application to the entire United Kingdom, without in our view sufficient attention to local variations and to local attitudes and conditions, that is one of the reasons for our objection to the Bill—as I hope I have already have made clear by reference to my right honourable friend's remarks in another place a year ago.
On the face of it, the Bill under discussion would seem to me to amount to a radical change not only in tile law as it stands but also in our whole approach to this matter. Not only does it create a new criminal offence of wilful assault on a minor, but where the parent and guardian are concerned it explicitly
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abolishes the common law defence in such criminal proceedings of "reasonable chastisement" upon which teachers have hitherto relied. It proceeds in an entirely different way to bring about what many people, I think on both sides of your Lordships' House, as well as outside, would regard as a desirable trend, a decline in the use of corporal punishment in education. Nevertheless the Government will listen with interest to your Lordships' deliberations on the Bill. What I am particularly looking forward to hearing is what, in the view of your Lordships, are the changes in the schools and the changes in society that have occurred, for instance, since the Labour Party were last in office which lead us to want to adapt such a radically different approach to the abolition of corporal punishment in our schools.
3.52 p.m.
LORD GARNSWORTHY: My Lords, the noble Baroness, Lady Wootton, claimed that this Bill was timely; and I think that she was quite right. I think that the speech to which we have just listened indicates that there is a great need for us to look in depth into this matter of corporal punishment. There are those who still claim that to spare the rod is to spoil the child; there are others who say that caning is the only tiling that some children can understand; and there are others who say that it is a means of achieving discipline that ought to be kept in reserve. Frankly, that would appear to be the attitude of one of the largest professional organisations catering for teachers, the National Union of Teachers who gave evidence to the Plowden Committee in 1964 to that effect.
I think we ought not to overlook the fact that it was their view that it was advisable not to concentrate of this single issue of corporal punishment as a means of achieving discipline but that more attention ought to be paid to supportive measures—and the noble Lord, Lord Sandford, touched on some of them—that would provide more interesting curricula and far greater opportunities for pupils to undertake interesting studies while at school. I am quite sure that we on this side of the House will say that many of our schools lack the resources they ought to have in order to make school as interesting and rewarding as it might be and that we cannot too soon

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achieve a state of affairs where we can say that all our schools are getting a fair share of the resources to such an extent as we would enable them to give far greater consideration to the needs of individual pupils than has been possible up to the present time.
The noble Lord, Lord Sandford, quoted from Plowden. Plowden was in 1967. We have heard from the noble Baroness, Lady Wootton, and from the noble Lord, Lord Sandford, of what has been done during these last few years and of what is promised for the immediate future. It is precious little when we look at it. It is true that ILEA, the greatest education authority in the country, last year decided that corporal punishment was to be abolished in primary schools. They made it quite clear that they hoped that there would be an improvement in the secondary schools in London. It has taken nearly six years to achieve that point. The progress that has been made in London has been achieved in precisely the kind of way that the noble Lord, Lord Sandford, suggested that progress should be made: by discussion and negotiation with the teachers. The discussions have been very lengthy indeed and one wonders whether in fact this rate of progress is anything like good enough. The way forward that many teachers would choose is discussion and agreement; and I have no doubt they feel that they have a very strong case.
I listened to the noble Lord, Lord Amulree, with interest. He started by saying that he did not think that corporal punishment, that caning children, did a very great deal of harm. I would be interesting to know what good it does. Does it do any good at all? Has anybody been able to prove what it does? I thought that the noble Lord, Lord Sandford himself went out of his way to denigrate the use of corporal punishment. He said that it was a practice that was not particularly effective and he welcomed the fact that it was on the decline. If he welcomes the fact that it is on the decline, then there is very little to be said for it. One wonders who is going to make a case for its retention, since the Government welcome the fact that it is on the decline and greatly look forward to the day when there will be none of it. Of course we welcome all the progress that
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can be effected by discussion and negotiation; but it has shown itself to be a very slow and uncertain procedure.
My Lords, I hope that the House will give a Second Reading to the Bill. I have noted the large number of speakers on the list and I do not wish to take up too much of your Lordships' May I say that I hope that the House will look at this matter dispassionately and will not be over concerned with making Party points. I had the feeling that the noble Lord was being a little political in his speech in the way he touched on matters concerning Party attitudes. Let me say that he well knows that the Party for which I am speaking to-day have not laid down a hard line on this; but I would remind him that Mr. Edward Short—who followed Mr. Crosland, who followed Mr. Gordon Walker; and it was interesting that the noble Lord went back to Mr. Gordon Walker—in his book, Education in a Changing World, which was published in 1971, said:
"Sanctions and punishment are utterly unacceptable to-day. A free society cannot be sustained by an authoritarian system of education. Perhaps the freedom of our society would possess more reality if our children were nurtured in freedom and given the chance to acquire the self discipline that it requires in order to survive."
Therefore, I say as frankly as I can to the noble Lord that that is the attitude which has been developing within the Labour movement towards the use of corporal punishment for minors.
I think we have no reason to feel that we are on the wrong road. A survey was undertaken in the West Riding of Yorkshire in 1961 and published in 1968 in a book by Sir Alec Clegg and Barbara Megson, called Children in Distress. It is quite clear from reading that report that there is no case to be made out for the retention of corporal punishment. As the report said:
"There is no support for the view that schools which cane rigorously produce the best behaviour. There is no support whatever for the view that schools in which the cane is most used produce fewest delinquents. There is no support for the view that the school environment does not affect the rate of delinquency amongst children of school age. There is no support for the view that the best behaved school in the West Riding drew pupils from socially favoured areas. In so far as schools in this inquiry are concerned behaviour was best and delinquency least in those schools where corporal punishment is used sparingly."

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If any Member of your Lordships' House is in doubt about the matter we are discussing to-day, I would urge him to read The Last Resort; Corporal Punishment in Schools, edited by Peter Newell.
The noble Baroness, Lady Wootton of Abinger, gave a number of instances of what has happened in schools where corporal punishment has been abolished. I think that if noble Lords read the book whose title I have just given, they will feel that the case the noble Baroness made to the House this afternoon is there supported by additional facts, and there will be others like it. I shall be surprised if we do not get more reasons and more argument from this side of the House before the debate is over. I have come to the conclusion that as far as this Bill is concerned, this House would be doing a good thing if it agreed to allow it to go to the Committee stage.
LORD SANDFORD: My Lords, I wonder whether the noble Lord would allow me to intervene before he goes on from that point. May I ask him to deal a little more fully with the view that his Party now takes in this matter? I think he would agree there are two issues. First of all, there is the general attitude adopted by the noble Lord and his friends and by myself and my friends to the continuing use of corporal punishment in schools. I detect there is little between us on that point. I have thought also there was not much between us regarding the way in which the decline of corporal punishment is furthered and carried on. The noble Lord's right honourable friend said in 1968 that this is best left in the hands of local education authorities, governing bodies of schools, and teachers. He quoted others besides his right honourable friend Mr. Gordon Walker on their general attitude to corporal punishment, but he did not tell the House, and it would be helpful for the House to know, whether the view of his Party has changed on the way in which further change is brought about.
LORD GARNSWORTHY: I must say I am very surprised at the noble Lord, Lord Sandford. I do not know whether he was talking or listening to something said by his noble friend Lord Aberdare, but in point of fact I thought I had dealt with this subject. I did not quote at length from what a number of people in
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my Party said. I quoted specifically from what Mr. Edward Short wrote in 1971. That was the only quotation I gave, and I said that this was indicative of the developing attitude within the Labour movement. I do not think any of your Lordships believe that this is—and again I will repeat what I said before—a keen Party issue. I regret it if I did not make myself clear, and in case I did not, I hope the House will allow me to repeat myself. In view of what the noble Lord said, I very much regret that he appeared to be making this matter a strong Party issue. I do not think we shall do the cause of education any good if we tackle a subject like this in that kind of way. I am surprised he should intervene at the point where I was merely emphasising that I thought this Bill ought to go to Committee for consideration of what it proposes in detail. I have reason to think that there is movement of opinion with regard to this matter. I have discussed it with a number of people who are professionals in the service of education. I am impressed by the fact that more and more of them are feeling that corporal punishment serves no really useful purpose, and that the challenge which exists to-day in regard to the maintenance of discipline requires other methods. It requires the kind of supportive help that the noble Lord himself indicated.
My Lords, I said I was not going to speak for long, and I shall conclude by trying to justify what I said just now about the movement of thought in this matter. I have been privileged—and I enjoyed it—to work for a great number of years with the old London County Council and with the Inner London Education Authority. I thought it would be useful to know what their attitude might be with regard to this Bill. Because it would be quite wrong, I cannot pretend that they thought this Bill was perfect in all that it offers, but I think I can say that the chairman of the Schools Sub-committee of the Inner London Education Authority has considered representations relating to this Bill from officers, and has expressed the view that he agrees with the broad aims of the Bill—that is, without accepting all its details. My only point there is that there is an excellent case for this Bill to go to Committee stage and for the House to have an opportunity of examining its provisions in detail and reporting back.

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For myself, may I make it clear that I support the general principles of this Bill. I believe it is very timely that we should look at the matter in the kind of way that consideration at Committee stage would permit.
LORD PEDDIE: My Lords, before the noble Lord resumes his seat, would he clear up a matter for me? The noble Lord made reference to authoritarian education, which he went on to condemn. Do I assume from his comments that he thinks chastisement in school is in itself indicative of authoritarian education?
LORD GARNSWORTHY: My Lords, I think my noble friend Lord Peddie did not take the point. I was quoting the words of Mr. Edward Short.
LORD PEDDLE: And supporting it?
LORD GARNSWORTHY: I think in point of fact it would be as well if the noble Baroness, Lady Wootton, replied to the questions. But may I say with regard to the use of corporal punishment in schools that it is indicative in many cases of far too great a strain on the teacher. There are far too many teachers who have learnt to rely on it. There can be no question that a great many teachers are able to live their lives and do their work without resorting to the cane. In my opinion, there is no case for the continuing use of corporal punishment in our schools; the need is for the introduction of supportive resources so that the teachers who now have to resort to corporal punishment can achieve better results without it.
4.10 p.m.
LORD PLATT: My Lords, in view of the number of speakers I will try to be brief and admit from the beginning that I really put my name down, not because I claim to be an expert on the subject but because I strongly support the Bill which the noble Baroness has proposed to us this afternoon. I was brought up in a family of educationists. The noble Lord, Lord Sandford, referred to the Government's being kept informed of the situation in schools by the inspectors of schools. My mother was the first woman ever to be an inspector of schools, and that was in the 1880s, or perhaps 1891, and when I was a boy in my family, which I am afraid was some 60 years
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ago, it was always assumed that corporal punishment was a degrading anachronism, and I have never felt that I needed to take any other view. My real amazement—and I am sure it would be to my mother's amazement—is that this subject is being seriously debated in 1973.
However, that being said, I really was rather amazed at what the noble Lord, Lord Sandford, said. He welcomed the fact that corporal punishment is gradually —very gradually— being "phased out", as I think the present expression would have it. The noble Lord looked forward to the day (whether he will live to see it I do not know) when it may have been completely phased out. He favours the end of corporal punishment. At this stage he does not tell us what the attitude of the Government is towards it but he did enumerate some of the Government's objections to it. I can fully understand a Government in the fourth year of its office not wanting to get too far ahead of public opinion, and I am quite sure that that would refer to any Government. It is not merely a habit of the Government in power at the present time. But I think there are times when we in this House, at any rate, independently of who is governing at the present time, should express a strong opinion, and if we feel, as I think the majority of us do feel, that it really is time that we came face to face with this problem, we should say so in no uncertain terms. In other words, we should, if necessary, put this matter to the vote and give a resounding majority in favour of the Bill, after which it will be for the Government and the rest of us in Committee to see whether, on balance, it is the right time and the right way to introduce this measure. But if we feel what the noble Lord, Lord Sandford, said he feels about corporal punishment, let us be in no uncertain mood and say what we feel.
The only other points that I might have made have, not at all to my surprise, already been made by the noble Baroness, who has marshalled all the evidence to show that there is little or no evidence in favour of corporal punishment. The two arguments we tend to hear are, first, "Well, I was brought up with it, and it never did me any harm". I think that is about the most egotistic statement that any person could make. My answer to

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it is, "My dear old fellow, you don't realise what harm it did! "The development of the stiff upper lip is liable to be accompanied by the development of a similarly rigid mind. The other argument, which I consider to be much more serious, is this: "All right, if you were a schoolmaster and you had to deal with some of the boys that we have in our schools in the East End of London" —or wherever you like—"who are really almost vicious bullies and so on, what would you do?" I find that a much more cogent argument and I can easily see people being led into the view that corporal punishment is the right thing. In that connection I can only say that the evidence is against them. If that boy went just so much further and got himself into the hands of the police and then into the juvenile courts, into a borstal, and so on, he would find himself at once in a situation in which corporal punishment has already been abolished. So why it should be allowed for the school teachers, I do not know.
I have been reading a very interesting book on the medical treatment of prisoners and I came across something which I ought already to have known (but I am always doing that): the minimum rules for the treatment of prisoners, a resolution adopted in 1955 by the first United Nations Congress on the prevention of crime and treatment of prisoners:
"corporal punishment and all cruel, inhuman or degrading punishments shall be completely prohibited as punishments for disciplinary offences".
Those are minimum rules for the treatment of prisoners. It seems to me that corporal punishment is a degrading punishment, and if that resolution is good enough for prisoners it should be good enough for children. Therefore corporal punishment should be ruled out.
4.16 p.m.
LORD DONALDSON OF KINGS-BRIDGE: My Lords, I find the noble Lord, Lord Platt, easy to follow because he has made many of the points that I had proposed to make. This is a very short Bill and a clear one, and it demands short speeches. So far it has had them, and I shall try to conform. There is a long list of speakers, most of whom I think are here to express solidarity with the noble Baroness, and that really is the only
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reason why I am on my feet. It never occurred to me that she would leave out any argument, nor do I think she has done. I should like to repeat two of the arguments in a rather different form and to make one severe and one mild criticism.
To deal with the two arguments first, there are only two arguments in favour of corporal punishment as a part of education. One is that you cannot maintain discipline without it—and that is untrue. I think there is enough evidence in what the noble Baroness said to make it perfectly clear that it is untrue; that although there were (I think she said) in one term over 8,000 cases of boy caning in Edinburgh, there is none in many other parts of the country. It is perfectly clear that many institutions can run with total discipline if they have proper leadership. So I absolutely reject the first reason. The other argument advanced in favour of corporal punishment is that it is a tough world and it is much better for children to be brought up tough. This, of course, does not hold water at all because it does not involve penal action. If beating is an essential part of the toughening of children, then all children should be beaten as a regular thing. That was Dr. Johnson's view, I think; and, if I remember correctly, it also appeared in Gulliver's Travels. But it is not now the general view, and in spite of the suggestions made by the noble Lord, Lord Platt, that this might in the long run be what the Secretary of State thinks, I do not really believe it is. So neither of the two arguments in favour of corporal punishment in schools holds up.
I have one severe criticism to make of the Bill as it stands. My noble friend—I am sure absent-mindedly—has included imprisonment as a possible punishment. If I may say so, this is ridiculous. I know she has done it in order to give people who are charged the opportunity of going to a higher court, but it will not do. The one thing we must not do is that. We are dealing with the teacher who, faced with an hysterical class takes the natural action, which is to strike the child. We are trying to make the teachers behave in a way which is less than purely animal, and I think if they do behave in that way the sanction of public arraignment before a court and punishment by a fine is quite enough. So I shall certainly move an

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Amendment to that provision, and I am certain that my noble friend will accept it.
This brings me to the only serious argument and one which the noble Lord, Lord Platt, has already raised. When I was in the Army abroad I remember hearing from my wife of a party of children coming down to be evacuated and of absolute hysterical bedlam. A friend of ours who was with my wife went in and stopped the thing in two minutes. When she came out of the room my wife said, "What did you do?" and her friend said, "I took the two noisiest ones and slapped them." I think we have got to do without this sort of action, but it is absurd to pretend that it does not sometimes work. Torture was a very effective way of making some unwilling people reveal facts. Yet we manage very well without it, and I think we must be prepared to manage very well without this particular form of punishment. My final point is that I think the noble Baroness's analogy between sport and teaching will not hold water, and I wish she had not used it. Having said that, I would say that there is no doubt whatever that this Bill must be given a Second Reading. There may be small points to alter within it, but I hope very much that we shall criticise it, improve it and end by making it work.
4.21 p.m.
LORD MORRIS OF GRASMERE: My Lords, I am speaking in this debate in order to give my support to this Bill. This is more a matter of standing up to be counted than of contributing to arguments. Arguments have been very well put by other people and will be very well put by other people. I have taken a very long time to come round to the view that the use of corporal punishment in schools should be forbidden. The world has changed, social conditions have changed, and I shall say a brief word about that in a moment. I think the time has come when it should be forbidden. Most people seem to be assuming that it is all a question of the time, whether the time has yet come, and I think that is the important point. I also want to say that it seems to me to be one of the very few questions that ought to be decided at one blow in Westminster. I know that the teaching profession is not yet ready for the abolition of corporal punishment. I
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think we have a very great secret in this country in our educational efforts, in using the powers of the teaching profession to make the schools as good as they are, which in many respects, almost all respects, is very good indeed.
The noble Baroness said a word about the professional aspects of this matter. I should be most reluctant to feel that we were in any way going back on our general attitude, where we rely to a tremendous extent on the good sense and imagination, the resource and the humanity of the profession. But I do not think this is a matter for local option. If the world is so changed and we have reached a stage when society just will not have corporal punishment for children in schools and similar institutions, it is a matter for society through its own central institutions to decide this and to decide it once and for all.
May I make one or two very brief reflections. I was for a time, and a critical time, a headmaster of a large State school. I never acquired the status, the skill or the character of a very professional headmaster, because I had spent all my life as a university teacher. But I had to face up to many of the questions facing a headmaster. It was at the time when fathers had not yet returned from the war, when there was a great deal of very strange behaviour by the young in schools, in the streets, on the buses, in the trains, everywhere, and where schools were expected still to play a great part in improving this behaviour. I remember that when I was a child my father was a village schoolmaster, and in those days, of course, he was part of the law and order system of society of the village; he was expected to be able to control the way in which the young people behaved all over the village, in the town and, of course, in the school playground, and he was supported almost without question in using rough justice to do this. The rough justice method in his case did not involve very much corporal punishment —indeed, so far as I remember, very little indeed. But he was able, if necessary, to face up physically to boys much larger than himself because he was regarded by the whole social system as part of the law and order and discipline of the place, and everybody was behind him.

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One must remember that in those days schools were expected to be able to deal with large numbers of things which the courts and police were more than happy to leave to them. Also with the universities, notably the residential universities in the small towns, with very large numbers of young people, the courts and the police were more than happy to leave a great many of the disciplinary problems to the university, to the college, the agricultural college, the school and so on. Nobody questioned that this rough justice method did not do a great deal of harm and was of enormous help to law and order.
But now, of course, this is quite impossible nobody can use this method at all. Some universities were very slow to see this coming. It has come in my lifetime. It came at a tremendous pace during the period when I was working in the administration of a university and its discipline and its education. Rough justice was out. Nobody was willing to accept anything except what was called natural justice, which meant that a thing had to be proved beyond all reasonable doubt against any individual person. The universities or the schools that went on trying to play their part in this disciplinary matter soon found that they got bitten. Public opinion was no longer behind them.
Similarly, in loco parentis is out. Everybody who is a university teacher, anybody who is a schoolmaster, knows that. It is out from the point of view of the children; they do not think there is anything in it at all. It is out from the point of view of the parents. One of the most impressive things, if one gets parents together and asks them, is that they will tell you that this sort of thing is no longer possible. Anyway, parental discipline is very different from what it was, and to have other people guessing what parental discipline is and trying to be in loco parentis is just not possible.
I have one other reflection. I quickly came to a conclusion, so fat as corporal punishment was concerned, that nothing important could be achieved by corporal punishment in any circumstances. I think this is accepted by the vast majority of teachers—and probably all teachers. In these days, the big things, whether for the individual or whether for a group or
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the mass, cannot be achieved by corporal punishment, and the world is a better place for that fact. Similarly, no school teacher would any longer think that corporal punishment is required or that they should use corporal punishment, or even be allowed to use it as a positive weapon in education.
Schoolmasters used to think that you could make children try harder by rapping them over the knuckles with the cane. They used to think that you could make them attend by a little painful corporal punishment—as the noble Lord said, not doing a great deal of harm, but painful and drawing the attention of the pupil and making the pupil try harder, and so on. Nobody any longer believes that. That has all gone. Teachers have other ways of doing these things and they know perfectly well that the old way had no effect. Therefore, inside the classroom corporal punishment is not necessary.
One is very reluctant to dream of moving faster than the opinion of teachers as a body, and there are without doubt very difficult circumstances in some schools where there is a good deal of violence in the neighbourhood, in the streets, perhaps in the homes, and where life is very difficult indeed for teachers and the public feel immense sympathy for them. The public think it absolutely marvellous that a young woman or young man can control a classroom of 50 children without going off her or his head from time to time. They have all the sympathy in the world with teachers, and when teachers say that it is very difficult to do without this punishment they are apt to sympathise with them. Similarly, if children gang up against a teacher, or a large boy or a large girl uses his or her weight against a small teacher, the "old Adam" in all of us as a public sympathises with the teacher and says that somebody ought to be hit over the head, or smacked on the bottom. But we all know that corporal punishment does not solve the problem and will not protect the teacher. It is out of line with the whole approach that we now have for dealing with such misconduct. Nobody believes that corporal punishment will do any of these things.
Corporal punishment—and this weighed with me for a very long time—is a simple punishment; it is over quickly, it does not

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last very long and it does have a certain effect. It has the certain effect without needing to be really painful, because the vast majority of people do not like pain, even if it is not very great and is sharp and soon over. So it does have a certain effect for small things in small ways. But that, too, has gone. Clearly, we no longer feel that that is an acceptable punishment. I have not tried to marshal the arguments; they were much better marshalled by the noble Baroness, Lady Wootton of Abinger. I have tried to offer one or two reflections from a little experience which makes me feel, first, that the time has come to banish corporal punishment and, secondly, that this should be done by a central piece of legislation.
4.34 p.m.
THE EARL OF SWINTON: My Lords, my own experience of corporal punishment was not only painful but unpleasant. I went to one of the schools that I think the noble Lord, Lord Amulree, mentioned, where larger boys beat smaller boys. Whether this did me any good or harm I am not in a position to say, but I found it extremely painful at the time. What I found more unpleasant was when I became a bigger boy and had to beat a smaller boy. I did it once and found it so distasteful that I never did it again. I believe in the theory that it must be right to end corporal punishment. In an ideal situation there would be no need for it at all.
Here I should like to quote from an interesting circular which was rooted out for me and which was sent out by the Board of Education over seventy years ago. It was on punishment generally:
"If discipline were perfectly efficient, punishment would be unknown, for the result of efficient discipline is to engender the good habits which render punishment unnecessary. Order, diligence and obedience, which are only maintained by frequent punishment or the dread of it, do not constitute discipline. Indeed, the infliction of punishment is, to some extent, a confession of defeat by the authority that inflicts it; for the object of discipline is to prevent commission of faults. No punishment which excites the emotion of terror in a child should ever be employed. In an infants' school, no punishment should be permitted which causes bodily pain. In schools for older children, corporal punishment should be discouraged as an ordinary expedient in boys' schools, and altogether in girls' schools."
That, as I say, went out some seventy years ago.
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I am afraid that I must disagree about the practice of corporal punishment. Here I would refer to what the noble Lord, Lord Garnsworthy, said about practical points. I am afraid that in true life things are different, and I can think of cases where it may be both expedient and necessary to use corporal punishment—for instance, where a teenage boy assaults a female member of staff, or there is excessive violence and aggression. The noble Lord, Lord Platt, mentioned bullying, and this is another case where it may be necessary. You may well have an older child bullying a younger one. I feel most strongly that this bully may well have problems at home and in the environment that he comes from which are the root cause of this bullying. It must be absolutely right that the first priority is to concentrate on a long-term cure for these problems. In order to do this one must concentrate all the professional skills available. There is the child guidance clinic, the child psychiatrist, and the educational psychologist.
But surely if it is right to do this, may it not also be right, for the sake of the victim of that bully or the protection of another small child, that that bully should receive at the time a short, sharp shock, not so much as a punishment but as a deterrent to stop him from doing it again? Who must make that decision at the time? Surely it must be the teacher or teachers involved. They know the circumstances, and they know the children involved. My own educational authority has always left the question of corporal punishment to the heads of the staff. They are one of the people the noble Baroness, Lady Wootton of Abinger, mentioned. I am sure that this is the right thing to do. After all, the teacher is a professional and has the skill and knowledge to know when corporal punishment is necessary and desirable. In my opinion to pass an Act of Parliament is not the right way to go about ending corporal punishment in schools. As a comparative newcomer to your Lordships' House, I feel that it is somewhat unfortunate for me that I should be the first to get up and oppose this Bill, and I hope that your Lordships will bear with me. I am against the Bill very reluctantly, because I should like to see an ideal state where corporal punishment was no longer necessary. But that ideal state is not here yet, and it

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cannot be induced by an Act of Parliament.
4.38 p.m.
LORD LEATHERLAND: My Lords, I listened with interest to the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Sandford. First there was a crescendo of hope as he spoke of his sympathy and his support for the decline in caning that was taking place, but that dwindled away into a diminuendo of disappointment when he stood on the brink and refused to take the plunge and back the Bill. I am sorry also that he tried to introduce Party politics, even though in a gentle way. This is not Party politics. I am not making a Party political speech; I am standing here to-day virtually as a political eunuch. I support the Bill. Even though it deals with many other kinds of institutions and establishments I shall confine what I have to say to the ordinary schools that boys and girls attend. I shall not deal with prisons because obviously they are not covered by the Bill, and anyhow I have never been in one. I shall not deal with borstals because there is not now any corporal punishment in borstal institutions. I shall not deal with remand homes, where there actually is corporal punishment today. Perhaps I ought to say that I spent the first few years of my life at a reformatory school. That was not because of any juvenile misdeeds on my part but simply because my father was the music master and bandmaster there, and we lived in a house in the grounds. I expect that the attitude of that reformatory school to corporal punishment has changed in the intervening years, just as it has changed in the community as a whole.
Now, my Lords, what are the questions to which we have to address ourselves? The first, I think, is whether it is possible to abolish corporal punishment. My noble friend Lady Wootton has given instances of countries in West Europe which have done that. I will go a hit further eastward and add Poland and Soviet Russia, and a bit further Eastward, for what the argument is worth, and add Egypt and Israel as well. Of course, there is an increasing number of individual schools in this country, both primary and secondary, which are abolishing corporal punishment, sometimes because of influence brought to bear by the
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authority, sometimes because of the personal will of the headmaster, and in none of these cases has there been any ill effect. On the contrary, the effects have been good; and it is generally recognised that there is a decline—a steady decline, but a growing decline—in the use of canes in the schools of this country.
The second point to which we have to direct ourselves is whether corporal punishment is cruel. I do not want to exaggerate. I would not suggest that a single, moderate stroke on the hand with a cane involves grave physical cruelty, but it does considerable psychological harm to both the boy and the teacher, and it does much to destroy human relationships between the two classes. We also have to bear in mind that from time to time we hear of cases where punishment has been inflicted in a very sadistic manner, and we cannot afford to take the risk of that kind of thing happening in our schools.
The third question which we have to ask is whether corporal punishment is effective. I do not think it is. First of all, it causes a boy to regard his teacher as an enemy; secondly, it does not cure his misconduct, but often makes it worse; thirdly, it sets the boy out to try to defeat the teacher at every turn, and that is why we find that it is the same boy or the same group of boys who are frequently punished time after time. My Lords, it would be futile to deny that in some of our schools there are boys who are defiant and who are violent, but to try to cure that by using violence against them is only to make matters worse; and the tougher the boy the tougher will be his reaction.
On this question about the effectiveness of corporal punishment, I have a few recollections from my own school days, which began just over seventy years ago. In the top class of the school, because our teacher was a member of the senior staff he was frequently called out of the room. As soon as he left there would be hubbub, and in the midst of that he would return. "Hands up", he would say, "all those boys who have been talking". Not a single hand would be held up. "All right", he would say, "come out Leatherland". I ask your Lordships to testify to the fact that the caning of me did not cure me of being talkative. There was in that same class another boy who was nearly as talkative

