Lords Sitting of 27 February 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 Hereford.

PAGE COMMITTEE'S REPORT ON NATIONAL SAVINGS
LORD HOY: 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 when they expect to publish the Report of the Page Committee.
THE LORD PRIVY SEAL (EARL JELLICOE): My Lords, in answer to the noble Lord's Question, I understand that the Page Committee, which was set up in September, 1971, is at present drafting its Report on National Savings which will be presented to the Chancellor of the Exchequer. It is hoped that it may be possible to publish the Report around Easter.
LORD HOY: My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Earl for his reply. May I ask him whether he realises the importance of this subject? There are 13 million accounts in the trustee savings banks in this country, and they are still the greatest savings banks in the world, but along with the national Post Office they are under the handicap of not being able to offer services to their depositors because of the present law. May we have an assurance that when Page does report no time will be lost, not only in presenting it to Parliament but, I hope, in making provision for the trustee savings banks and the Post Office savings banks to meet the needs of at least one quarter of the people of this country?
EARL JELLICOE: My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord for expressing his gratitude for my reply. I am glad that he was grateful, because of course I gave him a direct Answer to a direct Question. As for the substance of the
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Report, I believe that it would be right for us all to await the Report itself and for the Government then to consider the matter. This is a vast and very important area. I can assure the noble Lord that the whole area will receive the attention that it undoubtedly deserves to have.
LORD DAVIES OF LEEK: My Lords, after spending an hour this morning finding out what the Page Report was, may I ask the noble Earl whether he is aware that some of us believe that in these inflationary days it may be worth the Government's while, when this Report is put out, to consider increasing the interest on National Savings as an incentive to ordinary people to invest?
EARL JELLICOE: My Lords, if the noble Lord had telephoned me I could have told him very quickly what the Page Report was about. I was asked a Question about the timing of the publication of the Report, and I have given a reply to that. I have assured noble Lords that it will receive the careful attention of my right honourable friend. I think it would be quite wrong for me at the moment to be drawn on to the substance of the Report, which the Government have not yet seen, let alone this member of the Government.
LORD HOY: My Lords, while interest rates are always important, services inside the banks are also very important. Trustee savings banks are prevented at the present time from offering services to depositors, and have to transfer to the joint stock banks those services together with the cash that belongs to the depositors in the trustee savings banks. This is an important point so far as Page is concerned.
EARL JELLICOE: My Lords, I take due note of the point that the noble Lord has made, but I must again revert to the position that I should be very willing that this House should debate the Page Report, but I think that it would be a mistake to try to debate it and the area around it until we have the Report.

LIGHT RAILWAY ORDERS: CENTRAL WALES LINE
2.38 p.m.
THE EARL OF KINNOULL: My Lords, I beg leave to ask the Question

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which stands in my name on the Order Paper.
The Question was as follows:
To ask Her Majesty's Government whether they are now able to say when the draft for a Light Railway Order for the central Wales line (Craven Arms to Llanelli) will be implemented; whether there are plans for other similar Orders; and whether they will make a Statement on the usefulness of such orders as the means to reduce the overall costs of railway services in areas of light traffic.
LORD MOWBRAY AND STOURTON: My Lords, the Order was made on March 29, 1972, and the line is already operating as a light railway. It is for the Railways Board to decide whether to seek similar Orders where they consider this might offer practical or economic advantages, and my right honourable friend would judge such applications on their individual merits.
THE EARL OF KINNOULL: My Lords, I thank my noble friend for that reply. May I ask what savings it is estimated this Order will effect upon that branch line?
LORD MOWBRAY AND STOURTON: My Lords, I cannot give an absolutely exact answer to that question because I do not think that we have had long enough time to collect all the figures. By and large—and I am not going to be pinned down exactly by the noble Earl—there will be an estimated saving of about 10 per cent.
LORD CHAMPION: My Lords, can the noble Lord tell us whether the Railways Board have made any other applications in relation to other areas?
LORD MOWBRAY AND STOURTON: My Lords, I am not at this moment aware of any other applications that the Railways Board have made to make railways into light railways.

PARKING FACILITIES IN ROYAL PARKS
LORD BALFOUR OF INCHRYE: 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, in order to effect an immediate reduction in the number of daily commuter cars entering Central London, they will withdraw all parking facilities in the Royal Parks.
THE PARLIAMENTARY UNDERSECRETARY OF STATE, DEPARTMENT OF THE ENVIRONMENT (LORD SANDFORD): My Lords, the Government's policy is to provide parking for genuine visitors to the Royal Parks while deterring parking by the all-day commuter. With this in mind, parking before noon will shortly be prohibited in St. James's Park, Green Park and Hyde Park and before 11 a.m. in Regent's Park. If more stringent controls are needed my right honourable friend the Secretary of State for the Environment will not hesitate to introduce them.
LORD BALFOUR OF INCHRYE: My Lords, while those controls will go some way towards reducing the number of commuter cars, is the Minister aware that it would be far better to prohibit parking in the Royal Parks for all time, so that the number of cars is at once reduced by a tough and positive decision?
LORD SANDFORD: My Lords, I am afraid that I cannot agree with my noble friend. The Royal Parks are there for people to enjoy, and in our parking policy we have to distinguish between the provision to be made for genuine visitors to the Royal Parks and restricting the facility for the all-day commuter. We believe that this policy will secure that result.
LORD REIGATE: My Lords, if it is the policy of Her Majesty's Government to reduce the number of commuter cars in London, will my noble friend and his Department extend their inquiries to cover the use of parking facilities within the perimeter of various Government Departments and at such places as the Horseguards, around the Ministry of Defence, and so forth?
LORD SANDFORD: My Lords, the Horseguards is part of the Royal Parks. As to the rest of London, the G.L.C. is the main traffic authority.
LORD REIGATE: My Lords, arising out of that answer, may I point out that

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what I meant was the perimeter of Government Departments?
LORD NUGENT OF GUILDFORD: My Lords, is my noble friend aware that his Answer is much to be welcomed? Is he aware that for years now the parking space in the Royal Parks has been occupied from early morning to late at night by the same cars, and has long since ceased to perform the purpose which we would wish of providing for the occasional visitor? Also, is my noble friend aware that, if the action proposed is not sufficient, he should go further still?
LORD SANDFORD: My Lords, I am most grateful to my noble friend.
LORD SHINWELL: My Lords, if it is impossible to reduce the number of cars parking in the Royal Parks—which has already become a bit of an abomination and is very unsightly—why not try to raise revenue by introducing parking meters for them? What is wrong with that?
Loan SANDFORD: My Lords, there are a number of possibilities beside those which I have just outlined, and we shall keep them all under review. But these proposals are the ones which at the present moment we think will secure the policy we want to pursue.
LORD STRABOLGI: My Lords, may I ask the noble Lord whether the Government are aware that there is an enormous underground garage at Marble Arch which is very sparsely used, probably because it is too expensive? Will they investigate means of making this easier to use?
LORD SANDFORD: My Lords, needless to say we looked with the G.L.C. into the situation that pertains around the Parks before we decided to introduce these measures.
LORD HANKEY: My Lords, will the Government bear in mind that if unduly savage measures are taken they might damage the economy of London, and indeed of the country, and will probably cause more unemployment?
LORD SANDFORD: My Lords, noble Lords will have seen in my right honourable friend's comment on the Layfield Committee's Report on the Greater
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London Development Plan, that he takes the view that traffic control requires a combination of measures to produce the desired results.
LORD BALFOUR OF INCHRYE: My Lords, reverting to the Minister's original reply, am I to understand that it is the policy of the Government to retain parking in the Royal Parks in order that the small minority of visitors who use motor cars should have that facility granted to them, at the expense of many thousands of people who visit the Parks without the need for cars?
LORD SANDFORD: My Lords, again I cannot entirely agree with my noble friend. If all parking were prohibited around all the Royal Parks they would then be used exclusively by the people who are lucky enough to live around them. They are available for Londoners as a whole, and I am sure it must be possible for people to go to the Royal Parks from wherever they happen to live and park their cars there. What we are anxious to prevent is the use of the Royal Parks as all-day car parks by commuters.

NATIONAL HEALTH SERVICE REORGANISATION BILL [H.L.]
2.47 p.m.
EARL ST. ALDWYN: My Lords, I have it in command from Her Majesty the Queen to acquaint the House that Her Majesty, having been informed of the purport of the National Health Service Reorganisation Bill, has consented to place Her prerogative and interest, so far as they are affected by the Bill, at the disposal of Parliament for the purposes of the Bill.
THE MINISTER OF STATE, DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND SOCIAL SECURITY (LORD ABERDARE): My Lords, I beg to move that this Bill be now read a third time. If I may trespass on your Lordships' time for just a moment or two, it is appropriate to thank your Lordships for the very constructive way in which you have dealt with this Bill. On Second Reading I drew attention to the fact that this is the first time that a major Bill has started its life in this House, and it follows an undertaking given by my noble friend

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the Leader of the House that he would see what could be done to balance out the spread of legislation between the two Houses. He has discharged that obligation by producing at least this Bill as the first major Bill to start its progress in this House. It has been a unique experience. It has not always been easy and there have been certain difficulties. Not having had a previous sifting of the Bill by the other place has caused a great deal of extra work, particularly for Members of the Benches opposite. But I am grateful to all your Lordships for all the constructive work you have done on the Bill, and I believe that it has been a successful precedent. We have made a great many Amendments to the Bill and most of them are significant improvements. We have made more effective the professional advisory machinery. We have recast the whole set-up so far as community health councils are concerned. We have introduced some important Amendments on the subject of the Health Service Commissioner and with regard to staff consultation. We have also had some useful debates on many other matters of policy arising out of the Bill, especially the linkage between the health authorities and the local authorities, and have had some useful discussions on the subject of family planning, including one major Amendment.
I am particularly grateful to the three Graces, if I may so term them, on the Front Bench opposite, the noble Baronesses, Lady Serota, Lady White and Lady Llewelyn-Davies of Hastoe. Brightness, joyfulness and bloom were the Graces, and the noble Baronesses certainly displayed those qualities as well as being very powerful advocates for their viewpoint, and all of them have had a significant influence on the Bill. Associated with the Graces was the god Hermes—in this case the noble Lord, Lord Garnsworthy. The god Hermes, your Lordships will remember, was a precocious child and the god of eloquence, and certainly the noble Lord was very eloquent in defence of the interests of the staff, about whom both he and I have a deep concern.
I should also like to thank my noble friends on this side of the House. They have not always supported me in the Lobbies; in fact, some of my noble girl
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friends have been particularly rebellious. But I should like to thank all those noble Lords, especially some of my noble friends who have deep experience of the Health Service—the noble Lords, Lord Grenfell, Lord Reigate and Lord Auckland, Lady Ruthven, Lord Cottesloe, and others. In particular, perhaps, may I thank my noble friends Lord Amory and Lord Brooke of Cumnor, the Castor and Pollux, I think, of our side, for their very constructive assistance and suggestions to help this Bill forward. Others of your Lordships have played a considerable part in the Bill. The noble Lords, Lord Platt, Lord Brock and Lord Amulree have effectively watched over the interests of Aesculapius; and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Lichfield, who is an old and valued friend of the National Health Service, has been very helpful, too. Finally, may I thank my two colleagues on this Bench, my noble friends Lord Belstead and Lady Young, for their patience and untiring support in the course of the passage of the Bill? I beg to move.
Moved, That the Bill be now read 3ª.—(Lord Aberdare.)
2.52 p.m.
BARONESS SEROTA: My Lords, I know noble Lords will be very appreciative of the generous and humorous words of the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, and would undoubtedly wish me, first and foremost, to thank him and his colleagues for the unfailing patience and courtesy, and fortitude, which they have shown consistently throughout our consideration of this major measure. Apart from the sheer physical stamina involved in steering a Bill of this size through the House, the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, has accepted Government defeats on a number of issues of policy without bitterness or rancour, and without seeking to reverse the will of the House at a later stage. He has also—and we are most appreciative of this—listened to and taken heed of the strength of feeling expressed on all sides of the House, as well as from these Benches, on certain aspects of the Bill, to the point of submitting Government Amendments at the Report stage to meet many of the matters raised during the examination of the Bill by noble Lords who spoke from long experience and direct knowledge of the National Health Service.

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In addition to those whom I have learned in the course of these debates to call my noble Health Service friends I should particularly like to thank my colleagues, the noble Baroness, Lady White, Lord Garnsworthy, Lord Stow Hill and Lady Llewelyn-Davies, who unfortunately is unable to be with us to-day, for their invaluable support throughout the examination of the Bill and for all the time, tolerance and effort that their participation in this truly co-operative endeavour has involved. The kind references by the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, to my noble friends and myself are greatly appreciated and we in our turn would wish to thank the staff of the Department, through the Minister, for all that they have done in these many months, if not years, on the preparation of the legislation, its passage through this House, and the preparation for the transition in which they are now heavily involved. As a result of all our labours I would warmly agree with the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, that the Bill which will now go forward to another place for consideration and scrutiny has greatly benefited from starting its passage here early in December, and I only hope that this experience, apart from bringing credit on this House, will encourage rather than deter the Government from seeking in future Sessions to balance the burden of the legislative programme in this way.
The Bill still does, however, contain a number of major provisions, particularly in relation to the composition and the functions of the proposed Regional and Area Health Authorities, to which we on this side are as firmly opposed as ever. In spite of all our efforts, the Government have refused to give an inch on the rigid doctrine of absolute Ministerial appointment and control of the new Health Authorities which has determined the pattern of the reorganisation provided in the Bill. They have also completely failed, in our view, to take the opportunity of this first major reorganisation of the Health Service since its inception in 1946 to decentralise and democratise one of the greatest of our social services by allowing the producers of the service—the doctors, the nurses and other Health Service staff—together with the consumers of the service to play a more direct part in the new authorities which will take over in April, 1974. We are
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also particularly concerned at their refusal to provide for any arrangement to coordinate the strategic planning of health care services at regional level with other major social services to which they relate. I have little doubt that this very crucial question of the relationship of the new Regional Health Authorities with other regional agencies and to local government both now and in the future will be raised in another place. We also welcome the improvements the Government have made to Clause 9. There are still a number of matters in relation to community health councils that could be discussed further particularly in relation to staff and premises. Again, there will be opportunity for these matters to be further considered elsewhere.
My Lords, throughout the consideration of this Bill we have been constantly aware of the need for Parliament to bring to an end, as soon as is compatible with a full and thorough examination of the Government's proposals, the long period future of a Service which depends above ably experienced since the publication of the first Green Paper nearly five years ago. We have therefore refrained from putting down any further Amendments or raising particular issues to-day on Third Reading although we greatly regret that the Bill still does not contain a number of proposals that have been made in the course of our discussions. But I know that my noble friend Lord Garnsworthy and all concerned with the future of a Service which depends above all on those who provide it would particularly wish me to thank the Government, and the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, especially, for the undertakings that have been given and for the way in which the Bill has been improved in relation to consultations with staff interests in the processes of reorganisations and in the extensive preparations for the April, 1974, changeover which is now gathering momentum. For, in spite of the provisions of Clause 1, the real burden of this major reorganisation will undoubtedly fall on their shoulders while they must continue at the same time in every respect to maintain the level of the existing services to patients. We would therefore want to give them our full support at this time and wish them every success in the difficult months, the

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all too few months, to come in which they will have to effect the transition once Parliament has determined the final shape of the Service.
Finally, my Lords, I know that there are some noble Lords who genuinely doubt whether this reorganisation will really benefit individual patients or justify the great upheaval that is undoubtedly involved. I am afraid that the dominant emphasis in Government policy on the bureaucratic management and control of the new Service from Whitehall downwards has reinforced these views. For my part, I believe wholeheartedly in the very real advantages which could flow to patients and to the community as a whole from the development of a truly integrated and comprehensive community-based Health Service from which the existing inequalities between Regions, between social classes and particularly between people with handicaps and those without must be eliminated; but such a service, in our view, must be based on democratic principles of participation and control by managing authorities which are truly representative of, and sensitive to, producer and consumer interests from the outset.
Moreover, the new Service must surely be planned and provided at all levels and not merely at Area level in conjunction with the other great complementary social services—housing, education, the personal social services and environmental planning—if the needs of the individual patients are to be more effectively met and if we are to develop health-care services with a stronger emphasis on prevention and real care in the community. Unless this reorganisation succeeds in strengthening the general practitioner and community base of the National Health Service by developing improved local health and social care services to the family doctor and his team we shall not reduce the present demands on the Hospital Service and effect the much needed change in the balance of emphasis between prevention and cure. We shall therefore watch the progress of this Bill with great interest as it is considered in another place and hope that it will be returned to us with even more improvements than we have managed to achieve in this House. Although it is primarily concerned with organisation and struc
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ture, it is a Bill which will undoubtedly affect the future health and wellbeing of every single citizen and of future generations.
3.2 p.m.
LORD REIGATE: My Lords, may I, too, congratulate my noble friend on navigating this great measure through your Lordships' House? Perhaps I may also be allowed briefly to utter a very slight lament: it is that one of the outstanding changes in this Bill is the abolition of the independent boards of governors of the teaching hospitals. Speaking as one of the chairmen, I think that many will share my regret at the passing of a long and honourable tradition which goes back into the mists of time and has, I think, helped to make British medicine the very great service that it is. Those with whom I am associated in the Teaching Hospitals Association have endeavoured to point out some of the consequences as we see them. My noble friend and the Secretary of State have always listened with kindness, but not always, perhaps, as sympathetically as we should have wished. Nor, I think, have our arguments always been comprehended. However, my Lords, if this is the price of unity, we feel that we must accept the decision although with regret and with some misgivings.
It is fair that I should point out that through all the discussions, through all the long arguments, no one has ever sought to claim that this change is going to improve medical education. It is also fair to point out that the future of the Health Service must in the long run depend on the standards of medical education. Teaching hospitals exist to serve patients first and foremost, but also to serve the medical schools, and it is possible that the medical schools may find that the Area Health Authorities, which have many other irons in the fire and on which the schools will have only a small representation, will not be such sympathetic partners as the teaching hospital boards to whom they have been accustomed. I do not want to indulge in any way in an unnecessary jeremiad but merely to give a warning. After all, my Lords, if there are faults in the Bill, even when it becomes an Act of Parliament they can be remedied in the next National Health Service Reorganisation Bill. If history teaches us anything it should teach

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us that as the measure of 1949 followed that of 1946, the next measure should be in 1976.
3.5 p.m.
LORD GRENFELL: My Lords, I also should like to congratulate my noble friend on the successful termination of this Bill. I think that we are passing on a far better Bill than the measure that came to us. My noble friend has always been ready to listen to the voices in this House, and that is vitally important. In reorganising the Health Service I am not convinced that the Ambulance Service should remain under the G.L.C. rather than come under the umbrella of the new Health Service, but that has been the will of the House. My hospital management committee felt very deeply that a statutory duty should be put on the community health councils to inspect and report on hospitals rather than merely have access to them. I think that is a sound idea, and I hope that it will be considered in another place. I feel that we have greatly improved the constitution of the community health councils. I would stress very sincerely the real importance of ensuring that no part of the Health Service should be subjected in any way to Party politics. I wish the Bill all success. We shall be be able to judge its effect better and more fully in about two years' time when we see how this actually works. In any case, I feel convinced that all concerned will endeavour to ensure that the patient is always looked after to the best of their ability.
LADY RUTHVEN or FREELAND: My Lords, I should like to add my thanks to my noble friend the Minister of State for what he has done to this Bill. He was most amenable to suggestions from both sides of the House. I suppose that in a way it was rather difficult for him to accept changes in the Bill which were suggested from his own side of the House, but he did it in a charming and delightful manner. As a Back Bencher of his Party, I should like to thank him for all he has done to make the Bill a much better Bill to go to the other House.
3.8 p.m.
LORD PLATT: My Lords, speaking from the Cross-Benches, I must first regret that, having had to attend a
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luncheon, I was not able to be in your Lordships' House in time to hear the beginning of the Third Reading debate on this Bill. I would add my thanks to the Minister, who has carried the measure through with such courtesy, efficiency and obvious knowledge of the questions involved. I am most grateful to him.
LORD AMULREE: My Lords, I should like to say a word of thanks from these Benches to the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, for the great care and attention that he has given to this Bill and for the able and competent way in which he dealt with all the various problems involved. I am certain that one of the reasons why we were lucky enough to get the Bill introduced in your Lordships' House was because the Secretary of State knew that the noble Lord would be in charge of it. I should like to thank him for the Amendments which he accepted from us and for the kind and able way in which he conducted the business.
3.10 p.m.
BARONESS WHITE: My Lords, may I add a word or two to those so felicitously spoken by my noble friend Lady Serota? First, I should like to thank the Minister for his charming compliment. In my most dreamlike moments I do not think that I ever cast myself as a Grace. A Muse may be, but not a Grace. However, it was no less agreeable that someone should have thought of me in those terms. I am very happy that we are sending the Bill to another place as much improved as I think it has been by the labours of noble Lords on both sides of the House. There has been a quite remarkable unanimity on certain matters—that is to say, unanimity with the exception of the Minister, but he has been most forthcoming where he rightly felt that the strong feeling of the House was in a certain direction.
I have only two matters which still rather concern me in relation to the Bill. As some of your Lordships who took a close interest in the matter know, I was myself especially detailed to study the community health councils and the provision of an Ombudsman, a Health Service Commissioner. I should like to make the point which I made last week on the race relations debate. I was somewhat concerned at the proliferation of bodies for the protection of the citizen in various directions. We have now had

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Government support for a special police tribunal for possible complaints against the police; we have the machinery which we are setting up under this Bill, and major local authorities in various parts of the country are also establishing offices for the protection of the citizen including their relationships with the Social Security Department. It seems to me that the time has come when the Government ought to be giving some thought to this proliferation and to ask themselves what the local administration should be and whether we are justified in setting up networks of different bodies to follow up various procedures without interrelationship one with the other.
The other point which concerns me, my Lords, is the fact that the National Health Service Reorganisation Bill does not take cognisance of another section of the health care in this country, the occupational Health Service. I know that we passed a Bill last Session on the establishing of the Employment Medical Advisory Service; that consultations are going on about the Robens Report on Safety and Health and that work and legislation are to follow upon that, but these matters are under the care of a different Department, the Department of Employment, and one would hope that there is genuine collaboration between the two Departments. I have here the circular which was sent out by the Department of Employment concerning the Employment Medical Advisory Service which refers to liaison with general practitioners, hospital staffs, works medical officers and others interested in occupational medicine. It is being established on the basis of nine regions which may or may not have any relationship at all to regions set up under the Bill now leaving this House. Certain National Health facilities, particularly of a diagnostic nature, including a central pathology laboratory in London, are to be put at the disposal of the Employment Medical Advisory Service. This was not discussed in this House in relation to the Bill before us, yet the two things are to my mind plainly closely connected.
I am further disturbed by the comments made by a very highly respected Member of another place, Miss Mervyn Pyke, who was herself a Member of the Robens Committee. In addressing the
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annual conference of the occupational health section of the Royal College of Nursing recently, she said that the health part of the Robens Report was the woolliest and least satisfactory, and when she was taxed with this by one of the members of the Royal College of Nursing she said:
"To have gone into occupational health in sufficient depth, the Report would have had to be held up for six or seven months, and we felt we could not afford to lose that amount of time."
I mention this because if anything serious is to be done on the occupational health side I hope that there will be the closest co-operation between the Department of Health and Social Security and the Department of Employment. I think I am entitled to raise this plea because one Government after another has refused to face the real problems of occupational health. I do not blame this Government any more than I did my own, but I think it is wrong that we should not take cognisance of the difficulties we have not been able to tackle in this Bill. While we should congratulate all concerned on the Bill we have before us, we should regret that it did not extend to industrial and occupational health.
LORD ABERDARE: My Lords, I should like to thank your Lordships for your very kind personal references to me. I have had the greatest sympathy from my right honourable friend the Secretary of State which has enabled me to meet some of your Lordships' wishes. I recognise that there are still deep divisions between the two sides of the House on the administrative framework of the new National Health Service, but all that is on the Record and it would not be appropriate to re-argue it now.
May I say one word to my noble friend Lord Reigate. We have listened sympathetically to the arguments of the Teaching Hospitals Association. We are all deeply grateful to the members of the Board of Governors for the work they have done over many years past, as indeed we are to the members of all the other Boards and Committees that serve the National Health Service. I can assure him that if we can avoid it nothing we do will harm medical education, and the very fact of integration might well be of great benefit to medical education. I have listened with interest to what the

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noble Baroness had to say about occupational health and I will certainly study it.
On Question, Bill read 3ª, An Amendment (Privilege) made: Bill passed, and sent to the Commons.

IMMIGRATION RULES FOR CONTROL
3.17 p.m.
LORD O'HAGAN LORD O'HAGAN rose to move, That this House takes note of the Statements of Immigration Rules for Control on and after Entry: Commonwealth Citizens, and E.E.C. and other Non-Commonwealth Nationals, made by the Secretary of State for the Home Department and laid before the House on January 25, 1973. The noble Lord said: My Lords, I am afraid I must confess that I have come unprepared for this afternoon's debate. I am almost at a loss to know how to continue. I did not realise that it was the convention that the first speaker in a debate on Tuesday afternoon had to ornament his speech with a wealth of classical allusions. As to my own identity in classical mythology, I know I am not one of the Furies; I hope not a Cyclops with one single eye fixed forever on the subject of citizenship or immigration. I also very much hope that I am not a Cassandra with nothing but gloom and doom to give your Lordships this afternoon. Rather I hope to be able to prove to the noble Viscount, Lord Colville of Culross, that I am an Orpheus come to play sweet music to the Government with a wealth of constructive and harmonious ideas. I would also like to be harmonious at the beginning by taking this opportunity of congratulating the Government for at least taking the decision to re-unite many of the families who have been split after the confusion in Uganda. I congratulate the Government for taking the step they have just tentatively taken in this area.
We are doing something slightly curious this afternoon. We are not at a christening; we are at a funeral. We are going through the obsequies—and I hope if I have got it wrong the noble Viscount will leap to his feet and correct me—as laid down in Section 3(2) of the Immigration Act, which went through
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your Lordships' House and another place with so many trials and tribulations. We are debating a Statement of the Rules or any change in the Rules that the Secretary of State shall lay down from time to time. We cannot alter them; we cannot remove any rule that we dislike; we cannot say that a particular sentence is no good. All that we can do is to come along and make some brief (I hope) funeral orations on what has already been decided, and in this case, passed, by another place.
As your Lordships will have observed, the new Rules are to be in a different form from the version which was rejected by the other place. As a just reward, I suppose, instead of there being two Statements of Rules (as in the rejected version) there are now four Statements of Rules; so that we have twice as much. I think that this is an improvement because it makes clearer the distinction between the provisions for the E.E.C. and non-Commonwealth nationals and the provisions for the Commonwealth citizens. Although it is really too late to make any alteration and we have no alternative but to swallow them en bloc, I should like to make some specific criticisms of the Rules. There are some particular cases of changes that give one cause for thought. For example, what Mr. Enoch Powell called the "re-introduction of the qualifying grandmother", the grand-patrial clause, by the back door, is something about which I hope the noble Viscount will be able to reassure us. He may be able to tell us whether it is constitutionally proper that a provision struck out by a Committee of one House can be re-introduced by by means of subordinate rules some time later; although I admit the form of the re-introduced provision is almost, but not quite, the same.
There are one or two questions about changes between this and the former version of the Rules which I should like to put to the Minister. In the previous version (that rejected by another place) there was a phrase in Rule 16 which read:
"Admission as a visitor does not authorise the taking of employment for which a work permit is required."
This is a point about which a Member of your Lordships' House has asked me a question—mistakenly, I think, for I am

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not an expert on this matter. Whether you are allowed to work when you are admitted as a visitor is a tricky point and one which will arise from time to time. What has happened is this. In the new divided Rules this sentence is omitted in one form but retained in the other. It is omitted from HC79 but, as I understand it, it is retained in HC81.
There is the same sort of thing, the same strange lack of harmony between the two versions. For example, there is the discrepancy on supervised departure as an alternative to deportation. If the Minister, either now or in writing, could explain to me why this discrepancy should have arisen now that the Rules have been divided, I should be interested; because I should have thought that it was rather a strange thing to happen without any explanation or reason.
My Lords, perhaps one of the more constructive things that I can do this afternoon is to use some of the experience I have gained from going frequently to the countries of the E.E.C.—which I do as a Member of the European Parliament. Looking at these Rules when they first appeared, I was very interested to know whether our Statements of Rules covering nationals of the E.E.C. complied with their Rules. I took some pains to find out. I hope the noble Viscount can reassure the House that this matter has been gone into thoroughly—and I am sure that it has—because the official answers I get from the research staff in the European Parliament make it plain that this country has no obligation to show the authorities of the E.E.C. our Rules until they have been passed by both Houses of Parliament. The E.E.C. cannot officially take cognisance of our Rules until they are passed by both Houses. What happens if they do not like them? What happens if they do not fit in with everything they demand?
My information is that the formal processes do not require us to go closely into the form of the Rules with them before we have put them through Parliament. A reason behind my asking this question is that one of the Rules, that covering the freedom of movement and the rights of establishment of labour under the Treaty of Rome, lays down that when a person who is a national of
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a member State is moving about between one country and another of the Common Market he is entitled to take what the French call his conjoint (spouse). This is very much at variance with some of our citizenship laws. So far as the rights of transferring between husband and wife are concerned, we very much tend to think that they should go one way only. Perhaps there are some potential clashes here.
My Lords, there is one last point on the E.E.C. that I should like to bring forward. There is an Act, which I gather is still partly in force and which affects the Rules we are debating to-day, called the Aliens' Restrictions (Amendment) Act 1919. It has not been repealed in its entirety and, among other things (I must admit that this has now been repealed), it forbids any alien to change his name. I am informed by a Written Answer of yesterday that there are still sections of it in force which prohibit aliens from holding any pilotage certificates for any pilotage districts in the United Kingdom. If we have legislation of this sort on our Statute Book, are we sure that the E.E.C. Rules that we are talking about to-day comply with the conditions laid down by the Community for free movement of labour?
I should like now to come to what I hope is the constructive thing that I have to say this afternoon. As some of your Lordships may be all too painfully aware, I have been interested in this subject for some time. Since I have been going to the rest of Europe so often, I have found myself even more vividly aware of the confusion existing in our present citizenship laws. This is nothing particularly startling or new to say, but I think that the confusion of our citizenship laws is one of the underlying factors behind the disquiet and the despair in many quarters on subjects such as immigration and race relations. There is a feeling that something is being hidden and kept away. Governments are far too likely to wait until there is a crisis before acting in this field. We have had so many Immigration Acts recently—1962, 1968 and 1971—and decisions have had to be taken so fast that when taken they are not always the best decisions. I hope that before the next crisis arises, before the problem hits us all in the face and before we are forced to do something quickly

541
and therefore perhaps not entirely in a thought-out manner, we shall take steps to begin to tackle our citizenship problems. I would suggest to your Lordships that one of the ways we might do this is to have a Joint Select Committee of both Houses to look at the problem, study it and to make recommendations; or perhaps just a Committee of your Lordships' House where we have so much experience and wisdom of these matters from the great servants of the Empire and Commonwealth. Between the Houses we might mount a very powerful team to look at this problem.
During the passage of the Immigration Bill 1971, the noble and learned Lord who sits on the Woolsack told the House:
"The law in relation to citizenship, immigration and status is in a state of utmost confusion."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 24/6/71, col. 1146.]
As those who followed that Bill will be aware, the Immigration Act of 1971 did nothing to improve the situation in regard to citizenship but only complicated the position, so that while what the noble and learned Lord said was true before the Bill was law, it is even more true now and I think we must begin to think out some of the very difficult decisions we will have to take on this subject before they are forced upon us. I believe that such a Joint Select Committee could do a great service by being a focus for collecting the relevant information and for making some practical recommendations in the light of evidence which it would collect which would in itself be something that could relieve anxiety, because people would feel that something was being done, someone was looking at the problem, and we were not waiting for the explosion which would force us to something drastic.
I hope I have been a mixture of Cassandra and Orpheus and that this debate will continue in the same vein. I feel that the fact that we have to have this debate at all shows that all is not entirely well with our immigration and citizenship laws. I believe the ideas I have ventured to suggest to your Lordships could be a small beginning to cutting down some of the anxiety and replacing it with a more confident certainty. I beg to move.
Moved, That this House takes note of the Statements of Immigration Rules for
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Control on and after Entry: Commonwealth Citizens and EEC and other Non-Commonwealth Nationals, made by the Secretary of State for the Home Department and laid before the House on January 25, 1973.—(Lord O'Hagan.)
3.32 p.m.
BARONESS WHITE: My Lords, I am sure we are grateful to the noble Lord Lord O'Hagan, for having provided us with an opportunity to have another look at the Immigration Rules, Rules which are slightly amended, although perhaps not as much as some of us would have wished, compared with those originally laid before us a little while ago. We look forward with keenest interest to hearing the two noble Lords who have chosen this occasion for making their maiden speeches. I am sure they will contribute greatly to our store of wisdom on what I think we all agree is a difficult and sensitive subject.
Looking back, I think one was perhaps more disturbed than one realised at the time of the statements made by the Home Secretary in another place on January 25 when he introduced these four sets of Rules to Parliament. When one considers the matter, it really is astonishing that a senior Minister of the Crown can say that it is important to reduce the immigration of citizens of other countries, both Commonwealth and non-Commonwealth, to the inescapable minimum when he is introducing a set of Immigration Rules which will in fact give, or extend, rights of immigration to this country to well over 200 million persons. I am speaking, of course, not only of the very large number who hypothetically would have the right to come here from the countries of the European Community, which admittedly make up the great majority of the figure I mentioned, but also of the additional rights given under these Rules to those Commonwealth citizens who can now provide, as Mr. Powell mentioned, the qualifying grandmother. There are other extensions not so significant but nevertheless included which will affect some people more favourably than others, particularly of course those who come for a working holiday, as it is called. This facility is now to be extended from three to five years. There will also be extensions of time limits for visitors; that factor is not discriminatory but could apply equally to everyone.

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The basic objections to the Rules very largely remain untouched in regard to this revised version. Some of your Lordships feel more strongly about this than others. They include the very favourable conditions for those coming here from the other Members of the European Community compared with Commonwealth citizens. Especially is this so in relation to the members of their families whom they are allowed to bring without let or hindrance, whereas Commonwealth citizens are not able so to do. May I remind your Lordships that a person coming here from Europe may bring in not only his wife and dependent children, but may also count as dependent children those up to the age of 21 rather than 18, which applies to the Commonwealth or, in certain circumstances in the Rules, strictly speaking only to those of 16 years of age. Such a person is also allowed to bring in parents and grandparents, again without having to comply with the extremely stringent conditions laid down in the Rules for citizens from other parts of the Commonwealth.
So it is with very mixed feelings that one still has to regard these Rules. The major change that has been made has been referred to by the noble Lord, Lord O'Hagan. It is what is called the "grandparent clause", and it has been included by the Government for reasons which politically are perfectly understandable. They were under great pressure from those who felt that some means must be found of indicating that we have a very special connection with persons from what, incorrectly, were called the old Commonwealth countries. Historically, that is not so. What was really meant was former white Dominions.
We ought just to examine the consequences of the Government having inserted this provision into the new Rules. I do not propose to quibble unduly about the constitutional propriety of putting into the Rules something quite deliberately reversed by Parliament when the principal Act on which these Rules are dependent went through Parliament. Parliament in its wisdom turned down the grandparent clause, and now it is brought in by the backdoor. It is just sufficiently different in law for the Government to be able to say that it is not
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in fact the precise provision that Parliament turned down. It is something of a legal quibble, but one can perhaps understand the political interests which led to the change. But I think one can fairly ask the Government whether, taking a slightly longer view, it has been worth making this change. I do so partly in the light of the statement by the Home Secretary on January 25, when he said, as I think we would all accept, that the actual number of persons likely to come to Great Britain for settlement from Australia, New Zealand and Canada is, in practice, likely to be few.
It was emphasised last week in the debate on these Rules in another place that in fact, if one looks at what has happened over the past few years, there has been a considerable net outflow from Britain of people from Australia, Canada and New Zealand who came here either just as visitors, or who came, did not really like it, and went home again. The figures suggest that net outflow of citizens from these countries has been about 250,000 in the past six years or so, so the numbers concerned in practice are going to be very small. And, of course, because it is linked not to citizenship of these particular countries, but to the grandparents of the persons concerned, the provision, while it may be gratifying to those who have the necessary grandparent, may also be regarded, and we understand has been regarded, as insulting by those Canadians, Australians and New Zealanders who do not have such a grandparent, although they are full and proper citizens of the countries concerned. This is making a distinction between citizens of those countries which is far from being acceptable to all the population there including, for example, French Canadians and others who would not be able to claim this right although their next door neighbours are able to do so. The excuse given by the Home Secretary for bringing in the grandparent was:
"that we need not in any way feel ourselves wrong in recognising close and genuine recent family ties with this country."
Well, my Lords, family ties, as we mentioned on an earlier occasion, could go back at least 150 years, which is not exactly recent. And, as against the kind of very distant and remote connection, one has far closer and live connection of people who are here but whose close