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as I was. He was Stanley Evans, who later became the Member of Parliament for Wednesbury. It did not cure him, either. Perhaps that was a pity, because if he had not been quite so talkative about featherbedding farmers he might have risen to one of the highest positions in this State.
It would be wrong to think that the opponents of corporal punishment are people of a soft, namby-pamby disposition. There must be discipline in schools. I am a fervent upholder of discipline. I suppose that dates from the time when I was a 20-year-old company sergeant major in France in the First World War. But discipline has to come from the mind: it cannot be imposed physically. Any attempt at physical punishment leads to the child losing his respect for the teacher. There are many alternative forms of sanction which can be used, and these are used by teachers in our schools every day. There is detention; there is the deprivation of privileges; there is banning from school outings, the imposition of extra work and the imposition of additional responsibility on some of these children—because the old theory of the poacher turned gamekeeper still has some merit in it. There can also be a note to the boy's parents.
My Lords, if I may digress for a moment from the school to the home, I remember that I was only very rarely accorded corporal punishment at home. Other sanctions were employed. I was made to practise on the euphonium for an extra half hour a night nearly every day of the week, but whether that was more of a punishment to the neighbours than it was to me I do not know—and before any noble Lord says it let me say that that is how I learned to blow my own trumpet.
There are still further methods of remedial treatment. There are the school psychologists, who can do much to help a boy who is really unruly. There is the school welfare officer, who can make inquiries at home and find whether the cause of the trouble resides there, as it so very frequently does. And if we have a boy whose bad conduct at school is due to the fact that he is treated harshly at home, then that boy, more than any of the others, needs to be able to find a friend in his teacher at school. Then
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again, the transfer from one school to another, with new companions, a new atmosphere and a new environment, often works wonders with an unruly boy. There is also the kind of treatment that young offenders get from their probation officers. More and more of these remedial treatments are needed. More and more teachers and smaller classes are needed, and I am quite sure that they would make a very great difference to the conduct of children in the schools. We hear from time to time about what are called "blackboard jungles". I think the newspapers and television sometimes do more harm than good by the undue publicity that they give to these schools. They convert these young hooligans into public martyrs and heroes. We have to remember that this jungledom, where it exists, does so in schools where caning has been the custom for years and years past. I am not convinced that corporal punishment is the remedy. It does not cure youngsters; it only makes them worse. It sometimes represses inclinations which later burst out in another way—in the streets, or even at the universities—to the detriment of society generally.
I do not want to detail in any elaborate way what has happened in the primary schools of the Inner London Education Authority. That experiment has been a success. So also has there been success in secondary schools throughout the country where the headmaster and the governors, on their own initiative, have decided to ban the cane. But I will give one quotation from a report of the Inner London Education Authority, which says this:
"Various sanctions other than corporal punishment are in use in secondary schools, and a number of heads claim that they are every bit as effective".
The head of one of the London comprehensive schools says:
"Since abolishing corporal punishment we have had a more peaceful and friendly place".
My Lords, I do not want to speak about the Borough of Cardiff, which abolished corporal punishment and then restored it; nor about the fact that large numbers of teachers still want to retain the cane, although that number is markedly reducing. All I want to say is that a wind of change is blowing through our society on this question of punishment. We need to give more attention in all

917
sections of our society to the need for cultivating more self-discipline, and the schools in which our rising generation are being trained should be in the lead and not lagging behind.
4.50 p.m.
LORD BEAUMONT OF WHITLEY: My Lords, since your Lordships are used to hearing me speak on education as a spokesman of the Liberal Party, I think I should say that, like the other two Parties, the Liberal Party nave not a definite policy on this matter. We have declared ourselves definitely against corporal punishment in primary schools and schools for the handicapped, but we have not gone further than that. I should like, as a personal reservation, to say that I am not one of those who rules out the use of physical force in all circumstances. I am not, for instance, a pacifist. I think that sometimes the intellectuals in our part of the world tend to rule out the physical and to rely too much on the intellectual. But I am a member of the Bernard Shaw School. "If you strike a child", he said, "take care that you strike it in anger. A blow in cold blood neither can nor should be forgiven."
A parent may well spank a child when he or she is annoyed and irritated beyond endurance. But it is very important that this is seen to have nothing to do with education. Beating has nothing to do with education. Here I would say that I reject entirely the doctrine of in loco parentis. It is not just that I think it inapt as applied to this question; I think it is entirely wrong. Teachers are not substitutes for parents, and they should not be. This doctrine may have had some force when many people who were concerned with the forming of our laws sent their children to boarding schools and maybe thought of the boarding school as a natural place for that doctrine to be exercised. In a boarding school it is possible that this doctrine has some place; I do not believe it has otherwise. For most of us who send our children to day schools teachers are people whom we respect, and whom we engage, or whom the State engages on our behalf, to teach our children; to educate them. And, as I have already said, beating has nothing to do with education.
We are told that in respect of some
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schools if the power to administer corporal punishment were taken away the educational system would break down. Where that is true, my Lords, if it is true (I do not necessarily accept that it is, particularly bearing in mind the view of the London teachers), the educational system has broken down already, and this fact should be recognised. There is nothing to be said for using a cane to prop up a system which has already collapsed, and which already is not educationally worth while. That merely conceals the problem. We are told that beating is disappearing. I am delighted to hear it. But this has one particular result which I think we ought to consider and to which I would draw the attention of the noble Earl, Lord Swinton.
The beating that still continues should be offending us because a greater pro- portion will be beating by sadists. There are a few sadists in the teaching profession, just as there are in your Lordships' House and in any gathering of people, or any profession you like to mention. However good is the educational profession—and it is good—it cannot be denied that a greater proportion of beating by teachers will be done by a few sadists that are left; and the greater proportion will be applied to the children who most need some other kind of treatment. The occasional slap, the occasional beating, may not do most children much harm. I am sure that it did not do the noble Earl, Lord Swinton, any harm. The people to whom it does harm are the really sad cases, the bad cases, and this is exactly where it should be abolished so that we may help those people and those cases in the best possible way. My Lords, I repeat that beating has nothing to do with education, and I have great pleasure in supporting this Bill.
4.55 p.m.
LORD SOMERS: My Lords, I will not promise to be brief because I find that those who do generally make the longest speeches. So much has been said against corporal punishment, that I feel I should make one or two remarks in its defence; not from any desire to ill-use the defenceless young, but merely from the viewpoint of keeping discipline. For some years I taught in a school where corporal punishment was used regularly. It was used only by the headmaster or by the

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housemasters and it was used only for really serious offences. I think that is what should be, and what generally is, the case to-day.
A great deal has been said about what harm corporal punishment does both to the boy and to the master. I cannot say what harm it does to the master, because I never actually beat a boy myself, not being a housemaster. But once I was responsible for having a boy beaten. If the provisions in the Bill had been law at that time I should have been fined a very lage amount of money, but fortunately they were not. The boy and I remained the greatest of friends for the rest of his time at school. The punishment ran off him like water off a duck s back, and he did not turn a hair. That was the case with most of the boys. Corporal punishment was there as a possible extreme punishment. Every boy—I speak only of boys' schools because those are the ones of which I have had experience—goes through a period when, out of a spirit of adventure, or of wanting to get the better of his teacher, he will try to see how far he can go. He knows perfectly well that if he goes too far he will eventually probably suffer two or three strokes of the cane. But that does not stop him and he does not resent the punishment when it is administered because that is the standing rule.
The noble Lord, Lord Beaumont of Whitley, has just said—he said it three times—that beating has nothing to do with teaching. Of course it has not. But on the other hand one has to maintain discipline, and that is becoming more and more difficult in schools nowadays. Children are becoming more unruly and less willing to listen to older people and accept their guidance. It is becoming very difficult for the schoolteachers. I think that if corporal punishment were to be abolished, there would be a grave danger of even worse punishments coming in. I am referring to things like mental cruelty. For instance, there is nothing that can hurt a young boy, particularly if he happens to be a rather sensitive type, more than biting sarcasm. Such sarcasm may well be the only weapon the schoolmaster has. I should be sorry to see a wide use made of it, and much more sorry than I am to see the very reserved use, as at the moment, of the cane, which I think is now in a position
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much like that of the nuclear weapon, in that it is there purely as a deterrent, and nobody wants to use it except in extreme cases.
Therefore, my Lords, I am afraid I cannot support this Bill. To ban the use of the cane would lower the standards of discipline. I have spoken to innumerable people who have achieved great eminence in their various professions and asked them whether they were beaten at school, and they have said, "Yes" I have then asked, "Do you feel that it did you any harm?", and invariably the answer has been, "No, not in the least." So I cannot see that the holders of the view that the use of the cane does permanent harm to the boy have any evidence whatever on their side. Granted the sparing use of the cane and the confining of it to only the headmaster or the housemaster, I sincerely hope that it will still be retained.
5.2 p.m.
LORD GOODMAN: My Lords, I hope to follow the admirable practice of making an exceptionally brief speech. I have not a great deal to say, as almost everything that can be said on this subject has already been said. But I, like a number of others, am here to demonstrate solidarity with the noble Baroness in our total agreement as to the desirable nature of this short Bill. May I express one word of disappointment, in that the noble Baroness has not been able to marshall a single one of her sister Peeresses to speak on the Bill. There must be a very profound psychological reason for this.
A NOBLE LORD: Lady Loudoun is on the list.
LORD GOODMAN: My Lords, I apologise. I should say one of them. I expected them to be here in large numbers to support the Bill, but no doubt there is some explanation which the noble Baroness, Lady Wootton of Abinger, may provide when she comes to reply. The only things I want to say about the Bill are these. First, the major argument used in its favour is that it is a necessary instrument to protect teachers against the more extreme form of juvenile ruffianism. This of course is an attractive argument and there may be an element of truth in it. But I think the way to look at it is: Is this a sufficient benefit to compensate for the undoubted detriments and dangers which are involved in the retention of

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corporal punishment? It is really a question of weighing on the scale on one side the fact that there may be some danger in relation to the exceptionally depraved, violent, agile, vigorous youths, as against the physically weak and inadequate teacher in terms of being able to resist violence, and that therefore it may be necessary to resort to this expedient to deal with that situation. I should have thought that in those circumstances there were many other expedients that could be used, and that in any event, on balance, the very undesirable psychological, sexual and moral features involved in its retention overwhelmingly outweigh this particular argument. I cannot think of any other argument in favour of its retention.
My Lords, there can be few of us who are not extremely uneasy about the retention of corporal punishment. I think there can be few of us who will not he extremely gratified—and, in their hearts, even those who have expressed a contrary view—if we do sweep away this thoroughly degrading and disagreeable practice. There would have to be very strong arguments indeed in order to retain it. My own view is that if to-day we give this Bill a Second Reading, we can have a look at some of the obvious deficiencies in drafting, which, if I may venture to say so, can be quite easily repaired in the Committee stage. I should like to add a word in favour of what my noble friend Lord Donaldson of Kings-bridge has said. I, too, hope that the noble Baroness will agree to remove the sanction of imprisonment. This seems to me to be quite unnecessary, because if you have an extreme case where a child is badly injured by an assault, then the rest of the criminal law is perfectly adequate to enhance the penalties that have to be imposed. But it seems to me that to give the notion of martyrdom to schoolteachers in relation to a controversial subject such as this is undesirable at the moment the change is being made.
My next comment is in relation to the Government's argument when they were solicitously and rather ingeniously inquiring what change had occurred in the social climate since it was last decided not to make this particular improvement. I can only say that that is an argument which would abort every
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progressive measure that one can think of. There is never a change in the social climate. The world remains sad, mad and bad. But the fact remains that we can make it a little better by seeking to ostracise practices that we regard as sad, mad and bad. One could reduce this particular argument to total absurdity by saying that you would not increase the penalties or the precautions against larceny until there was clear evidence that that practice was abated. There are so many absurdities demonstrated by that argument, if I may venture to say so, that it ought not to be persisted in.
I would invite the House to give this Bill a Second Reading, and let us perhaps attain an ultimate end when we have removed a practice about which many parents are uneasy, which affects parents' choices of school and which in relation to maladjusted children, and where the schoolteacher has no apparatus for determining whether the child is maladjusted or not, is an absolute monstrosity. My final observation is this. One of the worst arguments in relation to observing this particular practice is that it is a hideous social alibi. The other day I had the misfortune to go and look at the slums of Glasgow. If you would consider adding to the deprivation of children brought up in those slums the fact that the consequences of those slums are brought down on them by way of physical punishment, I do not think you would need to think twice about a Second Reading of this Bill.
5.8 p.m.
LORD PEDDIE: My Lords, I wish to preface my comments on this Bill by paying tribute to my noble friend Lady Wootton of Abinger, whom the whole House knows as one who possesses a deep sense of humanity, sincerity, and infinite courage in her willingness to challenge established conventions. However, I would not go beyond that, and I certainly would not pay tribute to her judgment in sponsoring this Bill. I have listened carefully to the debate, and in a number of the speeches there has seemed to be an indication that this Bill is presented as a means to curb sadistic corporal punishment of innocent children. That is a most misleading concept, because there is

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little, if any, evidence that vicious maltreatment of children in schools is universal. This is no more true than the recent case (which I believe is before the courts) of a teenage scholar accused of breaking the jaw of his teacher indicates a universal desire on the part of scholars to break the jaws of their teachers. But of one thing I am certain: if that young man arraigned before the court is found guilty, he will not be punished by a fine of £250 or a year's imprisonment, or both, which is the penalty indicated in this Bill.
Let me make it quite clear that all of us here would join in condemning brutality of any kind, and the law as it exists now can fall heavily upon the shoulders of any teacher who is guilty of vicious maltreatment of the children under his care. I join with every Member of your Lordships' House in condemning the wanton infliction of pain upon children. But this Bill does not seek to eliminate the wanton infliction of pain upon children; indeed, it goes out of its way to recognise the right of parents and guardians to inflict chastisement upon their children or upon those who may be in their care. This House will remember the many recent cases of appalling cruelty inflicted upon children. In particular, there was one dreadful case where a subhuman individual battered a child to death in the home.
There is just as much justification for dealing with the prevention of chastisement in the home as there is in the schools. I would ask your Lordships to examine precisely what this Bill seeks to do It seeks to end reasonable chastisement in schools, but recognises the rights of parents, guardians and their spouses to inflict pain. I repeat what I said a few moments ago: that there are just as many cases of cruelty in homes as there are in schools. Of course there have been in the east, and there will be in the future, isolated cases where sadistic individuals—teachers or not—inflict pain on others. We all know of the psychosexual relationship that may exist between the beaten and the beater, but such cases can be dealt with under the law as it stands at the moment. I myself regard as most unfortunate the implication behind the gibe that only teachers and prostitutes can wield the cane with impunity. I think that comment was, to say the least, most unfortunate.
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As to the absence of chastisement, what could it mean? Do we believe that the only penalty, or indeed cruelty, that can be inflicted by a teacher is contained within the employment of a stick? If there is any teacher with sadistic intentions, believe me, my Lords, he could, if he so wished, inflict far more pain upon a youngster by psychological means than ever he could by the employment of a cane: the sarcasm, the humiliation, the gibe, can inflict torture upon a youngster which is far greater than any pain caused by a cane across his hands. Therefore I consider this Bill nonsense, to say the least, because it makes no contribution at all to the idea of eliminating what might be considered to be torture or cruelty within the schools.
One or two of my noble friends have asked: has reasonable chastisement done harm? The noble Lord, Lord Garnsworthy, asked: has it ever done good? Other noble Lords have referred to their own schooldays and I will make reference to mine. I went to a council school in the City of Hull; it was a tough school, in a working class area, where the stick was frequently applied. I remember the teachers in the school vividly. There was old John Pullan, the head master: a strict disciplinarian, a gentleman and a man whom every single scholar admired; Dicky Bainbridge: a young sportsman who played for the local rugby club, who was always willing and ready to apply the cane if need be. So I ask the question, did he create fear? No, my Lords; he created respect. There was young Mr. De Lacy; another young sportsman, also ready with the stick—but to suggest that everyone of the kids at that school was fearful of those teachers would be unadulterated nonsense—I repeat, nonsense. Every one of us respected those teachers. There was no cruelty whatsoever in that school. But I will tell you what it did not do: it did not demoralise or brutalise. It did create a healthy recognition of the relationship between misdemeanour and punishment.
I happen to have here—though I shall spare my blushes; I am not going to read it—a letter on the cheap notepaper provided by the Hull Education Committee and headed "St. Paul's Boys' School", written by the headmaster,

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John Pullan. I may say that I am very proud of that document. I have received many documents in my scholastic career, but none of them has given me greater pleasure or pride than that letter. It makes reference to me—and, as I said before, I shall not read it—in glowing terms. I should have been one of the good boys. I can assure all your Lordships that I had my full ration of stick when I was at school, but the discipline also earned me a testimonial of which I am proud. To think that the boys of St. Paul's School went in fear and trembling or were terrorised is nonsense. I could quote the names of some of those old boys from that school in a working class area. They have been not only a credit to that school, but to the City and to the nation as a whole. Therefore I suggest that the Bill is totally unnecessary. There is adequate protection in schools, because it is not possible for a teacher to inflict wanton pain without the rest of the staff knowing about it, without the scholars knowing about it, and, very quickly in these days, without the local Press knowing about it.
If I wanted a final argument to condemn the Bill, I would quote from the brief that has been handed out by the National Council of Civil Liberties. These words appear in their final paragraph and is the argument they advance in support of the Bill:
"Hopefully, abolition will encourage teachers to demand, and Government and local authorities to provide, better facilities for difficult children and the reduction of class boundaries."
Now we all agree with that, I am sure; but are we suggesting that we should put this sort of pressure on school teachers as a whole, who—goodness knows!— work under enough difficulties as it is, merely to obtain some other objective that is not indicated in this Bill? That is not an honest way of going about it. Certainly we want smaller classes; certainly we want better facilities; but the implication here, in my opinion, is a slur upon the teaching profession—an absolute slur upon the profession itself. In consequence, on that ground alone, I would ask this House to reject this Bill entirely and completely.
5.20 p.m.
THE COUNTESS OF LOUDOUN: My Lords, as we progress towards the perfect State, which we all strive for, however ineffectively, so rules multiply. There are things you can do, things you cannot do: so we multiply rules. Laws: this is our business, and here is a new law: no more stick, and even a smack on the bottom will become a criminal assault. At one time beating was for anything and everything. I am sure not that many of us could say that we have never received corporal punishment—not just the stick, but punches from older brothers or dear friends, pinches from sisters, and even scratches from cats. We have accepted those as part of growing up. That is not only so in regards to the past; it applies also to-day. People seem naturally to beat their children and to punch each other. This is regrettable, but it is a natural reaction, whether it arises from anger, fear, or even joie de vivre.
The respect for authority, based on fear, which has kept people in order since time began, has diminished in recent years. A change has taken place which we welcome. When the Beveridge Report was first published we knew that it was going to change society, but we never realised how much. With the arrival of the Welfare State, including, of course, the National Health Service and other back-up services, the character of society started to change; and, in theory anyway, one is supported and protected from wanton harm from the cradle to the grave. We have now that changed society, and the problems of to-day's society cannot be solved by yesterday's solutions.
Corporal punishment—that is, the stick, administered by the teacher—has already gone from the classroom but not the guiding smack of the teachers or the punches and kicks of classmates. Authority in the classroom is based on mutual respect and common interest. Rules are found out, rather than enforced. Surely today's child learns through the experience of give and take, in contact with others, by making mistakes, being a nuisance, misbehaving, even by being rude to adults. He learns that rules and standards of behaviour enable him to live in harmony and at ease with others. All authority in

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the school, as in society, is questioned, and if it does not come from respect it does not exist. Here the Mace is carried into the Chamber in front of the Lord Chancellor as a sign of his authority, not because he is going to hit anyone on the head with it: in the same way I feel that a headmaster must be allowed to keep the authority of the cane.
A policeman cannot control a riot with a stern eye or the air of authority; he carries a stick and has the right to use it. A stroke of the stick may bring misbehaviour, especially anti-social behaviour, to a halt, if only in the classroom, enabling the child to continue in school and the classmates to continue to study uninterrupted. The alternative is the streets. A child, unwanted at home and at school, a life that might have been saved, is lost. The final deterrent in a school is the headmaster's wrath: do not defuse him. This is a negative Bill; it takes away the headmaster's right to deal in the way he thinks best, and puts nothing in its place to help him, or the child.
5.24 p.m.
LORD FERRIER: My Lords, I was beginning to think that I might have been in a minority in my views until I heard my noble friend Lord Swinton and the noble Lord, Lord Peddie, and now the noble Countess who has just sat down. It gives me heart to go on with what I have got to say. My qualifications are simple. I was an extrovert, bumptious, naughty, rebellious boy, and suffered accordingly, from my parents and at school, in the old-fashioned way. I do not know whether it did me good or harm. At one stage I think I was so beaten that I think it did me definite harm. I also, of course, at one stage administered punishment to my juniors at school. Looking back, I think I did it very unwisely and sometimes excessively, and I am glad that that practice is now disappearing. But now, as a father and grandfather, inevitably I have a good deal of experience in observing the upbringing of the young, and I am opposed to this Bill, opposed to it for almost every possible reason.
First, as has been shown by many noble Lords who have spoken, as time has gone on the use of formal corporal punishment has largely diminished, and will, of course, continue to do so. Secondly (this
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is a point which has not been made, although the noble Lord, Lord Peddie, touched upon it), I believe that it is wrong to suggest that parents or guardians are better able than teachers to judge when to strike a child. Emotion is more likely to overlay a parent's judgment, I believe, than it is to overlay that of a teacher. What is more, to box a child over the ear, or give it a jolly good shaking, can actually injure a child, which a cane, or a tawse does not do. Incidentally, I refer to the tawse, which the noble Lord, Lord Amulree, mentioned, because of course I am Scottish, and it is the usual instrument of instruction (if that is the right word) in the schools in Scotland. It is a very much more sensible instrument, incidentally, than the cane. When I speak of parental reaction to naughtiness in a child, I know from my own experience that one can be carried away by emotion. A teacher is not so affected in the same measure. Take, for instance, the way in which a mother or a father slaps or shakes a child that runs across the street. The child is struck, probably, because the parent is so utterly relieved at seeing it safely across. Another cause of trouble is that children sometimes turn up very late for meals or very late for bedtime, and often they are chastised by parents or guardians out of sheer relief at seeing a kid safe again. For that reason, too, I think the Bill is at fault.
Thirdly, my Lords, while I agree that there are ruthless and even cruel teachers —and the same, of course, applies to parents—they are in a very great minority. That minority is decreasing, I believe, as the years go on and the standard of training improves. The majority of teachers are better able than almost any parent to judge whether a crack of a whip is needed; and the fact that treatment for the maladjusted child, to which the noble Lord, Lord Goodman, referred, is now much more readily available saves problems of that sort. One must remember that one of the teachers' troubles is that at the end of the scale there are too many parents who utterly fail to instil any sort of discipline in their children when they send them to school. That is something which must be borne in mind. The problem is much more complex than the tenor of this Bill would suggest. Indeed,

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when I decided to speak, I sought the advice of a well-known authority who has been the headmaster of three well-known schools. I have a letter from him which expresses views so closely in accord with mine that I propose to quote it to you if only to save time, because his writing in dealing with the matter is so succinct.
He, for instance, grieves for what he calls:
"The abdication of responsibility by parents and teachers, and the cowardice of adults lest they are thought to be 'illiberal'. There are those who, appear to think it the task of parents and teachers to allow young people to run violently down steep places, and then to stand by to pick up the pieces at the bottom (at whatever the social cost)'."
I think the latter point should be borne in mind.
He quotes from another teacher in another place, and he goes on to say:
"Now, as to corporal punishment … may I list sonic points? First, premises. (1) Love and concern are essential whenever sanctions teachers or parents use."—
that was the point which was brought out by the noble Lord, Lord Peddie—
"(2) The conscience grows effectively with the growth of the young, in body as in spirit. (3) As Bridges says in The Testament of Beauty, the job of man is to effect in his young the conscient passage from the "must" to the "ought". An over-dose of "ought", too young gives moral indigestion. Too long prolonged "must" breeds moral insensitivity". Every young person matters desperately, differs widely from others in him/her-self. Nothing calls for greater delicacy and skill in adults concerned with young people than to fumble after the graduation from "you must" to "you ought" at varying ages and stages because they are all different from one another.'"
He turns to corporal punishment and says:
"I am against 'pompous', 'judicial', and delayed use of this. But I know it to be true that while there are some children … for whom in no circumstances would it be appropriate "—
this was the point brought out by the noble Lord, Lord Goodman—
"there are others, especially the jolly extrovert and disobedient, for whom it is kinder than detentions, etc.,".
That is the point which noble Lords have brought out. He goes on:
"People say that it is not 'effective'. What do they mean? You could hang men for poaching—effective no doubt! But? We schoolteachers are not out to achieve total conformity or obedience. Good God! What sort
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of a school would that be? We aim to contain high spirits in reasonable and kindly bounds, not to quench them. In an ideal world, sanctions would not be necessary. But we do not live in such a world. With many schoolboys, sarcasm, humiliation, the removal of affection by an adult whom they admire, may be far more cruel than three or four with a slipper—and, because they breed hostility, less effective. Of course everything depends on the relationship of the child/adult, and children are very perceptive about motivation. But a vicious or sadistic adult can hurt a young thing in many other ways and much worse than physically. As Sir Henry Sidney wrote to his young son Philip at Shrewsbury, 'Remember, a hurt given by a word goes deeper than one given by a blow'. No one could call Sir Philip Sidney 'a brute'".
The head master went on to say:
"What real reason is there to remove one weapon in the armoury of good teachers and good men? Bad teachers and bad men will find plenty of ways of hurting young people (I suppose because they enjoy it) without beating them, and hurting them worse by sarcasm, removal of affection, public deriding, what you will. None suggests for a moment that corporal punishment for the young is a panacea —only that in some cases it is (a) the wisest; (b) the kindest way of emphasising disapproval without making the young person feel and look either a Charlie' or rejected."
My Lords, I will not continue reading the letter, but those are wise and kind words. This is the important way to approach the Bill of the noble Baroness. I particularly agree that to be effective corporal punishment must not be pompous, judicial or delayed. Physical retribution should be swift and have an aura of inevitability about it. In my view it is utterly cruel—and I repeat "utterly cruel"—to let a young human go out into the world without knowing in his or her heart that to the end of their days life will exact retribution for being sheer bad, crooked, or being just silly.
I have a daughter who, after her third child had started school, decided to take a diploma and now is a card-holding teacher. I have discussed this Bill with her—and I am sorry that the noble Baroness is not in her place at the moment. My daughter's comment was:
"Dear Barbara Wootton! so good, so kind, but so much so that she thinks everybody can be made good and kind because she is."
I wish that were so, my Lords; but it does not work out that way. My daughter brought out the point which has been mentioned in the debate that one has to realise that there are tough schools in tough places. This is quite a problem to the teacher. There are families where