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living relatives are not allowed to join them except under the most stringent conditions.
The real objections, however, to having reinserted the grandparent clause is that it gives the appearance to people overseas of being racially biassed. I know again that it can be said that it is not so in form, but in practice, at least in the fairly near future, it is bound to appear to be so; and I think it has made things much more difficult, for example, in countries like India, which recognise that these particular provisions are directed not to help their former citizens, but those of other countries in the Commonwealth who are predominantly white. I very much doubt whether, even at the price of purchasing peace within their own Party, the Government were justified in putting back this grandparent clause.
Having said that, I should like to ask one or two questions as to just how the Government expect the provisions in the Rules to work. We have had issued almost simultaneously with the Rules some notes from the Department of Employment on the work permit scheme. I think it would be helpful if these could be enlarged upon a little so that we may know exactly what is the policy of the Government. For example, it is said that:
"Permits will be issued in future only for work requiring professional qualification, skill or experience and where the employment of an overseas worker is necessary."
There are a few exceptions. The exception for Malta we all know and accept; and there are certain exceptions for seasonal agricultural work, hotel employment and the like. But, broadly speaking, the provision is as I have said. I think we are entitled to ask that if such provisions are made they shall be firmly and equitably administered. When we were discussing this on an earlier occasion, the Minister of State may recall that I mentioned the people from the Philippines who had come here, as it seemed to me, quite unjustifiably, more particularly when at that time we were concerned with Asians from East Africa who could well to my mind, have been trained to do any work that the Filipino ladies have been doing. I was astonished to find from a Question which the noble Lord, Lord O'Hagan, put down recently that last year work permits were given to no fewer than
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2,677 persons from the Philippines, some of them, it has been revealed, coming to work here under most unsatisfactory conditions, both at low pay, and being obliged to enter into a bond, if they could not stand the working conditions here and did not stay for the necessary period, to repay their air fare, which for a distance of that kind must be quite substantial, out of their own pockets. When we have all the fuss that has been made over the Uganda Asians and others coming here, and when one finds this significant number of young women are imported for the benefit of certain manufacturers in this country, at low wages and with unsatisfactory living conditions—and particularly having regard to this question of the bond, which seems to have escaped all scrutiny by the Department of Employment, or whoever it was who was responsible—then one feels that a certain element of hypocrisy enters into this. We shall be happy to have assurances from the Minister of State when he comes to reply that there will be a stricter concern over conditions under which people are brought to work in this country.
Then, my Lords, there are some other matters in relation to the Rules which it would be helpful if we could have cleared up. I should be interested to know a little more about the matter of extending the working holiday (as it is called) from three years to five years. Five years is a very long time for a holiday of any kind. One would like to know what kind of work is contemplated as being permissible. There is no mention of these working holidaymakers in these notes on the work permit scheme that were issued last month. Nor is there any definition, so far as I can find, of what is meant by the word "young" in Rule 28 of the Statement of Immigration Rules for Control of Entry. There is reference to "young Common wealth citizens", but we are not told what that means. There is something about which we should be a little clearer, because again it is expected that these working holidays will be indulged in mostly by those who are white members of the Commonwealth, from Australia, Canada and New Zealand—they will not actually exclude others—and it appears as if this is a backdoor concession, in addition to the grandparent concession. I do not wish to be misunderstood. I

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have no objection to young people coming in and extending their experience by being in this country, but I do not think we should give the impression that we are doing something in a hole-and-corner way, and therefore we should know precisely what are the conditions contemplated.
In earlier discussions on these matters some of us felt fairly strongly about the bias against women in a number of these rules. Some of the points, following protests made on earlier occasions, have been slightly modified. For example, with regard to family deportation, the woman concerned, if her husband is deported, is not given any actual further substantial rights, but the instructions that the conditions which are to be taken into account in making decisions have been somewhat modified, and for that we are grateful. But there are one or two curious conditions which makes one wonder just how the mind of the Government works. For example, in his statement on January 25, as I understood it, the Home Secretary took credit for one of his four main points when he was describing the Rules. He said that Commonwealth citizens who marry women who reside here will themselves be admitted for settlement provided they had a grandparent born here—obviously trying to get some credit for doing something for women who reside here and who are perplexed about the way in which they have been treated.
In that case, of course, these men were entitled to come here anyway, and whether they are married or not or proposed to marry over here or not is neither here nor there. It seems quite absurd to appear to be taking credit for some concession and for rectifying the bias against women whereas when one analyses the supposed concession one finds there is no such thing. I do not wish to weary the House by going into further details, since the matter is really rather complex.
A number of other questions have been asked, one of them being about the various estimates of the numbers of categories of citizens who are now here. The Sunday Times a few weeks ago suggested that there were six categories. My own calculation is that there must be at least eight categories of persons who are concerned under these Rules. I was much
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interested in the final suggestion of the noble Lord, Lord O'Hagan, that we in Parliament should do what we could to examine and to expedite a review of the law of citizenship. I am well aware that the right honourable gentleman the Home Secretary has said that a Departmental study is proceeding on this matter. That is all well and good, but this state of affairs has now been going on for a very long time. It would be extremely interesting to hear the view of the Government on the suggestion that Parliament itself might be able to expedite the matter. If any suitable terms of reference can be worked out for a Select Committee from this House or for a Joint Select Committee with another place, I am sure I can speak for my noble friends on this side of the House in saying we should be very happy to co-operate with it.
3.53 p.m.
LORD PORRITT: My Lords, I crave the indulgence and forbearance of this noble House for a maiden speech, an experience which I am intrigued to find, despite the fact that I have reached and indeed passed the biblical age of three score years and ten, is as abrasive as that of a new boy going to school for the first time. Not unnaturally, I paid particular attention to what I hope I may call the "model maiden" made by the noble Duke, the Duke of Marlborough, about two weeks ago. I would hope to emulate his timing and brevity, but in choosing to take part in this discussion I cannot really claim to have eschewed a contentious subject. However, I am sure that your Lordships will agree that, referring to the debate in which the noble Duke spoke, we were all made fully aware that even in a simple matter concerning the protection of the humble badger it was possible to produce a remarkable number of divergent opinions.
When I went to New Zealand some five years ago as the representative of Her Majesty, I was delightfully and tactfully advised that in any pronouncements I chose to make it would be wise not to allow them to be labelled "political" or "contentious". This I found, frankly, to be quite impossible; and it is for that reason that I have to-day taken a calculated chance in speaking to this particular Motion. After all, I think your Lordships will agree that it is difficult in to-day's world to find any subject which

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is not contentious, or controversial—and probably it is a good thing that this should be so. I intend to deal only with those portions of the revised Immigration Rules for control on entry and after entry as they apply to Commonwealth citizens, and especially to New Zealand citizens. For these latter, I feel entitled to speak both from a birth qualification and from a very intimate knowledge of the country, its people and its way of life that I have been fortunate enough to glean in the last few years; but I hope your Lordships will agree that what I have to say applies in varying degrees to other Commonwealth countries, and particularly to the old Dominions.
First of all, I feel it would be churlish not to express appreciation of the valiant efforts of the right honourable gentleman the Home Secretary to mix oil and water. That there is some improvement in the revised Rules of January 25, 1973, one must admit: that there is not enough results from the fact that, under existing conditions, the path of the Home Secretary is very like that which Agag had to tread. In this connection we are dealing with people—in the case of New Zealanders, with our own kith and kin It would be very easy to treat the problem in a sentimental way, but I believe I am right in saying that this has already been done in this noble House. Your Lordships may also feel that the very word "Maiden", referring to a speech, carries a concept of sentimentality. I would personally prefer to consider sentiments in their literal meaning of "feelings", and would humbly suggest that often the feelings of people outweigh in value the facts of pounds and new pennies.
I think it is a consideration of such values in this mercenary, material, fast-moving and mechanised world in which we live that motivates the youth (the often sadly undisciplined youth) of to-day. They, quite often thoughtfully and honestly, object to restrictions and limitations on their activities which they consider unnecessary. I believe that New Zealanders and others will look upon even these revised Rules governing entry to this country in a rather similar way, Let us remember that during the whole of the 140 years of its British history, New Zealand was born in and has lived by British tradition: its way of life, de
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fence commitments, trade connections and cultural interests have all been inherently British. It is therefore unthinkable to the New Zealander that he should not be admitted freely to the country which he still calls, almost reflexly, "home" "the old country" or "the Mother country".
Searching through the intricate and involved phraseology of the revised Rules, one finds only one clause, Clause 27, which provides for anything approaching free entry—this is the clause which has been referred to by the noble Baroness, Lady White—and which applies to those who are so-called "patrials", or now the "grand-patrials". Is it appreciated that even this small group will in the course of nature become extinct in the next generation, or most certainly by the end of the century? For them at the moment the original insult has been tactfully converted into an inconvenience or an annoyance, though the hurt remains; but for their children—British children, my Lords—it will be a case, as it is now for non-patrials, of multiple restrictions and limitation of entry, the necessity of producing innumerable forms of various descriptions from various official Departments, of carrying birth and marriage certificates, confirmation of financial solvency and good conduct medals. And if and when they do gain entry, they will be limited as to the time that can be spent in the country, and restricted as to what they can do with that time. It would seem that under the existing Rules they will probably spend most of such time as is allowed to them in seeking extension of stay or removal of restrictions on their activities. Does any other country in the world put up such barriers against its own people?
My Lords, I would not for one moment plead a special case for New Zealand; such a connotation to-day, as your Lordships know, has an unpleasant aroma. I suggest, therefore, that there is no case at all. While one appreciates that exceptions make bad laws, it is usually admitted that the best of rules must allow for them. I must say that I find it an odd thought that had these Rules been in existence fifty years ago when I came to this country, I should probably have gained entry under the patrial clause, but I should almost certainly have been denied the privilege of addressing this

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noble House to-day. If I am to live with my conscience I must wholeheartedly support this Motion, and hope that it may lead to some constructive action.
4.2 p.m.
LORD FOOT: My Lords, it falls to my happy lot to be able to be the first to express pleasure and satisfaction to the noble Lord, Lord Porritt, on his maiden speech to which we have just listened. The attention that the House has given to it, and the clear interest which the House has shown in every word the noble Lord has spoken to us, will have conveyed already to him how much his speech has been appreciated. I took the precaution, when I saw that I was to follow the noble Lord, of having a look at his record in a well-known work of reference. I came across one item in the vast list of achievements and positions that the noble Lord has occupied which particulary interested me: I see he was a Brigadier in the Royal Army Medical Corps in the 21st Army Group. That enables me to point out that I have therefore a very remote and tenuous connection with the noble Lord. It so happened that for a short period of time I was attached to a brigade field ambulance under the authority at the top of the 21st Army Group. Therefore, in a remote sense I am able this afternoon to salute my very superior senior officer after a period of thirty years. It is an opportunity which I take with great satisfaction.
In discussing this subject which the noble Lord, Lord O'Hagan, has raised, my mind goes back to the debate that we had in this House on Second Reading of the Immigration Bill in 1971. I have looked back to see how the Act was commended to us at that time by the noble Lord, Lord Windlesham, who was in charge of the measure on behalf of the Government. I was particularly interested to remind myself of the objectives and the criteria which the noble Lord, Lord Windlesham, offered to the House as being the justification of that Bill.
The noble Lord attached particular importance to three criteria. The first criterion was that he thought it would be universally agreed that there was a general desirability of setting out clearly and simply in one comprehensive Statute the law controlling immigration into this country. The second criterion was that the Bill and the law should be as short
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and explicit as possible. The third criterion, and the most important for my present purposes, was that the Bill, the noble Lord said, proposed a new, single—and I emphasise the word "single"—system of control over all immigration—and I emphasise the words "all immigration"—from overseas to which everyone would be subject, except the patrials. That was the objective which was given to us when we first discussed that Bill in this House not so long ago.
I welcome the Rules which we now have in front of us on one count at least—and possibly on only one count—because if one reads the Rules one finds that they spell out perfectly clearly how the Government have utterly failed to meet the criteria which were laid down at the very beginning by which we could judge whether they had succeeded in their purpose. The first objective was clear and simple. I suggest it would challenge the ingenuity of anyone to produce a set of Rules more obscure, more difficult and more complicated than we have in these papers. On the matter of brevity, we have no fewer than 73 pages of these Rules. On the matter of explicitness, I simply ask this question. Is there any noble Lord here, with the exception of the Minister, who is always fully aware of everything, who could put his hand on his heart, having read these Rules, and say that he understands them all and understands all their implications?
Then, what of the criterion that there should be one single system of control for all immigrants, except patrials? That is completely in tatters; it has gone to the winds. The Community and Race Relations unit of the British Council of Churches have made an examination of these Rules, and in doing that they have succeeded in identifying no fewer than eight different categories of people, of potential entrants to this country, who are differently treated under these regulations, either on entry, or after entry, or sometimes in both situations. How can it possibly be contended that Rules that produce that result fulfil the test of being a single system applicable to all?
The fact that the Government have not succeeded in that is demonstrated by the fact that they have seen fit to issue two sets of Rules, one for dealing with Commonwealth immigrants and one for dealing with others. If this is a single system

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of control applicable undiscriminatingly to everybody, why is it necessary to set the Rules out in different places? What has happened here is not that the Government have simply failed in their objective, not that they have set out to try to devise a single system where everybody will be treated equally. I am afraid I have to suggest that it is not for want of trying that the Government have not done that; it is because the Government quite deliberately set out to build in these Rules a great edifice of discrimination and distinction. Therefore, it is not surprising to find that since the Government have fallen so far short of their own objective, these Rules are full of every kind of anomaly and absurdity.
It would be tedious to try to enumerate them, but may I just point to two examples? What could be more without rhyme and reason than the arrangements by which a third generation Australian who happens to be lucky enough to have had a British grandparent is regarded by the Government and by these Rules as having closer family ties with this country than a Commonwealth citizen whose family are already here as of right? That is what the Rules say. And what could be more ludicrous, as a test of whether a Commonwealth citizen is entitled to join his wife here—a British subject—than simply whether he happened to have a British grandparent?
I suggest that these Rules and the Act itself are based upon three major pretences. The first is the one about which I have been speaking: the pretence that there has been a genuine attempt to arrive at a simple, undiscriminating system of immigration control applicable to all people. The second pretence, I suggest, is that the Rules and the Act itself do not distinguish people on grounds of race or colour. And the third pretence is, as Mr. Carr put it in another place:
"The Rules reflect the Government's determination to ensure strict control of immigration"
as such: that is the immigration of all kinds of people; not merely coloured people, not merely Commonwealth citizens, but strict control of the immigration of all classes of entrants.
The noble Baroness, Lady White, has already pointed out that theoretically these Rules and the Act of Parliament
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allow for the first time the potential entry of 200 million people. She would no doubt agree that that is a theoretical figure but there are certain figures which are far from theoretical. The 1971 Act itself opened the door, for the first time since we introduced control in 1962, to some 4 million to 5 million patrial Commonwealth citizens. Until this Act came into force those people had no such free right of entry. Then under the amended Rule about grandparents the door has been opened in the same way, giving almost complete freedom of entry to what has been estimated to be another 8 million people—that is, 8 million non-patrial Commonwealth citizens. How can it possibly be contended with any sort of sense that these Rules and this Act reflect the Government's determination to ensure strict control of immigration? Before passing from that subject I think we ought to contrast another figure with those two figures. Those are the figures of the way in which the door has been opened, but there are about a quarter of a million United Kingdom passport holders who, under the Act and under the regulations, remain subject to the rigid control of the special voucher system.
I have listened, as I have no doubt everybody did, with interest to the proposal made by the noble Lord, Lord O'Hagan, that it might be helpful, and certainly would do no harm, if a Select Committee were set up consisting of Members of both Houses to study the problem of our citizenship law. While I would not be able to speak as to whether that is the most appropriate procedure for tackling the problem, I would certainly agree that until we get our citizenship law tidied up we shall not arrive at any kind of sane and sensible immigration control. Therefore, in principle, I am wholly with the noble Lord in thinking that this matter ought to be looked at urgently and should indeed have been looked at a long time ago. It is my opinion that these present Rules, because of their absurdities, anomalies and discrimination cannot last. In saying that I do not mean that they are unworkable, because anything is workable. However unfair and however indecent, one can always make it work. What I hope is that with the passage of time the British people, who are, as I still believe, fair minded and decent people, will come to the conclusion that these Rules, so

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discriminating and so absurd, can no longer be tolerated.
4.16 p.m.
LORD THURLOW: My Lords, the diffidence with which a newcomer to your Lordships' ranks addresses your Lordships is increased in my case by the experience that I had 15 years ago when I was asked to address a group of Peers within the precincts and omitted to obtain the leave of my boss. On returning to Whitehall I was summoned and ceremoniously dismissed from Her Majesty's service. I hope that addressing you to-day has not the same hazards. I should perhaps add that I was reappointed half a minute later.
I gladly accept the status that the noble Lord, Lord O'Hagan, suggested, as an adopted son of Cassandra and Orpheus. It seems to me that the Rules satisfactorily meet the position in the short run, not because they are the final masterpiece of human wisdom on the subject but because within the framework of existing nationalities, legislation and our European commitments they can be regarded as a fair compromise. But surely they can be regarded only as a stop-gap to patch up the old suit until the tailor can produce a new suit of a cloth and style suited to modern conditions. It has been my privilege over the last thirty years to serve in I think all the major Commonwealth capitals as well as in Whitehall: in Canada and New Zealand, in India, in African capitals and in the Caribbean. It is not without embarrassment that I look back on some of the episodes in the context of immigration control. I recall when I represented the Government in New Zealand in 1962 the belief of the Government at the time was that the restrictions would not have a significant effect on depriving people of bona fide movement, and we let that view be known. The Rules before your Lordships' House are a considerable gesture to the views previously expressed in debate here and elsewhere, but this labyrinth surely cannot be regarded as a permanent structure. Other Governments, as the noble Baroness and the noble Lord, Lord Porritt, pointed out are uneasy about the patrial formula. It creates awkwardness in integrating their own communities. I do not underrate the difficulties of producing a final and
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satisfactory solution. The views of India, African countries and others must be given due weight if wider British interests are not to be prejudiced.
I therefore warmly endorse the proposal of the noble Lord, Lord O'Hagan, that the whole subject of our nationality legislation should be reviewed. The contortions which we have been obliged to go through, and which our unfortunate immigration officers have to try to implement under the Rules, stem largely from the failure to face the realities when framing the 1948 legislation. It was thought then that a few new legal definitions would dispose of the problem of technicalities and that no practical problems need arise. I believe that the views expressed to-day and previously in Parliament have shown that for practical purposes the old system has broken down. It is desirable, therefore, and will be helpful I am sure, if the noble Viscount, Lord Colville of Culross, will consider taking steps to initiate a review such as that proposed by the noble Lord, Lord O'Hagan. If a Joint Select Committee is not the right method, some other means could be found. I venture to suggest that a departmental review is not enough because in my experience departmental committees are not the best suited to the grasping of nettles, especially nettles which have political overtones.
I thank your Lordships for listening so patiently. I hope that for addressing you on this occasion I shall not be sacked.
4.23 p.m.
THE EARL OF CORK AND ORRERY: My Lords, may I begin by associating myself with everything that has been so admirably said by the noble Lord, Lord Foot, on the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Porritt, in regard to whom I wish to add my admiration, respect and hope for the future.
It is with a strange mixture of pleasure and sorrow, the one every bit as genuine as the other, that I find myself the first person in your Lordships' House to utter the familiar words "the noble Lord, Lord Thurlow" with a new meaning. The death of Harry Thurlow was something which caused great sorrow to a great many Members of your Lordships' House, and those I know will be the first of a large number of people to experience pleasure and to extend a welcome to his