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violence in almost every form is an everyday part of the children's life. School without a strap in the drawer would be utterly unreal to such children. This is an angle which my daughter knows from her own experience and which I had not appreciated. If you can obtain a copy of to-day's issue of the Scotsman you will find an interesting letter in it describing the problem of violence in the classroom, referring to a father who is a schoolteacher and to his two children, who are both teachers, all suffering violence at the hands of pupils in one week.
What we need is not Bills like this one but concentrated effort and expenditure to improve the position of teachers, to let them know that we trust them, to ensure that parents understand and accept that their duty to civilisation is the upbringing of their children. The letter from which I have quoted brief extracts also emphasised the importance of the association between the parent and the teacher, which I know is a difficult matter in secondary schools with large classes in busy areas.
I should like to pour scorn and obloquy on the monsters in the film world and, to some extent, in the media, who produce films like the Clockwork Orange and Straw Dogs. One university has made compulsory viewing of these things part of one of their courses. Can you believe it? This debate will have been well worth while if it establishes for ever that if we would like to see physical violence eliminated in any form, the first step is to eliminate wickedness. But I oppose the Bill as it stands. I feel that the matter should be left, as my noble friend Lord Sandford pointed out, in the hands of the local authorities to use their judgment. They are the people who have to face the problem of staffing the schools. I should like to see something done to tackle violence on television and on films. I should like to see our education system broadened in one respect. I will quote from an eminent professor of physiology who at one stage was my guardian. I have been reminded by his daughter that he said:
"Man is an animal whose existence depends on his being a member of a community. Education is too concentrated on developing the individual without training the individuals to be responsible members of their community."
That I believe has an important bearing on this right of the teacher which exists
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to-day of administering punishment to a child—not, as the noble Baroness, Lady Wootton, said (and I agree with her) that a cane is no assistance to learning, but it may well be an assistance to education. My Lords, force still remains the ultimate sanction of all law; and much as we should like to see it abolished it still remains so. But let us hope and pray that the use of it and the necessity to use it will decrease, as it must. At the same time, I do not feel that I can vote for this Bill.
5.41 p.m.
LORD HALE: My Lords, much was said by the last speaker about which I could find an appreciation, and even a limited degree of agreement. He made reference to the absence of my noble friend Lady Wootton, apologising for doing so, and in effect said: "Poor Barbara Wootton. She thinks everyone can be cured by kindness." I hope I quote correctly. I cannot reply for the noble Baroness, but everyone who has heard her speak to-day will know that she can speak very well for herself. Indeed, there are very few subjects under the sun on which she cannot also speak for me. My reply to what was said would be that of course we do not think that everyone can be cured by kindness. Those of us who have for many years taken an interest in matters such as penal reform know that there are insoluble cases. We know that even among young children there are children who seem to be born with the gift of evil. We know that the little blue-eyed girl in the witness box may be a mythomaniac and a pathological liar. We know that we can proceed in such cases only by trial and error, and that some of them are going to finish up in Broadmoor; and some used to finish near the scaffold.
However, I remember that "Nye" Bevan used to say that the first thing to do is to ascertain your principles. Politics does not always permit you to apply in full your principles. There are pragmatic reasons, there are experiences, which limit their immediate or their complete application. In this matter only two principles are involved, one of which I think goes by default. Generally speaking, most people are now in favour of children. This was of course not so in the eighteenth century. Indeed, it was constantly said

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that Britons were the one people who beat their children.
BARONESS WOOTTON OF ABINGER: It still is said, my Lords.
Loan HALE: My Lords, it may be surprising to hear that among those who said that was a mass-murderer named Stalin; he said it to Lady Astor with contempt when she went over to teach him how to run Russia.
The real principle in this case poses the question: "Are we in favour of violence?" I am not in favour of violence. It is the most dangerous thing in the world to-day. It is infectious and it can become endemic. Although I do not regard this aspect as anything like the gravest aspect, I say that from one point of view it is serious and requires considering. The one point of view is this. If one says: "Well, I am against violence in general but I must make exceptions", where do you make your exceptions? On tiny children? At a school to which they are sent by compulsion? Is this really where one wishes to found one's approval of violence?
I believe I disagreed twice with the noble Baroness in her brilliant opening speech. One case was when she referred to the pain, which I do not think matters quite so much as the fear, the humiliation. The humiliation may be the most serious aspect of all. The noble Lord, Lord Peddie, said that what I would call (I hope it is not offensive) pachydermous children were not greatly hurt by this. That is probably true. It is the sensitive, it is the possible genius, who may be hurt. I lived for a little time on a gun-site where as a lance-bombardier I was actually in charge, contrary to the regulations. We found that men of all classes could gather together there—except the one man who could not mix because he was something of a minor genius. His passion was for music. All his war-time life was almost antagonistic to his own isolation, to his own genius, to his own desire to think for himself. This happens to young children. No one in this debate has said that anyone is going to be cured by corporal punishment. It may deter children. It may of course drive them into concealment. It may drive them to deceit. But nobody has really said that thrashing a child is beneficial. It has merely been said that,
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on the whole, it is going down, and it will go down, and so on.
In these circumstances, I think the proposals in the Bill are quite unexceptionable, with one exception which has been made by the noble Lord, Lord Donaldson of Kingsbridge. I agree entirely with what he said. I have always constantly disagreed with what I call the "Mrs. Ramsbottom mentality". Those of your Lordships who recall Mrs. Ramsbottom will remember that she was in an agony of emotion; her son had disappeared down the lion's mouth and she felt quite rightly that something had got to be done. The idea that someone has to be summoned is on the whole rather anathema to me. I am not sure that the provisions of this admirable Bill will really need any special sanction; but certainly I think the argument put forward for four months' imprisonment is really unsatisfactory and ought to be reconsidered. Subject to that, my Lords, I found myself in complete agreement with every word the noble Lord, Lord Goodman, had to say, and I see no reason to repeat what he said. Because if I express myself further I might express myself too strongly and drive away support, I will content myself with what I have said and resume my seat at this moment.
5.48 p.m.
LORD ANNAN: My Lords, I must apologise to your Lordships' House for not being present at the beginning of the debate. I was prevented from coming here earlier by having to attend a Statutory Committee. I am sorry for many reasons that I missed part of the debate, particularly because I imagine there has been a great flow of reminiscence from noble Lords who have brought to your Lordships' House memories of their past and of the undoubted beneficence of corporal punishment. In fact, I met a noble Lord who was so stirred on this subject that he was anxious to testify to the efficacy of corporal punishment. He wanted to show us scars he bore honourably of chastisements long ago inflicted upon him. I assured him that your Lordships' House would take those as seen.
May I address myself to the general principle, which is simply this. There is no solution to the problem of discipline in schools which involves in the long run

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reliance on assault and battery of children. I entirely agree with Mr. Crosland who, when he was Secretary of State of the Department of Education and Science, said, on December 19, 1967, "The practice of corporal punishment should be dropped in our schools"; and he hoped that "the local authorities, the governing bodies of schools, and the teachers themselves, would all use their power and influence to achieve this end."
There is one rider that I would add to that general principle, and I add it because I was a member of the Public Schools Commission. That body had the distinction of producing a report which won monumental disapproval from all the interested parties concerned, and was approved by no one at all. Nevertheless, I think that certain paragraphs in the report were wise; indeed, they may even have had an influence in the public schools during the time they were being gestated and the report was in the process of being written.
The paragraphs to which I refer were the ones which dealt briefly with the question of corporal punishment in boarding schools. There is a particular point to be made here. In day schools corporal punishment can be checked by parental opinion and by public opinion; if there is some abuse going on it very easily and readily comes to light. Whereas in boarding schools the problem is much more difficult. It is not at all easy for boys to complain of corporal punishment being inflicted upon them because, since it is a school convention, to complain against it is a most difficult and dangerous thing for any boy to do. It is important also to remember that in our public schools the local authorities cannot intervene on behalf of a boy; nor indeed, very often, can the parents. The only recourse they have is to take the boy away.
There was one further point that was referred to in the report of the Public Schools Commission. It went on to say that although in general terms the members of the Commission disapproved of corporal punishment they could not declare that the independent schools must abolish it, because it was still extant in the maintained schools in this country. But they did point out there was one practice that should be abolished at once, and that was the beating of boys
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by boys. It is said to be disappearing in public schools. For years the public schools were criticised for permitting this practice to continue, and the members of the Commission were unconvinced by any of the defences they heard. They asked why, if it was in practice dying out, it should not be abolished. One headmaster made a statement with which the members of the Commission associated themselves. The headmaster said, "It is worse for those who inflict this punishment, and for those who watch it being inflicted, than for the boy who suffers it." I do not think that corporal punishment inflicted by boys on boys is used in the independent schools as it was in the 1950s. It is probable that that practice is diminishing. It is certain that in many schools it has already been abolished. But I think that the Public Schools Commission were right when they said that they could not recommend that any boy be sent from the maintained sector on any kind of grant to an independent school in which that practice was still condoned. I would at this point ask the Minister whether there is not a possibility of the Secretary of State bringing some pressure to bear on independent schools for a declaration of intent on this matter. I think it is a matter which it is perfectly proper to raise with the Headmasters' Conference.
I have spoken of the general principle; and the general principle is all very well. But what are we to do in our maintained schools when the violence of boys —and indeed the violence of some girls —is increasing all the time?—for increasing it is. And let there be no doubt about the matter: it is not increasing because of the number of immigrant children in our schools it is the white children rather than the black who are responsible. Indeed, it is sometimes the middle-class children rather than the working-class children, the nine-year-olds as well as the 14–16-year-olds who are the wreckers and disrupters in our schools. And faced with this rising violence is it any wonder that teachers and the National Union of Teachers are against the abolition of corporal punishment? To them it seems the only effective defence, perhaps their last defence, against this rising tide. And I suggest that we should not this evening pass general principles and leave the teachers in the front tine without any concern for them. It is very important to

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maintain discipline in schools, and our teachers, just as much as our children, need our support and need our encouragement.
How can we resolve this problem? My Lords, I speak with great diffidence on this subject because one needs a great deal more experience of what life is like in maintained schools than I have, and I do not think that the enunciation of general principles is enough. I think we need to have some new thoughts about schools; and some of these new thoughts may be rather strange. We have to recognise that we face the problem of the ineducable—the ineducable at the age of puberty. We have to recognise that there are totally alienated children; we have to recognise not merely the delinquent child but the fact that he often comes from a delinquent family. The first subversive thought I want to air is about the school-leaving age. I am sure that everybody in this House believes that it was right to raise the school-leaving age, but I ask myself whether it is not necessary to have second thoughts about how the raised school-leaving age is actually enforced.
Is there not a way of releasing from school children who palpably cannot stand it or understand its purpose, shall we say, after the age of 14? Things have changed since the days when the raising of the school-leaving age was an absolute essential in the advancement of the disadvantaged child or the working-class child. Things have changed because to-day we have a number of "second chance" institutions—and I am glad to see the noble Baroness, Lady Lee of Asheridge, in the House because she was the founder of one of the greatest of our" second chance" institutions, the Open University. If there are these institutions which give a second chance to those who have dropped out, in the early stages of their life, then perhaps we should recognise that it is not absolutely necessary in all circumstances to compel children to stay on at school. It should be a question of opting out on the advice of the teachers of the school, instead of, as it was before the school-leaving age was raised opting in. That is the first thought that I put forward.
The second thought is whether we ought not to consider having special schools for children who are deeply and emotionally disturbed. It is not true that
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the emotionally disturbed child, the tough destroyer of order within the school community, will naturally be converted by the angelic children around him. Therefore I ask myself whether we should not think more of having special places where such children can be helped and possibly adjusted to their environment. Such a policy assumes that the local authority must accept responsibility for all children. The great difference between the independent schools and the maintained sector is that if there is a thoroughly ill-disciplined boy at an independent school the school has the perfectly easy recourse of saying that he can no longer remain a member of the school. But in the maintained schools, it is impossible to sack boys. That is a difference which must always be borne in mind by those who are facing the problem of ill discipline in the schools.
That is why I maintain that we ought to believe in a new kind of school which does take care of the children who really are wrecking the lives and opportunities of the majority of those in the same class at school, who are perfectly prepared to accept the ordinary school rules and regulations. I think that you will need specially-trained teachers who will identify and isolate for special treatment the emotionally disturbed and the violent. I do not doubt that there will be teachers forthcoming who will be willing to teach in such schools. We have had dedicated teachers in the borstal institutions and in those institutions which deal with physically disabled children. I repeat that I do not doubt that teachers will come forward to work in such special schools. What is very hard is to expect the ordinary run of teachers (and at times they are very young teachers) to work in urban environments in which the schools are at the mercy of very violent children.
I hope that we shall not burke this problem; that we shall not fall back on the fact that this country is peculiar and that we need never consider what is happening in other countries. The list of other countries in which no corporal punishment takes place is enormously long. It is we who are peculiar in maintaining it in our schools. At the same time, we have to consider the different social structures of these countries. There is a spectrum of countries to be observed.

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At one end are the very highly disciplined schools, in the U.S.S.R.—a discipline which is produced by the whole nature of that State but where observers note how tidy and orderly and strictly disciplined are the children in the schools; though at what cost that discipline is achieved is another matter. At the other end of the spectrum is the U.S.A. where often in the schools in large cities all semblance of discipline has gone and all semblance of education has also disappeared. We must recognise where we stand in this spectrum. In certain of our cities we are nearer to the U.S.A. than to the U.S.S.R. Having taken note of that difference, we must ask ourselves what we are doing about it.
As I understand it, the argument behind this Bill is that we should abolish corporal punishment in order to make the teaching profession face the problem of ill discipline. I myself wonder whether this is not a little premature, whether it would not be wise for the Government to investigate this as a matter of urgency —for we cannot go on much longer ignoring this problem. We need not set up a heavily-weighted Commission which will take two years to produce a report. All we need to do is to investigate the large amount of research that has already been done on this problem and finally to come forward with recommendations which would entail in the end the abolition of corporal punishment. I put that to the House because I think it is too much to expect the teaching profession at the moment to accept the abolition now, immediately; but, on the other hand, I think they must accept that a terminus ad quem must be fixed, a terminus ad quem which must depend on their being convinced that certain measures will be taken after the investigation by the Government to meet the problem of growing violence in many of our less-advantaged schools, thereby eliminating the need to retain corporal punishment.
6.5 p.m.
VISCOUNT BARRINGTON: My Lords, I shall try to be brief. Like a noble Lord who spoke earlier, I did not come here intending to make a speech on this subject but, as it were, to stand up and be counted. If I now
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stand up and am counted out in five minutes I shall try, in those five minutes, to make clear why I find this a difficult subject to explain why, if it comes to a vote, I am inclined to vote in favour of the Bill. I believe that a great deal of what has been said does not really concern the issue here to-day. There are three questions which have arisen. The first is: ought corporal punishment to be discouraged? On that I think that everyone, including the noble Lords, Lord Ferrier and Lord Peddie, would agree that it ought not to be encouraged. But that is not what we are discussing. The next question is whether it should be prohibited by law. The third—and here I am in complete agreement with the noble Lords, Lord Donaldson of Kingsbridge and Lord Hale—is whether it ought to be prohibited by law with penalties, including imprisonment and very heavy fines. I shall not say anything about either the first or the last of these questions; but will give the reasons why I believe that, on the whole, this Bill, with certain emendations, is timely.
Almost all the arguments produced at the beginning of the debate, arguments influenced by a climate of opinion very different from that prevailing now, were based on the fact that corporal punishment is an anachronism, is outdated, is not in accordance with the feeling of the times and, in fact, is against the stream. In most cases, I do not regard that as a good reason for voting for a Bill; and I often regard it as an excellent reason for voting against it. I believe that the matter we are now discussing differs from some of the other highly emotional subjects that we have debated, in that the whole attitude towards corporal punishment of any kind, be it execution, beating, making somebody walk on tintacks, or what not, is affected by the climate of opinion in a way that certain other issues are not affected. That came out very strongly in Lord Peddie's speech which I found very impressive. He made a devastating defence of a type of headmaster who existed at Eton before any of your Lordships were born. I was at Eton, where corporal punishment was practiced, and I was in a House in Keate's Lane. Doctor Keate was the celebrated headmaster who flogged a whole Confirmation Class which came to him, and

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when he discovered that they were a Confirmation Class, he flogged them again for not pointing it out. His pupils all respected him enormously and in their old age often went back and called on him in much the same way as Lord Peddie looks back on and honours his own headmaster. It may be that it was right in those times and in those circumstances to believe that this was a good way. Doctor Keate was faced with problems very like those of many teachers in schools now. At one time he and one other master dragged in the whole school to flog them for something—and was admired for it.
The noble Earl, Lord Swinton, made an extremely impressive speech and pointed out—as have many others before him, including the excellent Mr. Joyce who was once a master at borstal—that there are occasions when a short, sharp shock can make all the difference in the right direction. That is so; but I think there are many occasions in which it can, with the best intentions and with no question of sadism and unwanted children, have a bad effect in the wrong direction.
May I give one example which perhaps could not be called corporal punishment and which certainly would not be affected by this Bill because it was the case of a parent, but I think the story is substantially true. It concerns a former Member, now deceased, of your Lordships' House who was taking his son and heir aged eight or nine out shooting with him (as my father took me) with the idea of introducing him to the joys of shooting. The boy had not heard a gun go off in quite such close proximity before, and after jumping an inch or two into the air committed the unforgivable offence of almost putting his hand up to his ear. This action horrified and distressed his father who, after sharply exclaiming in a very audible voice" I'll teach any boy of mine to be gun-shy!" proceeded to discharge both barrels of his gun within two inches of the boy's ear, breaking the ear-drum with the result that the boy was deaf in that ear for the rest of his life. I quote that only because I think it was an example of an experiment in education which failed in its objective. It did not make the boy a keen shot; in fact, something worse happened, in that he developed what one might literally call an ear for music", and later he became a more than com-
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petent violinist. This outcome so horrified his father that I believe for the rest of their lives they were not on speaking terms—or I suppose one should say "speaking tubes". That is an extreme example of how, with good intentions, things do not always work out as one would like them to.
I see that I have exceeded the five minutes that I set myself and it would be quite inappropriate for me to continue and to make some of the points that I should otherwise have made. I will only say that as well as an Amendment which I believe may be made on the matter of imprisonment and which I shall certainly vote for, I am not very happy about the Title of the Bill. It has been pointed out before that it is not concerned with the full protection of minors. I do not think it was meant to be. I do not think anyone will blame the noble Baroness for not trying to protect minors against damage by fire, hail, Bishops, deacons or any other adversity. The Bill is only a limited attempt to protect them in certain circumstances from being beaten by a limited number of people. But it does not, of course, protect all minors, because there is a limited number of minors—I suppose one should call them "minimuses"—who are too young to be included in the Bill at all. That point might possibly be raised in an Amendment to the Title of the Bill, but now is not the moment to stress it. I apologise to your Lordships for speaking longer than I intended to.
6.13 p.m.
LORD WELLS-PESTELL: My Lords, I find myself in complete agreement with the intention of the Bill and I also welcome the comments made by the noble Lord, Lord Annan. I hope that whatever happens to this Bill, the Government will take the advice proffered by the noble Lord and will look carefully at this matter of the retention of corporal punishment in schools. When he spoke earlier the Minisler referred to the decision of his right honourable friend in another place that the matter should be left to local education committees and heads of schools, but I want to suggest that this is invariably the sort of formula that is put forward when we in the United Kingdom do not want to face something, when we want to run away from an issue which may be embarrassing or likely to

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divide the community. I do not think this is an issue that we can run away from; I think it is one that we have to face, although I suspect that the noble Lord, the Minister, when he replies, will not give the Bill a great deal of encouragement.
What surprises me is that we in the United Kingdom can hold fast to the belief that corporal punishment is very desirable when most other countries in the world abolished it a good time ago. As we were told, Poland abolished it something like 190 years ago. But even if we think their way of life is so vastly different from ours, there are numerous countries to-day which share our particular basic philosophy and our particular outlook and they decided tens of years ago to abolish corporal punishment. It surprises me that a nation which considers itself to be enlightened should take this atittude. In fact we are enlightened: we have perhaps done more for our people than a good many other countries. Yet, in spite of our enlightenment and our desire to do what we think is right, there are many people—and quite a number in your Lordships' House—who are prepared to support the continuance of corporal punishment.
The Plowden Report, which has been so much in evidence today, said:
"We believe that the kind of relationship which ought to exist between teacher and child cannot be built up in an atmosphere in which the infliction of physical pain is regarded as normal."
It is really on that passage that I want to base my remarks.
LORD SOMERS: My Lords, if I may interrupt the noble Lord for one moment, may I say that what he is saying is absolutely in contradiction to my own experience. The boys of the school where I taught were all devoted to their housemasters and to other masters—with a few exceptions, naturally—and it made no difference at all to their feelings for the masters.
LORD WELLS-PESTELL: My Lords, of course I must accept what the noble Lord has said. He is speaking from experience; I have never taught children and young persons. I have only taught much older people and the question has not arisen. But the noble Lord's experience is not the experience of a good many other people in the teaching profession.
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What I wanted to go on to say is that the retention of corporal punishment in schools means, in my view, that each year we put a large number of academically trained teachers into a cultural setting which is much more in keeping with the Middle Ages. I believe that caning is a middle-class concept of discipline and quite out of place with and far removed from modern thought and modern methods of teaching. Progress in understanding the wants and needs of each child is much more important, and I believe that there are many teachers today who want to understand what the young people are really thinking and feeling but who are seriously hampered by the lack of adequate school buildings and far too few teachers. It is our present educational system, with its classes of unmanageable size, which makes it very difficult for the right kind of relationship to flow from teacher to pupil and back from pupil to teacher. Many teachers today are working in conditions where perhaps they feel they cannot do anything else. I think we must take into account the deprived backgrounds of a large number of our children in schools today which provide the greatest obstacles to learning and present the spearhead of trouble and difficulty. Allowances have to be made for this all too frequent situation. Fortunately for us, we have a growing number of schools in which there is not only a good teacher/headmaster relationship, but a really good and effective teacher/pupil relationship. I believe that this has resulted in the decline of reliance on the use of the cane in recent years.
I was chairman of the board of governors of a school in London for ten years. It was patently clear to me, and to others, that teachers who have a real concern for their pupils acknowledge that caning is not the answer. It can be the easiest way out of a situation; it can be a means of dealing temporarily with that situation. It can also be an excuse for not doing anything really constructive. The real answer is to enable teachers to have the time to go properly into the reasons for the misbehaviour of a pupil. This is being done by a large and growing number of head teachers, who uncover all kinds of difficulties and frustrations. Some schools already have on the staff a teacher who has been specially selected and trained to act as a pupil counsellor. A great deal has been done

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by such counsellors to help the difficult, wilful and disobedient children.
To look at the problems of the antisocial child objectively is time-consuming, but the schools in which it is being done to-day—and there is a good number—find it worth while in the long run. Where that has been done, the abolition of corporal punishment has not created the disaster that so many people in the community, and perhaps in your Lordships' House, thought it would cause. It was abolished by the head master of Rising Hill, a school in one of London's most difficult districts, proving that the argument for the retention of corporal punishment in tough areas is no longer valid. Many of your Lordships will know the difficulties which occurred in Rising Hill school a few years ago, but that problem has been overcome. This is perhaps the only point at which I join issue with the noble Lord, Lord Annan, who asked, "What are we to do about violence in schools?" I may be doing him an injustice—I hope I am not—but I got the impression that he thought there ought to be effective defence. It is my experience, from the many friends I have in the teaching profession, and from the time when I myself was involved as chairman of a board of governors, that it is the same children who get caned time and time again. Caning holds no fear for them. It is not a deterrent. If this is so—and I believe it to be the experience of a good many people—then I think there is no point whatsoever in retaining a measure that serves no useful purpose.
I would draw your Lordships' attention to the West Riding survey made as far back as 1961. This survey found that behaviour was best and delinquency least in schools where corporal punishment was used very sparingly. I do not claim that by outlawing capital punishment—
BARONESS WOOTTON OF ABINGER: My noble friend means corporal punishment.
LORD WELLS-PESTELL: My Lords, I must have made a mistake like that from listening to some of the speeches made this afternoon, from which it seemed that some of your Lordships might even want to introduce capital punishment rather than retain corporal punishment.
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But I do not claim that by outlawing corporal punishment in schools, antisocial behaviour and violence are going to disappear overnight. Of course they are not. Much more is needed.
Our schools need more money. They need more teachers. They need teachers who in some respects are better trained; and, if I may venture to say so, selected more carefully. There is a need for more sensitive supporting services and changes in attitudes and thinking, plus the overriding requirement to look more closely at the needs of individual pupils. It would be a considerable asset to our educational system if every school could have on its staff someone who was not there merely to teach the subjects taught in that school, but who had been specially selected and trained to deal with the problems of pupils. In that way, one could come to understand why there is so much violence, why there is so much wilfulness, and so much destruction. In the last analysis, this misconduct is very often a form of protest against the kind of environment in which many of the pupils live.
6.26 p.m.
LORD JAMES OF RUSHOLME: My Lords, as someone who was a schoolmaster for 28 years, I feel it would be appropriate for me at any rate to express an opinion on this subject, and I will try to do so very briefly indeed. For 12 years, I taught in a school where assistant masters were not allowed to use corporal punishment. I regret to say that my school persisted in what I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Annan, is a quite indefensible practice of allowing prefects to beat other boys. Assistant masters were not allowed to use corporal punishment. In any case, with the kind of relationship that I had with my pupils, it would have been unthinkable. Then I became head master of a very large grammar school where discipline had become somewhat difficult (shall we say?), partly as a result of the war. Corporal punishment was used, though not a great deal. For my first year or so I used it myself. But I was wrong. I soon came to regard it as unnecessary, undesirable and, most important of all, ineffective. Though there was never a formal prohibition in the school, the general disapproval among my colleagues, and my own disapproval of corporal punishment, made

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it obsolete. Thus, my experience and my convictions lead me to support this Bill wholeheartedly.
I ventured on my short autobiographical introduction so that it could not be said that my support was simply based on starry-eyed inexperience. I see that the noble Lord, Lord Peddie, has gone. It is in the light of that experience, extending over a number of years, that I should like to comment on one or two of the all too familiar arguments we have heard to-day. In the first place, I would affirm as strongly as I can that I do not believe that corporal punishment can do any good to anybody, certainly no good comparable with its potential and actual harm. The fact that the old phrase (how sick one is of hearing it!) "I was beaten repeatedly and it never did me any harm", should have been quoted so often is sufficient evidence, surely, that whatever else corporal punishment is, it is not a deterrent; otherwise the speakers would not have been beaten so repeatedly. The tough boy in a difficult school—he has been quoted to-day—is often thought of as accessible only through a good thrashing. We have even heard the old stuff about violence, that the way to deal with it in school is to retain the cane. The cane we are told, is the only punishment he fears. With respect, I believe that that is nonsense. As often as not the tough boy has been beaten repeatedly and fiercely in his own home and it is part of his self-image to endure such treatment and to laugh.
The boy for whom the thought of physical pain may actually be thought to be a deterrent and may be a deterrent is the nervous, the physically timid boy, and to him there is surely no doubt that corporal punishment can do definite harm. But, of course, the harm of corporal punishment goes a good deal further than its effect on the frightened child. I am referring to the more subtle damage to the atmosphere of an educative community and to the proper development of the individuals in it when authority has to rest on the infliction of physical pain; as the noble Countess said, the headmaster's symbol being a cane. What a conception of my one-time profession! The truth is that the interest aroused by beatings and the rituals so often associated with them are, we must now acknowledge a good
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deal more unhealthy than our predecessors knew, or at any rate were prepared to admit. I am not, of course, maintaining that every schoolmaster who canes a boy is a sadist, though some are. What I am saying is that in a school where corporal punishment exists there are dangers of introducing fears, attitudes and sometimes pleasures which are inimical to good education and proper maturity.
A common line of defence is to say, "By all means let such punishment diminish, but let us keep it as the ultimate sanction"—I think the phrase was used in this Chamber to-day—like the atomic bomb. That is, I think, with respect, an extremely misguided view. Serious offences such as truancy or stealing are the very last which should be dealt with by the summary expedient of the cane. They are nearly always signs of some trouble that needs diagnosis and sympathy and help and guidance. If caning is ever justified, I think it is for the essentially trivial offence, such as impertinence or practical joking on a big scale, or something similar, and for such offences there are other far less potentially harmful punishments.
There are two other arguments against a positive prohibition of corporal punishment in schools; we have heard both of them to-day. The first, and it seems to be the Government's view in so far as the Government's view is crystallizing, says that since the use of such punishment is diminishing all the time, we can afford to do nothing and let it wither away. That argument does not satisfy me; first, because if something wrong is going on we surely cannot stop it too soon, and secondly, because I am not prepared to tolerate the pockets of fear and sometimes cruelty that anything short of prohibition will leave untouched. The second argument says that methods of punishment should be left to the professional judgment of the practising teacher. This argument also leaves me unmoved. The operations of every profession, as the noble Baroness said in her opening speech—she said practically everything in her opening speech—are quite properly the subject of judgment by the community when moral issues are involved. I am too jealous of the reputation of the profession to which I belong to believe that it needs the liberty to do something that is, after all, prohibited

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by a great number of civilised countries in order that it may do its work at all.
Finally, I would say this, and I think here my mind is working on the same lines as that of the noble Lord, Lord Annan, although I do not think I should reach the same conclusion of another Committee. If we prohibit corporal punishment in schools, as I think we should and can, we must make every effort to remove the causes which, in the view of its defenders, make it essential. We must ask ourselves whether we are fair to teachers when we create very large schools in difficult areas, with impossibly mixed abilities, leading to boredom, and boredom is the first step to bad behaviour. We must ask whether we give young teachers enough guidance and support over disciplinary problems, and in my experience we do not. Hitherto, we have not given them enough support of practically any kind. We must ensure that difficult schools and disturbed pupils get adequate help through other social agencies. The use of the cane is often, after all, a reaction of teachers lacking in confidence or special talents or experience, their reaction to behaviour which seems intolerable and to problems with which they simply cannot cope. It is the easy way out, and, misguided, ineffectual and sometimes harmful though I believe it to be, it is, nevertheless, comprehensible enough that some people should take that way. If we abolish it by law, as I believe we should, we must at the same time do our best, by the better training of teachers, by more sensible organisation of our schools, and by giving those schools and those teachers ever greater social support, to deal more rationally and more effectively with kinds of behaviour for which beating is now supposed, so erroneously, to be the right answer.
6.37 p.m.
LORD STRATHCLYDE: My Lords, I intervene, very briefly, not to make any profound remarks; I have come to this debate following on a most profound speech to which we have all listened with great interest. I want to contradict from my own experience what has been said time and again this afternoon. It was said by Lord Morris of Grasmere for the first time, I think, and other speakers have said it—that corporal punishment serves no useful purpose. It was said by Lord James of Rusholme a minute
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ago, and by Lord Wells-Pestell as well. My experience is somewhat different in my own person. As a small boy I went to one of the great Scottish day schools, and when one was about 10 or 11 one got homework to do. If you did not do your homework, you were told about it, but when it was proved that you obviously went playing games or some other thing instead of doing what you were told, then you received a punishment. I can remember it perfectly well; after the master had questioned you and proved to his own satisfaction that you had not done a single thing about what you had been told to do, he said "Galbraith, come down here and hold out your hand", and you got three or four smacks with what we call the tawse—in other words, strap. It taught you to do your homework, believe me. On another occasion years later, as a midshipman in the Navy, I was told to do a certain duty and I did not do it—not purposely but because I forgot—and I got six over the backside, and it taught me not to forget.
I do not know what kind of schools some of your Lordships were at; I do not know what kind of experience you have had in the world. You may have taught in schools, but, goodness gracious!, you will never maintain discipline, except by men of the greatest character and there are not many of them, without having something to make people know through their own skins that they have to do the right thing or suffer for it. That is my experience in a long lifetime, and I can confirm it further from my own home. I am one of eight children. I have seven children of my own; they have all been spanked; we all love one another, and they have all learned to do what they are jolly well told, and to do it properly.
I will give your Lordships another example in another connection. I was working outside one day when a car drew up and a policeman got out; he was an inspector of police new to me. He came over and had a talk with me, and he deplored several things. One of them was the fact that, going round the countryside and the villages in his area to-day, he would find a boy going wrong. He would try to find the mother and father to warn them, but it was very difficult to find them. The mother was at

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work, and so was the father, and in the evenings they had a little relaxation, either in the bingo hall or the pub, to use the inspector's words. Then the boy does something really serious, and what happens? He goes to borstal and mixes with all kinds of naughty boys. He probably has his whole character altered for the worse and, as the policeman said to me, "All because you have taken away from us the right to give him a smack on the ear with the back of our hand, or a kick where a kick should be administered." I do not understand this namby-pamby way in which we are going on. We are so soft that I can hardly believe that I live in the same country in which I was brought up. This is to the detriment of the young and of the old as well.
6.41 p.m.
LORD BROCK: My Lords, I hesitate to prolong this debate after so many noble Lords have spoken, but I wish to briefly emphasise one aspect of this problem which has not been made clear from many of the speeches, although it has been well brought out by the noble Lord, Lord Beaumont of Whitley, and also by the noble Lord, Lord Somers; that is, that beating has nothing to do with education. This point must be made very clear. I unreservedly support the object of the Bill in trying to stop attempts at teaching by beating, but it is not possible to lump all the cases for caning under this one heading, because this causes confusion.
I am concerned as to the use of caning as a selective disciplinary measure. There are occasions for which the remedy of caning should not be forbidden. We all know examples—bullying and other cases have been mentioned. I suggest, as the noble Countess, Lady Loudoun, has stated, that this is a Bill that takes something from the headmasters. Casual caning, or caning of small boys by older boys, should not be permitted, and I strongly support what the noble Lord, Lord Annan, has already said about this. But we should not deprive a headmaster, or a housemaster, acting in concert with the board of governors or council of management, of the right to administer appropriate punishment for certain offences, but not as a so-called means of education. In some circumstances the
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alternative would be expulsion, which could be a permanent setback to a career, when the matter could be dealt with by a short, sharp lesson, which causes no resentment. I find this Bill by no means clear about this important aspect of the problem of total abolition of corporal punishment, and for this reason I cannot unreservedly support it.
6.44 p.m.
LORD SANDFORD: My Lords, before turning to the issues raised solely by the Bill, I should like to say that I am grateful to the noble Baroness for stimulating a valuable debate, and to assure noble Lords that if I do not mention all the points now—there were many raised in the course of the debate—for instance by the noble Lords. Lord Annan and Lord James of Rusholme—my right honourable friend and I will be taking them up and considering them with care in due course. When I asked noble Lords who put down their names to speak in this debate what line they were proposing to take, many of the supporters of the Bill said, in effect, that they thought, "The time had come". This was the phrase that the noble Lord, Lord Morris of Grasmere, actually used. Therefore, I was looking forward to-day to hearing what it was that had happened, what changes had occurred that, in their view, call for the sudden, sweeping, dramatic change of approach in the use of corporal punishment that is embodied in this Bill. I must say that after this debate, although I now know more of how many noble Lords' minds have been working, I am still very short of firm data and practical evidence of the need for such a sudden, sweeping and dramatic change in our approach to this problem at this particular moment.
Perhaps I should now turn aside to justify the expression, "sudden, sweeping and dramatic". It is a sweeping change. I have already set out, and other noble Lords have mentioned, particular instances where the use of corporal punishment has been forbidden or withdrawn: for example, throughout the whole of Inner London in respect of primary schools; fifteen or more other authorities in respect of infants' schools; and in Northumberland in respect of all their special schools. All the evidence (and there is plenty of it) and indications are

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that where there has been local consultation about such a proposal, especially with the teachers, this formal change of policy has gone well, caused no trouble, and the use of corporal punishment has ended. But such is not the way of this Bill. The aim of this Bill is to make one comprehensive, sweeping change apply to secondary as well as primary schools, State schools as well as Church schools, independent schools as well as direct grant schools, schools in England, schools in Scotland, schools in Wales, schools in Northern Ireland, and possibly to be imposed on the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands. There is no scope left in the Bill for any exceptions to allow for the different attitudes and different conditions prevailing in different areas and different types of schools. I do not think that there is any doubt at all that this is a wholesale change in our approach.
It is also a sudden change. I have already outlined the sequence of some of the main events that have led, and are leading, to the decline in the use of the cane in schools. There is the process of formal prohibition by local education authorities over the whole of their areas—the ILEA is a case in point, and the noble Baroness mentioned others. There is the process of formal prohibition by governors and managers; there is the process of prohibition by individual head teachers. The combination of all those processes seems apparently to some of the noble Baroness's supporters to be too slow and too haphazard. But there is plenty of scope for those who feel concerned about the pace of change to seek to influence it and expedite the process. Again this is not the way of this Bill. The aim of the Bill being recommended to us is to abandon this sensible, gradual, flexible process, the one adopted by the noble Lord, Lord James of Rusholme, in the case of Manchester Grammar School, and instead to arrange matters so that, without any further consultation with the teachers, no further consultation with the local education authorities, no further consultation with managers and governors, this legislation should come into force a little over a year from now on January 1, 1975, which will be much less than a year after any date on which it might conceivably become law. So it is a sudden change.
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It is a dramatic change. At present if a teacher finds occasion to cane a pupil he has, against any action for assault, the defence that he was inflicting no more than a reasonable chastisement. As I have said, there are already several classes of establishment, several categories of school, several education authorities, several boards of governors and several headmasters who forbid their teachers to use the cane or physical force upon their pupils, and there are many of us who believe, with the supporters of the Bill, that this prohibition in the use of corporal punishment will become more widespread. But the aim of this Bill is quite different. It does not proceed on these lines. In one move it takes away the defence of reasonable chastisement which teachers have had for so long, and substitutes in its place, for any teacher who raps or canes a pupil, the liability of being convicted of a criminal offence, and being faced on conviction with the heavy penalties set out in Clause 1(4) of £50 or four month's imprisonment on summary conviction, or £250 and one year's imprisonment on indictment. The point which the noble Baroness made about these being maxima and not fixed penalties of course does not remove the liability to receive the maximum if convicted. That, I am sure your Lordships will agree, is a dramatic change, and I have listened in vain for any assurance from the supporters of the Bill that the teaching professions are in any way content with it.
My Lords, I had anticipated that there could be three possible arguments in justification of such a sudden, sweeping and dramatic change of approach. One I had expected, and which we have had, is the argument that caning does positive harm. We have not had any particular instances of it. We have had mention of sadism and brutality; but, my Lords, displays of sadism and brutality would already be caught, because that would be going beyond reasonable chastisement, and the defence that the law already provides would not hold. So there is no need for this change—
LORD GOODMAN: My Lords, perhaps I may interrupt the noble Lord for a moment. Is the Minister seriously suggesting that if a teacher is animated by a sadistic motive and carries out a

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moderate chastisement that would in any way be discovered?
LORD SANDFORD: How it would be discovered and whether it would be discovered would depend on the local circumstances in each particular school and on the particular form of regulation and prohibition which headmasters and governors are applying. The other point which has been made in the case about caning doing harm is that there are other approaches and methods which teachers do, alas!, sometimes use which can do much greater harm than caning—and this is undoubtedly true. Harsh and sustained sarcasm can do much more harm than caning. The Bill does nothing whatever to curb them; and in fact the removal of the possibility of corporal punishment may well induce some weak teachers to use more of these equally cruel and undesirable approaches.
Another argument which I expected to be used, and which has indeed been used, is that there is now such widespread acceptance of the case for the formal abolition of corporal punishment in this country and in other countries, in these institutions and in other institutions, that this Bill would do little more than set the seal on a process which is almost complete. It is certainly true that corporal punishment is already virtually abolished in penal establishments, and I should like to deal with that point. This certainly demonstrates—and the noble Baroness was perfectly right to bring it forward in support of her case—that difficult and indeed wicked people can be managed without recourse to corporal punishment. But, my Lords, prisons are not schools, and schools are not prisons. Prison staff have at their disposal an entirely different régime and a far wider range of controlling sanctions than the teacher in a school. The other difference is that prisons and the like are part of a centrally administered system in which policy decisions are formulated in Whitehall and, after such consultation as is proper for good management, are then applied throughout the system. No part of the British education service—
BARONESS WOOTTON OF ABINGER: My Lords, does the noble Lord have in mind that the abolition of corporal punishment applies also to
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borstals, and that there are boys of 15 and 16 in borstal institutions?
LORD SANDFORD: I was indeed bearing that in mind, my Lords, and what I said about corporal punishment having been abandoned in penal institutions was intended to cover that. I am fully aware of that fact. What I am saying is that those establishments have quite different regimes from those in schools, and the staff have a quite different range of controlling sanctions available to them.
I was going on to say that no part of the British education service—the word "British" is important, and I will come back to it in a moment—or, for that matter, the network of local authority community homes; are in the least like the prison service and the system of penal establishments. Both the British education service and the local authority community homes are composed of a very wide variety of sectors, the only common characteristic of which is that not one school and not one home is run from Whitehall; and in many important fields, not least the teaching that goes on in the school from day to day, the direct interference and influence of Whitehall, of central Government, is expressly excluded. So there are a whole lot of highly relevant differences between these two sets of establishments.
The point was also made—in fact it was made by many noble Lords—that we are almost alone among Western European countries in retaining the right to administer corporal punishment in our schools. While this, by and large, is true—and I would not want to question that—I think your Lordships would do well to remember the fundamental differences which exist between our country and our European neighbours, not only in the administrative organisation of our educational system, which is far more decentralised than any in Europe, and certainly than most in Europe, but, more generally, in the whole structure of the social fabric that has shaped our system. I have therefore been at some pains to convince your Lordships how inappropriate it would be for such a change to be effected in the courts by means of one sweeping act of central Government. The Government firmly believe that it is a matter for local and professional resolution.
Now, my Lords, I come to such moves as have been made by local authorities

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to restrict or abolish corporal punishment. There have been a number of instances in the past year or so in England and Wales, and in Scotland, of local education authorities seeking to impose a total or partial ban on the use of corporal punishment in their schools. We do not collect statistics on corporal punishment, and we do not of course have a comprehensive and definitive picture of what authorities are doing in this field. However, a number of instances have come to our notice, some of which have attracted a good deal of publicity in the Press. My overriding impression from these is that such moves have been effective, but only where there has been genuine consultation beforehand with representatives of the teaching profession, leading to an agreement to co-operate in the change. This Bill would completely short-circuit all this essential process of local consultation.
My Lords, there is one other argument—and we have heard it to-day—and that is that it is here in central Government, in Parliament, in the Palace of Westminster, where matters like this have to be decided. The noble Lord, Lord Goodman, said quite explicitly that this is a field in which Westminster knows best; and we have heard a good deal from noble Lords about how minds are moving in the Palace of Westminster. But I think your Lordships should have the benefit of the views of the local authority associations, who are responsisble for running this service, and of the unions of teachers, who are responsible for running the schools. In giving your Lordships their views, I should like it to be borne in mind that I am now about to give you a summary of the bodies which are representative of something between 300,000 and 400,000 teachers, whereas this campaign for the abolition of corporal punishment by this particular means at this particular stage has been mounted by an organisation known as STOPP, the members of which can be numbered only in their hundreds.
The teachers' unions and the local authority associations, like many noble Lords who have spoken on both sides of this debate to-day, are in principle opposed to corporal punishment, and are aware that it is being used less and less. They look forward eventually to its complete disappearance from schools—and this is the point on which the noble
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Lord, Lord Garnsworthy, and I, and the Parties we represent, are in accord. But—and this is where we part—they do not want to see professional discretion removed; and, like Lady Plowden in her Report, they are quite certain that legislation for a new criminal offence is not the right way to tackle this question. They are very concerned about this Bill because it removes from the teacher his defence of reasonable chastisement and exposes him to the risk of severe penalties, and they cannot see how objections could be removed by its amendment.
My Lords, I have been impressed by the constructive and positive tone which the unions have taken in answering our inquiries as to their attitudes. Some unions, like many noble Lords, have rightly pointed to the present need for a more general examination to be made of the broad problem of maintaining discipline in schools. I welcome comments from noble Lords that we have had on that subject. They have gone on to indicate, as did the noble Lord, Lord Peddie, how irrelevant they feel this Bill is to the central and topical point which is their concern. They have also made the point that the sensible way to proceed to the removal of corporal punishment is to involve the teaching profession from the very outset in any discussions or negotiations leading to this end. I have had no assurances this afternoon that so far this has been undertaken.
They have also expressed alarm at the prospect, which could arise if the Bill became law, of a serious erosion taking place in the concept of the teacher being in loco parentis towards the children in his charge. They do not seem to share the view expressed by the noble Lord, Lord Morris of Grasmere, in this respect. The concept extends well beyond the field of discipline, across the whole range of the relationship between teacher and child. This is not an academic point. It is one of the impressive features of our educational system that the teacher does not confine his interests and his feeling of responsibility for his charges to the narrow confines of his classroom; his relationship is stretching out all the time from the school into the community.
My Lords, I come to my conclusion. Your Lordships' House is undoubtedly the repository of very great wisdom and

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very wide experience. There is here an accumulation of many skills in many fields, many of which have been deployed to-day. But, my Lords, in dealing with this Bill we need to ask ourselves, as did the noble Lord, Lord Annan, whether we really have the personal, up-to-date, firsthand experience of classroom teaching, for instance in a big inner city comprehensive school, to bring our own personal, unaided judgment to bear decisively on the wide variety of issues that arise in the evolution of this essentially local service and the place of corporal punishment in it. Certainly this Government—and, until to-day, I thought the Party opposite—remains clear that evolution in this sphere should be left—
BARONESS WHITE: My Lords, this is a Private Member's Bill.
LORD GARNSWORTHY: My Lords, I wonder whether the noble Lord, Lord Sandford, would give way? He raised this point while I was speaking. I made our position quite clear. I indicated that there was a developing movement of thought in this field. The noble Lord really must not—as he did when he intervened before and as he has done when he spoke—attempt to give this a Party flavour, a strong Party flavour, that nobody, I think, who has listened to the debate will feel is involved.
LORD SANDFORD: My Lords, I do not want to force the Party opposite into expressing their opinion on this matter. I thought it would be helpful to the House to know whether the Party opposite remain of the view expressed when they were last in power, or whether, as I suspected from what he said at that Despatch Box opposite, the noble Lord, Lord Garnsworthy, was expressing his own personal view. I will not pursue the matter. If the Party opposite do not want to express a view, they need not do so.
LORD GARNSWORTHY: My Lords, I read to the noble Lord what Mr. Edward Short wrote in his book, and I repeated it to him because I thought he might have missed it the first time. The noble Lord ought really to be a little more careful.
LORD SANDFORD: My Lords, the House and I were interested to hear what Mr. Short had to say in his book. What I thought the House would also be
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interested in was to know the official view of the Party opposite about this particular Bill. But, clearly, the Party opposite have not felt willing or able to express that—
BARONESS LLEWELYN-DAVIES OF HASTOE: My Lords, I really must protest at the line that the Minister is taking. Parties are not expected to have official views on Private Member's Bills, and I think it an outrage—I repeat the word "outrage"—to try to press us to take a political stand on what is a Private Member's Bill.
LORD SANDFORD: My Lords, I am not pressing the noble Baroness in the very least. I am saying that I think the House might be interested. The Party opposite have now made clear that they do not want to commit themselves—at least we know that—and we can leave the point.
LORD GARNSWORTHY: My Lords, before we leave it I want to make this point. The noble Lord asked me to go out of the Chamber with him. He asked me what line I intended to take. I think he will agree that I gave him a very detailed résumé of the line I intended to take. He at no point indicated that he would be asking me the question he has or would put the point he is making.
LORD SANDFORD: My Lords, I do not want to press it any further than that. I say that I think it would be helpful for the House to know that the Party opposite, at this stage, does not want to express a view; and I quite agree with the noble Lords and Ladies opposite that there is no need for them to express a view.
BARONESS WHITE: My Lords, may I ask the noble Lord, Lord Sandford, is he speaking for his entire Party?
LORD SANDFORD: My Lords, I am speaking for the Government, and perhaps I may now go on. My Lords, it is appropriate, because the next words I have written in my speech are that I am a Minister of the Department of Education and Science. It is in that capacity that I have had the benefit of getting inside several scores of schools in recent weeks. But I would certainly not back changes as sweeping in scope, sudden in application and dramatic in effect upon

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the teachers as these—even if I supported them—without prior assurances that the local authority associations, bodies of governors and managers and associations of teachers and head teachers had been fully consulted about them and, at the very least, understood their purpose and broadly consented to the new régime that they would introduce. My Lords, it is because this debate has brought me no such assurances of consultation, and because it has brought out no argument that I find convincing for a change now of this kind or to show why the sudden sweeping and dramatic change of approach embodied in this Bill should be introduced, that I must advise your Lordships not to accord the Bill a Second Reading.
7.8 p.m.
BARONESS WOOTTON OF ABINGER: My Lords, I am grateful to noble Lords who have spoken in this debate, and particularly to those who have spoken in support of the Bill. I am grateful, also, for some constructive criticisms which I shall certainly consider very carefully; and I hope that if your Lordships give the Bill a Second Reading this may lead to some improvement in it at a later stage. I should like to make an apology to the noble Lord, Lord Ferrier, because I was absent from my place during the early part of his speech. If I have been correctly informed, he quoted his daughter as saying that I thought that everybody could be cured by kindness. Is that right—or substantially right?
LORD FERRIER: My Lords, it is substantially right. My daughter said that, "Dear Lady Wootton is so good and so kind, and thinks that everybody can be cured by kindness."
BARONESS WOOTTON OF ABINGER: Perhaps the noble Lord will tell his daughter that, if that is her opinion, she is mistaken. I do not think that everybody can be cured by kindness; it would be surprising if I did after 44 years' experience in magistrates' courts. What I do think is that nobody can be educated by being beaten, which is a different proposition.
I should like now to come to the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord
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Sandford, on behalf of the Government. I cannot, for obvious reasons, deal with these at length: the House would not wish me to. But I will deal with one small point and then say a little about a more substantial point. The small point occurred in his opening speech, when he said that the Bill could not apply to Northern Ireland because it was to be presumed that, under the new arrangements, this would be a matter for Northern Ireland to determine for itself. My information is that under the Northern Ireland Constitution in 1973 the criminal law is retained with the Westminster Parliament. Perhaps the noble Lord will look into this point at a suitable stage and see which of us is right.
The noble Lord's substantial point is one which I think is widely shared and one that I have heard from many quarters. It is that we should wait until the right thing happens in due course. The noble Lord, Lord Sandford, is not enthusiastic, I think, about corporal punishment. He was inclined to say that it did not do any particular good, but he was not convinced that it did any particular harm. I think he was well answered at an earlier stage by a noble Lord who said that this argument that, "We must wait; that this is not the moment because we cannot prove the change in the climate of opinion", is one that would stop every progressive movement. And I think it was even more effectively answered by the noble Lord, Lord James of Rusholme, who said that if a thing is wrong to-day it should be put right to-day, not to-morrow or the day after. The noble Lord, Lord Sandford, would have us wait until corporal punishment passes out in due course, and this means until every one of several hundred (I am sorry I do not know the total, but it is at least a great many hundreds) of education authorities in this country are unanimous in wishing to abolish it completely. At the moment, the number of who have got that far can be counted on the fingers of one seriously mutilated hand, and it looks therefore as if we might have to wait a very long time.
My Lords, my real difficulty in answering the noble Lord, Lord Sandford, is that I do not use the same English vocabulary. Many times in his speech he used the words "radical", "sweeping", "sudden" and "dramatic" as though they were

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automatically of a pejorative nature. I am sorry, but I do not share that use of language. Neither do I share his use of language which identifies "sensible" and "gradual". I recognise that in some matters it is important to move gradually—though not when one is rectifying a wrong or putting right an injustice. I recognise that it is necessary to move gradually when changes are to be made that may involve the obsolescence of existing technical equipment which it would be expensive to throw away. In circumstances like that, and others, it is proper to hasten slowly; but not, as I say, on the question of rectifying injustices or putting right a wrong.
But, my Lords, the British have a peculiar addiction to gradualness. My mind goes back longer than Lord Sand-ford's, at least in personal memory, to a
time more than half a century ago when Parliament decided that it was wrong that women did not have the vote. But for 10 years thereafter women between the ages of 21 and 30 continued to be disenfranchised simply because of this extraordinary reluctance to realise the immediate consequences of our convictions. If we wait until corporal punishment dies out of itself, or until hundreds of local authorities are agreed that it ought to be abolished, exactly the same thing will happen. Numbers of children who are now at school, and numbers of children who will be at school next year and the year after, will continue to be beaten for no better reason than that they made the mistake of being born too soon.
7.12 p.m.
On Question, Whether the Bill shall be now read 2a?
Their Lordships divided: Contents 51; Not-Contents, 67.