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brother. I know also that I have the House with me when I venture, I hope not impertinently, to congratulate him on his maiden speech, a speech of enormous clarity and, as one might expect from so distinguished and long-experienced a proconsul, of authority. I hope that we may have many more opportunities of hearing such speeches in the future.
The noble Lord, Lord Porritt, was speaking particularly from the angle of New Zealand and it is somewhere in that region that I wish to take my stand also, though on a somewhat wider area than the old Dominions. We can be fairly certain that if the noble Lord, Lord Clifford of Chudleigh, were here this afternoon he would certainly be speaking on behalf of the peoples of all of the old Dominions, particularly Australia and New Zealand. He is, however, in Australia and writes to me sending me, among other things, a quotation from a leading article in a newspaper, the West Australian, which says of these Rules:
"They are totally unacceptable. Those who have been loyalist longest become in effect aliens."
That I take to refer to those who because they, their parents and grandparents were born in the Dominions are not patrial and have not the right of abode. They do not benefit under the interesting new law that has been described as saying that the dog born in a stable is a horse. But none the less, they have retained from generation to generation their loyalty to the Mother Country.
I do not mean to pursue that line directly beyond making the point, which I believe your Lordships will concede that I make on good authority, that clearly in Australia at any rate there is still some bitterness over the Act and the manner in which it will operate through these Rules. The words I particularly fix on in the noble Lord's letter are these:
"The only answer is our reciprocal arrangement'."
Those last two words are in inverted commas. I confess that when I read that I thought that my old friend was barking up the wrong gum tree. My immediate thought was that reciprocity was alas! among the deader ducks. But something has happened since to show me that my judgment was over-hasty. Noble Lords will doubtless remember the word
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"reciprocity" which emerged as a new word in connection with immigration in the course of the Committee stage of the debate on what is now the Act of 1971. It was the noble Lord, Lord Clifford of Chudleigh, who introduced it and embodied the idea of reciprocity in an Amendment of which I may perhaps very lightly sketch in the history. It gave rise to ding-dong arguments, was seen to be unsatisfactory, and was withdrawn.
The word reappeared at the Report stage in an improved Amendment which was moved by me, the noble Lord, Lord Clifford of Chudleigh, being at that moment in Brazil. According to that Amendment the concept of reciprocity is very briefly this: a Commonwealth country is to be designated as reciprocal if, over a period of three years, that country has received from us more immigrants than we have received from it. A citizen of that country can apply to the Home Secretary for United Kingdom citizenship by registration, and with it the right of abode, after he has dwelt among us for two years, whereas for a citizen of any other Commonwealth country the minimum qualifying period is not two years but five. Countries that at present would be affected by that amendment would be Canada, Australia and New Zealand, though it is conceivable that others may turn out to be so affected later. It operates without regard to race or colour, indeed without regard to anything other than the simple arithmetic of the immigration figures. There will be no releasing anyone from immigration control because the right that the reciprocal immigrant would enjoy would be solely that of applying for registration. The Secretary of State retains the power to refuse it on grounds of undesirability. I need not enlarge on that thumbnail sketch because it is not my purpose in any way to reopen that debate.
To proceed with the history of the matter: I divided the House on that Amendment and, despite a most powerful and effective speech by my noble friend Lord Brooke of Cumnor, it was defeated by 118 votes to 21—nearly six to one. A resounding defeat, you may say. Nor in some ways was such a result to be wondered at, particularly in view of the attitude of the Government. I will quote a couple of the more trenchant remarks

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made by my noble friend Lord Aberdare in his reply. He said:
"We consider, … that we could not possibly accept this Amendment without breaching one of the main principles to which we hold, which is that it has never been the policy of any British Government to discriminate between one Commonwealth country and another."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 11/10/71; col. 275.]
And again:
"I do not think that we should be justified in discriminating between one Commonwealth country and another. If we were to do so I think it would cause damage to the whole concept of the Commonwealth, and I can only advise your Lordships not to accept this Amendment."—[col. 278.]
Do your Lordships wonder that I thought our poor little reciprocity idea must be regarded as defunct? I am ashamed now of my faintness of heart, for it appears it was only stunned.
Last week the same Rules were debated in another place and the Home Secretary took part. I will quote from what he said, which was somewhat different from the remarks I have just quoted from Lord Aberdare. What he said was of such a striking character that I venture to repeat (I am sorry to say) one whole column of his speech, and this is it:
"I was glad to hear the right hon. Member for Stepney, while rejecting a grand parental connection as a qualification, say he believed it was right to have some special relationship recognised with those countries in the Commonwealth which are peculiarly British. I do not admit that it is in any way racial or prejudicial to admit openly what is a clear fact. I was glad to hear the right hon. Gentleman say that, I was hoping that he would have gone on to say what sort of connection this might have been, because that is what we all ponder and, so far, ponder without much flash of enlightenment. This is what we promised to explore.
"Since those pledges were given my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister has had discussions both in this country and in Canada with the Canadian Prime Minister.
"Concerning Australia and New Zealand, officials from the Home Office and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office went to Australia and New Zealand in the second half of January to have talks at official level in preparation for the visit at the beginning of February of my noble Friend the Secretary of State for Defence, who discussed these matters with the Prime Ministers of New Zealand and Australia and, of course, other Ministers particularly concerned in their Governments. I should also make clear that there have been diplomatic
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contacts on this subject with other Commonwealth countries.
"The upshot is that the subject—when I talk about the subject. I include discussion of reciprocity which, although it can have different meanings, was one sort of special recognition which hon. Members were suggesting in the last debate—has only just been opened up, and we have not by a long way carried these explorations to finality. I cannot, therefore, give any firm, let alone final, report. However, it is fair to point out that each of the three countries—Canada, Australia and New Zealand—see considerable difficulty in coming to bilateral or even multilateral reciprocal arrangements on this subject. It would be misleading the House to pretend that there is no difficulty or to let it think that if there is difficulty it is particularly on the United Kingdom's side. All three countries have considerable difficulty in this matter and we shall be pursuing it with them further."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, (Commons) 21/2/73; cols. 592/3.]
In those words my right honourable friend the Home Secretary presents us with the spectacle of the Government standing on its head. Six months ago he was holding up his hands in pious horror at the suggestion which I, and others in both Houses who thought as I did, had the temerity, if not the bad taste, to put forward. Now we learn that this suggestion, with others designed to bring about a special relationship with countries which are peculiarly British—the Home Secretary's own words—are discussed by our Prime Minister with the Prime Minister of Canada, are discussed at Cabinet level with the Governments of Australia and Canada and are discussed at diplomatic level with other countries of the Commonwealth. I am greatly heartened; so much so as to say that I think the Government shows to greater advantage standing on its head than it did when it was what it used to consider to be the right way up. May it continue in this becomingly antipodian pose!
If it should turn out that the difficulties are, after all, too great, may it be made very widely known in the countries affected and concerned that the difficulties were not all of our making, and that failure, if it should come about, does not arise from any lack of good will on the part of the British Government or Parliament or people. If the reciprocity principle, or something like it, should be found eventually to be workable, then I believe that a great blot will have been removed from the Bill and from these otherwise, as I see them, generally reasonable Rules.
4.35 p.m.
LORD GARNER: My Lords, at the outset I should like to be allowed to pay my tribute to what I am sure all noble Lords will agree were two very remarkable maiden speeches this afternoon. It gives me personally particular pleasure to do so because both the noble Lords, Lord Porritt and Lord Thurlow, have devoted their services to the Commonwealth, which has been my own life work, and Lord Thurlow has been a lifelong colleague and friend. I thought both of them addressed themselves to the subject with remarkable force and frankness, and indeed with great felicity of language, and I am sure all of us will hope to hear from them on many occasions again.
My Lords, I do not propose to speak at any length on this subject. I gave some views at considerable length when the Bill was first under discussion and when the Rules were first introduced. The only point that I wish to repeat is one that the noble Lord, Lord O'Hagan, has already made this afternoon; namely, that we cannot hope to make sense out of our immigration legislation until we have put some degree of order into our law of citizenship. This is a big subject which needs very careful going into, and I would very strongly support the suggestion that this should be done. Whether a Select Committee is necessarily the right answer I would not be able to judge. It seems to me that probably what is needed is a combination of the virtues of the Select Committee, which can take a broad view on a broad political issue, without some of the handicaps of the inter-Departmental committee which the noble Lord, Lord Thurlow, was decrying. What is needed, in addition to the broad brush, is technical assistance and legal advice on what in fact the very complicated law at present is. But however it is done, I trust that the Government will think of this very seriously so that a new view can be taken.
As to the Rules themselves, I think I can give three cheers for the revision of the Rules dealing with aliens on the one hand and Commonwealth citizens on the other. I think this is right for three reasons. First, it is right on grounds of substance. There are differences in the treatment of the two. They are not in many cases as broad or as wide or as
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distinct as I and perhaps many others would like to see them, but nevertheless there are distinctions, and it is right that they should be recognised. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, I think psychologically it was of great importance to have this division of treatment, and I think it was the fact that they were all bundled together in one Regulation at the earlier stage that gave rise to the complaints that Commonwealth citizens were all being put in the same bag as aliens. Thirdly, there is the technical advantage that if you want to make changes—and several speeches to-day have indicated that changes may well be desirable—in respect of Commonwealth citizens or aliens, then you can do so without affecting the entire immigration procedures.
I think I can give two cheers for the statement about British passport holders. I can fully accept the reasons why it was found necessary for the Government to issue the warning that they did, and I do not myself see any inconsistency between that and the clear statement that they have made about accepting the British passport holders from Uganda when the crisis there arose.
Finally, I would give perhaps one cheer for the concessions which have been made in the various directions that have been suggested. I think here that perhaps I ought to make a confession, and I am sorry that the noble Lord, Lord Clifford, is not here to hear it. I have come to the conclusion that I, like many others, probably have sacrificed too long on the altar of non-discrimination and made too much of a fetish of it. I have now come to the view—and have for some time—that really there has been an element of hypocrisy in our actions and perhaps our sayings, and that there really is no reason why we should not make access easier for people who want to come to this country (not necessarily for permanent settlement) because they have a close association and a natural feeling for it. I therefore welcome the general principle which the Home Secretary asserted.
Where I think one runs into difficulty, as other speakers have suggested, is when one tries to put this principle into practice. I admit that it is an extraordinarily difficult matter. One would not wish

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specifically to object to two of the suggestions that have been made but one cannot regard them as ideal. The extension of the grandparental connection is obviously a completely artificial arrangement and, moreover, as we know, it is felt to be divisive in some of the Commonwealth countries that will benefit from it. I am bound to confess that to talk of a working holiday going on for five years seems to be an extraordinary misnomer. Nevertheless, one must be grateful for small mercies. I think that these are steps in the right direction and that the Government's heart is in the right place, although I am not satisfied that they have necessarily found absolutely the right way to put the ideas into practice.
I would conclude by expressing gratitude to the noble Lord, Lord O'Hagan, for giving us the opportunity to debate this Motion. I do not think that anyone would wish at this stage to throw the Orders out, but this debate has given us the opportunity to raise some points, and I dare say that, in the light of experience, we may want to come back to them from time to time. I would only hope that the Government will pay serious attention to some of the quite serious anxieties that have been expressed during this discussion.
4.42 p.m.
LORD BROCKWAY: My Lords, may I join with others in thanking the noble Lord, Lord O'Hagan, for moving this Motion this afternoon. He ended with certain constructive proposals, to which I want to refer before I conclude. I should like to take this opportunity of saying to him that I hope that now he has the distinction of being a Member of the European Parliament, he may be able to raise in that Assembly dynamic issues such as he has raised this afternoon.
LORD O'HAGAN: My Lords, may I interrupt the noble Lord, Lord Brockway, just to correct him? One of the first things I did when I arrived there was to put down a Question to the Council of Ministers about putting pressure on the British Government to reunite Ugandan Asian families. I have reason to believe that this returned via the proper channels, to the Cabinet Office at this end.
LORD BROCKWAY: My Lords, I appreciate that intervention. It is now over ten years that we have been discussing Immigration Acts, Regulations and Rules. The noble Lord, Lord Garner, who has just spoken, used the word "hypocrisy". I think that there has been a little hypocrisy in our whole attitude when we have discussed these issues. We have described it as "immigration control". It has not been immigration control at all; it has been colour and racialist control. Since the last world war, except for two years, more people have emigrated from this country than have come into this country. If we were honest with ourselves we would recognise that this series of Acts, Regulations and Rules has really concentrated on the issue of race and of colour.
In saying that, I recognise the necessity for some control. While we have nation States in the world, Governments have the right to decide what immigration there shall be according to the economic and social circumstances of their countries. Indeed, even when we have a World Government there may be some necessity for the control of migration into the more densely populated areas from those which are less populated. I want to urge very strongly indeed that, when we are considering the control of immigration, it should not be on the grounds of race, colour or sex. I add "sex" because I recognise the change that Her Majesty's Government have made in relation to sex. At last they have agreed that the 300 husbands who have wives here may come to this country, when before they only allowed wives to join their husbands. They have now recognised sexual equality in that respect and no longer regard the wife as the mere chattel of her husband.
In the two maiden speeches that have been delivered—and I want to congratulate the noble Lords on those speeches, and express some sympathy with them in having passed the ordeal—and in the speech of the noble Earl, Lord Cork and Orrery, we have had the argument that special provision should be made for those who have left this country and gone to the Dominions. I want to say at once that I recognise there is some strength in the kith and kin argument. I recognise that when people have gone from this country to Dominions overseas and

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still feel that Britain is their homeland there is a special case to be made in their favour. However, I think that the House must also recognise that a change is now taking place in the psychology of the Dominions. This is particularly indicated in what has happened in Australia in recent weeks. In the Dominions now there is less sense of belonging to the homeland than of asserting their own nationality. The number of people in the Dominions who have this sense of belonging to the homeland is decreasing, and is becoming limited to the older generation in the Dominions. As we make new Rules for immigration I hope we shall allow, as indeed these Rules accept, that there should be grounds for people coming here on the basis of their domestic relations with families in this country, as well as because of their technical capacities. If you apply those two conditions to the citizens of the Dominions you will find that the proportion of those who fulfil them is undoubtedly greater than in respect of other territories.
Having said that, I want to say that we have very special responsibilities for Commonwealth citizens who come from territories other than the Dominions. Sometimes the demarcation is described as the "old Commonwealth" and the "new Commonwealth", but those terms are misnomers. The oldest territories in the British Commonwealth are not the Dominions but the Caribbean territories, the West Indian territories; and if the length of association with our Commonwealth is to be regarded as a reason why their citizens should have the opportunity to come to this country, the claim of the Caribbean islands, the West Indies, is greater than that of the Dominions. But, in addition, there is this reason why we have a special responsibility for citizens of the Commonwealth who are not part of the Dominions. For 300 years we have occupied these colonial territories, and during that time we have used them to provide our foodstuffs and our raw materials but we have failed to build up balanced economies. The consequence has been wretched poverty and the heavy unemployment that there is in those territories now. Our 300 years' rule of those territories places upon us a special responsibility to give their people opportunities in life.
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I want to turn to one other point which has not been mentioned in this debate but which is frequently in the minds of people as they discuss this issue; that is, the fact that in our cities—in Birmingham, in Wolverhampton and in parts of London—there are now ghettoes occupied by non-white Commonwealth immigrants which are in appalling conditions of overcrowding and destitution, and opinion is motivated against the resident immigrants as being responsible for those conditions. The answer came rather surprisingly—and I welcomed it—in a speech by Mr. Robert Carr quite recently. In that speech he said that if there were not a single Commonwealth immigrant within those "inner cities", the conditions would be exactly the same: there would be the same shortage of housing, the same poverty, the same destitution, the same frustration which leads to violence. Commonwealth immigrants have been made the scapegoats for our shortage of housing, for our unemployment and for our social conditions. Before they came those conditions existed in this country, and they would exist in our "inner cities" now, whether the Commonwealth immigrants were here or not.
In conclusion, I want to turn to the constructive proposals which the noble Lord, Lord O'Hagan, has made. He was absolutely right when he described the chaos of nationality recognition and of citizenship: citizens of the United Kingdom, citizens of the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth, protected persons in the Commonwealth, residents in the Commonwealth who have declined to accept the nationality of their territories and who have remained British citizens. There is absolute chaos, and of course we should give consideration to the problems. The noble Lord has proposed a Joint Select Committee of another place and this House. It may very well be that that is the best method of dealing with the problem.
I would say only that the solution of the problem is not for the British Parliament alone; it is for the whole Commonwealth. It may be said that representatives of the Commonwealth could give evidence to a Select Committee. I believe that an American citizen has even given evidence to our

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own Select Committee on Sex Discrimination; and we should welcome that. But that is not enough. I am among those who have repeatedly urged in this House that there should be a conference of Commonwealth countries on this issue of migration and nationality. We are to have in Ottawa in August the Conference of Commonwealth Prime Ministers, and I would urge Her Majesty's Government to see that on the agenda is this whole issue of nationality, citizenship, migration, emigration and immigration. Because it is only if we co-operate with Commonwealth countries that we shall be able to solve this issue in a way which is approachable and constructive, not only for this country but for their peoples as well.
4.58 p.m.
LORD GORE-BOOTH: My Lords, may I join with other noble Lords in expressing both welcome and admiration to the two noble Lords who have made their maiden speeches? I found the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Porritt, particularly moving, because I have just been to New Zealand for the first time in my life and I think that, while the New Zealanders are not professional extroverts, somehow they and their beautiful country give one a feeling for their country, to which he referred, in a very short time indeed. What he said had a very direct human appeal. It was also very good to hear from my former colleague, the noble Lord, Lord Thurlow, who has so much experience of living in the Commonwealth and so much wisdom to bring to this subject.
In a debate of this kind, one feels that everything we do is inseparable from the name of the noble Lord, Lord O'Hagan, who introduced it. I do not think any of us will forget what a tremendous contribution of both wisdom and compassion he made in 1971, when your Lordships' House contributed a considerable degree of both humanity and common sense to the draft of the Act when it was still a Bill. I think we ought to keep up the Greek classical tradition, and I should like to ask him to consider whether he will also accept the Order of Athene, representing justice, and just a whiff, if you like, of Aphrodite, representing at least compassion, even if we go no further than that.
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I wonder whether at this stage of our debate, which the noble Lord rather tentatively described as a funeral but which I am inclined to think of as a launching pad, it might be helpful to make one slightly different approach to the question of these Rules which I do not think any noble Lord has yet attempted. There has been much criticism of the Rules as such, notably by the noble Lord, Lord Foot, but I have felt that the more violent that criticism, the further it got away from the reasons why we have an Immigration Act the way we do, and why the Rules have to be what they are; and I hope your Lordships will afford me your indulgence if I go through a few imperatives under which any Government of this country has had to act over the last dozen or so years. We started with the imperative, of which we were rightly rather proud for a time, that this was a country in which anybody from the Commonwealth could come and settle without questions asked. Then this became economically and socially impossible, and the Government had to decide how to limit the flow of immigration from the Commonwealth into this country. I think the noble Lord, Lord Brockway, may have unintentionally misled us a little by describing this as a racial formula. The problem was in fact the problem of the second imperative, which was how to do this in the then properly strong climate in favour of non-discrimination. Because we were faced with this we had to have some complicated legislation, not necessarily satisfactory in every respect, to apply these limits and, at the same time, to observe the principles of non-discrimination.
Then we were faced with a further difficulty. The difficulty was that if we applied these principles we appeared then to be discriminating against people who had a certain claim on us; and this is so delicate a subject that very often I think we feel it difficult to talk about it at all. Here I think we might give a few words in the Act to messrs. Scylla and Charybdis, because we are dealing with this question of our connection with the old Dominions—and "old" is a term of art and not a term of history. We are dealing with whether they have some special connection with us which is a discrimination but not a racial discrimination; and I noticed, as did the

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noble Earl, Lord Cork and Orrery, the felicitous way in which, in another place, Mr. Peter Shore alluded to this very real fact. He said that in his opinion it was right that we should acknowledge that a special relationship exists among Australia, New Zealand, Canada and this country. We now have already three imperatives jostling each other in the presence, as one might say, of the British Legislature.
Then we come to yet another imperative—and we have not yet done by any means with imperatives. We come to the requirements of the Treaty of Rome. The Governments of both our main Parties came to the conclusion that we should join the European Economic Community, which would mean an acceptance of the Treaty of Rome. That meant, by 1968, not only the acceptance of Article 48, Section 3, which allows people from one member of the Community to go to another to take up work, but the decision of 1968, which freed them also to go and seek work. That again became an imperative if we were to be accepted as members of the Community; and once again you had a further imperative or a further principle jostling against and conflicting with the principles which we had already accepted. So when we came then to discuss the Rules for the first time, we had not only these different influences, to all of which we had to yield to some extent, but the sudden reaction in Australia, particularly, and also in New Zealand, to the impact of the first edition of these Rules when it was published. There was a very strong feeling in those countries, and I was critical about this matter in a previous intervention in your Lordships' House. There was an immediate assumption, caused by the public relations not being correctly propelled, that made Australians feel for 24 hours that they had become aliens. Incidentally, I hope that the noble Viscount who is to wind up this debate for the Government will once again say in a firm voice that this Bill and these Regulations do not turn Australians, New Zealanders and Canadians into aliens, since the Government follow-up of what was said at that time has been practical and visible to all.
My Lords, confronted by all these imperatives converging on any British
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Government—and I underline the word "any"—it was simply not possible to draw up a set of plain and simple rules; and, whatever the noble Lord who was handling this earlier may have hoped to produce, it was simply not possible in the circumstances, in dealing with all these different convictions and influences, to draw up something short and simple. Certainly immigration officers, whom I have always found to be courteous and helpful, need precise guidance, but one cannot give brief guidance on a subject of immense complexity. I really do feel that all of us should recognise that if you are going to have Rules, as you must in a situation of this kind, then they must be complicated and they must be long. The only thing one can ask for is that they should be as clear as possible. The new Rules are, I feel convinced, a very laudable effort by civil servants and Ministers to find a mean between all these influences, and I think the Government should be given credit for that.
There are one or two items which lead to questions. I join the noble Lord, Lord Garner, in wondering whether it was really necessary to extend the working holiday to five years, because it seems to me that that creates a difficulty which need not have been created, since it is the period over which people coming in qualify for naturalisation. I know that the Home Secretary said in another place that power would be taken to prevent that if the British Government thought it was undesirable, but it is surely making a difficulty and then creating a remedy rather than saying, "All right; let us settle for four years."
THE MINISTER OF STATE, HOME OFFICE (VISCOUNT COLVILLE OF CULROSS): My Lords, perhaps I may correct the noble Lord, Lord Gore-Booth. My right honourable friend said—and it was picked up by my honourable friend the Parliamentary Under-Secretary—that the remedy is already there in the legislation. It is not a question of our having to create it: it is already in the legislation.
LORD GORE-BOOTH: My Lords, I thank the noble Viscount, and apologise to him. I expressed myself wrongly. But it still presents the problem of having to use the power, whereas if four years had been chosen it would not have been

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necessary to do so. Again, I think that in the other place also there was this problem of whether the safety valves which the revised Regulations allow are valid, or whether really one must again give any Government in these circumstances the benefit of the doubt in creating a situation in which, of course, there might be far too many immigrants under the proposals in the new Regulations. Again, the Government will have powers to prevent this; and I think the moral of that also is that in a question of this complexity the safety valves are bound to be such that the Government may have to use further powers in order to make sure the situation does not get out of hand.
So, in concluding my argument, I would say once again that I think any Government of this country, confronted by our past convictions and our present ideals, would have found this an immensely difficult matter to get right. I am sure that in the future there will be constant vigilance over the working of these new Rules, in which your Lordships will take part, to see whether anomalies arise and to bring them to the attention of the Government whenever it seems that this attention should be drawn. But, also in conclusion, I feel very much attracted, as have been other noble Lords, to the proposal by the noble Lord, Lord O'Hagan, that the time is now ripe for having a really good look at our citizenship laws. I think that the noble Lord, Lord Thurlow, made a good point when he said that we had been labouring with the 1948 Act for these many years. Perhaps I could add to the suggestion that the present Government have shown a laudable desire to have a look at all our procedures and institutions to see whether they are working well or badly, and producing legislation accordingly, that perhaps it would be possible for this institution and this legislation also to be looked at with a radical improvement in mind. In concluding, may I again express an obligation to the noble Lord, Lord O'Hagan, for raising this matter and may I reiterate my feeling that perhaps some of the criticisms that were hound to be made in this matter are due to the nature of the problem itself and not always to the iniquity of the policy makers and the drafters.
5.11 p.m.
LORD AVEBURY: My Lords, I hope that I may intervene having omitted to put my name on the list of speakers. There are a few words that I should like to add to what has already been said. May I start by taking up the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Gore-Booth, that there are various imperatives that we must consider in formulating an immigration policy in this country. He went through them one by one. If I may say so—and I am sure this is not because he did not attach importance to it, but because he was dealing with the mechanics of the situation—the one thing that he omitted from his list of imperatives operating over a period of time was the consideration of humanity. We can draw up all the Rules that we like, but there is one overriding imperative, to use Lord Gore-Booth's word, which must be uppermost in our thinking. Whether we have a Select Committee of both Houses—and the noble Lord, Lord O'Hagan, suggested this—or whatever is the way that we formulate our policy, we must not apply it in such a manner as to cause hardship, to divide husbands from families, to prevent people who legitimately want to come to this country to complete courses of study or to result in people who are our own citizens being severely fined or thrown into prison in countries where their presence is no longer welcome. It is to this aspect of the Rules that I should like to draw attention.
LORD GORE-BOOTH: My Lords, I thank the noble Lord for his intervention. I did intend my tribute to the noble Lord, Lord O'Hagan, to include the imperative of humanity; but I did not come back to it.
LORD AVEBURY: My Lords, I am sure that the noble Lord had that in mind and I am grateful for his assurance. The noble Baroness, Lady White, said that the new Rules extend the right of entry to over 200 milion people. She is quite right in saying that, theoretically, this is so; even if the people do not choose to take up their privilege. I think it is important that one should first consider the number who are likely to come into the country and then to think how it is possible to deal with that likely influx in the most humanitarian manner possible.

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If one looks at the figures over the last few years one finds, as the noble Baroness said, that there has been a net outflow from this country. From the Registrar-General's projection of population in this country from the year 1971 to the year 2011, one sees that he is making the assumption that emigration from the United Kingdom will exceed immigration by 50,000 in each of these years. This is an enormous number over a period of 40 years, vastly exceeding anything contemplated as inflow into this country in any single year or over the whole of that period. There is going to be a greater number leaving the United Kingdom than arriving.
It comes back to the point that Lord Brockway was making when referring to the social effect of migration on some of our larger cities, and it underlies the extreme importance of not blaming people from Pakistan and India for creating conditions which would have existed if no immigrants at all came to this country: conditions such as shortage of housing, shortage of school places and difficulties with the National Health Service. If they are caused by excess population in this country, they are due to the high fertility of the British people and not to the numbers of people from abroad. As the noble Lord, Lord Brockway, knows, such studies as have been undertaken into the use made by immigrants of the social services show that they are less of a burden on them than the native population; because the vast majority of immigrants have been of working age and therefore have contributed through rates and taxes and have not imposed a burden on the social services in the matter of the amount of retirement pensions paid to them.
I think that that more or less disposes of the matter of numbers and of the burden which immigrants put on to the social services. May I now turn to the main question, that of the imperative of humanity? I am indebted to the noble Lord, Lord Gore-Booth, for using the word "imperative", because it is fully justified if we consider not the Rules themselves but the way in which they are interpreted or are likely to be interpreted. We can judge this because many of the Rules correspond with those which appeared in previous editions. We can
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ask the Home Office, through the noble Viscount, just how they are going to look at the phrases which occur here in terms of how they apply to people arriving in the future. I was pleased and gratified that the right honourable gentleman, Mr. Robert Carr, made his announcement last week that we were going to admit the husbands of the Uganda refugee women who arrived in this country and who were initially allowed to come in to secure their own safety, but were told even before leaving the country that it would be necessary for them to resettle in some third nation as soon as their husbands gained permission to go there. It became clear that the United Nations High Commissioner was not resettling all the husbands in places to which they might wish to go or which were willing to receive them. I can only wish that the Home Secretary had made this announcement some time ago so that a great deal of unnecessary suffering could have been avoided—perhaps at the time when we last debated this matter on December 6. at which time I made a plea (unfortunately without effect at that time) to the noble Viscount, Lord Colville. But one should be grateful for small mercies that this has been done at the end.
My Lords, there are one or two questions to put despite the Home Secretary's statement. As I understand him, the husbands who are at present resident in the resettlement camps in Europe are to be permitted to come here if they wish and if the wives and children are resident in the United Kingdom under the previous concession. May I ask the noble Viscount to say whether this applies to people not in the resettlement camps? As he knows, there are husbands in various places in Europe—for example, I have a case in Frankfurt at this moment—but also in countries of the Middle East and Asia because these were the only places to which they could go when expelled from Uganda at the time of General Amin's action. I am certain that it was not the intention of the Home Secretary to say that if a person were unfortunate enough not to finish up in a resettlement camp he would be deprived of the right to join his wife and children in the United Kingdom. I should be grateful if the noble Viscount could give an assurance on that this afternoon.

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The second point, and one that I also mentioned before, concerns the question of students who were at Makerere before General Amin's expulsion order. When in the past I wrote to Mr. David Lane over the case of individual students (and I shall not give details here) he told me that the Immigration Rules provided that if the authority were not satisfied that a student would return to his country of origin on completing his course of studies, he must automatically be refused entry. I pointed out to Mr. Lane that it was quite impossible for any students coming from Uganda who have been at Makerere College to give an assurance that they will go back there when they finish their studies at Edinburgh University or the University of London. I know that the noble Baroness, Lady White, is extremely interested in this question. I was also told that the Committee of Vice-Chancellors had set up a Working Party concerning where these former students from Makerere College could best be fitted into our universities. I asked Mr. Lane what was the point of doing that if, every time one of the students arrived here, he was going to be told, "No, you have not the intention of going back to Kampala on completion of your course, therefore even if the head of computer studies at Manchester University, to take one example, has written to the Home Office to say that he is prepared to admit you and you are qualified to enter this course of studies, we are not entitled to admit you under the Immigration Rules".
The third section of humanity that I should like to mention and on which I should be grateful for an answer from the noble Viscount, Lord Colville, is this: I have had referred to me one or two cases of dependants living in Islamabad who want to come here and join their husbands who have already been admitted to the United Kingdom. To take a typical example, the wife in question has been told that she cannot even be interviewed until June 4, 1973, because there is a long queue of persons in a similar position all of whom have to be personally interviewed and their documentation thoroughly examined before they can be admitted to the United Kingdom.
When one looks at these Rules they appear to be quite straightforward. They say that the wife and children of a
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breadwinner who has already been admitted to the United Kingdom are entitled to entry as of right. There is no question of going back on that. What is happening, particularly in the case of Islamabad, is that the wife and children are being kept waiting for perhaps six months or even longer, and if at the end of that period there is any question of their entitlement to come here the matter is referred back to London and a further period of six months or a year elapses; so it might be two and a half years after the first formal approach is made by the husband, or by his wife in Islamabad, before she and her children are finally admitted.
In one particular case on which correspondence passed with the Foreign and Commonwealth Secretary, he replied, "It is most distressing to me that Mrs. X should be asked to wait this long", and he then said that the matter was being looked at. A team has been out in Islamabad to investigate the position. Some improvement has been achieved, but, my Lords, that improvement has still not secured any advance in the date at which this lady will be interviewed. I wish to ask the noble Viscount, Lord Colville—I know this is not his departmental responsibility, but perhaps he could discuss the point with his colleagues in the F.C.O.—whether in the case of many of these dependants (I understand there are over 4,000 in the queue at this minute) documentary evidence would be quite sufficient and a personal interview would not be necessary after all, because after we close the offices in Lahore or Rawalpindi that for many of the Africans would mean a journey of several hundred miles which they can ill afford financially and which puts them to very great inconvenience.
I realise, of course, that the system of registration of births, marriages and deaths is not as highly developed in some other countries as it is in Great Britain, and that in some cases there may be doubts concerning the validity of the documentary evidence; but where, as in the case that I am talking about, the Foreign Secretary is convinced that Mrs. X is married to the person who is already resident in this country, that these are her children, I do not see why it should be necessary to put them through the hoop of a long journey to Islamabad simply in order to be inter

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viewed for five minutes and have a form submitted on their behalf. I would think, if there are as many as 4,000 dependants in Islamabad waiting in the queue, that the Foreign and Commonwealth Office would be only too delighted if some of the cases could be dealt with on the basis of documentary submissions alone.
LORD BROCKWAY: Not weeks, my Lords, but many months.
LORD AVEBURY: My Lords, may I, in conclusion, say how very interested I was in the suggestion of the noble Lord, Lord O'Hagan, that we should have a Select Committee to look into all these questions of migration and citizenship. This illustrates one of the advantages of our representation in the European Parliament. The noble Lord, Lord O'Hagan, has already had the opportunity of comparing the laws on citizenship and migration of this country with those which operate in our fellow E.E.C. countries, and in some respects he says they are superior to our own in that they do not contain the elements of sex discrimination which we have discussed this afternoon. If another place would accept his suggestion I would be heartily in favour of it. Obviously we cannot decide on our own initiative that this would be a good thing there would be a process of discussion through the usual channels. But in view of the fact that not one noble Lord who has spoken in this debate has criticised the proposal which has been made by the noble Lord, Lord O'Hagan, I think that it would merit discussion through the usual channels with another place, with a view to getting something going as quickly as possible.
As my noble friend, Lord Foot, has said, we are discussing four sets of documents. They are extremely difficult to understand and they contain elements of uncertainty, some of which I have been discussing, which in the course of deliberations in a Joint Select Committee such as the noble Lord has proposed ought to be cleared up with 'the combined weight of expertise in both Houses. I personally think, although I cannot speak for my Party, that this suggestion ought to be very carefully and thoroughly explored by Her Majesty's Government, and I hope that in the end it is adopted.
5.26 p.m.
VISCOUNT COLVILLE OF CULROSS: My Lords, when the noble Lord, Lord O'Hagan, said that his speech was in the nature of a funeral oration, I rather agreed with the noble Lord, Lord Gore-Booth, in questioning that sentiment. Perhaps, if I may restore the analogy away from the 20th century of the launching pad back to the classical idea of the phœnix, we have really had a debate arising out of the previous discussions in both Houses and very much following up what was said in another place last Wednesday. It has been a debate embellished by two notable maiden speeches in which I instantly join in congratulation to the noble Lord, Lord Porritt, and the noble Lord, Lord Thurlow, whose brother I knew very well indeed. We have also been singularly fortunate in having from the noble Lord, Lord Gore-Booth, as amended by the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, a very clear discourse on the history and the conflicting obligations that any Administration would have to deal with in this field. And, if I may say so, the noble Lord, Lord Brockway, made what seemed to me a realistic, statesmanlike speech on the whole matter which brought out many fundamental points which I have not heard put so clearly or so well put together for some time. I dare say there are one or two small points that I do not agree with, but it is unusual for me to go along with him so wholeheartedly in almost all he said.
I am sorry to say that this contrasted very much in my mind with the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Foot, which I considered to be full of barren sterility and which contributed nothing whatever positive to our discussion this afternoon. The noble Lord might like to bear in mind what his noble friend has said about humanity. As the noble Lord, Lord Porritt, put it, we are dealing with people. If the noble Lord wants something which is so neat and tidy that it can be wrapped up in a simple package, I suppose his policy is that we should have no immigration control at all and let in everybody regardless. I am afraid that I cannot see any other solution to what he said.
Some themes have emerged in this debate. The noble Baroness, Lady White, said that the Rules had not been amended as much as she had hoped. I can assure

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the House that everything said last time has been taken most fully into account. Also, I have made inquiries to see whether any noble Lord or noble Baroness wished to supplement what they said at the time; but I imagine that they were satisfied that they had conveyed their views to us adequately, because, so far as I can discover, there have been no further written representations or suggestions, although if there had been, we would have taken them into account as well. One has to realise that the room for manœuvre in the redrafting was slightly limited—in fact it was fairly substantially limited—by the controlling power which the Act of 1971 gives. For instance, no one has touched on the question of where the appeal against a refusal of entry might lie, but one is completely bound in this matter by Section 30 of the Act, and there was not much room for change.
I think everyone will realise (and putting together the various points of view expressed this afternoon I do not believe that this is anything that the House would seriously challenge) that while one wishes to be as flexible and humane in individual cases as possible, there is a real necessity to keep strict control over the rate of immigration. We can, and of course we must, allow in these Rules for accordance with accession to the Economic Community. We do not think—I have said this before—this accession will put much pressure on the population of this country in terms of numbers. We have sought as hard as we could to make concessions in other areas where they would be appreciated, on the psychological side and on the practical side in some cases, but again it would probably not put a great deal of pressure on our population. We have to realise that, as in the instance given by the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, who talked about the pressure in Islamabad, there are sources—it is no use blinking the fact— where the countries are poor and the standard of living is low and from where, if they could, many people would come to this country. In the face of that one has to remember that this is a crowded island. The noble Lord, Lord Avebury, talked about the net flow of people in and out, but he will also remember that the occupancy ratio of housing goes down year by year; so that even if people stay at the same number they take more
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and more room to live. Their recreations and other activities become more widespread and they need more room, even if the same numbers remain; and it is a small island which is fairly crowded now.
In fact, my Lords, we have an adequate labour force. To judge by the unemployment troubles, perhaps they are almost too many. We want to cure that unemployment and not do anything to make the situation worse. We have to take acount of the fact that we have a continuing responsibility for United Kingdom passport holders, to allow them in in an orderly fashion. It is no use denying—I do not think that anything said by the noble Lord, Lord Brockway, contrary to this—that there are areas of strain. It may not he the fault of the immigrants; it may be that they have congregated in certain places which would be as bad anyway. But there are places where the fact of their presence, for better or for worse, has caused strain. We have seen the symptoms of this in some few places in recent months where the Ugandans have gone in large numbers. I think it wonderful how they have been absorbed; but one cannot get away from the fact that there are areas of strain.
My Lords, we have, on the contrary, the most cogent pleas put forward that where there are natural ties with the main part of the population in this country we should recognise them. In the circumstances I was very glad to heat the noble Lord, Lord Thurlow, say that he thought these Rules worked out a pretty fair compromise, at least in the short-run. I am grateful to the noble Lord for saying that. I am grateful to him also for saying that they constitute a considerable gesture in at any rate one direction from which we received considerable criticism last time. The question of the two sets of Rules which the noble Lord, Lord Foot, attacked in his diatribe has been explained by the noble Lord, Lord Garner, and I agree with all the four reasons he gave. If I may, I would adopt them as being good reasons, and I note that the noble Lord, Lord O'Hagan, thought there had been an improvement.
As for the question of Commonwealth consultation, I am again indebted to my noble friend, Lord Cork and Orrery, for reading out the relevant pasage from my