CONTENTS

Amulree, L.

Garnsworth, L.

Morris of Grasmere, L.

Ardwick, L.

Goodman, L.

Phillips, B.

Balogh, L.

Hale, L.

Platt, L.

Barrington, V.

Harmsworth, L.

Segal, L.

Beaumont of Whitley, L.

Henderson, L.

Sharp, B.

Blyton, L.

Hoy, L.

Stocks, B.

Brockway, L.

James of Rusholme, L.

Stow Hill, L.

Burton of Coventry, B.

Kahn, L.

Strabolgi, L.

Clwyd, L.

Leatherland, L.

Taylor of Mansfield, L.

Collison, L.

Lee of Asheridge, B.

Vernon, L.

Davies of Leek, L.

Listowel, E.

Wade, L.

Diamond, L.

Llewelyn-Davies of Hastoe, B.

Wells-Pestell, L. [Teller.]

Donaldson of Kingsbridge, L.

Lloyd of Kilgerran, L.

White, B.

Elliot of Harwood, B.

Longford, E.

Willis, L.

Evans of Hungershall, L.

Maelor, L.

Wootton of Abinger, B. [Teller.]

Faringdon, L.

Melchett, L.

Fiske, L.

Milford, L.

Wynne-Jones, L.

Gaitskell, B.

NOT-CONTENTS

Ferrers, E.

Massereene and Ferrard, V.

Aberdare, L.

Ferrier, L.

Mowbray and Stourton, L.

Ailwyn, L.

Furness, V.

Newall, L.

Allerton, L.

Gowrie, E.

Northchurch, B.

Baldwin of Bewdley, E.

Grenfell, L.

Oakshott, L.

Belhaven and Stenton, L.

Gridley, L.

Orr-Ewing, L.

Berkeley, B.

Hacking, L.

Peddie, L.

Bethell, L.

Hailes, L.

Porritt, L.

Bledisloe, V.

Hailsham of Saint Marylebone, L. (L. Chancellor.)

Rankeillour, L.

Brock, L.

Redesdale, L.

Brooke of Cumnor, L.

Hanworth, V.

Rowallan, L.

Brougham and Vaux, L.

Harrowby, E.

St. Aldwyn, E.

Caccia, L.

Hunt, of Fawley, L.

Sandford, L.

Coleraine, L.

Kilmany, L.

Sempill, Ly.

Colville of Culross, V.

Kinloss, Ly.

Somers, L. [Teller.]

Courtown, E.

Limerick, E.

Stamp, L.

Cowley, E.

Long, V.

Strange, L.

Daventry, V.

Loudoun, C.

Strathclyde, L. [Teller.]

Denham, L.

Luke, L.

Strathcona and Mount Royal, L.

Drumalbyn, L.

Lytton, E.

Emmet of Amberley, B.

Macleod of Borve, B.

Swaythling, L.

Swinton, E.

Tenby, V.

Windlesham, L. (L. Privy Seal.)

Taylor, L.

Vivian, L.

Young, B.

Templemore, L.

Resolved in the negative, and Motion for Second Reading disagreed to accordingly.

CRUEL EXPERIMENTS BILL [H.L.]
7.22 p.m.
LORD WILLIS: My Lords, I am delighted that the Bill for which I am now inviting a Second Reading in your Lordships' House should follow the Bill presented by the noble Baroness, Lady Wootton of Abinger, because in some parts it answers a criticism which is often made against those organisations and those people who tend to take up the cause of animals and who are too often dismissed as "cranks". The fact is that the House to-day is demonstrating a concern for life, a concern for all living creatures. That, to me, is a fundamental principle which should guide the actions of any individual or nation with any pretension to be civilised. Children cannot speak for themselves, nor can animals; and it is good that their cause should be voiced to-day in your Lordships' House.
The Bill for which I now ask a Second Reading is no "Cranks' charter". It comes before your Lordships with impeccable references. Perhaps I may go back in history a little and say that it began with a letter bearing the signature of a distinguished Member of this House, the late Lord Silkin. This letter was sent out to people in all walks of life by a Miss Barrington, who has most selflessly devoted herself to the work of MACE—the Movement Against Cruel Experiments. The letter speaks for itself, and I hope that your Lordships will pardon me if I read it in full, because it will save time in the long run by explaining the purpose of the Bill.
The letter, which is about the Movement Against Cruel Experiments, is headed, "The Right Honourable Lord Silkin", and it says:
"Dear Sir,
Nearly a century ago Frances Power Cobbe drew the attention of some prominent members of society to the painful and often pointless experiments that were then being carried out on some hundreds of animals every year.
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Her memorandum calling for a halt drew support from the Lord Chancellor, the Lord Chief Justice, Cardinal Manning, Jowett, Ruskin, Tennyson, Browning and many other distinguished persons. This led to the enactment of the Cruelty to Animals Act, 1876, regarded by Lord Shaftesbury as a first inadequate step. Today some five million animals, their 'welfare' supervised by thirteen inspectors"—
the number is now fourteen—
are used and disposed of annually like paper tissues, and there has been no second step.
"There are many people who feel that licensed researchers can be trusted to use their powers with discretion and humanity. After reading in The Times on 26 August, 1969, that animals at a government research station have been exposed for five hours at a time, for three months on end, to the distressing effects of CS gas in concentrations 1,000 times greater than that required to disperse a crowd, we cannot share their confidence.
"There are also those who assert that a ruthless exploitation of less intelligent creatures is justified in the interests of expediency and progress. What then is progress? The modern citizen recoils from the respectable Victorian who sent small boys up chimneys, but yesterday's expendable child is surely today's monkey flaunted in space (or more privately abused in laboratories) and it unhappily meets the same passive acceptance from a public that always accepts any form of cruelty commonly upheld by leaders of opinion as part of the current way of life."
The letter then goes on to ask people to support a stand against this situation.
The response was overwhelming. The memorandum was signed by over 100 prominent people in the Arts, the Church, the Humanities, the Law, Medicine, Science and public life generally. I will not give the full list, but I will give your Lordships some of the names. They were as follows: Benjamin Britten, the late Poet Laureate, C. Day Lewis, Yehudi Menuhin, the late Sir Compton Mackenzie, J. B. Priestley, Peter Ustinov, Dame Sybil Thorndike, the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of London, and twelve other Bishops (I should say that the Right Reverend Prelate the Bishop of London has asked me to present his apologies to the House because he cannot be here to-night, and to indicate his full support for the Bill) Professor Sir Hugh Trevor Roper, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Gardiner—who also cannot attend to-day because he is at another conference in Paris, but who has sent me a note of his support for the

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Bill; the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hodson, the noble Lord, Lord Soper, seventeen leading doctors and surgeons, Malcolm Muggeridge and over a dozen of our leading scientists. That is to say nothing of the support of thousands of ordinary people. That, I hope, is sufficient proof that this is no "Cranks' charter" but a serious and responsible measure.
I want to emphasise from the outset that this Bill does not seek to prohibit genuine experiments which can be proved to be of benefit to humanity. That is quite outside the scope of the Bill; but it does seek to provide—and surely nobody could argue with this—that all experiments should be carried out with a proper regard for the welfare of the animals used, and it seeks to prohibit the many thousands of experiments which have no real scientific or medical purpose. Finally, it sets out to encourage the use of suitable alternatives.
My Lords, it is a grave mistake to think that experiments on animals are mostly carried out for the purpose of medical advance. Let me give a few statistics. The proportion of medical experiments has declined steadily from 62 per cent. of the total in 1920 to 31 per cent. in 1971: in other words, by half. Over 100 million animals died as a result of experiments between 1919 and 1972—I repeat, my Lords, 100 million. The annual total of experiments has increased by over 1 million in the past nine years. Something like 6 million animals are used each year. That is about 14,000 a day, 600 an hour, or 10 for every minute of every day. In fact, something like 50 animals have died since I have been on my feet, not all in the cause of medical advance. Eighty-six per cent. of all experiments are carried out without the benefit of anaesthetics. I cannot believe that such slaughter and cruelty on such a scale is necessary.
I believe, and I am sure your Lordships will agree with me, that the enormous increase justifies a new look at the situation and a revision of the 1876 Act. That Act has undoubtedly been better than nothing, but it is out of date. It was devised for a different time and a different situation. When that Act was passed, nearly a hundred years ago, it was designed to control a few hundred experiments a year and a handful of
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experimenters. The Home Office has declared, times without number, that the Act is perfectly well suited to deal with the massive change in conditions that has taken place since its enactment. My Lords, that statement is about as convincing as if the Minister of Transport were to argue that a Road Traffic Act, passed a century ago and intended to control hansom cabs and penny-farthing bicycles, was suitable to the needs of the present day.
The sad truth seems to be that the Home Office either does not know, or does not want to know, the facts of the situation, or that it is the prisoner of a very powerful lobby. Its stonewalling attitude was indicated in a reply by the Minister of Science and Education, Mrs. Margaret Thatcher, in 1971 to a similar Motion in the other place, and by a Home Office spokesman who, for my part, summed it up more clearly than any words that I can say. He said,
"All experiments, for whatever purposes, are subject to restrictions to ensure that no animal suffers severe pain that is likely to endure or avoidable pain of any kind."
My Lords, that is rubbish. There is absolutely indubitable evidence to show that thousands of animals do, in fact, suffer severe pain and that it is prolonged; and, moreover, that much of it is avoidable.
The impetus for this Bill came originally from an experiment seen on television. I invite your Lordships to tell me how much such an experiment advanced the cause of human welfare. In this experiment monkeys were strapped into chairs before a board displaying various light bulbs. It was on television. Every second one of the bulbs lit up, and the animal had to place his or her paw over the light immediately. If he got there too late, he was punished with an electric shock and could be seen to be crying out. Of course they got there later and later because they were already dying of radiation sickness. My Lords, where was the 1876 Act during that experiment? Where was the Home Office during that experiment? Where was the anaesthetic? What was the human value of that experiment? The plain fact is that the benefit to human or animal welfare is not a factor that is required to be taken into account under the 1876 Act. An experiment may be authorised because it is thought useful for saving life or alleviating suffering.

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This respectable motive is entirely overshadowed by the more comprehensive statement which says that it can be allowed if it is in the interests of the "advancement, by new discovery, of physiological knowledge".
LORD BROCK: My Lords, I wonder whether the noble Lord would tell us where that experiment was originally conducted? If it were conducted in this country it would be illegal to have exhibited it on televisison. Perhaps it was of American origin.
LORD WILLIS: I will come back to that.
LORD BROCK: Could we have the information now?
LORD WILLIS: I will come back to that later. I will make my speech, if you do not mind, in my own way. You might wonder, my Lords, what "the advancement, by new discovery, of physiological knowledge" can mean. A new discovery may cover any collection of data—
VISCOUNT COLVILLE OF CULROSS: My Lords, perhaps if the noble Lord will allow me to interrupt. Since he does not want to make this point now, may I inform the House that that experiment did take place abroad.
LORD WILLIS: I thank the noble Viscount. It was none the less shown on television here, my Lords.
VISCOUNT COLVILLE OF CULROSS: But the noble Lord will appreciate that in those circumstances it is irrelevant to say, "Where was the Home Office?" and "What was the effect of the 1876 Act?" It was done outside the jurisdiction of anything we do inside this country.
LORD WILLIS: Well, my Lords, I have quoted perhaps one experiment that took place abroad. I shall not, as the noble Baroness, Lady Wootton, did not in her speech, weary your Lordships with details and evidence that we have of endless experiments taking place in this country which do cause needless pain, and which do cause prolonged pain without anæsthetics. I will come to one or two in a moment. The fact that one of them took place abroad should be a warning and should not be something
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about which we should smile with complacency.
My Lords, under the present Bill, the Bill that I am introducing, it is proposed that the only legitimate purpose for research on living animals should be the advancement of specific or fundamental knowledge that is directed towards saving of life or alleviating suffering. Fundamental research is not excluded as a legitimate object. I fully appreciate that it may not always be possible to predict which lines of research will, in fact, turn out to be useful for alleviating suffering. In the Bill, I have leaned over backwards to leave the way open to research that may lead to medical advancement.
Schedule 3 to the Bill sets out a catalogue of procedures deemed to be distressing. These were not drawn up at random. As I have said, they are based on evidence of what has been happening; examples, accurate examples, of painful experiments. In many cases, what is objectionable is the extravagance of the painful stimulus. Why hurt the animal a little when with no extra trouble you can hurt it a lot? In a report published last year, newly shorn sheep were subjected to freezing cold winds at temperatures of minus 20 degrees centigrade for up to eight hours at a time. What was the report?
"It was concluded that the induction of different forms of adaptation depended on the length, severity and frequency of cold exposures."
Did bare-coated animals actually have to be frozen for hours on end for that startling conclusion to be reached? It is like pushing a horse over a cliff to find out whether it hurts itself when it gets to the other end.
LORD PLATT: My Lords, will the noble Lord excuse me for just a moment? He has quoted one cruel experiment abroad. Would he tell us whether this last one was done in Britain?
LORD WILLIS: Yes. This was done in Britain. It was done in Scotland, in fact, and the man who did it was a man called Slee.
LORD HALSBURY: My Lords, can the noble Lord tell us the date of this experiment?
LORD WILLIS: I cannot at the moment, but it is a quotation from a

971
medical journal, and I will find it for your Lordships before I reply. In outline, the difference between the Act of 1876 and the Bill is as follows. Under the Act, a certificate is required only for a defined range of experiments and is not required for an experiment that is to be carried out under anaesthetic at every stage. Under the Bill, every experiment would require the issue of a certificate and a special form of certificate would be needed for any experiments that might cause pain or distress. These matters are dealt with in Clause 3. The licensing of experiments is dealt with in Clause 4, under which the Home Secretary would have to be satisfied on several important matters before issuing a licence.
Clause 5 makes the registration of premises mandatory instead of the permissiveness of the present situation and sets up machinery for inspection of registered premises under conditions a great deal more effective than is now the case. Clause 2 differs from the equivalent provision in the Act by the up-dating of the financial penalty, and also by providing that any person convicted under the clause shall be disqualified from holding a licence at any future time. The clause also disqualifies any person who performs abroad experiments that would be prohibited under the Bill in this country. If an experiment has been refused a certificate in this country it would clearly be intolerable for an experimenter to arrange for it to be carried out abroad, and it is therefore provided that this too would lead to disqualification. The sanction is a severe one, but the offence is extremely difficult to pin down. So far as my information goes, no one has ever been successfully prosecuted under the Act of 1876.
Subsection (1) states that a certificate may be granted for an experiment directed to saving life or alleviating suffering, these two expressions being taken from the Act of 1876. The Bill differs from the Act in that the acquisition of physiological knowledge, divorced from this principal purpose, is not an authorised purpose. I would add only the following comments: It is open to the applicant for a certificate to state in what way the knowledge he seeks might save life or alleviate suffering. If he fails in this object, it is still open to him to seek his knowledge without the use of a
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living animal. There are many satisfactory alternative methods of research, and there have been notable medical advances that owe nothing to experimentation with animals. Medicine will not in fact be prejudiced at all by this limitation. Physiologists and others intent on imposing endurance tests on animals would however have to think again.
There is a proviso to subsection (1) which would make two types of experimentation illegal and they are rather important. These are experiments concerned with the testing of cosmetics. A "cosmetic preparation" is defined as,
"a product intended to enhance physical attractiveness, but does not include any product the purpose of which is to remedy a disfigurement or other abnormality."
I have never yet met any human being who thinks that rabbits and guinea-pigs should have shampoos and hair sprays squirted in their eyes so that a manufacturer can announce the production of a gaily coloured packaged liquid described as having a magic ingredient. The plain fact is that completely satisfactory shampoos, sprays, creams, lipsticks, powders and astringents are available that are composed entirely of vegetable and other harmless constituents. There is no need to torture animals in the interests of beauty, or even hygiene.
The other class of experiments the Bill seeks to prohibit are those in which animals are forced to ingest nicotine, or alcohol, or other drugs that are taken by humans, voluntarily, for their own pleasure or satisfaction. Perhaps I have a restricted circle of acquaintances, but I do not know of anyone who wants animals to be tortured so that he can be helped to make up his mind to stop smoking or drinking. If animals have to suffer for our diseases that is one thing, and let us minimise their sufferings. But do they really have to suffer for our vanity and our vices?
My Lords, I turn now to the subject of anæsthetics. Certificates are at present issued by the Home Office only in the case of experiments not to be performed under anæsthetic; under the Bill all experiments would have to be certificated. To this day one of the few statistics published annually by the Home Office puts experiments into two classes,

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those performed with and those performed without anæsthetic. This distinction is not a very useful one. Very painful experiments may be carried out without anæsthetic, sometimes because the whole point of the experiment is to hurt the animal and see how it behaves. Guinea-pigs which in 1967 were subjected to feeding experiments developed scurvy, suffered bleeding from the mucous membranes of the nose, eyes and extensive ulceration. They did not receive anæsthetic over the six weeks or more when they received the experimental diet; but they suffered very much. In other experiments anæsthetic may be applied during the surgical part of the operation, but not afterwards. There are two researchers at Cambridge who in 1967 specialised in cutting out parts of monkeys' brains, and watching the results. They observed that the animals,
"stumbled around their cages, bumping into the walls and hitting their heads on protruding objects. If they had to steady themselves by catching hold of the wire, they reached too short, too far, or in the wrong direction, missed their target and fell."
As your Lordships will notice, the interesting part of the proceedings took place after the anæsthetic had worn off.
I think it will be seen that the use or non-use of anæsthetic is no guide at all as to whether or not an experiment is painful, and therefore requires additional scrutiny. Subsection (2) of the clause therefore makes it clear that nothing turns on the use of anæsthetic.
A very much more detailed system is proposed for the control of experiments that will or might cause pain at any stage. Again, the experiment would have to be authorised by a certificate issued by the Home Secretary, but he would not issue a certificate unless a recommendation for its issue had been made to him by a committee to be known as the Committee of Moral Reference. The setting up of a committee was one of the suggestions made by the Littlewood Committee. I am happy to say that the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of London has agreed, in the event of this Bill's passing into law, to become the first President of the Committee of Moral Reference, and he would be responsible for appointing the members.
What is proposed therefore is that while the granting of certificates for
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painless experiments would be done by the civil servants in the Home Secretary's Department, a committee of laymen and citizens would stand between the researcher and his animals, to decide whether the claims of research should be allowed to override the rights of captive animals to humane treatment. If a two-thirds majority recommended the issue of a certificate, then the experiment could proceed.
Noble Lords will probably be aware that in recent years two attempts have been made in another place to secure legislation prohibiting experiments on animals in cases where alternative methods might be used. These appear to have had the objection raised against them that a researcher could not be expected to comb the four quarters of the globe inquiring about alternative methods. Under this Bill he is not required to do so. Those who specialise in this field would put their evidence before the Committee, and the Committee would determine whether or not the alternative techniques proposed would or would not serve the purpose. If not, then it would be open to the Committee to recommend the experiment for a certificate. There is a great deal of optimism in some quarters about the many fields, and especially the field of toxicity testing, in which alternative techniques not involving live animals are considered to be effective. I do not have the time to develop the theme of alternatives, but I can assure your Lordships that they exist. Tissue culture systems, the use of mathematical models to simulate living systems, are being developed. Indeed, it is of some urgency that such developments be speeded up because many experts agree that there are many areas in which tests on animals are irrelevant to man.
Clause 3(4)(a) prohibits the causing of severe pain or distress. "Severe" is unfortunately an elastic word, but I should imagine that there must be some experiments in which it would be generally agreed that the point had been reached. In 1954, two experimenters injected various chemicals into the brains of cats. The injections of tubocuranine caused a cat to jump
"from the table to the floor and then straight into its cage, where it started calling more and more noisily whilst moving about restlessly

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and jerkily … during the next four minutes the movements became wilder … finally the cat fell with legs and neck flexed, jerking in rapid clonic movements, the condition being that of a major (epileptic) convulsion … within a few seconds the cat got up, ran for a few yards at high speed and fell in another fit. The whole process was repeated several times within the next minute."
My Lords, this animal took 35 minutes to die. Let us hope that from this act of cruelty the experimenters learned something to the advantage of the human race.
There are other tests, known as writhing tests, in which the purpose is simply to count the number of times an animal writhes in pain before it dies. These are some of the reasons why the Bill stipulates that in all cases where pain or distress can be relieved by anæsthesia, or other measures, this must be done. Human beings are given the greatest care after an operation, but I have yet to see any mention in a report of an animal experiment describing methods taken to relieve post-operative discomfort of an animal.
Unfortunately, many researchers who deal habitually with laboratory animals come to regard them as more or less inert matter, and few of them take steps to nurse animals suffering from the effects of surgery. I am sorry to say that some eyewitnesses have reported that animals are frequently disposed of after an experiment by having their heads smashed against the bench. We know from recent history—and we cannot afford to forget it—that people, quite good people, can and do become insensitive to the suffering of others; and I am afraid that this happens far too often with researchers. The Bill also insists that no animal is to be subjected to suffering for an unreasonable period. Perhaps I may quote your Lordships an example which will illustrate the point.
In March, 1972, in the New Scientist, Dr. Nicholas Humphrey described how, six years before, a monkey known "affectionately" (I use the word "affectionately" in quotes) as Helen had her visual cortex destroyed by surgery. For the first year or two she appeared not to be able to see at all, though later she recovered her vision to some extent. At that stage her behaviour is described as follows:
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"Helen bumped into any and every obstacle; she collided with my legs and she several times fell into the pond."
In the earlier stages she merely groped around in her cage, and after about a year of this the researcher found that he had other things to do—a thesis to finish, and, in his own words, "Helen was left to her own devices for about 10 months"—that is to say, such devices as she could manage in a small cage in her condition. That was for 10 months, while her researcher was busy elsewhere. After hearing this, perhaps your Lordships will understand why the Bill also ensures that no animal shall be the subject of more than one pain certificate.
I have been reluctant to write into this Bill any privileged treatment for dogs and cats. Favouring a dog or cat implies disfavouring an unpopular animal such as a rat, which is in fact also highly intelligent, very sensitive to pain and, if allowed to be, affectionate to humans. However, we have to recognise that, whereas a rodent may pass a tolerable life in a cage, a dog or cat kept in a cage is in a state of misery before the researcher gets to work at all. The Bill therefore has something to say on this, and on the subject of other larger animals.
I am drawing to the end of my speech, my Lords. Clause 6 might be regarded as the clause with the most teeth because it requires a certain amount of publicity to be given to experiments on animals. At the present time the veil of secrecy is thick and impenetrable. I have never quite been able to understand why. If nothing is going wrong, why is there such secrecy? There is no possible way under the 1876 Act or anything else by which an interested person can intervene to prevent an experiment from taking place, either because it is excessively cruel or for any other reason. There is no way in which information about these experiments can be funnelled out, except through well-wishers. Under the Bill, any Member of Parliament could request copies of all applications made. It would then be possible for experiments that ought not to be permitted to be intercepted.
My Lords, that is the substance of the Bill. I have, of course, put the dark side of the case. I am ready to admit that many experiments are not cruel, and that many experimenters take every step to ensure that their animals do not suffer

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and are well cared for. No humane researcher, therefore, need fear this Bill if it becomes law. But it is also abundantly clear that a very large number of experiments slip through the very inadequate net of the Act of 1876 and the situation needs to be changed. I have heard, not directly, that the Government intend to oppose the Bill in its entirety. If that be so, I shall listen with great interest to their reasons, and I should like to pose the following questions.
Do the Minister and the Government really believe, in face of all the evidence, that no cruel experiments ever take place? If that is the case, why has this issue been raised a dozen times in the last 10 years in the other place and here and elsewhere; and why is the stonewalling going on? Does he support painful experiments of animals which have no other purpose than to devise a new beauty treatment? Does he really believe that an Act drafted a hundred years ago—and even then claimed to be inadequate—can cope with the immensely changed situation of to-day? Does he think that 14 inspectors can cope with experiments on millions of animals in hundreds of laboratories? Does he think that 14 people can ensure that the rules about anæsthetics are complied with? Does he believe that there is no scope for improvement, and that everybody who has spoken in this House and in the other place on this issue over the last 10 years is blind, or wrong, or simply out of his mind? Why do successive Governments continually stonewall on this issue and refuse to admit that anything is wrong, and contend, in face of formidable evidence, that the present Act is working well?
My Lords, I should like to repeat that I am no "crank". I am not an antivivisectionist. I came to this Bill only a few months ago, to take it up from where the late Lord Silkin had left it off, because I was convinced by the evidence. I am well aware that this country faces graver issues, but it is the mark of a civilised people that, even when faced with grave difficulties, it can still spare time for the helpless and the voiceless. Almost a hundred years ago Ralph Hodgson wrote a poem which I commend to your Lordships. It does not
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perhaps have an immediate bearing on this Bill, but its sentiments are right:
"'Twould ring the bells of Heaven
"The wildest peal for years,
"If Parson lost his senses
"And people came to theirs,
"And he and they together
"Knelt down with angry prayers
"For tamed and shabby tigers
"And dancing dogs and bears
"And wretched, blind pit ponies
"And little hunted hares."
My Lords, I beg to move.
Moved, That the Bill be now read 2ª.—(Lord Willis.)
7.57 p.m.
THE MINISTER or STATE, HOME OFFICE (VISCOUNT COLVILLE OF CULROSS): My Lords, I hope that the noble Lord will forgive me if I do not answer the questions in exactly the terms in which he has asked them. He did not tell me beforehand that he wanted them dealt with in quite that way. I hope that he will be able to spell out from the course of my speech the implicit answers to everything he put to me. Indeed. I am sure that all your Lordships and all right-thinking people are glad that we can set aside some of the grave issues to which the noble Lord has referred and look at this subject to-night.
Certainly we all share the noble Lord's sentiment that animals should be properly and humanely treated, and that we have a solemn duty to ensure that everything is done to protect them from being subjected to cruel treatment or unnecessary suffering of any kind; and, quite frankly, the noble Lord cannot state this principle too strongly for me. I entirely respect the motives that have led him to pick up this Bill from the late Lord Silkin. One also has to be very careful (I say this with great respect to the noble Lord) that the examples that are taken are from practice in this country; because the difference between standards of protection for animals in this country and those in some others is in truth quite remarkable. So one has to be stringently and scrupulously accurate about this.
The Long Title of the Bill is:
"An Act to restrict and regulate the performance of experiments on living animals."
One notes. "restrict"; and the noble Lord means it. He has made it clear that this is the basis of what he is saying. I think that he and certainly some others