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right honourable friend's speech so that I do not have to go over all that again. He read out exactly what my right honourable friend said, and that is the situation. We have been carrying on these consultations. The noble Earl also referred to the question of reciprocity and said he liked the present attitude of the Government, which whether ambivalent or not, is not something which is wholly without difficulty abroad, as well, apparently, as sometimes in this country. I was grateful for what he said. The noble Lord, Lord Porritt, spoke of feelings, and I very much understand what he said, with my own relations in Canada. I understand and take the point he has made about feelings, and we have tried very hard to do something about those feelings. Certainly there is no need for me to repeat again, with all sincerity—I think it was the noble Lord, Lord Gore-Booth, who asked—that there is no question of Canadians, Australians and New Zealanders being in our minds aliens. I will come back to that point in a moment.
We have done one or two things on the question of procedure (which is, of course, entirely outside these Rules) which I think may help on the psychological side, a side which I agree is very important. At a number of important airports and seaports in this country we have introduced the four-channel system and made very certain that if a Commonwealth citizen comes along and the Commonwealth gate is closed, he is sent to the United Kingdom gate and not to some alien gate. We are marking the entry certificates on the working holidaymakers' passports as "working holidaymaker", so we hope that they will have less difficulty when they reach the port of entry. A good deal has been done about the publicity given to the various arrangements for people wanting to come into this country. There has been publicity in the countries from which they come, so that there will be no doubt that they should get their entry certificate if they need one, or their patriality certificate if they are entitled to it, and things of that sort. There are one or two other matters of this nature which I hope, together with the consultations we have been carrying out, will go some way to show that in countries abroad we are really trying to put over this helpful psychological side.
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My Lords, I think I ought to say a little about the grand-parental situation which the noble Lord, Lord Porritt, did not think went far enough. I can assure my noble friend Lord O'Hagan that it is perfectly constitutional under the Act even without amendment. People with grandparents born in this country would have been allowed in as of right with no control at all. Under the Rules, which of course can be changed and tightened up if necessary, they still have to be subjected to a certain amount of control. There is a substantial difference in law in this situation, but we thought that the views expressed, both here and also in another place, ought to lead us to recognise the close family ties that go back over more than one generation and lead us to grant if not complete freedom at least a relaxation. So a person with a grandparent born in this country will be issued with an entry certificate enabling him to come here, either for employment without a work permit, or as the husband of a woman settled in this country or entitled to settle here, and the Commonwealth citizen admitted on this basis will be admitted for settlement. There will be no restrictions on any employment he may take, although there will remain powers to refuse entry in individual cases on personal grounds. There will also be the power remaining to deport anybody in this category who does abuse our hospitality.
LORD AVEBURY: My Lords, the noble Lord said that husbands would be admitted where the wife is here. Could he answer my question about the husband of the Ugandan refugees here, husbands not in resettlement camps of Europe, but at loose, if you like, in places such as Germany or Austria or some other country? Are they going to be admitted?
VISCOUNT COLVILLE OF CULROSS: My Lords, I have had enough difficulty as it is in trying to structure this speech. I promise the noble Lord I will come to that point and will give him an answer. Would he be so kind as to be patient until I get to that particular point?
I wonder whether your Lordships may be interested in this question of patriality, because I have been doing, not exactly research but practical work on it for my own family. I have a brother who wanted a patriality certificate in his passport—it is a Canadian one, like my own. We

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produced the birth certificate of my mother, which was issued in County Kilkenny before Ireland was cut in half. We produced a Canadian marriage certificate in the district of South Saanich, British Colombia, and his birth certificate from the B.C. Department of Vital Statistics; and there now appears in his passport this fine blue, buff and red coloured stamp which lasts as long as his passport. In future he will, without let or hindrance, go through the "United Kingdom" channel in all the ports of this country. Perhaps slightly more interesting still is the case of my cousin, in whose passport there now appears a similar certificate because she is an undergraduate at a university in this country. When she came in under the previous Rules last September she was admitted on condition that she did not remain in the United Kingdom longer than 12 months, because that was the then law. Instead of having to go back and do something about this, she now has the patriality certificate in her passport, and will in future, as I understand it, have no difficulty at all in going to and fro, whether at Prestwick or anywhere else where she may land. It may be interesting to the House to realise that there are practical advantages in this proceeding, that it can actually be done, and that the three documents I have mentioned are the ones needed.
My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Garner, was grateful for the extension we have made on the grandparents' side, and I am coming back to this subject. I hope that the combination of that extension and the patriality one I have just been explaining will show that we have attempted to make things easier for people who have close connections with this country. There are one or two details with which I ought to deal. I think it was the noble Baroness, Lady White, who mentioned the question of deportation. I was grateful for her recognition that we had here moved, and moved in a direction I think she found welcome. The situation will now be—and it is really the only amendment of substance in the Rules for control after entry—that the ability of a wife to maintain herself and her children, which was not previously in itself a sufficient ground to allow them to remain after the husband's deportation, is now reinstated. It
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is reinstated together with a list of other matters in paragraph 45 of Paper 80 and paragraph 52 of Paper 82, which will be taken into account by the Immigration Appeal Tribunal and my right honourable friend himself. I think it will give considerable extra flexibility to the consideration of these very difficult cases, and I was grateful to the noble Baroness for her welcome at this particular point.
There were some other detailed points about which I was asked, and I will attempt to deal with them. The noble Lord, Lord O'Hagan, asked about the relationship between these Rules and the European Economic Community. Strictly speaking, all that we have to do is to make Rules which fit in with the E.E.C. laws and regulations and the Treaty, but in actual fact there were detailed discussions with the Commission about the contents of these Rules and the application to them of the Community Rules. Our Rules were drafted in the light of those discussions so far as they relate to the E.E.C. We believe they give full effect to our obligations. If there is any conflict about pilots and merchant shipping under the remaining bits of the Aliens Act 1919, then this is something that we shall have to sort out when it arises, but I suspect that if there is a divergence it may be one of those cases where the rules of the European law will prevail over the domestic rules in this country. However, that matter has not been examined in detail to see whether there is in fact discrepancy.
LORD O'HAGAN: My Lords, this is the point I had my finger on. If such a discrepancy is discovered, do we have again to go through all we have gone through to-day because the Rules have to be re-presented to Parliament with one or more additions or amendments?
VISCOUNT COLVILLE or CULROSS: My Lords, I do not think so, because my memory, which has now grown a little dim, of the intricacies of Section 2 of the European Communities Act is that they provide the courts with a duty to consider domestic legislation and European legislation together and to give precedence to European legislation if there is a conflict. It may be that this is one of those cases. I do not think it would require any alteration to the Rules, although as the noble Lord, Lord O'Hagan,

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knows, we can make minor alterations of these Rules without any undue difficulty.
The noble Lord, Lord O'Hagan, asked me about certain discrepancies that he appeared to have found. I think the one about the visitor not being authorised to take employment, which the noble Lord found in paragraph 14 of Paper 81 but not in Paper 97, arises because Commonwealth citizens who are here as visitors remain free to take employment which is merely incidental to their holiday—they are working holiday-makers, and they can do this. The same scheme for working holiday-makers does not apply to people from non-Commonwealth countries. As to the other point, that matter is slightly involved. May I write to the noble Lord about it, rather than take up time in the House?
The noble Baroness, Lady White, asked about some of the points relating to work permits. So far as the Filipino lady is concerned, I may tell the noble Baroness that the new work permit scheme does not allow for permits to be granted for the employment of semi-skilled machinists, so I think we have already put an end to that particular matter. The noble Baroness asked me a rather wider question, about working holiday-makers. We have extended the period during which, first of all, they have their initial admission for 12 months, as various speakers mentioned, and the maximum of five years which the noble Lord, Lord Gore-Booth, was a little concerned about. I assure him that this is not a back door to registration, because, unlike the previous system whereby one automatically was entitled to registration if one had been here for five years, there is no automatic entitlement any more. Since there is no longer an automatic entitlement, the mere fact that you have been here for this length of time as a working holidaymaker does not give you any more entitlement than any other reason for being here. So there is no difficulty here, and no loophole.
The noble Baroness asked whether in these cases there was a restriction on the type of work. The answer is that there is not, so long as it is incidental to the holiday. This is, after all, a scheme which has worked extremely successfully for a long time and of which altogether many
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thousands, if not millions, of people have taken advantage. I am not certain that I have ever been told of any reason why there should be restriction on the type of work. Certainly if the noble Baroness has any particular point in mind, I should be glad to look at it, but I have never heard of a problem of this kind. Equally, we have purposely not defined "young". Perhaps this is always an invidious thing to do, but in this case the overriding requirement is that it should be a holiday with the idea that in the end that person is going back to settle in his or her own country. I suppose one can have this sort of holiday when one is not all that young, but the whole point of the exercise, and the whole machinery of getting in as a working holidaymaker—and this is part of the entry certificate machinery—is that you have to convince the High Commission, or whoever is concerned, that this is what you are going to do and that you are in fact going to return. We think it better not to try to lay down a maximum age here, but rather to judge each case on its merits.
BARONESS WHITE: My Lords, I am sure that the noble Viscount can qualify almost indefinitely.
VISCOUNT COLVILLE OF CULROSS: My Lords, I will look at what I said in the OFFICIAL REPORT. I want just to mention the question of the Stateless Ugandans, and to thank the noble Lords, Lord O'Hagan, Lord Brockway and Lord Avebury, for their recognition of what we have done. I think they will appreciate that this was a difficult matter that had to be discussed and sorted out with the United Nations High Commissioner, and that there was no instant solution to it. I know that noble Lords have been impatient, but I thank them now for the gratitude which they have expressed on the decision we have made.
The noble Lord, Lord Avebury, in particular, asked me the question he repeated just now: Were all those who were going to benefit in the camps? The answer is, No. Some of them, though not a large number, are outside the camps, in various places in Europe, and they, too, will be coming to this country under the arrangement.
LORD AVEBURY: My Lords, apart from those in Europe, there were one or two others. For example, there was a

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man who went on a pilgrimage to Mecca, and was caught in Mecca at the time of General Amin's announcement. Is there no restriction whatever on the right of these husbands to enter the United Kingdom, whether they be in Mecca, Aden, Pakistan or in one of the refugee camps in Europe?
VISCOUNT COLVILLE OF CULROSS: Yes, my Lords; I think there are certain restrictions. But this is being done really on the basis of case by case. I think, in fact, that people who have been admitted have been in Europe. I just do not know the answer about the gentleman who went to Mecca at that particularly crucial juncture. The noble Lord always has the names of everybody, and if he will kindly tell me who it is, I will try to get my colleague to answer that question. I am afraid I was not prepared to deal with the students who had been at Makerere University. The noble Lord will readily admit that he did not give me notice of that one. It is not a matter that my Department would deal with, in any event, so perhaps again I can write to the noble Lord about it.
The third matter raised by the noble Lord I have already mentioned, namely, the question of the pressure on the Embassy in Islamabad. I do know about that. I have already commented on the degree of pressure on the Embassy there, and these are dependants who are exerting pressure. It shows that the pressure there still exists for dependants to come into this country. Numbers were slightly up last year over the previous year, and we still have quite a steady flow of dependants, which nobody would wish to resist, but which shows that we have to be careful of the extent to which we make any relaxation in our entry control. I will tell my right honourable friend the Foreign and Commonwealth Secretary what the noble Lord has said, but I know from conversations that I have had preparatory to this debate that the situation about the pressure in Islamabad is well known.
Although I cannot say whether it is necessary to interview every single person, I think there is, as the noble Lord recognised, a certain dubiety in the case of some of the documents that are presented
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for what is really a valuable privilege, that of coming to this country as a dependant. One has to be careful that people are not being let in under some false pretence. I am sure that the vast majority are perfectly genuine; but there is a good living to be made, I believe, in producing credentials which do not necessarily in the end stand up to scrutiny. It is for that sort of reason that I believe the Embassy staff are being rather careful. They also have, of course, the necessary appeal procedure in Islamabad. This, on account of the thoroughness with which it is done, does take a certain length of time, which may account for some of the delay to which the noble Lord referred. I am sure he would rather have a proper and thorough appeal procedure and have it take a little longer than have a terrible one which churns out injustice very quickly.
LORD AVEBURY: My Lords, I apologise to the noble Viscount for intervening once again, but in the particular case that I mentioned the Foreign and Commonwealth Secretary himself wrote to one of the right reverend Prelates opposite saying that he agreed that the lady in question was married to the husband who was living in this country, that the children were the children of the marriage, but nevertheless she still had to go for an interview which could not take place until June 4, 1973. All I was suggesting was that in his conversations with the Foreign and Commonwealth Secretary the noble Viscount might suggest that as many as possible of these cases are processed by documentary evidence, thus eliminating the need for interviews which cause hold-up.
VISCOUNT COLVILLE OF CULROSS: My Lords, the noble Lord is bowling me some very fast and unexpected balls, as I think he will appreciate. I simply cannot comment on this case, because I do not know about it. The only thing that I can do—on his own words it was the Foreign and Commonwealth Secretary who wrote—is to say that I will pass on what he has said to my right honourable friend.
My Lords, I think I should close on what has been one of the main themes of this debate. Practically everybody who has spoken has asked that we should

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do something about the law of nationality. As a matter of fact, the idea of a Select Committee has already been raised in another place, I think by the honourable and learned gentleman the Member for Northampton, and in reply to him my right honourable friend the Home Secretary said that this was certainly something that he would like to bear in mind at a rather later stage. I cannot remember which noble Lord it was—or it may have been the noble Baroness—who said that we rather tended in these affairs to wait until there was a crisis, and then act. That is not happening here. Nobody supposes that the review of the law of nationality will be a panacea. I think everybody appreciates that, because there are limitations to what one can do. As one noble Lord with a diplomatic background told us—I think it was the noble Lord, Lord Thurlow—we must have the proper technical information. But I also agree with him that that alone is not enough. We must get the very complicated state of the law sorted out, and we must also find out what is the state of the law about citizenship in a large number of other countries whose citizens, or people living within their territory, could be severely affected by anything we did in the way of change of our citizenship law.
Then, I entirely agree with the noble Lord, Lord Brockway, that in this connection we need to consult the Commonwealth fully. Whether one does that at a conference or in a rather more technical atmosphere where one can get down, at any rate to start with, to some of the nuts and bolts of the matter, so that we can see what the possible policy decisions might be, I do not know. One thing is perfectly plain: the noble Lord is quite right in thinking that we shall need to have wide consultations inside the Commonwealth before anything is done. Whether these can take place in time for the Prime Ministers' Meeting in Ottawa I do not know, but I take his point and I agree with him. So we must proceed quickly, and when we have the necessary information and some ideas on the necessary policy it may well be, as has already been suggested, that the matter could be examined by a Select Committee. Exactly whether this would be the right way to do things, I do not know, but I am sure that the words of
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my right honourable friend—he has already said that he will bear this in mind—will be given considerable impetus by the views expressed in your Lordships' House this afternoon. Certainly if (as, for example, occurred with the Army Act of 1955) the House could assist in framing a measure, I am sure this would greatly assist the passage of that measure when it came to be legislated upon. We could also draw upon the experience of so many Members of your Lordships' House and of another place.
I thank the House for a useful and constructive debate except, I regret, in the case of the noble Lord, Lord Foot. I do not know whether the House wishes to "take note", as the Motion suggests. I frankly do not mind very much whether or not the noble Lord, Lord O'Hagan, withdraws his Motion, because the fact of the matter is that the House has taken note of the Rules and has debated them very fully. I thank the noble Lord for having given us the opportunity to do so.
6.2 p.m.
LORD O'HAGAN: My Lords, I shall not keep you for very long. We have been discussing this subject on an appropriate day—the first day that immigration officials have ever gone on strike—and on their behalf I should like to thank everyone who has spoken to-day, in the hope that what has been said collectively here will help to make their task easier in the long run. I should like to thank the two maiden speakers in particular. I much admired the clarity and foresight of the noble Lord, Lord Porritt, though I hope I shall not be thought impertinent in saying so. The noble Lord, Lord Thurlow, got up and sat down again so quickly that I missed him, because I was correcting my speech in Hansard; but I have been told from all quarters of the powerful contribution that he made.
I have run out of classical allusions, and all that I have down on this piece of paper are two phrases: "No room for complacency" and, "Trapped by history". I do not believe there is any room for complacency, and I believe this debate has shown the Government that there are many Members of your Lordships' House who feel that the situation is by no means perfect. But I do not think that we are trapped by history. We are in the middle of two very powerful forces—there is history on one side,

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represented by our links with the Commonwealth, and economics on the other side, represented by the pull of migrant labour from all parts of the world to this country in order to do the jobs that we do not want to do ourselves. I believe we must make really determined efforts to resolve the conflict in a spirit of humanity and that one of the first steps in doing this would be to have a thorough look at our law of nationality.
I wish to thank all noble Lords who have supported and, in part, welcomed my ideas on this topic. As I feel that your Lordships' House ought to be a positive place, I believe that we ought to take note of these Immigration Rules.
On Question, Motion agreed to.

MUSEUMS (NORTHERN IRELAND) ORDER 1973
6.5 p.m.
THE MINISTER OF STATE FOR NORTHERN IRELAND (LORD WINDLESHAM)THE MINISTER OF STATE FOR NORTHERN IRELAND (LORD WINDLESHAM) rose to move, That the Draft Museums (Northern Ireland) Order 1973, laid before the House on January 24 be approved. The noble Lord said: My Lords, I beg to move that the Museums (Northern Ireland) Order 1973, a draft of which was laid before Parliament on January 24, be approved.
The need for this Order, as for many others we have discussed recently, arises from the reorganisation of local government in Northern Ireland. The present position is that Northern Ireland has two national museums—the Ulster Museum and the Ulster Folk Museum—both of which are mainly financed by grants from the Ministry of Finance. Each, however, also receives grants from local authorities. The Ulster Museum is assisted by the Belfast Corporation and Londonderry Development Commission. After reorganisation later this year, the new district councils will only bear the cost of those functions for which they are directly responsible and it would have been unreasonable to expect them to contribute to the increasingly heavy burden of financing the two national museums. The Order therefore provides for the ending of these contributions at September 30, 1973. The district councils will, however, have powers to run local museums. There are already one or two local
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museums in Northern Ireland, one of which is of a particularly high standard—that is, the Armagh County Museum, which is financed by the Armagh County Council. Local interests fear that the cost of maintaining this at its present standard would be too great for the new Armagh District Council, when it comes into existence, and so this Order empowers Armagh County Council to transfer the County Museum to the Trustees of the Ulster Museum. The cost of the museum will consequently be met as part of the Government grant to the Ulster Museum. Discussions on the proposed transfer are already under way.
The shortfall in the income of the museums will be made good by an increase in Ministry grants. In the case of the Folk Museum there is at present an obstacle to this, as a statutory limit of £45,000 is placed on the grant. In practice, this limit has already proved too low and additional extra-statutory payments are already being given. The Order removes this limit, and also that of £70,000 on grant from the Ulster Land Fund at present at the level of 50 per cent., on the most of minor development at the Folk Museum. In future these grants will be 100 per cent. without any statutory maximum. These changes put the Folk Museum in the same position as the Ulster Museum.
In both museums, local authorities are represented on the Boards of Trustees and even though their financial contributions will cease we want to encourage them to maintain their links so far as possible. The opportunity has been taken, however, to revise the composition of the Boards. At the Ulster Museum, a Trustee will be nominated from the New University of Ulster (that is the new University at Coleraine) in parallel with the Trustee already nominated by the Queen's University of Belfast, while three persons appointed by the Council of the City of Belfast will join the nine nominations by the Minister, bringing the total to 14 in all. I might add that the Chairman of the Trustees of the Ulster Museum for the ten years between 1962 and 1972 was a Member of your Lordships' House—the noble Duke, the Duke of Abercorn. I think it would be right to put on Record the Government's appreciation of the very significant contribution the noble Duke made to the