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who agree with him make certain assumptions, some of which, I am afraid, are ill-founded. For instance, some people say that the present scale of animal experimentation is grossly excessive. That was a topic which the noble Lord at any rate touched on. Some people say that the existing controls over experiments are inadequate and ineffective, and the noble Lord challenged me directly on this. Without doubt, all of us want to do our utmost to minimise suffering by animals. But let us take care that, in our enthusiasm to achieve this objective, we are not so zealous that we produce a result that actually impedes essential medical and scientific research of great value to the welfare of men, and also of animals themselves.
Let us just bear in mind that the experiments on animals are not all pointless; and when it is suggested that alternatives should be developed and used I doubt whether any scientist would disagree with that proposition, because alternatives are usually cheaper; they are almost always, if they are successful, more certain and more sure. Therefore the noble Lord is preaching to the converted in saying that the experiments should have a point and that where alternatives are available it is highly desirable, and indeed sensible, to use them. But I have to tell the House that after a very careful and close examination of the Bill the Government have concluded that it would do a positive disservice to the proper development of medical, veterinary and scientific research in this country. I shall have a little more to say about this when I turn to the Bill itself, but perhaps it would be helpful if I say a few words about the much maligned existing law and the much maligned present administration of it.
The controls and safeguards over animal experimentation in this country of course are embodied in the 1876 Act. That is an Act which this Bill wishes to repeal. It is true that it was passed nearly a hundred years ago, but its basic principles are certainly not outdated. In fact even to-day the controls imposed on the use of living animals for experimental purposes in this country under that Act are probably more stringent than those imposed in any other part of the world. It is also worth remembering what the
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Departmental Committee on Experiments on Animals, the Littlewood Committee, had to say about this Act. After all, they carried out a pretty thorough examination and heard evidence from all shades of opinion. They were of the opinion that the aim of legislation should be to prevent objectionable activities and to encourage humane practices, and they concluded that by these standards the 1876 Act was generally effective. They went on to say—and I quote from paragraph 239 of their Report:
"no licensees appeared to regard it as a piece of useless bureaucracy, many left us in no doubt of their high respect for it. The Act has been effective partly because it has commanded the ready support of those subject to it, partly because the Home Office has adopted a wide interpretation, insisted on humane standards, and administered the law conscientiously".
There is an answer to a number of the noble Lord's questions in the form of an impartial Committee's findings.
The basic object of that old Act is to regulate and restrict experiments calculated to cause pain to living vertebrate animals. This is not dissimilar to the object of the Bill, but, as I shall explain, the existing Act achieves its purpose in a rather different way. That Act contains no definition of "experiment" or "pain"; in practice any procedure upon an animal designed to find the answer to a problem—other than in the normal course of veterinary diagnosis—is regarded by us as an experiment and it is considered to be subject to the Act if it presents any risk of pain, discomfort or interference with the animal's ordinary state of health or wellbeing. I would ask your Lordships to bear in mind that in the administration of the present Act "experiment" is interpreted in that very wide sense, and therefore control is exerted in that very wide way.
The Act prohibits absolutely any experiment performed for the purpose of obtaining manual skill or for any purpose other than the advancement by new discovery of physiological knowledge or of knowledge which will be useful in saving or prolonging life or alleviating suffering. Experiments are also permitted, under special restrictions, to enable persons such as medical students attending lectures at hospitals, medical schools and elsewhere to acquire such knowledge. No experiment permitted by the Act may

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be performed without a licence from my right honourable friend the Home Secretary, and itself contains restrictions on the infliction of pain to any animal under experiment. My right honourable friend uses his powers of licensing to impose other conditions to ensure that no animal under experiment suffers severe pain that is likely to endure or avoidable pain of any kind—a phrase held up to ridicule by the noble Lord. I deny his allegation and I can assure the House that this is the attitude of my right honourable friend.
LORD WILLIS: My Lords, I accept the attitude of the noble Viscount's right honourable friend, but can the noble Viscount explain how the experiment which I quoted about Helen can slip by? Is there not needless pain there? Was that not certificated? Was that passed? And what about all the other evidence quoted in all the debates that have taken place in the last ten years in both Houses? Is that to be ignored? Is that not evidence that the Act is not working, that something is wrong?
VISCOUNT COLVILLE OF CULROSS: No, my Lords, it is nothing of the kind, because one has to look not at the inevitably abbreviated version of these incidents which noble Lords and right honourable and honourable Members can put into their speeches—it is impossible to give full details—but at the whole of the case, and I would again remind the noble Lord that one has to see whether these occurred in this country or abroad. I do not know about Helen; I do not know about the other cases that he mentioned, except that we know about the sheep. I therefore cannot comment on these specific ones without notice. Nevertheless that is the attitude, and to my own knowledge this is very strictly adhered to.
LORD WILLIS: My Lords, can the noble Viscount tell me how the sheep slipped through the net?
VISCOUNT COLVILLE OF CULROSS: My Lords, I do not accept that they slipped through the net. Perhaps my definition of "net" and the noble Lord's is different. I should like to know more about the details of this matter than the noble Lord could possibly give in the course of a short speech. I cannot comment without notice on these matters.
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There are, however, some matters that I can comment on, and one of them was touched upon by the noble Lord and relates to the number of animals involved and the statement that the majority of experiments performed under the Act are carried out without anaesthetics. I have the numbers. While these have risen considerably in the years since the last war there is now some evidence that the rate of increase is slackening or even stopping altogether. In 1972 the total number of experiments performed was 5·3 million, which was more than a quarter of a million less than in the previous year. In fact experiments in that year were fewer than those in 1969 and only marginally more than those in 1968. As your Lordships will probably know, the Littlewood Committee looked into the reasons for what was at that time a steady increase in the number of experiments and concluded that:
"the increase in the numbers of animals used in research is largely to be explained by the expansion of biological science and the mandatory testing of biological substances".
The noble Lord might like to look with some care at Sections 31 and 32 of the Medicines Act, 1968, because he will find that there are many mandatory requirements in that Act.
It would, I think, be premature to attach any particular significance to the levelling off in the annual number of experiments in recent years, but it may to some extent reflect the changing pattern of medicine whereby the use of sera and the use of living animals for diagnostic procedures is becoming less common. It may also be in part attributable to an increased use of alternative non-animal tests which I mentioned a short while ago. The noble Lord really must get the present law right. I think he said twice that experiments carried out under anaesthetics required no licence. The noble Lord is wrong. If the animal is anaesthetised throughout and subsequently killed before it recovers consciousness a licence is required under the same stringent conditions. There are yet more stringent conditions in all other circumstances, and therefore the noble Lord's description of the present law was seriously inaccurate in this respect.
As regards experiments without anaesthetics, I would like to make it clear that in every case where the experimenter

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proposes to carry out such an experiment wholly or partly without anaesthetic he must submit to the Home Office—and this is why I say it is more strict still—a certificate signed by the President of a learned Society and a professor of a branch of medical science that the administration of an anaesthetic would necessarily frustrate the object of the experiment. Most of the procedures used in experiments without anaesthetic involve no significant risk of pain and consist of innoculations, external applications of stimuli, modifications in diet or environment or the administration of some pharmaceutical or biological product followed in each case by observations of any effects. In the majority of such cases, the administration of an anaesthetic would be likely to cause more disturbance to the animal's wellbeing than that involved in the procedures themselves; as well as frustrating the object of the experiment.
I must make it clear that authority to dispense with an anaesthetic is never granted where an "operation" more severe than simple innoculation or the taking of a blood sample is proposed. Experiments in which anaesthetics are used for the operative part of the experiment, but where the animal is allowed to recover and to survive after the effects of the anaesthetic have worn off, are permitted only where survival forms an essential part of the experiment; and that needs yet a different sort of certificate in addition to the licence. An example is where one is developing or assessing new methods of surgical treatment of human or animal diseases or new types of post-operative treatment. The noble Lord suggested that no research was taking place into post-operative treatment. I do not know whether the noble Lord, Lord Brock, may wish to say something about this in due course. Strict conditions are imposed, as I have said, to ensure that any pain or discomfort is kept to an absolute minimum and that the animal receives adequate nursing or other care—certainly of no less standard, in many cases better and in some cases much better, than that given to any animal undergoing veterinary surgery.
Before anyone is granted a licence to experiment on living animals, a Home Office inspector satisfies himself, by personal interview if necessary, that the
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applicant is a suitable person to hold a licence, and therefore inspectors keep in touch with licensees by regularly visiting all laboratories registered for the performance of such experiments. There is a substantial number of licensees (about 16,000 at present) but generally in any one year about a third of them do not perform any experiments; so that the active number of licensees is always appreciably fewer than the overall total. The inspectors visit at irregular intervals, and without prior notice, all laboratories registered for the performance of experiments to ensure that proper standards of care, accommodation and handling facilities for the animals are maintained; to see that licensees working in the laboratories understand and fulfil their responsibilities under the Act and that the requirements of the Act are strictly observed. Last year over 4,000 such visits were made to the 592 laboratories then on the register. From my personal experience at the Home Office—and I have been on irregular and unheralded checks with the Inspectorate—I can assure your Lordships that the law is faithfully administered by the Home Office, properly complied with and well respected by the research workers.
My Lords, that is the background; that is the present law and the present practice built up under the 1876 Act. If that is thought to be anything less than stringent and severe, I should be surprised if many noble Lords were to agree with that view. I turn now to the Bill itself. It would repeal the old Act and set aside the structure of control over animal experimentation that has been built up over the best part of this century. In it place it would introduce the new system of control that the noble Lord described,—designed severely to restrict the use of animals for medical and scientific research and the use of animals for the purpose of producing sera, vaccine or any other biological product. Let me make it quite clear that, so far as I can see, the Bill does not seek in any way, except possibly on the Committee of Moral Reference, to implement the Littlewood Committee recommendations. Indeed, in many respects its proposals run completely counter to those endorsed by the Littlewood Committee. For example, under the terms of the Bill experiments will be permissible only if they are undertaken specifically to acquire

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knowledge directed towards saving life or alleviating suffering.
Moreover, Clause 3(3) limits this to human life and suffering; and therefore there will be no further experimentation to help the cure and relief of animals' distress and pain and disease. That would in future be prohibited. That is the interpretation that we put on it. I would remind your Lordships that the 1876 Act permits experiments for the acquisition of fundamental physiological knowledge or for the acquisition of knowledge which will be useful for saving or prolonging life or alleviating suffering, and that old Act applies to animals as well as to human life and suffering—and we would say rightly so.
The Littlewood Committee gave very careful consideration to evidence presented to them about allegedly unnecessary experiments and to representations made to them by the R.S.P.C.A. that restrictions should be imposed to ensure that experiments were allowed only if they were essential to solve some specific problem of human or animal suffering. That again is of the essence of the Bill. The Committee specifically rejected such suggestions and I think it is worth quoting what they had to say on this matter. They said:
"From our study of the evidence about unnecessary experiments and the complexity of biological science we conclude that it is impossible to say what practical application any new discovery in biological knowledge may have later for the benefit of man or animal. Accordingly we recommend that there should be no general barrier to the use of animal experimentation in seeking new biological knowledge even if it cannot be shown to be of immediate or foreseeable value."
This was their recommendation No. 16.
Since this Bill was published the Government have received representations from medical, veterinary and scientific bodies, including the Medical Research Council, the Medicines Commission, the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry and the Agricultural Research Council—and the noble Lord, Lord Shawcross, in The Times to-day, as one-time chairman of the British Medical Research Council was very critical indeed—stressing that if experiments were restricted as proposed in the Bill it would effectively prevent a considerable volume of valuable medical and scientific research from being carried out in this country. These people just do
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not agree with the noble Lord, Lord Willis, I am sorry to say, that medical research would not be inhibited by this Bill.
It is worth noting, incidentally, that the terms of the Bill appear to us to prevent almost completely all the research work that is going on into the development of fisheries and into the cure of fish diseases and the development of fish farming. I should have thought that a very valuable and useful form of food for the human race; but it is prohibited as a sidewind by the noble Lord's Bill. The arbitrary prohibition on experiments involving certain substances was another matter on which the noble Lord touched. It is in the proviso to Clause 3(1). That also is completely at variance with the thinking of the Littlewood Committee on this issue. After considering and rejecting suggestions that restrictions should be imposed on the use of animals for consumer safety tests on cosmetics, the Committee said, in paragraph 266 of their Report:
"From the wider point of view, we think that it is in any case undesirable as a general principle arbitrarily to determine that particular kinds of purpose should never be served by animal experiments whether or not they involve stress or pain."
I do not agree that this is "torture", to use the noble Lord's word. If, in any event, the noble Lord were to succeed in this, what would happen? It would be done abroad, the product would be imported and the prohibition or penalties in Clause 2(2) would do nothing to prevent this. If it is done abroad, there would not be even the safeguards under the 1876 Act. Secondly, the other important difficulty, as we understand, about this prohibition is that supposing you found a certain cosmetic produced severe disease, or a skin complaint, the Bill would then prevent any research in this country to discover how to put the matter right. The noble Lord cannot intend this, I think. But, unfortunately, if he will insist upon having these arbitrary divisions, that is the sort of thing that happens. Then again, the Medical Research Council have commented that the prohibition on experiments involving the administration of nicotine, or any other "social" drug (in passing, my Lords, what is "any other social drug"?), would halt important studies on the physiology and pharmacology of alcohol and other drug dependence, which I would have thought was a very great problem in this

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country, not only of medical but also of social importance.
A person proposing to perform an experiment permissible, or which he believes to be permissible, under the Bill would have to get a licence from my right honourable friend, in much the same way as he does now. But there the similarity ends. Before he could undertake an experiment he would have in addition to obtain a special certificate for each experiment carried out for a different purpose. The vast majority of the certificates that would be sought could be issued only on the recommendation of a special Committee—about which I shall have something to say in a moment. Before recommending the issue of a certificate the Committee would have to satisfy themselves, first, that no alternative method was available and, secondly, that the benefit to human welfare expected to result from the experiment justified the pain likely to be involved.
This may sound superficially something which is relatively simple and straightforward, but a close look at this provision, which is really the nub of the Bill, reveals problems that are so numerous and so complex as in our opinion to make the Bill quite unworkable. Let us look at a few of them. Except for the very few experiments which would not be liable to cause any pain or distress whatsoever, each application would have to be referred to the Committee on Moral Reference. Under the terms of the Bill an "experiment" may cover a series of related acts on the same animal, and may include more than one animal on which substantially identical procedures are performed; but this would appear to apply only when the purpose of the experiment is the same. For example, a certificate given for producing or testing one drug would not seem to be valid for performing similar procedures on animals in connection with testing another drug, since the Committee would be required to consider the justification of, and the availability of alternative methods for, producing or testing the second drug. So it would have to go back to them.
It therefore seems inevitable that the number of references to the Committee would be substantial, particularly in the early years of the operation of such a scheme. A modest estimate of the num
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ber of references in a year would seem to us to be something in the region of 100,000. Simple arithmetic shows that even if the Committee remained in permanent session they would not be capable of dealing with this number of applications. If the Committee sat for five days a week, eight hours a day and for 46 weeks in a year, so that they would have six weeks' holiday, there would be about one minute available for each application if the Committee had to deal with 100,000 applications a year. During that time they would have to see into all the points about alternative methods and the benefit to human welfare. It just is not possible. Inevitably this would create a serious bottleneck and, in turn, serious and unacceptable delays in the issue of certificates, holding up vital work and jeopardising the continuation of drug production and medical research in this country. Veterinary research and research on fish, for instance, would stop altogether under the Bill, as this would not even come within the terms of reference of the Committee.
In considering whether to recommend the issue of a pain certificate the Committee on Moral Reference would have to exercise some sort of value judgment —all in one minute—on the experiment and satisfy themselves that no viable alternative method, not involving an animal experiment, exists. Questions such as these involve matters of the finest judgment; and more often than not the decision, particularly about the availability or effectiveness of an alternative technique, would be a matter of opinion rather than of fact. Scientific opinion is often divided about the acceptability and effectiveness (so I am told) of some suggested alternatives to animal tests, yet the Committee may possibly have no scientific expertise in their membership at all, and certainly no scientific majority. Only if one or more of the three Fellows of the Royal Society happened to be scientifically qualified would there be any scientists on the Committee at all.
Then how would the Committee decide this sort of issue? I think one only has to look at the composition of the Committee to see that it would be very difficult for them. I hear that the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of London has agreed to be Chairman: I wonder if he knows what he has let himself in

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for? One then looks at the very distinguished people who would be sitting with him: serving or retired judges, bishops, principals of universities, Fellows of the Royal Society—and that is where the scientists would come in, if at all—and persons who have distinguished themselves in the creative arts, in politics or in other fields of service to the community. Without there being necessarily even one scientist on this Committee how could they determine matters such as the availability of alternative tests and the likely benefits to result to human medicine? These would pose problems calling for detailed medical and biological knowledge which I am afraid simply would not be available to them.
There are many other aspects of the Bill about which we have serious reservations. For instance, an all-veterinary inspectorate, appointments to and dismissals from it being subject to the approval of a Committee of the R.S.P.C.A., and the question of giving wide-ranging powers of entry to laboratories (which are of course private property) to Members of both Houses of Parliament. I will not go through all these objections; they are more detailed but equally severely held. Broadly speaking, I am afraid that our criticism is that the underlying principle of the Bill is quite unacceptable and that the detail of the Bill is unworkable. We cannot support it, and I am afraid that it is not amendable because the only words that the Government can support are the first three words of the Long Title. Therefore we have to say that in principle this Bill is something to which we cannot even suggest that the House should give a Second Reading because we say it is quite unamendable so as to make any form of sense at all.
That does not mean—and I go back to this simply in order to express it again because I have been somewhat forthright in my remarks—that the Government are unconcerned about animal welfare. We are very much concerned, my Lords. But we are equally concerned to see that nothing is done that may have serious and undesirable repercussions on medical research and the constant search by dedicated scientists for new treatments for diseases in man and animals. We feel—and I hope that I have shown this in what I have been able to say—that
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we already have under the existing law very strict control over animal experiments. We say that the effect of the Bill would be to impair and impede research without bringing any tangible benefit to the animals used for experimental purposes. We are not challenging the motives or the underlying thoughts of the noble Lord, Lord Willis, in bringing forward this measure: we are simply saying that, with great regret, we have to inform the House that it is objectionable in principle and quite unworkable in practice. Accordingly I hope that in due course the House will refrain from giving it a Second Reading.
8.29 p.m.
THE EARL OF HALSBURY: My Lords, in rising to address your Lordships' House this evening, I have three interests to declare. First, I am a member of the Medical Research Council whose work would be irreversibly dis-disrupted if this Bill became law; secondly, I am Chairman of the Institute of Cancer Research, which is a postgraduate teaching school of London University, where upwards of 100,000 animals are sacrificed every year. I suppose "the buck stops here" and I must take the ultimate responsibility for that sacrifice. Thirdly, I am the President of the Research Defence Society which has recently lobbied some of your Lordships with a written document over my signature, giving a written analysis of the objectionable features of this Bill.
It is usual in debates on this subject to compliment the reformists on their good and worthy motives while coupling these compliments to an expression of regret that the reforms proposed are impracticable or unacceptable. As I study this matter in ever greater depth as the years go by, I become more and more dubious as to the justification for these compliments. This Bill comes from a very bad stable. These are strong words, but I propose to justify them with illustrations from what the noble Lord the sponsor of the Bill has said.
My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Willis, was asked a straight question: "Was this experiment done in England". Instead of saying "Yes" or "No", he said he would deal with this matter in due course and make his own speech in his own way. The noble Viscount who replied for the Government informed the House that

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it was not done in England. The noble Lord, Lord Willis, had nothing to say. I hope he will clarify this when he winds up. Did he not know, or did he not take the trouble to find out? He referred to dropping a horse over a cliff to see whether it was damaged when it reached the other end. I would ask him to clarify in his reply: Did he know that an experiment on a horse, ass or mule requires Certificate F from the Home Office? I asked him whether he could give us the date of this incident, because I wanted to know.
LORD WILLIS: My Lords, I mentioned this in a speech. I used the example of the horse not because it was an actual experiment, but as an illustration of the stupidity of some of the experiments that take place. So far as the other experiment is concerned, I did not know at the time I was speaking that it had been performed in America. I was informed by a note just prior to the Minister rising to reply, and I apologise to the House for that.
THE EARL OF HALSBURY: My Lords, I am glad to extract that apology from the noble Lord. Then we come to cosmetic experiments. There is a very difficult interface between cosmetics and dermatology. Does the noble Lord know that "cosmetics" is a technical medical term used in the medical profession? I wonder whether he has any view on how the courts will construe his embargo on cosmetic experiments if something should happen to be "cosmetic" in the medical sense. May I ask him to clarify whether, when drafting the Bill or taking sponsorship for it, he knew that "cosmetic" is a medical term? There is a very simple way to prevent the type of cosmetic experiment which involves no more than beautifying people who would really look better without it; that is, to bring public pressure to bear on the Home Office and the Government not to issue licences and certificates for this type of unnecessary experiment. I would agree with the noble Lord in this and have no particular approval to voice whatsoever, but it is very important to phrase this matter correctly. To use the word "cosmetic", without defining in what sense it is meant, in an Act of Parliament intended to be taken seriously, is completely irresponsible.
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There is the embargo on nicotine. May I ask the noble Lord, Lord Willis, in his reply, to tell up whether he knows that nicotine has a large number of uses as a pharmacological tool among others which are used to study nerve transmission? It is an extremely important pharmacological substance from the research point of view. How does he think the courts will construe the use of nicotine in its physiological aspect as opposed to its aspect as a social habit? This is a very badly drafted Bill. I feel less and less interested by the wide list of distinguished ignoramuses presented by the noble Lord, Lord Willis, who have never conducted an experiment under licence, who have probably never seen an animal operation, and who cannot give a list of the advantages and the good to the human race accruing as a result of animal experiments. I am sorry to see that the noble Lord, Lord Zuckerman, is not in his place. I understand that he may be here later; he is held up by other public business. I am sorry he is not here, because he at least is a Member of your Lordships' House who actually holds a licence. I expect the noble Lord, Lord Stamp, does, and also the noble Lord, Lord Brock. But there are few Members of your Lordships' House who do. I think your Lordships ought to listen seriously to what noble Lords such as the noble Lord, Lord Zuckerman, have to say. I refuse to be blinded by the statistics as to the totality of the animals sacrificed without regard to the circumstances or without comparison with the total number of animals sacrified for food; again, in what circumstances?
My Lords, the author of the Book of Job was overwhelmed by insight into what I have called elsewhere the ultimate cosmic horror; namely, that a righteous God could have created agents and patients capable of inflicting and suffering pain either deliberately and consciously as men do, or unconsciously and by reflex action, as animals do. The Book of Job ends with a voice from the whirlwind stating that these problems are beyond us. Notwithstanding the passage of time since the Book of Job was written, I believe that these problems are still beyond us. But I also believe that we have a moral duty not to be overwhelmed by their insolubility. I believe the anti-vivisectionist spectrum, from the extreme

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to the compromise anti-vivisectionist, consists of those who have failed in their discharge of this duty. They have allowed themselves to be so overwhelmed by the unacceptable horror of unrelieved human suffering that they turn their backs on it in order to salve their reconciliation to a cosmos in which it can occur; so alleviating some of the manifestations of that cosmos by alleviating animal suffering: namely, that proportion of animal suffering inflicted on some animals by men as opposed to that inflicted on them by other animals. It may well be, from the standpoint of moral philosophy, that we have a positive duty to exploit a regulated amount of animal suffering in order to alleviate both human and animal suffering in the long term. If we have this duty, then the anti-vivisectionist is not a moral hero; he is a moral coward! He ignores the fact that, owing to animal experimentation, the deaths of children from diphtheria have been reduced since immunisation was introduced in schools from an annual total of 2,600 to an annual total of 1·3.
The point is that the assessment of what is our objective moral duty is an act of subjective moral judgment carried out by a faculty whose origins are obscure and mysterious, and which leads many of us to differ in our conclusions, one from another. Moral philosophy does not produce an algebraic formula which answers "Yes" or "No" to any particular situation. We have no criterion in terms of which we can say that we certainly have this duty to experiment on animals, or that we have a duty to refrain from it. In a situation where we cannot agree whether we have this duty or the reverse, we must therefore compromise. The current compromise is the Cruelty to Animals Act 1876, which originated mostly from the activities of men of science who were also men of conscience, though they enlisted many other people in their campaign for support.
The noble Lord, Lord Willis, has stated, as if it were a failing of the 1876 Act, that no prosecution has been brought under it. Again, I would ask the noble Lord, does he think that Acts which provoke the subject into disobedience of the law and into breach of the law of the land are for that reason good? The virtue of this Act is that it produced co-operation between the animal experimenter
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and the licensing authority. No prosecution has taken place because no prosecution has been necessary. The animal experimenters have invariably co-operated with the Home Office. The Act makes the Home Office, or its Inspectorate, the keeper of our conscience with respect to what is and what is not legitimate to inflict on an animal in relation to those other purposes to which we put animals; for example, killing them in order to eat them, just as many of the animals kill one another for food.
There are ways in which, I agree, the Act of 1876 could be improved. The Littlewood Commission has suggested a number of them; I could suggest some more. The classification of animals currently employed for the purposes of certification is based on the sentimentality that regards them as cuddlesome pets, the chosen of animal lovers who, notwithstanding their love of animals, through ignorance, will breed Alsatians to a specification which ensures an unacceptably high level of dislocation of the hip, and Pekinese to an unacceptable specification which ensures an unacceptably high level of extravasation of their eyeballs.
I am much more concerned with protection for a phylum which the noble Lord's Bill entirely neglects, the higher mollusca. Seen when skin-diving, the octupus is an object of transcendant beauty: its deep enormous impenetrable eyes perceiving what? I do not know what it perceives, but it can discriminate the 26 letters of the Roman alphabet. Out of water the octupus is not a cuddlesom pet but just a nasty, slimy mess. Doubtless that is why the present Bill makes no more provision for it, although I think it deserves it, than any other Act. As to being cuddlesome, the youngest and most athletic Member of your Lordships' House, let alone myself, subject to it endemically, would suffer a slipped intervertebral disc if he tried to pick up a performing dolphin. Yet dolphins have a high intelligence second only to our own, and for all we know spiritual insight comparable to our own. The noble Lord's Bill does not do much for performing dolphins. How many anti-vivisectionists in your Lordships' House are aware that the lifespan of a performing dolphin is reduced from 25

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years in nature to 5 years in a dolphinarium? How indignant does this make them feel? This is a context where one needs more than good will; one needs knowledge.
All this, my Lords, is but a preliminary to an attack on the totally irresponsible Bill now before your Lordships' House. It abolishes the Act of 1876 to set up a Committee of Moral Reference under the Bishop of London or his nominee. It gives them such power that an anti-vivisectionist Bishop could pack the Committee of Moral Reference with fellow anti-vivisectionists in such a way as to place an embargo on all experiments on animals. The Bill does not require the appointment to the Committee of even one person qualified in medical or veterinary work or the techniques of animal welfare. The noble Viscount is not here at the moment but he asked a question, I think of the noble Lord, Lord Brock, as to who is it who is concerned with operational aftercare of an animal. I can tell him that that most admirable body The Universities Federation for Animal Welfare is concerned. This is a body which is concerned with animal experimentation, and is also concerned with animals as animals.
The Bill, of course, refers to Fellows of the Royal Society, but they could be distinguished lay Fellows, like the noble and learned Lord on the Woolsack. It does not follow that they would necessarily be biologists or physiologists who are accustomed to this kind of experimentation. They are required to decide whether alternative experiments are available, or alternative techniques. This is a profoundly technical point which the Committee would be totally unqualified to pronounce upon, quite apart from the fact that in order to evolve and validate alternative techniques animals have to be sacrificed in animal experiments. It is a most complicated situation. They are entitled to consider the effects of these experiments on human health, but no reference whatsoever to animal health is made. The sponsors appear never to have heard of Veterinary Science. Nor have they referred to the need to do experiments on animals to educate students in the medical sciences.
At this point I would appeal to whatever residue of common sense remains
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(at this current nadir of our fortunes) among those capable of providing the nation with that almost evanescent quality, political insight into the laws of cause and effect. Your Lordships are aware of tax havens. Your Lordships are aware of passport havens. Your Lordships have heard of flags of convenience. And every one of them is due to over-legislation of one kind or another. Do your Lordships want to set up a vivisectionist haven?—a straight question. It will probably be in Japan. Dogs are scavengers in Japan and their natural increase has to be kept down, so every year so many tens or hundreds of thousands of dogs have to be put down. It is cheaper for the City Fathers of Tokyo to give them away. And recipients do pretty beastly things to dogs in Japan by way of experiment. There is no Cruelty to Animals Act 1876 there. There is no Home Office Inspecorate there.
Is this because the Japanese are beastly? No, my Lords, not at all. They are not beastly; they are probably just Buddhists. I wonder if anyone opposed to animal experimentation has ever tried to argue the pros and cons with a Buddhist. I am hoping somebody is going to interrupt me and say that he has. But since not, well, let me tell those opposed to animal experimentaiton that they have not even begun their education into the nature of counter-productive activities. The suffering animal in Buddhist philosophy may, for all one knows, be purging its Karma of some sin of cruelty in an earlier and higher incarnation, while the animal experimenter may be purging his Karma of failure to exercise moral responsibility in incarnations likewise gone by. How on earth does a Committee of Moral Reference propose to resolve basic differences such as that? What if somebody comes along with an experiment and says, "Your criteria are invalid. I am a Buddhist"? You cannot make something morally right or morally wrong by voting on it. No representative Committee of Moral Reference could ever agree on anything. It could do so only if it was unrepresentative.
We in Britain have probably got the most highly developed system of ethical control over experiments on animals of any country in the world. It is up to others to follow us, not up to us to scrap

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what we have and institute something new and untried but which foreseeably sins against common sense and will make the overall situation worse and not better. There is a current trend to believe that something new, however untried, must inevitably be better than something traditional, however well proven. So we come to the Bill's attempts to stop the setting up of vivisectionist havens; we come to Clause 2(2). Anyone procuring or participating in the performance abroad of an experiment that would be refused a certificate under this Bill forfeits his licence in this country indefinitely. My Lords, since when have British subjects been convicted for acts locally legal and done outside the jurisdicition of British courts? What is "to participate"? What is "to procure" in these circumstances? Where does a right of appeal lie, since there is nothing under the Bill which permits any lesser sentence to be imposed? It is life forfeiture of one's qualification for one's professional career.
In terms of these criteria, I would appeal to every Member of your Lordships' House to cast this Bill into outer darkness by such a majority that the subject is removed for a long time to come from the sphere of moral eccentricity, thereby providing time to deal with matters wherewith your Lordships are more genuinely interested and concerned, namely, consideration of the Royal Commission Report on the Act of 1876 and matters arising therefrom. It seems to me monstrous that on this subject we have Private Members' Bills galore to the utter waste of your Lordships' time, while the Royal Commission Report on the same subject goes unattended to. It was debated in the other place in 1971, and I seem to remember that the late Lord Silkin put down an Unstarred Question on it in January, 1970, four years ago, but nothing came of it. This subject is too complex to be left to Private Members' Bills, and the present one bungles the job. I shall vote against it accordingly.
8.51 p.m.
LORD FERRIER: My Lords, you will be glad to know, as I am, that practically every point that I had planned to deal with has been covered by the speeches made by the noble Earl and my noble friend Lord Colville. I was chairman of
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a pharmaceutical group of companies, but I was pensioned off in 1965, since when I have had nothing to do with it. I was extremely interested in the work of the research department, and I feel that it is proper to say, and to urge upon the noble Lord, Lord Willis, to remember, that certainly in my experience researchers are as sentimental and silly over animals as I am—and that is very silly. They are very tender, and it should be borne in mind by people who promote figures such as the noble Lord gave us, of millions of experiments, that to impute any measure of cruelty to the professional people employed in these tasks, some of which are unpleasant but have to be done, is wrong.
There are two points that have not been touched upon by noble Lords who have spoken to which I should like to refer. First, I should like to ask the noble Lord, Lord Willis, whether he can say in his reply whether Clause 3(4)(b) of the Bill will preclude the toxicology tests which are necessary in passing insulin for medicinal use. Under the Bill too, a very large increase in the number of veterinary officers will be necessary. My mind goes to the Unstarred Question which my noble friend Lord Balerno has down for the day after tomorrow suggesting that we are already very short of veterinary officers. It will be interesting to hear how that shortage is to be overcome if the Bill passes through Parliament. Another point to which I should like to draw attention is the clause which provides for Members of Parliament, and others, to have free access and to bear away copies of possibly confidential and valuable reports. What price patent protection there? How could patent protection, which is so valuable in providing the resources for pharmaceutical research, be protected if anybody could come and pick up reports and take them away? There was one other figure that worried me, and that was the noble Lord's statement that 82 per cent. of the experiments carried out were done without anæthetic. Of course they do not always need an anesthetic. Does the noble Lord realise that every time you put a rabbit on a diet it is an experiment? The prick of an ear for drawing a drop of blood is another experiment.
I would conclude by recalling as a matter of interest that when the 1876 Act was only some 30 or 40 years old

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I was involved in animal experimentation. I was brought up by a professor of physiology, and in the country we were sent half litters of puppies. I was only nine or ten at this time. We used to measure and record the diet and the hours of sunshine to which these puppies were exposed, and they were then sent back to the laboratory and examined. The result of these researches was that the causative factors of rickets came to be discovered, and it was not long before vitamins became a common word, though they had not been heard of previously. I shall not take up any more of your Lordships' time because there are names on the list after mine of men highly experienced and far more knowledgeable than I am. I look forward to hearing, or certainly reading (because I do really want a bite of supper) what they say.
8.56 p.m.
LORD PORRITT: My Lords, it already seems obvious that we have only to cross the t's and dot the i's. It is obvious that the motivation of this Bill is to limit, so far as is humanly possible, infliction of pain on animals in medical research. Who would quarrel with that objective? It is the method of implementing that objective that seems to be causing all the trouble. I would entirely agree with the noble Earl, Lord Halsbury, that this Bill does not begin to achieve that objective. It is not helped at all by a series of horror stories. I speak as one who has seen much in the way of animal experimentation and have admired it greatly, and all of it has been done under this excellent Act of 1876, the Cruelty to Animals Act. In the dim and distant past I myself held a number of the licences and certificates issued under that Act. It may seem therefore that I am automatically biased, but I can assure your Lordships' that this is not so. I should like to mention one point that has not been raised yet, and I do so having seen a great many research laboratories and worked in some many years ago. Although we have this national trait of being animal lovers, I suggest that one would find more animal lovers in a research laboratory than in any similar sample outside. They may occasionally be casual, but cruel—never.
My Lords, this old Act—the 1876 Act —has worked for nearly 100 years and
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it is working well to-day, yet we are asked to repeal it, and, it is stated in the Explanatory Memorandum, to replace it with a modern code—redefining conditions for research. To my mind there is one thing that this Bill does not do, and that is to define anything. Terms such as "discomforting experiments" and "pain certificates" are surely as airy-fairy as any terminology could be. The definition of "distress" in Schedule 3 is so broad as to necessitate almost every experiment likely to be performed requiring a "pain certificate".
I think that the Bill, in comparison with the old Act, is notable for its glaring omissions. It contains some most astonishing suggestions that it would seem highly impracticable to implement; and then, at the end of it all, it gives far less protection to animals and—a point that has not been mentioned—to those poor unfortunate two-legged animals, the licensees, who are now left wide open to malicious and irresponsible prosecution. This is covered in the old Act. At the same time, as we have heard, the Bill imposes so many limitations and restrictions on research work that one can only envisage a sad and frustrating brake being put on many of the experiments which have led to the medical advances of the last 50 years or more; work which has brought incalculable good to the people of this country. Many of your Lordships have been circulated with an example of this, and one has been quoted already, in which both poliomyelitis and diphtheria have been virtually wiped out in this country, entirely as a result of animal experimentation. This new Bill would virtually preclude all toxological studies required by the 1961 Medicines Act—the testing of the safety and efficiency of all medicinal compounds. This is surely a most impossible thing to suggest. To all intents and purposes, pharmaceutical research would by this Bill be brought to a standstill.
Perhaps I may say one or two words about some things, most of which have already been mentioned. I must say I feel exactly the same as other noble Lords about the proposed Committee of Moral Reference (I cannot imagine what this means) which is to be responsible for the issue of every certificate and pleasure to know the right reverend

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Prelate the Bishop of London for a considerable number of years, but I imagine that if he has read this Bill he must quail at the thought of chairing a Committee constituted as this one would be, virtually without any help from the scientific, medical, veterinary or animal husbandry professions. There is another point about that Committee which I think is worth mentioning. The chosen members of that Committee, before accepting membership, must have pledged themselves to consider only experiments of "significant benefit to human welfare". How on earth can any Committee, least of all that one, make decisions of that sort? The members are not qualified so to do. Note, too, that in stressing human welfare no mention is made in the Bill of animal welfare—a point which I think has been mentioned already. Again, this unfortunate Committee is to be asked, before agreeing to any particular experiment, to consider the
"efficiency and availability of alternative techniques".
No wonder it has been suggested that this committee should be chaired by a right reverend Prelate! Supernatural powers would certainly be required for this Committee to arrive at the necessary decisions.
In saying this, my Lords—and more seriously—I am well aware that methods alternative to animal experimentation do exist and have in recent years been increasingly developed. Such methods involve, chiefly, the use of cell, tissue and organ cultures in vitro. But to ask this Committee to make decisions of this sort is quite impossible; it is just nonsense. It is a very highly scientific and currently very controversial matter. I would, however, mention the suggestion of the National Anti-Vivisection Society to set up an institute in this country, under the aegis of the Medical Research Council, to investigate the value and the feasibility of such alternative methods. This is a practical and constructive idea, and is not prohibitive, as is the Bill we are considering.
Returning to the Bill itself, my Lords, its provisions seem to limit everything, so far as I can see. No provision is made, as in the 1876 Act, for experimentation in the field of prolonging life; and, as has already been stressed—and very importantly stressed—the basic biological and
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physiological investigation from which so much of value comes directly and indirectly is excluded from this Bill although it exists in the Act. Turn, too, to those niggling restrictions, as we have already heard, to be placed on experiments dealing with cosmetics, nicotine, alcohol and—this glorious term—"social drugs". I do not know what horrors are covered by that term, but I presume it is meant to cover the all too prevalent drugs of addiction. Why are these specially included? As we have already heard, the study of cosmetics is very important from a medical point of view, not only in the question of skin cancers but in that of a mass of allergies—things which make experimentation with cosmetics essential. I would suggest that anything which can throw any light on the problems of smoking, alcoholism and drug addiction is not to be thrown away lightly.
Nobody has yet mentioned the poor, unfortunate Secretary of State, but he comes into this Bill as well. Not only has he to produce an annual report, which I suppose is fair enough with his statisticians, but he would also have to give an evaluation of the benefits accruing from such experiments during the year. How can a Secretary of State, with the best will in the world, or even the best staff in the world, possibly deal with a problem of that size or of that importance? The licences now might take up to six weeks to produce; they used to take a week. Again, the applications for licences would, under the Bill, need to be countersigned by a university professor (description unspecified) and by a colleague (academic status, nature of work and experience unstated), in place of the previous signatures of the President of the Royal College and that of a medical professor. Comparisons are very often odious, my Lords; and that is, I think, obvious.
When we come to the question of the inspection of registered premises, we learn in Clause 5 that they are to be carried out at irregular intervals and without notice four times a month—that is to say, weekly —and by inspectors (veterinarians only; no medical men to be allowed, as under the 1876 Act) appointed by the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals—not the Department, as was previously the case. I bow to no one in my respect and admiration for the R.S.P.C.A., but if this is not a biased

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decision I do not know what is. And what a vastly increased flock of inspectors would be needed! If my mathematics are right, the number will be eightfold. In the earlier part of our activities to-day we heard of the lamentable shortage of veterinary surgeons throughout the country. Finally, my Lords, there are those astonishing clauses which are to give permission to any Member of either House of Parliament, first, to see any application for animal experimentation and, second, to enter, inspect and obtain the the records of any registered experimental centre. One's mind boggles at the thought of a posse of your Lordships breaking into a laboratory to observe the exposed "innards" of an unfortunate rabbit.
The need for the control of experimentation on living animals is assuredly not in question, but I would suggest that we already have a very comprehensive and practical protection in the old Act. I should suggest that we stick to that, and that we do not accept this Bill. Change is certainly the universal law of to-day, but change for the sake of change is surely both expensive and futile.
9.8 p.m.
LORD WELLS-PESTELL: My Lords, I am in some difficulty—in fact I am in two difficulties. I understand that it is desirable that your Lordships' House should rise to-night somewhere in the region of 10 p.m. My other difficulty is that having listened to the Minister, I am not sure whether he recommended the rejection of the Bill on the ground that there is no evidence of cruelty, whether he is of the opinion that the 1876 Act is quite effective or whether, in his view, the Bill is badly drafted. I am sorry that the noble Earl, Lord Halsbury, is not in the Chamber. I wanted to say that it is seldom that I have heard a speech in your Lordships' House given with so much vehemence touched with a certain amount of impatience. I would ask noble Lords to believe that those of us who support the Bill do so because we believe that there is to-day sufficient evidence available of unnecessary cruelty practised on certain animals. It may well be that we are victims of inaccurate propaganda; nevertheless we hold our views just as sincerely as do other Members
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of your Lordships' House who feel that this Bill is quite unnecessary.
If there is no evidence at all of unnecessary cruelty and unnecessary suffering, I am wondering why the propaganda which has come from, if your Lordships like, anti-vivisectionist organisations, from the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and from some scientists and people engaged in research has gone on so consistently over the years. I am surprised that nothing has been said about it in your Lordships' House to-night. Certainly the Minister did not say that there was no cruelty, and I gathered from the speech made by the noble Earl, Lord Halsbury, that at no stage was he saying that there was no cruelty. Therefore, some of us are of the opinion, rightly or wrongly, that unnecessary cruelty is caused to animals in a large number of experiments which take place.
I will make my point shortly in view of the time factor. I believe that valid distinctions are to be made between human and non-human animals, just as there are between adults and children. No one asks a child to cast a vote in an election for Members of Parliament because the opinion of a child does not count, even though he may have a definite opinion on several issues which he considers important. In this sense children matter less than adults. But that is not to say, my Lords, that children have no rights. The very weakness that makes the unfit to pass as equal citizens gives them the right to care and protection, and they have the right to expect it. If we consider for a moment the status of a mongol child, that child is not only unequal as a citizen but also unequal compared with other children. No one argues that because of his severely limited intelligence a mongol child is not entitled to have his feelings considered. No one treats mongol children as if they are incapable of mental or physical suffering. No one takes this view of a human being, even if his brain is so damaged as to make him have less intelligence than a normal person; because as long as he is clearly recognisable as one of the human race people can identify with him and acknowledge how atrocious it would be to take advantage of his simple mentality and to inflict pain upon him.

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Because he is a human we do not consider that because he cannot use words to protect himself he is not entitled to consideration.
Many of us take the view that animals, like grossly defective humans, lack intelligence and cannot use words. When that has been said there is little to distinguish them from humans. They are capable of intense happiness and of intense unhappiness. The animals most commonly used in research, rodents, primates, dogs and cats, are all capable of great affection and devotion to mankind and, to a limited degree, they even show that to their fellow creatures. Animals can suffer anxiety, fear and disappointment as we can. Animals can suffer frustration as can an imprisoned man; except that the imprisoned man may console himself by reading a book or even by speculating on the meaning of his wretched existence. Beyond all shadow of doubt, animals fear pain, and there is no reason to suppose that they apprehend it any differently from the way in which we humans do.
Perhaps all this is sentimental nonsense, but a distinguished zoologist and a Fellow of the Royal Society, G. J. Romains certainly did not agree. In his book Animal Intelligence he described how a baboon comforted another companion when it was in pain and did not know what to do. It was my intention to quote exactly what he said but perhaps your Lordships will take it from me that he made it absolutely clear that there was what he would call a human reaction on the part of the baboon to its unfortunate companion. I think the claim of animals to be treated as creatures having the power of perception has always been recognised, not only by human scientists like Romains, but by a good number of ordinary people: and I hope that we shall continue to do this.
As animal experimentation is practised to-day, some men treat animals as if they were mechanisms, and think no more of inflicting appalling injuries on animals than they would think twice about opening the bonnet of a car and tinkering with the engine. I am not saying that animals matter more than people; but I do say that they matter, and certainly matter more than some of the things we do. Though their rights
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are not identical with human rights, they nevertheless have some rights in a moral society. I suggest that an animal has the right not to be tortured, and, so far, nothing has been said in this debate that some animals are not tortured.
The Bill before the House does not prevent the use of animals or the killing of animals. I am not going to contend that in our society the animal has the absolute right to life, but I do contend that it has the right not to be made to suffer extreme pain and distress. I would remind your Lordships that Clause 3 of the Bill states quite definitely the conditions subject to which certificates may be granted, limiting their issue to experiments having a legitimate medical purpose. The Bill does not do away with animal experimentation altogether, but it limits it to experiments which have a definite medical significance.
There are many things which I should have liked to say in support of this Bill, but bearing in mind that there are a number of other speakers and, as I say, there seems to be a time limit on our debate to-night, I would ask those of your Lordships who are exercised in your minds with regard to this Bill to look at it carefully. We have been told that there have been no prosecutions under the 1876 Act. Can we honestly and sincerely say to ourselves that there has been no cause for proceedings? Is not the truth that no proceedings have been brought for the simple reason that there have not been enough people to see that the Act is enforced? In view of all the propaganda that has gone on in this country for so many years by organisations and individuals who are concerned to see that animals are not treated cruelly, I cannot believe that there has not been any cruelty. I would ask the Minister whether he is asking this House to believe that there have been no prosecutions under that Act for the simple reason that there has been no cruelty. I hope your Lordships will look at the Bill carefully and come to the conclusion that it should have a Second Reading, so that we can take steps to see that the cruelty which is administered, sometimes needlessly, ceases in the future.
9.19 p.m.
VISCOUNT HANWORTH: My Lords. I think I can keep my speech to under five minutes. I should like at the outset

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to make my attitude clear before discussing the Bill. I believe that, on balance, we are justified in using animals for testing drugs and for essential research, but within strict limits and to the minimum reasonable extent. In my view, it is only in extreme cases that some actions can be classed as black or white, and that in fact many of them are grey. I rather ascribe that colour to experiments with animals. It therefore follows that, whereas experiments with animals must continue, in my view we should make efforts to reduce them to what is essential, and not to tolerate painful experiments to satisfy scientific curiosity where that sometimes masquerades as justified research.
There are obvious areas where one might cut down the need for this vast amount of animal experimentation, and I consider quantity and quality are of some importance, if viewed from my own philosophical standpoint. It is highly questionable whether it is necessary for the drug firms to-day to produce as many similar types of drug as they do. This is a constant criticism, and one which I am perfectly certain is valid: we have nad debates on this subject before. Therefore, I would consider it unjustified, unless there is some opportunity of producing a worthwhile new drug, to produce one that is just marginally different. Again, where possible, we might make greater use of cells. Also, I am not entirely happy about what may go on masquerading under pure research, or about how efficient the periodic inspection may be. I simply cannot accept the view that anybody making an Act nearly 100 years ago can have had such prescience that the Act continues to work perfectly to-day. My Lords, that is a quite unacceptable proposition.
What I believe we should do is to grasp the nettle to see whether we can make some improvements where they seem to be necessary. I do not believe that this Report, which was made in 1965 and contained a large number of recommendations, can have been wholly wrong. In fact, it was considered to be a very well-balanced Report. The plain facts are, of course, that this is a subject which no Government, of whatever colour, really like to grasp, and if they can possibly avoid doing anything about it, they will. But I feel it is time that we made some limited improvements in the old Act.
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What really worries me—and I think it is a terrible pity—is that we should have before us tonight a Bill which is so extreme that many, if not most, of us cannot possibly accept it. We have lost an opportunity to strike a blow for the animals, and perhaps also for making improvements which would be possible, by putting forward a Bill which is so extreme that it has no hope of getting substantial support. If I possibly could, I would vote for a Second Reading of this Bill; but I really cannot. I must say once again to those who are really keen on this, that it is an area where a more moderate approach is likely to produce something far more beneficial. There are areas where extremists do succeed in getting something useful done by their extremism. I am quite sure this is not an area where that applies, and I feel that this is a lost and wasted opportunity.
9.25 p.m.
LORD AUCKLAND: My Lords, 9.25 on a Monday evening hardly seems the right moment to make a speech except one of considerable brevity—and that is what I shall try to do. The Bill we are discussing has no doubt been motivated by the sincerest of reasons. Like the noble Viscount, Lord Hanworth, I feel that there are many of us who would like to see some improvements in an Act which is 97 years old. I rise to speak only because my family and I have had an interest in the medical profession—not a financial one, I may say—for many years.
I have in fact been round and visited a number of pharmaceutical companies both here and on the Continent, and have seen for myself some of these experiments which are performed on animals. My Lords, we are all animal lovers. I have lived, as many of your Lordships have done, with dogs for a good deal of my life, and to me there is nothing more distressing than to see a dog being used for an experiment. The same goes for any other animal. Where deliberate suffering is caused, of course those responsible should be brought to book. But there are, too, human beings who suffer—from brain cancer, from cancer of the stomach, and from other malignant diseases. Some of these diseases, alas! are still incurable. But if we did not have experiments of this kind, properly conducted, the curative

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methods available in respect of these diseases would certainly not be on the scale they are to-day.
I have seen, in a number of pharmaceutical companies in this country, places where the animals are kept, as well as the experiments concerned. I believe that the Home Office inspectorate do a very good job in the close watch which they keep on this work. Of course, they can inspect at any time and without notice. So far as I know, it is open to any Member of either House of Parliament, by arrangement, to visit one of these establishments, and there is nothing to hide. In fact, I believe that it is the duty of Members of another place who have pharmaceutical companies and other such places in their constituencies to visit these places. And if, in the course of such visits, they see or hear about malpractices, by all means let these come to light. The present Bill does not really legislate for this. The present Bill merely puts a damper on research in this country and on those devoted people who carry out this research, and thus cut down, and we hope will in time cut out, the number of malignant diseases that still occur. For those reasons, and with some reluctance, I feel that this Bill should proceed no further.
9.28 p.m.
LORD STAMP: My Lords, in intervening in this debate to-day as an ex-professor of bacteriology and licence holder for nearly forty years, there are two feelings uppermost in my mind. On the one hand, I fully understand the motives behind the sponsors of this Bill who are deeply concerned to limit the infliction of pain and distress in animals used for experimental work, but who, I believe, are equally and, one would hope, even more concerned to alleviate human suffering from disease in all its manifold forms, and also suffering in the long term in animals.
On the other hand, I completely fail to comprehend, as other noble Lords have said, how anyone could really believe how these objectives could be furthered by the provisions of this Bill. Indeed, in seeking to abolish the 1876 Act, and to establish an entirely new organisation for the supervision and control of all animal experiments, its supporters would, it
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would seem to me, be passing a vote of no confidence in the Home Office, its inspectors, and all concerned in the implementation of that Act who have, over many years, on the whole maintained a balance between all the complex issues involved. Of course there is always room for improvement, as I am sure they would be the first to admit. There would have to be overwhelming reasons for so doing before your Lordships supported such a drastic step as the Bill envisages. In what I have to say, while I hope I can make one or two additional points—and it is rather doubtful in view of the number of points that noble Lords who have already spoken have raised—I should like to emphasise some of those that have already been made, particularly by the noble Viscount, Lord Colville of Culross, and by the noble Earl, Lord Halsbury. Some points merit repetition and may gain in effect if they are put in a slightly different way. I hope that I shall not detain your Lordships too long at this late stage of the proceedings.
The basic problem is the complete, or almost complete, inability of the layman, without any medical, veterinary or biological knowledge, to understand the purpose behind many medical animal experiments, and how essential they are if there is to be any progress in a particular field. This would apply with particular force to the Committee of Moral Reference which, as has been said repeatedly, need not contain a single member with any medical or biological knowledge and, if it did, these would be a small minority. Much would doubtless be said before that Committee advocating methods not involving the use of animals, such as cell, organ or tissue-culture techniques, to which the noble Lord, Lord Willis, has already referred. It is essential that one should go into that subject for a few moments in this debate.
While much progress has been made in such fields, and they are undoubtedly a valuable adjunct to research for certain purposes, few, if any, with any basic scientific training in the fields we are discussing could possibly believe that they could be anything more than that, at least in the foreseeable future, though I should be the last to suggest that they should not be investigated as fully as possible. Can anyone, for example, really maintain that tissue-culture methods