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Museum in terms of great expansion and re-modelling. On the Ulster Folk Museum Board at the moment several associations of local authorities are represented. As these associations will disappear, provision is being made for the nomination of four trustees by the proposed association of the newly-formed district councils. In all, the Minister will appoint seven Trustees, the Council of the City of Belfast two and the two universities one each, giving a total of 15.
There are other changes in the Order. To indicate the scope of its interests, the Folk Museum will become the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum, while the Trustees will be able to lend moveable property for up to 12 months without the approval of the Ministry. The Order also provides power for the Trustees of the Ulster Museum to impose charges for admission. At present there are legal impediments to their doing so full-time. The Order not only removes these, but clarifies their right to charge. Admission charges are already made at the Folk Museum—at present 15p for adults, 5p for children; with pre-arranged groups at half-price.
The Order also provides that at April 1, 1973, responsibility for the grants to the museums, and also to Armagh Observatory (to be distinguished from the museum at Armagh), will transfer from the Ministry of Finance to the Ministry of Education. This was recommended by the Macrory Report and is in line with Great Britain where the Treasury handed over its responsibilities in this field to the Department of Education and Science some years ago.
In this brief introduction I have, inevitably I am afraid, had to concentrate on the organisation and financing of the two national museums in Northern Ireland. But I do not want to end without saying a few words about the contents and resources of these two splendid collections; both of which I have been able to visit for myself. The Ulster Museum is now a major regional museum, multidisciplinary in its approach, which compares well with any in the United Kingdom outside London. An ambitious expansion programme over the past decade has been completed which has had the effect of almost doubling the amount of display space. I am particularly pleased
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to see in his place the noble Lord, Lord O'Neill of the Maine, because I have heard what a very important part he played in this expansion programme, first as Minister of Finance in Northern Ireland, and latterly as the Prime Minister of the Northern Ireland Government. I believe that now the noble Lord has the pleasure of acting as President of the Friends of the Ulster Museum, so he has maintained his connection with the museum right up to the present time.
In addition to an architecturally distinguished new building opened as recently as last autumn, the greater part of the galleries in the original building have been renovated and remodelled at the same time. The director has a staff of about 130 people, and departments cover: antiquities; art, botany and zoology; geology; and technology and local history. The treasure from the Armada galleon, the "Girona", is now permanently on display at the museum.
The Ulster Folk Museum is much newer, although I understand that it, too, acknowledges its debt to the noble Lord, Lord O'Neill of the Maine. It dates back only about fifteen years, but in that time a superb site has been acquired at Cultra in County Down, and a highly original folk museum developed which takes the form of a composite picture of the social and cultural life of Ulster. A number of smaller representative buildings from different parts of the Province (such as farm houses, a weaver's cottage, a spade-maker's mill, a Blacksmith's forge, and so on) have been acquired and moved brick by brick in a most conscientious way to the Folk Museum where they have been restored to what they were in the past, in some cases even to the extent of having contemporary exponents of the old crafts of hand weaving, spade-making and forging iron work, actually working in the original buildings when transferred to their new site. These are backed up by exhibitions at Cultra Manor.
My Lords, I must not go on too long, although there is much more that could be said. Let me simply affirm that both museums are an admirable example of enterprise and artistic endeavour and, what is more, in a field that by broadening the knowledge and interests of those who visit the collections, or who benefit from the various educational activities carried out by both institutions, can only help to

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bridge the sectarian and cultural divide in Northern Ireland. I beg to move.
Moved, That the Draft Museums (Northern Ireland) Order 1973, laid before the House on January 24, approved.—(Lord Windlesham.)
6.15 p.m.
BARONESS LEE OF ASHERIDGE: My Lords, this ought to be an entirely happy occasion on which we need do little more than give our thanks to the noble Duke, the Duke of Abercorn, to the noble Lord, Lord O'Neill of the Maine, and a very distinguished company of Trustees who have obviously worked so hard and with such distinction in giving to poor, strife-torn Northern Ireland and, in particular, Belfast, something in the case of the Ulster Museum which is not only a treasure house but, situated as it is in the botanical gardens, a sanctuary. I was fascinated by the figures of attendance in the past few years, when the Ulster Museum was being so adventurously expanded. In 1969 the attendance figures were 66,400, and by 1972 they had risen to 185,200, almost a 300 per cent. increase. The big upward jump came after June 1971, when one of the main expansions was taking place.
I speak with the disadvantage that I have not had the privilege of seeing either of the two great museums that we are discussing. I know that the noble Lord has seen them very recently, and therefore I should have been only too happy if all that we were required to do from this side of the House was simply to congratulate everyone concerned, and he thankful that in the circumstances of Northern Ireland the flag of civilisation was still flying. But in the debate in the other place a number of matters were left in some doubt, although they have been clarified more recently by Questions and Answers. Just to make quite sure, I would ask the noble Lord whether lie would confirm that in certain instances we have the correct picture.
For example, there was some alarm in case the appointment of the chairman of the Trustees should be a Ministerial decision rather than as a result of the selection of the fellow Trustees. I hope I am right in saying that the whole matter has now been cleared up. When the Trustees body was being reconstituted the
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noble Duke, the Duke of Abercorn, was appointed by the Minister. But his successor has now been appointed, and it is firmly established that the chairman will be selected by fellow Trustees. This point is important because the trustees of our great national galleries here and in Ireland have been knocked about a great deal from the political end. For instance, they have had to swallow the imposition of charges, although it is quite clear that the trustees of the Irish galleries are just as hostile to them as our own trustees. We want to be quite sure that those who are responsible for running the museum, and who ought to know one another's calibre, have the privilege and responsibility of appointing their chairman.
We should like to be quite clear that there will be no imposition of charges during the present period of price controls. I have in my hand an Answer which has come from the other place to-day, but the matter is still a little ambiguous. The Member for Smethwick asked the Secretary of State for the Environment whether he intends to increase any admission charges at public buildings or monuments under his control during the period of price restraint. The answer that was given to him was:
"This matter is under consideration in the light of the Government's programme for controlling inflation, but admission prices will be held at present levels during Stage 1 of that programme."
What about Stage 2 of the programme? We should like to be absolutely certain that, so far as the immediate issue before us is concerned—that is, the future of the museums in Northern Ireland—there will be no charges whatsoever while we are in a period of attempted price controls. I think it ought to be clear to everyone that we cannot possibly expect the trade union movement to co-operate with Ministers and to feel that there is fair play all round if, on an issue such as this, they feel that the Government are insisting on going ahead with charges—and I am speaking about both the period while the freeze is on and the period beyond the freeze.
The argument in relation to Belfast is in many respects the same as the argument we have tried to put before the Government about charges in our own great national museums and galleries; with

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this difference, that there is something, even more ignoble. Here is Belfast, with its unemployment, with sectors with very low wages; here is a great museum in the park, and here is the Folk Museum on the outskirts, a contemporary concept that interests and excites a younger public because it is dealing with crafts, with industry, with transport and all kinds of things. Surely, what we want to do is to attract the maximum number of young and old into civilised environments. It took us a long time to convince some Members on the Benches opposite that education for all children ought to include a knowledge of the Arts. But that battle has been won and now it is a benediction to go into most of our primary schools, where it is no longer a case of austere teaching of rudimentary facts that would help the children to become good machine minders, good factory workers, good bus drivers and the rest; our children now have a sense of colour and design, of painting, dancing and music.
We are giving the younger generation those opportunities. It is not uniform all round, but this is the spirit of contemporary education. So how can we justify not giving the maximum encouragement to the young who follow on from the schools to the great centres of culture? In my judgment—and I hope I have the support here of all Members of your Lordships' House—our great museums and galleries are a most important part of schooling. They are part of the school. There is no justification at all for imposing charges if we really want to follow the logic of trying to give to our children a civilised education. We hear a great deal about automation meaning that there is going to be more leisure in the future, and if we want the children to be saved from rowdyism, from despair and boredom, then of course we must help them in every way we can.
I know that some Members of your Lordships' House may say, "What a lot of fuss to make about £11,000"—because from the answers given in the other place I gather that the revenue which is expected from the charges will be in the region of £11,000. I shall be corrected if I am wrong, but from the questions and answers in the other place I believe the figure is between £10,000 and £12,000.
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At present no money is being raised from this source and we should like to be clear that so long as the freeze lasts no charges will be imposed. But is it the case that, although there is no revenue from this source, at present additional expenditure is being undertaken? Is it the case that in Ireland, as here at home, the poor trustees have been obliged to spend money, to go ahead engaging extra staff, putting up turnstiles and all the rest of the squalor? should like to know about that because this seems to make the situation madder than ever.
So this is the big thing that divides us. We are in agreement that the changes made are good and necessary, but I still have a certain sympathy with some of those who are a little afraid of the transfer from the Ministry of Finance to the Ministry of Education. We had to discuss this in the last Parliament and the way we settled the matter was to transfer responsibility for the Arts, museums and galleries from the Treasury to the Ministry of Education, but at the same time a Minister for the Arts was appointed, and although the Treasury officials detested the arrangements we made nevertheless we stuck to them. The arrangements were that the Minister for the Arts negotiated separately with the Treasury the grants for the Arts and for the museums and galleries. This was necessary, because if you have a Minister of Education who has to find financial support for primary schools, nursery schools, universities, and so on, he already has so many mouths to feed that if an extra, such as museums and galleries, is imposed on him then the Minister regards it as a kind of cuckoo in the nest—one more mouth to feed.
One way out of the dilemma—and if there is any optimism in future developments this may come—in England, is to have a separate Ministry for the Arts, but we decided that we were not yet ready for that because we know the fate of small Ministries. Very often they cannot attract the best of the Civil Service; they have to have a most expensive administrative machinery and often small Ministries are apt to come a cropper. So I think we made the right decision in appointing a Minister for the Arts, including the museums and galleries, and if you have a Minister who is really the

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champion of those interests he can save them from being thrust aside by the counter, and equally essential, claims in other fields of Government expenditure.
But our problem is that while our concept of a Minister for the Arts was someone who would be the champion of the museums and galleries, who would defend their rights and privileges and fight for our musicians and our theatres, instead of that, unfortunately, at the present moment we have a Minister for the Arts who is leading the battle, not on the side of his own trustees but on the side of the charges. This is the basis of the divisions between us. If I may respectfully say so, I think the Government have got themselves into quite unnecessary ill-repute and difficulty over what is a paltry sum. It is pouring salt into the wound of people who are concerned about rising prices; it is adding bitterness, because of course paying 5p or 50p means nothing if you are well-to-do, so this is discrimination against the poor.
There was a revealing sentence in one of the contributions in the other place, to the effect that if charges were imposed there could be more control over admission. I wonder what that means—whether too many people tried to go in; whether old-age pensioners who simply wanted to sit down in pleasant surroundings went in. Would the Government rather that they did not go in? Were there children from the back streets of Belfast playing in the park who thought they would have a look, too? What is interesting is that if there is that kind of objection, it does not come from the trustees. The trustees are opposed to charges. It comes from the Government. What are the Government trying to do? With one hand they accept the civilised attitude that the Arts are part of the heritage and the education of the children of the nation; but at the same time we have this indefensible situation in which the poorest of the children will have an unnecessary hurdle put in their way.
My Lords, I now conclude this speech because I do not think there is any reason why we should cover the entire ground that was covered in the other place. This is a measure in which there is Party agreement. There is no dissension among us about the necessity for transferring the controls in the way that has been done—
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the reorganisation of local government; all that is agreed territory. But we shall have to be careful because the size of Northern Ireland means, I am assuming, that one cannot have a special Minister who is responsible for the museums, galleries and the Arts, I am assuming that that means that the Minister of Education will have to establish the priorities. We have been given an assurance in the other place that this will not be in any way damaging to the future interests of the museums and galleries. All we can hope for is that that will in fact be so. But, even at this late hour, may I say to Government Ministers: "Your Government have had to turn a great many somersaults." I am not raising this point in malice. With changing economic circumstances, Governments often have to amend and change their course, but could not a Government who have turned so many somersaults on major issues—wages, working conditions, price control, trade unionism, and the rest—do just one more little somersault and stop this crude, unworthy attempt to penalise the poorest of the people in our communities by these foolish charges that cause so much trouble to all of us? As I said, I wish that my congratulations could have been unequivocal, but I am afraid that they cannot be that between the two sides of this House so long as we have to go on fighting, as we intend to go on fighting, to get rid of charges.
6.33 p.m.
LORD WADE: My Lords, I should like to join in thanking the noble Lord, Lord Windlesham, for explaining this Order. The noble Baroness has spoken very forcibly on the subject of museum charges and I shall not, therefore, go over all that ground, but I should be interested to hear from the noble Lord, Lord Windlesham, what effect the price restraint policy will have on the proposal to authorise charges for admission to the Ulster Museum. There seems to me to be a case for deferring these charges during the period of price restraint. On the general subject of museum charges, I remember the noble Viscount, Lord Eccles, answering a number of supplementary questions in this House. It seemed to me that it was getting so very complicated that I was inclined to suggest that we might adopt the policy of simply having collecting boxes. I was not quick enough on my feet to put forward that proposal, and I

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realise that that is a little wide of this particular Order.
The point I should like to raise relates once again to the constitutional position. I know that we have had several discussions about the constitutional position so far as the Northern Ireland Orders are concerned, and I apologise if I am going over the same ground. But there is just one point. On one other occasion I mentioned the value of the Special Orders Committee. On this occasion, if we read the Seventh Report of the Special Orders Committee we see:
"The Committee have no doubt about the vires of any of these Orders nor is there any other matter in these Orders or in the enactments under which they are made to which they think it expedient to call the attention of the House."
At first sight it may seem that that implies there is nothing to discuss. But it is clear already that there are matters to discuss and of course the Special Orders Committee are not concerned with the merits; they are concerned with technical aspects. But it is right that this should be mentioned because it may be that some noble Lord in reading this Order will assume from it that there is nothing to discuss. This is of special importance in the case of these Northern Ireland Orders, because, as the noble Lord, Lord Windlesham, has pointed out on other occasions, they are in the nature of Bills coming before this House, and the merits of these Bills have to be considered by the House. It is perfectly proper that these points should have been raised which have already been raised, for example, by the noble Baroness. I conclude by simply adding my tribute to the trustees to whom reference has already been made.
6.37 p.m.
LORD AUCKLAND: My Lords, I intervene only for a moment because my family and I have paid two visits to the Ulster Folk Museum at Cultra while we have been holidaying there with a very good friend of ours who was a member of the Ulster Unionist Party over here. I should like to pay my own tribute to the trustees of that museum and to those who run it. It is a unique place and I hope that my noble friend is able to give an assurance that at least during the period of "freeze" no additional charges, over and above the charges which have, as I understand it, always
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been made in this particular museum, take place. I should hope also, though this is perhaps outside the scope of the Order, that even during the present troubles in Northern Ireland, as many people as are able who are visiting Northern Ireland from other parts should visit this marvellous museum if only, so to speak, to help swell the exchequer. Anything that can be done to promote the survival and the beauty of museums of this kind is to be actively encouraged, and inasmuch as this Order does that, I very much welcome it.
6.38 p.m.
LORD O'NEILL OF THE MAINE: My Lords, I must apologise to the Minister for arriving halfway through his remarks, but unfortunately in time to hear him piling pæons of praise upon my shoulders and therefore making it all the more difficult for me—as he doubtless intended—to criticise this Order. But I should like to make a few remarks. First of all, on the national front, I am absolutely against charges for entry into museums. That is a remnant of the "lame duck" days which were quickly killed when Rolls-Royce went "bust" and I should like to think, like the noble Baroness, Lady Lee of Ashridge, that before the term of the Government's office comes to an end they might be able to make a tiny backward somersault on this problem, which would be nothing compared to somersaults that they have already been able to carry out.
Historically, the Minister is extremely well informed and does his homework on Northern Ireland very well, but many noble Lords may not know the small fact which I should like to give you. When I became Minister of Finance in 1956 there were no national institutions whatsoever in Northern Ireland. I believe I am right in saying that under the Government of Ireland Act 1920 certain finances were set aside for cultural institutions. But, whatever other qualities Ulster Governments may have had, they were not particularly interested in that sort of thing. I think this sum of money—very large at that date; about a quarter of a million pounds—was spent on more mundane matters. It was a difficult thing to turn what had been a municipal institution in Belfast into a national institution. It required great tact, as I relate in the

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book that I wrote before Christmas, and but for the charm of the chairman, who was a lady, of the Museums and Libraries Committee of the Belfast Corporation we should never have had a national institution at all. She was the first to realise that if I tried to "pinch" this municipal institution, all the members of the Belfast Corporation would rise on their hind legs; so she very cleverly came and asked me whether I would take it over, which, of course, simplified everything. Later on we were able to spend a large sum of money on the magnificent extension which the noble Lord visited, and now we have a national institution in the Botanic Gardens of which we can be proud.
The history of the Folk Museum is rather different. That came into existence only with the assistance of the local authorities, and that, I think, is probably why a charge was instituted. It is a national institution and a very fine one, as the noble Lord has just said—a magnificent site. In fact we were much praised by the Swedes, who are experts in folk museums and who came over and said that this site was far better than theirs. Nevertheless the origins of the Folk Museum, under its excellent director George Thomson, are different from the origins of the Ulster Museum. That is why it was thought necessary to make a slight charge for entry, and, like the noble Lord who has just spoken, I very much hope that the charge will not be increased in any way.
I am in rather a strange position, in that the Prime Minister of Southern Ireland, Jack Lynch, made me a governor of the National Institute in Dublin, and I am president of the Friends of the Ulster Museum, so to that extent I straddle the Border, on a purely cultural basis. So far as I know, there is no intention whatever to create a charge for entry into the magnificent National Gallery of Dublin. Of course, chickens always come home to roost. In the excellently drafted Green Paper, which we all read, there was that enigmatic phrase "the Irish dimension". Past Ulster Governments may be criticised for their unreasonable attitudes to the South of Ireland and all that kind of thing, but if we are discussing this "Irish dimension"
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—I do not know quite what it meant; it was thought to mean Irish unity in Dublin, and statements were hastily issued from Whitehall to say it meant nothing of the kind—it seems rather strange to me that Westminster should raise a barrier between the cultural situation in Belfast and the cultural situation in Dublin. For however many charges the Government in London intend to put on museums in any part of the United Kingdom, so far as I understand there will still be free entry to the magnificent National Gallery in Dublin. If we are talking about the Irish dimension, either in the Green Paper or even (if this name is going to be dropped) in the White Paper, this point should be borne in mind.
Like the noble Baroness, Lady Lee, I would ask whether a charge for entry into the Ulster Museum, which is being made against the wishes of the Trustees, would be against the provisions of the Counter-Inflation Bill; and if, in fact, it is against the provisions of the Counter-Inflation Bill, then I should like an undertaking that in no circumstances will any charge be imposed until after the provisions of that Bill have lapsed. I would also ask whether this Order removes a legal stipulation that the Ulster Museum should have some free days, because if there are going to be free days in other national institutions, is it right that the power to have free days of entry into the Ulster Museum should be abolished by this Order? I question that very much indeed.
Next, I would say this—and this may apply to other museums in England; therefore I should not like to suggest that it is in any way unique. The Minister quite rightly mentioned the magnificent Armada treasure which was found by a Belgian underwater diver in a spot where somebody else ought to have found it years ago, called Point L'Espagna, next door to the Giants' Causeway. This magnificent treasure, as the noble Lord knows, has now found a home, very rightly, in the Ulster Museum, While it is perfectly true that the Ministry of Finance are going to be faced with some financial assistance for that, it is nevertheless also true that the Friends of the Ulster Museum have, on their own account, raised quite a lot of money in order to make it possible for that Spanish Armada treasure to stay in the Ulster