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could reproduce the conditions necessary to demonstrate the toxic effects of thalidomide on the fœtus which have been demonstrated in only two animal species, apart from man; namely, the monkey and the rabbit, and then only at a certain limited stage of pregnancy. The fact of the matter is that had more, rather than less, animal experimentation been carried out, that tragedy—which shook the conscience of the world—might have been avoided. If even the scientists were caught out, how could any unqualified person presume to pass judgment on what was a justifiable or unjustifiable series of toxicity tests?
Tissue-culture techniques may be of some value in studying the cause of various forms of cancer, but can anyone with any knowledge of the subject seriously believe that they can be made to reproduce all the complex factors that contribute to producing this most baffling of diseases? Nor is large-scale animal experimentation work essential only in investigating the cause of disease and in testing therapeutic agents for toxicity; it is equally vital for the development of methods for prevention and cure. All your Lordships will be familiar with the near miracle vaccination against poliomyelitis that has almost entirely removed from our midst a dreaded scourge, particularly of the young; one that might have afflicted our own children. This was only made possible through experiments involving large numbers of monkeys, many of which I suspect would never have received the approval of the proposed new Morality Committee. How many sufferers from diabetes owe their lives to the work of Banting and Best, carried out on dogs?
Animals are also used to a large scale for the diagnosis of certain diseases and, in the public health field, for the control of infection. Even these aspects represent only a part of animal experimentation carried out in this country that would be adversely affected by the Bill. Physiological and other biological experiments designed to extend knowledge in these fields which may, even though indirectly, be of profound importance in advancing knowledge of human disease are excluded from the Bill. For example, neurophysiology may well be of the greatest importance in the investigation
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of that tragic and dread disease multiple sclerosis, though the direct connection may not be fully evident.
If this Bill were to become law, what a sad thing it would be for a great British scientific tradition in physiology, established by such famous Nobel Prizewinners as Sherrington, Dale and Adrian, the last named of whom we are so pleased to have with us here this evening, who have brought great honour to our country! Are we voluntarily to relegate our country to the "has been" in this vitally important field of human progress? I refuse to believe it.
For some extraordinary reason, as has already been pointed out, a reason which is quite incomprehensible in view of the solicitude expressed for animals, veterinary research and the need to benefit animal welfare are also conspicuous by their absence. As has been said, these are to be no concern of the Committee of Moral Reference, judging from Clause 3 which makes no reference to them. If this Bill becomes law, we should, for example, be unable to carry out further research in such fields as rabies, of particular concern to dog lover and doctor alike. In fact it would seem that veterinary research in this country, including its agricultural and bloodstock aspects, might just as well pack up—a fact that may give considerable concern to many of your Lordships. So much for some of the vital aspects of animal research which the Bill fails to provide for.
Unfortunately, in its positive proposals it is no less open to criticism. I and other noble Lords have already referred to the shortcomings of the composition of the Committee that it is intended should take over the responsibilities of the Home Office. Incidentally, I question the applicability of the name of the proposed Committee, implying that it is to be a guardian of morality. The first point to which I should like to make reference, to which the noble Earl, Lord Halsbury, has already referred, relates to Clause 22 which states:
"any person procuring or participating in the performance abroad of an experiment that would be refused a certificate under this Act shall be likewise disentitled "—
that is, to hold a licence. My Lords, I do not see how it would be possible to enforce this and, if it were possible, it would mean that a very large number of

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research workers wishing to come to this country to pursue their work would be automatically prevented from doing so. As one who has had many such coming to my department from overseas, I feel this would be an impossible situation.
To turn to the conditions under which the Committee of Moral Reference would authorise a pain certificate, it is stated in Clause 3 (4) (a):
"no severe pain or distress shall be caused deliberately."
What does this mean? As I understand it, no experiment would be permitted if there is a likelihood that it would cause severe pain or distress. If this is so, it might be held to include many vital fields of animal research, depending on the definition of the word "severe". How does one define it? The noble Lord, Lord Willis, has underlined this difficulty. But if such an interpretation can be excluded and it is intended to ensure that only the primary intention should not be to cause severe pain or distress, this is an insult to all engaged in experimental work on animals. They are responsible persons and not perverted little boys inflicting pain just for the sake of it.
The same implication is apparent in Clause 3 (4) (b), where it says:
"no greater pain or distress shall be caused than is requisite to effect the purpose of the experiment".
In this paragraph, which also deals with toxicity tests, anyone who has any experience in this field would know that such step-by-step testing as is laid down would be quite impracticable — particularly when the toxic effect may be delayed and large numbers of substances are under test, as in the safety testing of drugs. So far as the stipulation in Clause 3 (5) is concerned, that the pain certificates must be applied for at least six weeks before they are required, an indefinite number of blank certificates would have to be issued in advance if a large part of diagnostic work involving animals was not to be brought to a halt.
Turning to Clause 5, dealing with the inspection of research centres, subsection (1) states that every registered centre should be visited not less than four times a month by veterinary inspectors, and with the increase in the number of inspectors that this would involve this is really going too far. Even if they could
1014
be recruited, the expense would be quite unjustifiable. As I said, I have held a licence for many years, and having been concerned with experimental work my mind boggles, as the noble Lord, Lord Porritt, said, at the implications of subsection (2) of this clause. An unheralded visit from the honourable Member for Much Quizzing, or perhaps even the great honour of one on a busy morning from the right reverend Prelate the Lord Bishop of London, acting in the capacity proposed for him, would be liable to drive you round the bend. If the visit of an M.P. or other lay person is to be worth while, it must involve a large amount of time on the part of the experimenter being given up to explaining, as far as possible in non-technical language, the objective of the experiment and the need to use animals and possibly inflict considerable pain or distress in order to obtain the desired information. Even then the visitor with no special knowledge could hardly be expected to grasp it all and would certainly not be in a position to pass judgment on the necessity or lack of it for the experiment he had witnessed. The fact of the matter is that the inspection of such work is not a matter for Members of your Lordships' House or of another place, but solely one for qualified professional inspectors who are doing the job very effectively under the present system and who from experience know what to look out for.
What a prospect, though, for animal experimenters throughout the country to look forward to if this Bill were ever to become law. One undoubted effect would be to drive many of them abroad, as has already been said, where regulations would not be so strict—an exodus which would be to the great detriment of medical and veterinary research in this country. I simply cannot believe that your Lordships will agree to give further consideration to this Bill, based as it is on false premises and open to serious criticism on practically every point of detail. On the other hand, I feel that this debate will have served a useful purpose in reminding all experimenters of their great responsibilities in this field. The overall aims of vivisectionists and anti-vivisectionists alike are surely the same—the alleviation of human and animal suffering and disease and the acquisition of knowledge to that end by the most effective means.
9.44 p.m.
LORD SOMERS: My Lords, before I begin, may I say that I think it is a great pity that this very important debate should be taken at this time of night when the House is virtually empty. I should have thought that something a little less important could have been tucked into to-day and this Bill relegated to another day. However, be that as it may.
I am going to support the Second Reading of this Bill, but with certain very grave reservations. I support it because I know the noble Lord, Lord Willis, well enough to know that his motives are entirely genuine and sincere and that if there is anything wrong in the Bill it is probably simply because he has been badly briefed. I do not know who has been responsible, what organisation or society has given him the information that he has received, but he quoted in his opening speech some very sweeping allegations against totally unnecessary and irresponsible experiments. It would be interesting to know where he got those allegations from; and may I say that if anybody hears of experiments such as those, their first duty is to go to the police and report them with some evidence that they have actually seen them.
I dislike experiments on animals, as I think do all responsible research workers and, as I know, does the noble Lord himself. But I also dislike human suffering, and I have seen enough of it to know that it can be every bit as horrible as any suffering we may see in animals. Therefore I feel that anything that will check the research that is necessary to eliminate that suffering should be very carefully looked at.
I should like first of all to refer to the Committee of Moral Reference in Schedule 1. I am entirely in favour of having the Bishop of London, particularly the present holder of that Office, as the Chairman of this Committee. He will make an excellent, entirely impartial chairman, which is what is wanted; but the composition of the rest of the Committee seems to be to be utterly unrealistic. They are all highly respected eminent men in their own walks of life, but I very much doubt whether any one of them will have the faintest idea as to (a) whether experiment is necessary for
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medical research, or (b) whether or not it is causing pain. I think we want on the Committee people with expert medical and veterinary knowledge. This is a matter that I think could be put right in Committee. In fact, I think that all the objections which I am going to make to-night can be put right in Committee; and that is why I support the Second Reading.
My Lords, paragraph 6 of Schedule 1 says that experiments
"involving procedures or suffering of the type mentioned in the third schedule to this Act should be permissible if, and only if, a significant benefit to human welfare could be expected to result from their performance."
What is a "significant benefit to human welfare"? I do not think it is generally known—in fact it was not known to me until a few days ago—that by far the majority of experiments on animals are made, not to produce some new substance, but to test the quality of some already known substance which is coming on to the market. I believe—and I shall be corrected if I am wrong—that an instance of this is insulin which varies very much in its strength—or so I understand. Some are extremely strong, some extremely weak. It has to be tested on a live animal before it can be put on the market. That is an important point. Surely that drug is of significant benefit to mankind.
Clause 3(3) mentions alternative methods. Tissue cultures have been mentioned already. They are, I suppose, among the most prominent of alternative methods. Tissue cultures are very good and are much used for certain things but only to a very limited degree, because the tissue is only a part of the human body. A substance may be tested upon tissue and produce no reaction at all, but when it is tested on the whole body it may produce a violent reaction. Therefore tissue culture is no use except for materials which purely affect the tissue.
Another great objection to the Bill is that there is no provision for veterinary science. It has already been mentioned to-night that rabies has been practically exterminated in this country by means of animal experiments, and surely we want our pet animals to live in as healthy a condition as our fellow human beings. It has also been said that the Bill could drive research into other countries where there is less protection for animals than

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exists here. I think this point needs careful thought. Of course one might say that simply because other people are doing wrong, that is no reason why we should not do right. On the other hand, I think one must ask oneself whether we are trying to protect all animals or merely trying to protect those which are at present resident in the United Kingdom. Surely it should be all animals. Therefore, we do not want to drive research abroad because there will be far less protection for them there than there is here.
I should like to mention Clause 5, which deals with the inspection of registered premises—four times a month or once a week. There are 600 registered premises for research in this country. One will have to recruit a new army if it is intended to visit them all once a week. I think four times a year would be entirely adequate. I should like to see something done to ensure that experiments which are carried out are not irresponsible and are not unnecessarily painful. I do not think many of them are, because I think that research workers are responsible people who have as much consideration for causing pain as we have. Therefore I think the noble Lord should really stop and consider whether he is not putting too hard a brake on research, action which is, after all, going to cause a good deal of difficulty in the medical world. I sincerely hope, therefore, that he will accept such Amendments as I hope to put down for the Committee stage, if we have one. I think that provided we consider it thoroughly we could make it a workable Bill.
LORD BALERNO: My Lords, may I ask the noble Lord, Lord Somers, a question? The noble Lord said that he approved the appointment of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of London as Chairman of this Committee. Does he realise the intense resentment in Scotland against such an appointment? The Church of England does not affect Scotland; the Church of England communicants and bishops are dissenters in Scotland. If the noble Lord wishes to realign the balance, the Committee would have to include with the Lord Bishop of London the Moderator of the Edinburgh Presbytery.
LORD SOMERS: My Lords, the only answer to that is that we should have joint Chairmen.
THE EARL OF HALSBURY: My Lords, have joint Chairmen ever made a success of anything?
9.56 p.m.
LORD BROCK: My Lords, I had composed a fairly long speech, but in view of the late hour I will only say, as shortly as possible, what I feel has abundantly emerged from our debate. I suppose I could decline to say anything, but I feel it would be improper of me to say nothing.
I should like to indicate my support for the Act of 1876 and for those who administer it so well. Also, I would like to comment on the present Advisory Committee which exists to judge any doubtful matter that the Home Office wish to refer to it, and which I think is a very satisfactory Committee—in contrast, of course, to the Committee on Moral Welfare which has been proposed and which has an entirely unacceptable composition. I wish to emphasise again the point already brought out, that the members cannot possibly understand what they face. Particularly I would suspect that the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of London has no idea what amount of work this would involve. It would certainly allow him and his successors no time to conduct their episcopal duties. They could manage only part of the work if they acted as a rubber stamp. One would have to think up an alternative organisation that would supplant the present Home Office organisation and that excellent panel of advisers with presidents from learned societies and Royal colleges who do the main mass of work. I find it impossible to conceive of an organisation that would be equal to and certainly superior to that.
There is no provision in the Bill for any veterinary research or any improvement of animal welfare, which to me is quite incomprehensible in the case of people who declare their interest in animal welfare in relation to research projects. There are many other equally unacceptable details, but I will not go into those. They have already been stressed. Briefly I would say that the Bill is unwise, badly framed and totally unacceptable.
9.59 p.m.
VISCOUNT MASSEREENE AND FERRARD: My Lords, I am sure noble Lords will be pleased to hear that I have completely scrapped my speech. However, I would like to ask the noble Earl, Lord Halsbury, who is such a distinguished scientist, one or two questions. He quite rightly said that dolphins, which belong to the whale family, are extremely intelligent animals. In fact I have known of a case where a dolphin was run over by a boat; he was stunned and the other dolphins tried to keep him on the surface. The noble Earl said, and I am quoting from memory, why did not the people who sponsored this Bill worry about dolphins kept in dolphinariums where, as he said quite rightly, the dolphins live only for about five years on average, whereas in their natural state they might live for 30 years, certainly for 25.
May I quote a paragraph from a Mr. Richard Ryder, senior clinical psychologist at Warneford Hospital, Oxford. He is talking about monkeys, baboons and rats that were kept for research, and he says:
"My first experience of an animal laboratory was when I was an undergraduate at Cambridge. They were kept for weeks and months before they underwent brain surgery—usually in small single cages about 2 foot by 3 foot,…living upon wire mesh, deprived of exercise, their lives devoid of any normal pleasure. Usually they could not be allowed any natural contact with others of their species, and their diet, never varying from day to day, consisted of dry proprietary pellets."
They are kept in cages a fraction of the size that the most impecunious zoo would be allowed to keep animals in. The noble Earl was complaining about dolphins being kept in a small area. When there are monkeys kept in these cages, only 2 feet by 3 feet, for months on end, it seems rather odd that the noble Earl should complain about dolphins. But I quite agree that dolphins are not being experimented on for, presumably, human benefit.
Before I finish, I should like to ask the scientists this question. With due respect, I do not want to be rude but I thought they showed slight arrogance in this debate. I am not going to argue on the medical side. If it is a fact that animals have to be experimented on to preserve and to help human beings, then, provided that it is done as humanely as possible, that is all right. But where I cannot agree is when it comes to the non-
1020
medical aspect, cosmetics in the non-medical meaning, the psychological experiments. Because, so far as I know, no psychologist is a doctor, a medical man, and presumably they are allowed to experiment on animals without proper medical training. The other thing I cannot understand is why, if it is desired to find out the toxicity of some poison like weedkiller or detergent, the animals have to be dosed and dosed with these poisons—weedkillers, detergents, colouring material, or whatever it is—until they die. I would have thought surely it is enough to dose the animal until it is ill. Why is it necessary to dose it until it dies? Presumably all that is needed is to know when an adverse effect is reached. I do not have any sympathy with scientists when it comes to trying out pesticides and weedkillers. I think there ought to be some other means of testing these materials other than causing agony to animals. After all, we are all animals; we are primates. We call ourselves homo sapients and we by so doing rather try to distinguish ourselves from the animals. In my opinion, we may all be homo but I do not think we are all sapiens.
I would end by saying that I appreciate the noble Lord's action in bringing in this Bill. His motives are excellent. The Bill is very widely drawn, and it will be a pity if it does not get a Second Reading. If it gets a Second Reading, it can be very widely amended. I hope the Home Office will at some time do something about causing pain to animals just to prove the strength of a weedkiller, or the toxic content of bread colouring OT of a dye for colouring smoked fish. To test animals and cause pain for such purposes is highly immoral. Having said that, I will now sit down because I know the Whips want to close the debate.
THE EARL OF HALSBURY: My Lords, the noble Viscount has asked me a rather protracted question. If I may, I will compress it slightly in order to accelerate our debate. He asked why I talked about dolphins instead of primates, and the answer is because the Bill legislated for primates instead of dolphins.
10.6 p.m.
LORD PLATT: My Lords, that was brief, and I shall try to be likewise. I

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have been a licence holder for many years; as Professor of Medicine I have signed hundreds of applications for certificates for research on animals; as President of the Royal College I have countersigned them; as a member of the Medical Research Council have come into contact with this, and finally, I have been a member of the Advisory Committee to the Home Office which was established by the Act of 1876. I am quite sure that everything the noble Viscount, Lord Colville of Culross, said to us is correct. The 1876 Act was absolutely inspired. It has worked extraordinarily well. The regulations for animal experimentation are far better in this country than in any other country in the world. That is not to say that there could not be improvements.
I always feel with animal experiments that I dislike them intensely, and I wish they did not have to be done. I always feel on the side of the animals. With that, I have asked myself very sincerely whether I could possibly support this Bill to a Second Reading in order that we might, by amending it drastically in Committee, get something of an improvement. But I can see nothing in this Bill that improves on the 1876 Act. I can see a great many things that are not nearly so good. Therefore I cannot argue myself into that position. I do not know whether the noble Viscount is going to reply on behalf of the Government, but I should like to know why this Government and, if you like, the previous Government, have done nothing whatsoever about the Littlewood Report. The noble Earl, Lord Halsbury, referred to it as the Royal Commission, but it was actually a Departmental Committee. Why has nothing been done about this? That Report states quite clearly that the 1876 Act has been very good, that on the whole the situation is good, that scientists doing animal experiments are responsible people, that the inspectorate works excellently though it needs strengthening; and then the Report makes 83 recommendations, of which no fewer than 48 need legislation. I hope that my figures are correct.
This Report has been allowed to lie on the table, and it is a very great pity, because the 1876 Act needs amendment to bring it up to date in a number of ways. I can well imagine why the Report has been shelved. Successive Governments
1022
have said, "Well, after all, things are not really bad in this area. This is something that can wait until next month, or next year, or the year after; or to the next Government". So it goes on being shelved. I suggest to the Government that the time has now come for some responsible people to look into the Littlewood Report, read it carefully, and see what simple acts of legislation would improve matters.
All I will add is that, as a member of the Advisory Committee to the Home Office, I was not entirely happy. I quite often disagreed with my scientific colleagues about the severity of certain proposed experiments—because it was of course only the difficult and severe ones that were referred to us. I think that we should have a reconstituted Committee, on the lines suggested by the Littlewood Report, and it should meet much more frequently. I would not require it to meet once a fortnight for no particular reason, but if it met even four times a year, instead of once in three or four years, it would be a great improvement. I also think the Committee should discuss very much more, not only the problems which are brought to their notice by the inspectors but general problems of policy; and whether, for instance, it is right to keep cats and dogs in quite small cages—and monkeys, too—which is something I absolutely loathe. Those matters of general principle a really active Committee, meeting frequently, could discuss, and in those respects, I think, could do a lot of good.
10.11 p.m.
LORD HOY: My Lords, I apologise to your Lordships for not putting down my name for this debate, but I want to say one or two words on it because in the City of Edinburgh we have a very large research institution and they would like their opinions to be known. May I say to the noble Lord who has just sat down —and I do not want to be patronising—that I think his speech was the most substantial contribution to this debate that I have listened to to-day—because noble Lords in all parts of the House have had their opinions. One of the lessons I have learned in your Lordships' House is that the language does not differ very much from that in another place. I was interested to hear the noble Lord, Lord

1023
Auckland, say that he had only two words to express and he took five minutes to express them. That was exceeded only by the noble Viscount, Lord Massereene and Ferrard, who had one word which took him seven minutes to say. This is the kind of language we used to use in another place.
My Lords, what are we discussing here tonight? It is a Bill introduced by my noble friend. In fact, what is the purpose of it? To begin with, I do not much like its title, "Cruel Experiments Bill". But if my noble friend feels that there is something which must be done in this particular field, then my noble friend is entitled to introduce a Bill to do it. It so happens that I do not agree with the Bill that he has introduced, but I will always assert that he has a right to introduce it if he thinks fit. Indeed, I was a little disturbed, if I may say so, by the vehemence of the noble Earl, Lord Halsbury, who I thought, from his most vituperative point of view, seemed to think that my noble friend did not have this right. Indeed, when he was calling in the aid of the Bible to supplement his case, I thought he was going a little too far. I felt rather like the old Scotsman who said that indeed he had a great belief in the Lord. When someone said, "And what had the minister to say in the sermon, John?", he said, "It was from the Book of Deuteronomy. I am not at all sure what it was about, but I think the minister was against it". That is a much better attitude to adopt —perhaps the noble Earl will just let me finish—than to take the line that the noble Earl took, and seek to condemn my noble friend for saying, mistakenly or not, what he was saying.
THE EARL OF HALSBURY: My Lords, I never disputed the right of the noble Lord to introduce the Bill. I merely discriminated between his right, on the one hand, and its wise exercise, on the other. I said that this is too complex a subject for Private Members' Bills: the Government should exercise their proper responsibilities in this matter.
LORD HOY: My Lords, if the noble Earl wants to complain about the Government, I would agree with him; he has my full support. But, to tell the truth, the noble Earl has made so many
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amendments to the speech which he made originally that he had better get it drafted and submit it to me, when I will tell him whether I agree with him or not. All I say now is that I agree with the last remark he made—that he is against the Government. In that, I think he is absolutely right.
My Lords, this Bill seeks to do a job which I think might well be popular, but I would say to my noble friend who moved it that if one is going to bring in a Bill of this kind there is only one reason for doing so. The justification for the introduction of a new Bill must surely rest on demonstrating that the existing controls are inadequate. Provided one can do that one is entitled to bring in a Bill of this kind. Whatever else he might have done in introducing this Bill, I thought that my noble friend did not produce that argument, and that must be the test of any Bill of this kind. I had a long experience at the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food. I do not like to boast about it, but I would say to your Lordships that I served as a Parliamentary Secretary in that Department longer than any other Minister in the Department's history, and in the course of my long experience I met these cases times without number.
I agree that there will be a response from any human being to any allegation of cruelty, and we all want to take steps to put it right, but if we are going to do that by legislation we have to remember that the legislation becomes legally the responsibility of everyone concerned. That is what my noble friend is asking of us tonight. I think of one small measure in the Bill, the appointment and dismissal of veterinary officers by a committee of the R.S.P.C.A. That would not be appropriate or acceptable to the profession. It is a section of the agriculture industry for which I have a great respect. The veterinary inspectors do a tremendous service. Very often they are not commended for the job they do, except when we are in trouble because of an outbreak of foot and mouth disease or something of that kind. Then everyone pays tribute to their work. But when the incident is over they are forgotten. I do not think that veterinary officers would like to be at the beck and call of such a committee as would be created by my noble friend's

1025
Bill. For that and other reasons I cannot support the Bill. I think that my noble friend was right to introduce it and to ask your Lordships to debate the matter, but, having done so, I think that he would be equally right to say that he does not propose to take the Bill to the Division Lobbies.
10.18 p.m.
LORD WILLIS: My Lords, we have had a fairly lengthy debate and I am in a little difficulty because a number of points were raised, but I am sure that at this hour your Lordships will not expect me to answer all the points. Were I a scientist or a doctor, probably I should be able to answer a number of the points raised, but without a doctor or scientist at my elbow to advise me I do not know the answers. I am sure that there is an answer to many of the points that were raised, if only because I know that there are many distinguished doctors and scientists who take the opposite view to that expressed by some of the speakers who have opposed the Bill.
The pattern of the debate was not entirely unexpected to me. I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Hoy for his defence, which was not quite necessary because I am always happy to take on a scientist and I can look after myself. The pattern of the debate was summed up by the noble Earl, Lord Halsbury, who made a brilliant speech, often quite funny. Like a dancing master, he danced all round the point without getting on it, and sometimes he confused the House with comments which indicated that he had not studied the Bill in detail. For example, the word "cosmetics" is clearly defined. There can be no mistake about what we mean by "cosmetics". What interested me most, and the point was touched on by the noble Lord, Lord Hoy, was the way the noble Earl poured scorn on the amateur. He showed that we who are promoting this Bill are the woolly-minded idealists and he and his friends are the stern, practical people who, at the end of the day, are concerned with the good of humanity while we woolly-minded idealists are the reverse.
I assert strongly the right of the amateur to be heard in all matters concerned with this country: and I can talk of them on a large number of issues, not least decimalisation, where if the voice
1026
of the amateur had been listened to by some of the experts we might be a lot better off. The noble Viscount, Lord Massereene and Ferrard, mentioned a little arrogance. I thought that the arrogance was monumental. It did not surprise me a little, because it seems to me that there are two professions in this country, in particular, that suffer from this kind of insulated arrogance because they lack contact with reality and they lack contact with ordinary people: they are the scientists and, if the noble and learned Lord on the Woolsack will forgive me, the law.
THE LORD CHANCELLOR: My Lords, would the noble Lord not agree that the two professions which have most contact with individuals and their suffering are precisely the doctor and the lawyer?
BARONESS LLEWELYN-DAVIES OF HASTOE: My Lords, might it also not be possible that that is precisely why they have to keep themselves so isolated?
LORD WILLIS: My Lords, I was particularly referring to the scientists. I should be more convinced if, for once—just once—apart from the noble Lord, Lord Platt, one of the scientists got up and said "It is conceivably possible that some of the evidence, as brought forward by these woolly-minded idealists, these amateurs, is right; it is conceivably right that Helen, the animal I mentioned, was a bad case and should be looked into; there may be dozens of other cases; it is conceivably right that somebody in my profession "—says the scientist—"may at some time become de-sensitised to the suffering of animals, as men have become de-sensitised to the suffering of other men. It may conceivably be right that something is wrong and we ought to listen, and it is therefore our duty, as scientists, and the duty of our scientific organisations, to approach the Government and make proposals as to how the law of 1876 could be amended and improved."
It would be of great interest to me if that was said, instead of vague words of blessing about my motives, and saying, "He is a very sincere lad, but very mistaken", and so on. I should be much more convinced if we had a few hard, practical proposals, and less of this cutoff, stonewall arrogance which seems to suggest that "Everything is right in our

1027
world and nothing is right from outside". Why do you gentlemen think for one moment that people are screaming out, year after year, about cruelty to animals if there is no basis of truth in it? Why do you arrogate to yourselves all the moral judgments, all the rights? Why do you say, "We, and we alone, know what goes on, because we, and we alone, can understand what an experiment is for." I beg you, gentlemen, to come down from that great big pyramid on which you place yourselves and listen occasionally to the humble voice of the amateur. Think sometimes that the man in the street could be right. He may not phrase it right; he may not argue correctly; he may even get his experiments
1028
mixed up, but, by God!, he could be right. Why do not you listen sometimes?
As I have said, I have not time to go into all the detailed points that have been asked—and there is another reason for it—and at this stage I will not press the Bill to a Division. While thanking all noble Lords who have taken part in the debate, I beg leave to withdraw the Motion.
Motion, by leave, withdrawn.
Bill withdrawn.

ZETLAND COUNTY COUNCIL BILL
Brought from the Commons; read 1ª, and referred to the Examiners.