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Museum. This also ought to be borne in mind. If the Friends of the Ulster Museum have gone out of their way to raise money, thousands of pounds, in order to ensure that the Girona treasure stays in Northern Ireland, then we have in effect made a contribution to the expenses of the museum.
Finally, I would ask this question. Am I right in thinking that 41.6 per cent. of this small sum of money which is going to be collected by imposing charges will be spent in the actual cost of collection? In normal circumstances this kind of thing would be frowned on by the Treasury, but of course I realise we are not living in normal times. As a last postscript, I would say, as a former Minister of Finance, that while I am perhaps one of the only Ulster Protestants to be in favour of direct rule, had I been Minister of Finance in Northern Ireland to-day I would have come over to the Treasury and seen William Armstrong, then in charge of Home Finance, and I have no doubt whatsoever that this ridiculous charge would have been waived in view of the fact that Northern Ireland is in a far worse financial position than the rest of this country. Therefore I regret very much that these charges have been imposed on this national institution, of such recent date and of such a difficult birth. I would express the hope that the Minister will consider very seriously what I have had to say. May I finally say to your Lordships that anything I have to say, or have said, to-night in no way detracts from the great admiration I have both for the Minister and for the Secretary of State.
6.50 p.m.
LORD SHACKLETON: My Lords, this has been a very interesting debate. The Irish dimension has very firmly come into your Lordships' House, and it is quite right that it should. I am now using "the Irish dimension" in terms of England in relation to Northern Ireland; I realise the context is different elsewhere. I particularly welcome the fact that on this occasion we should be debating an Order that is concerned with cultural matters that are so far removed from the hard day-to-day business of Government administration and some of the more difficult Orders concerned with law and order.
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This has been a notable debate. My noble friend Lady Lee, whose personal contribution to the Arts has been so widely recognised as quite tremendous, and the noble Lord, Lord O'Neill of the Maine, whose own work in this field as well as in Ireland generally is so valuable and so valuable to your Lordships' House when we come to consider what the Government are doing, have both taken part in this debate. A further reason why I welcome this debate is that was well aware, as a B.B.C. producer in Northern Ireland many years ago, of the vitality and urge for cultural life there. It was interesting to hear the noble Lord, Lord O'Neill, pointing out the absence of national institutions, because we were well aware how important the B.B.C. was in Northern Ireland as providing a focus for a tremendously strong spirit for the Arts among Ulster people. Therefore, it is interesting that we should now be debating an Order to which the House has given a general welcome except in one respect, and I want to say a few words about that before I close.
I should like to refer to an institution that I have not visited but which the noble Lord, Lord Windlesham, with characteristic thoroughness, has visited. It is typical of him that among all his other duties he should have paid a visit to the two principal institutions. We recognise that characteristic. I am referring here to the Folk Museum. I am bound to echo the tributes that were paid by the Member for Down North in another place to Professor Estyn Evans. If I may change my hat once again, as President of the Royal Geographical Society I recognise that he is a most distinguished geographer, who has made a tremendously important contribution in the cultural field. I could continue at greater length, because we know so well how important his work has been.
It was interesting to hear the noble Lord, Lord O'Neill, reporting the reaction of a Swedish delegation to this institution. I was interested in the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Windlesham, about Armagh Observatory. Looking at the national position, I take it that in this country the observatories receive their financing—and I am not sure of this, because there have been so many changes in these institutions—from the Department of Education and Science. The

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institution is a valuable, historic one, and I assume that this matter is in some way linked with the transfer of the Armagh County Museum to the Trustees.
LORD O'NEILL OF THE MAINE: My Lords, the origin of the Armagh Observatory, curiously enough, is ecclesiastical. The Church of Ireland Archbishop, Archbishop Robinson, established it in about 1790. In recent years we have built a wonderful planetarium there which is a great success, and so, in a sense, the Observatory has become not only nationalised but more interesting.
LORD SHACKLETON: My Lords, I am interested to hear that. I ought to have known that because in my B.B.C. days in Northern Ireland I not only visited the Observatory but also produced a talk programme on the subject. I remember that it was the then curator of the museum who explained to me the mysteries of the expanding universe and the shape of the galaxy, and I remember his demonstrating it. I am grateful to the noble Lord.
There are one or two points that I should like to raise in relation to the subject of charges. I would ask the Minister to take very seriously the matters that have been put before your Lordships, and particularly the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Wade. Once again here is virtually an Act of Parliament, and all we know about it under the Special Orders Committee procedure is that it is intra vires, and all right for us to pass. The Special Orders Committee have done precisely what they are required to do. We are getting all too inclined to accept the fact that anything that the Government bring forward in regard to Northern Ireland, because it is an Order and it is Northern Ireland, somehow or other we have to let through. In fact this is the position that we are in to-day. If this was a Bill I have no doubt that in the present atmosphere—and noble Lords have shown a good deal of independence on many matters lately—this particular item would be struck out of the Bill. It was a miracle that that wretched charges Bill ever got through in the first place; I do not believe that it would now.
Although we have talked about trying to improve procedure, we have done
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nothing about it. This may be just as much the fault of the Opposition as of the Government, but I should have liked to ask the Government to take this Order back and re-lay it without this particular paragraph, for the reasons that have been given by my noble friend Lady Lee and by other noble Lords. That is what we ought to be doing if we are taking this sort of legislation seriously. We know that it had gone so far as having a Second Reading at Stormont when the clouds were getting thicker on the horizon, and that it did not receive the full consideration that it should have done. None the less, it was presumably considered by the Advisory Committee. I find it difficult to believe that the Advisory Committee that vets Northern Ireland legislation can have welcomed this particular paragraph.
I wonder how far the noble Lord is aware that some of the arguments, particularly those used in another place, do not really stand up at all. We may have one of those arguments again to-day—and while the noble Lord is now an expert on so many things, he cannot be an expert on everything—for consistency with the rest of the United Kingdom, even though it produces an inconsistency with the Republic of Ireland. But the Army Museum in Britain does not have to charge, and the Folk Museum already makes charges, for reasons that have been fully explained, because of special circumstances. The Ulster Museum, I understand, can make charges if it wants to do so. Mr. van Straubenzee, in another place, said that the Trustees of the Ulster Museum are not yet empowered to make charges. I do not know whether that is correct. I have been informed that they are empowered to make charges but on not more than 4 days in the week. Will they now be empowered to keep to that number if necessary, and make charges on 4 days but have 3 free days? We should like clarification as to whether Mr. van Straubenzee's remark on February 23 was correct.
I hope the noble Lord will not dismiss this matter as something unimportant, because it is a matter on which a number of people feel very strongly. Furthermore, the de minimis argument does not carry much weight against the opposition: rather, it is against putting this

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item into the Order. Again, if the figures of the noble Lord, Lord O'Neill, are correct and these charges will produce only £10,000 (I think my noble friend said £11,000), and 43 per cent. will be spent on administration, it becomes a nonsense. We do not expect the noble Lord to be willing to take the Order back to-day, but I hope he will see that his right honourable and other friends realise that this is a mistake, particularly in the Northern Irish context. Otherwise, my Lords, we welcome the Order.
7.1 p.m.
LORD WINDLESHAM: My Lords, one of the subjects I thought I had escaped from when I went to Belfast was museum charges. But now, several months later, I find myself, somewhat surprisingly, the target in this particular controversy. What I can say is that I shall certainly bring to the attention of my noble friend the Paymaster General, who has overall responsibility for national policy in this respect, the very well-informed debate we have had on this matter this evening. I shall also bring it to the attention of the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland.
Noble Lords will accept that an Act of Parliament—the Museums and Galleries Admission Charges Act 1972—has been passed by your Lordships' House and by another place and is on the Statute Book. The noble Baroness, Lady Lee, played a major and active part in the debates on that Bill. What is being done now is to bring the two national collections in Northern Ireland into line with the national museums elsewhere in the United Kingdom.
I shall say something in a moment or two about the question of museum charges and how they affect Ulster, and I am grateful to the noble Lord the Leader of the Opposition for informing me in advance that this was a matter which was concerning Members of the Opposition Front Bench. I accept that this concern is not just confined to the Front Bench opposite, since the noble Lord, Lord Wade, and the noble Lord, Lord O'Neill of the Maine, spoke in similar terms. Therefore, I have prepared myself to make a short statement on this matter. I hope it will be interesting and useful to the House to have some additional information, even
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though I fear it may not satisfy absolutely everybody. However, before I do so, let me deal with one or two of the other points raised.
The noble Baroness, Lady Lee, asked about the chairmanship of the Trustees of the Ulster Museum. A misunderstanding arose—I do not know how—but the position is quite clear and is fundamentally as she stated it. The first chairman of the newly-constituted Trustees of the Ulster Museum in 1961–62 was the Duke of Abercorn. He was appointed in the first instance, but was re-elected on a number of occasions and served over a 10-year period. He retired last year and his successor, Dr. Mayne Reid, the new chairman, was elected. I had the pleasure of meeting Dr. Mayne Reid on Saturday last when I visited the museum. Future chairmen of the Trustees will be elected. I think that clears up that point.
The noble Baroness also asked about the transfer from the Ministry of Finance to the Ministry of Education. I agree with her in what she said when she remarked that it is the personal interest of the Minister with responsibility for the Department which is of paramount importance. In our case, this means that Ministerial responsibility transfers from one Minister of State who is responsible for finance to another who is responsible for education. It happens that education is the responsibility of my honourable friend, Mr. van Straubenzee, who handled museum charges in another place on behalf of the Paymaster General. He has already visited the Ulster Museum and the Ulster Folk Museum, and I know that he intends to take just as close an interest in these two Museums in the future as others have done before him.
I was pleased to hear from the noble Lord, Lord Auckland, that he has some personal experience of the Ulster Folk Museum and I hope he will come back and see it again soon. There are some new additions to the museum which I think he will find interesting. I can give him the assurance for which he asked, which was also asked for by the noble Lord, Lord O'Neill of the Maine. I understand there is no intention by the board of the Ulster Folk Museum to increase the level of charges at the present time, subject to any adjustments that may be necessary for value added tax. The noble

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Lord, Lord O'Neill, spoke most interestingly about the origin of these two museums. I had heard some of that information on my visits to both museums, but to have it from the horse's mouth, as it were, is particularly valuable and interesting for those Members of your Lordships' House who have not had the opportunity of seeing the museums at first-hand for themselves. As to the Girona treasure, this was purchased by the Ulster Museum. A grant of, I think from memory, £88,000, was made available from Government funds and the balance, of the order of £50.000, has been raised by public subscription and, I may say, by charges. Charges are made for special collections and for the Girona exhibition at the Ulster Museum at the present moment. It will form part of the permanent collection so it will be located in the Ulster Museum, except when it is out on loan.
LORD O'NEILL OF THE MAINE: My Lords, is it not a fact that when there has been a special exhibition at the Victoria and Albert, for instance, we have been charged to go to it since long before the Government ever thought of making charges for a museum? It is quite true that there are charges for the Girona treasure, but has this not been an established fact in London for years?
LORD WINDLESHAM: My Lords, I am on thin ice already, and I do not think I should stray on to other museums outside those for which I have any responsibility. The noble Lord, Lord Shackleton, paid a tribute to Professor Estyn Evans, the distinguished geographer, who can claim to be regarded as the father of the Folk Museum. Professor Evans, as it happens, is also a Trustee of the Ulster Museum representing the Queen's University of Belfast, and we hope that, with the advent under the new Order of a second university representative from the New University of Ulster, a contribution will be made by both of the national universities in the future. The noble Lord also asked about the Armagh Observatory. This is separate from the Armagh County Museum and is not directly affected by the Order, except that its funds, at the present time running at the level of a £22,800 Government grant, will in future
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come from the Ministry of Education rather than from the Ministry of Finance. The noble Lord, Lord O'Neill of the Maine, explained that the Observatory has its origins in the Church of Ireland and was set up by an Archbishop of Armagh in 1791. I have a historical note on the Observatory, but perhaps it would be in the interests of the House if I sent it direct to the noble Lord rather than read it out at this moment. Let me turn now—
LORD SHACKLETON: My Lords, will it be too long for a reply to a Written Question?
LORD WINDLESHAM: No, my Lords. That is a very happy suggestion. I should be delighted if the noble Lord would put down a Question to enable me to supplement that body of knowledge which he started to acquire when he was a B.B.C. talks producer in Northern Ireland. I was pleased to hear that the noble Lord's interest in astronomy began at that time. Let me move on now to the central question—the only question—which has divided noble Lords in considering this Order; that is, the question of charges. The Order is, of course, enabling legislation. That is the first point I should like to make. The Order itself does not impose any charges.
The policy of Her Majesty's Government, as explained by my noble friend the Paymaster General on a number of occasions, is to introduce charges at national museums. The date when such charges are to be introduced is still under consideration, and it is not for me to add to what was said in another place to-day. What I can say, however, is that no charges will be made at the Ulster Museum if they are not introduced in Great Britain. The scale of charges, the provision of free days and so on is a matter to be settled by the trustees with the approval of the Ministry of Education, again in line with general United Kingdom policy. As noble Lords are aware, the Northern Ireland Folk Museum already charges for admission; the Ulster Museum does not.
The noble Lord, Lord Shackleton, asked about the legal powers of the Trustees of the Ulster Museum in relation to charges, and referred to the fact that there was an obligation to open free on three days. I have studied a note from

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the lawyers, and find that this particular situation is exceptionally complicated. As I understand it, and subject to correction, the position is that at the Ulster Museum there has been, as the noble Lord correctly said, a long-standing obligation to open free on three days a week. The museum was originally a municipal museum—it came under an Act of 1891—and the trustees, therefore, it might be said, had a right to charge on certain occasions, but not on the three free days. There are, however, I understand, other ambiguities—by-laws are involved; and there is also the change in status from a local museum to a national museum in 1961. What the legal opinion says, in a nutshell, as often happens with opinions of this sort, is that the position is obscure. There is ambiguity; there is the point I mentioned about three free days. It was decided that a provision of this sort was needed to make the position clear.
LORD SHACKLETON: My Lords, may I interrupt the noble Lord? I am grateful to him. I take it that his colleague, Mr. van Straubenzee, will now correct his statement in another place. This has caused some uncertainty. This statement simply says:
"The Trustees of the Ulster Museum are not yet empowered to make such charges."
It is at least an ambiguous statement. However, I leave it there.
LORD WINDLESHAM: My Lords, am grateful to the noble Lord for drawing my attention to this, and for giving me notice of the Answer to which he has referred. I believe it really turns on what is meant by "such charges". The Question by Mr. Money was to ask
"the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland whether he intends to request the trustees of the Ulster Museum to impose admission charges."
Most people, both in another place and here, would understand that what the honourable Member was referring to in his Question was the overall scheme of museum charges which has been the subject of controversy for so many months. The Answer was that there is no power at the present time, because the Order in Council has not yet been passed and does not come into effect until April. But, as the noble Lord says, one can look at these things in different ways.
LORD SHACKLETON: My Lords, I will not press it. The noble Lord of course quoted the Question asked by Mr. Money rather than the Question asked by Mr. Kilfedder, which would suggest that this Answer is not entirely satisfactory. But I leave it to another place to deal with that.
LORD O'NEILL OF THE MAINE: My Lords, I wonder whether, before the noble Lord gets up again, he would answer the question I put to him. I appreciate from what he has said that the legal position is very obscure, but I wonder whether the noble Lord would be willing to answer the question I asked, despite that fact. Does this Order in fact remove the legal stipulation that the Ulster Museum—even though its origin was municipal—must have certain free days? That, surely, is a fairly simple question, despite the fact that the legal position is obscure.
LORD WINDLESHAM: My Lords, it is usually unwise to give an unqualified reply to a question of that sort, but I think the answer is, "Yes".
LORD O'NEILL OF THE MAINE: It does remove that stipulation?
LORD WINDLESHAM: I believe it does, my Lords. If I am wrong on that, I will write to the noble Lord and qualify my answer, but I think he is correct in saying that it does remove it.
My Lords, let me give a few further details, because they cover some of the points which have been raised. The Trustees of the Ulster Museum have not had any formal discussions with the Ministry of Finance about the level of charges, but it is anticipated that they will be kept in line with the charges in Great Britain that is, 10p for adults and 5p for children and old-age pensioners. As in Great Britain, there would be free admission for organised school parties and students on pre-arranged visits. It is unlikely that the rate for adults will be doubled in July and August, as is proposed in Great Britain. Season tickets would be available. Any proposals put forward by the Trustees for free hours of opening would be considered in the light of the policy in Great Britain. So that touches on the answer I have just given to the noble Lord, Lord O'Neill of the Maine. I understand the Paymaster General has said that he envisages some free opening provided that the total

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charging arrangements allow for a compensatory effect, or some other resources are used. As I said earlier, the introduction of charges at the Ulster Museum will take place only if charges are introduced in Great Britain.
My Lords, the final point to which I ought to refer—it is one of detail—is the question put by the noble Lord, Lord O'Neill of the Maine, about the cost of collecting charges at the Ulster Museum. The estimated receipts after deduction of value added tax have been correctly quoted in this debate as of the order of £11,000. That is the estimate. But I understand that the first year's running cost as a percentage of receipts are expected to be, not 43 per cent. but 29·6 per cent.
LoRD SHACKLETON: And the second year the same?
LORD WINDLESHAM: We must be careful about this. In the second year, it might perhaps be about the same. In some ways one would expect it to be less, because some part of the costs are costs of installation. On the other hand, we have to remember that, despite the exceptional efforts of Government to restrain them, costs do have a way of rising. So it might be that the two trends would cancel each other out. But the figure I have quoted is the one I have before me at the moment for the first year. My Lords, I quite understand the strength of opinion on this matter but, as I have said, this is an Order which falls within the policy which has been accepted recently by Parliament in the Museums and Galleries Admission Charges Act. I have provided some detail which I hope will be of interest to noble Lords who are concerned about these matters, and, as I say, I can undertake to pass on the opinions which have been expressed to those of my right honourable and noble friends who are mainly concerned.
On Question, Motion agreed to.

BIRTHS, DEATHS AND MAR RIAGES (NORTHERN IRELAND) ORDER 1973
7.19 p.m.
LORD WINDLESHAM LORD WINDLESHAM rose to move, That the Draft Births, Deaths and Marriages
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(Northern Ireland) Order 1973, laid before the House on January 24 be approved. The noble Lord said: My Lords, this Order is a straightforward measure and, I hope, in the light of the previous debate, an uncontentious one. It is concerned with the setting-up of a new registration service for births, deaths and marriages in Northern Ireland. This will be based on the twenty-six new district councils which will result from local government reorganisation later in the year. In operating the service the councils will be acting as agents of the Ministry of Finance, and all expenditure will be borne on central funds. I understand that the expenditure is running at about £66,000 per annum. At present there are 120 registrars' offices in Northern Ireland, the majority of them open for a few hours only each week. The intention is to man the new register offices full-time. There will probably be about 35 to 40 full-time officials. Registration facilities will also be available at maternity hospitals where well over 90 per cent. of all births take place. Even should the birth not be registered there, it can be registered in the district in which the mother of the child lives.
The Order allows for the recording of one change of forename and one change of surname under the age of 18; and thereafter one change of forename and three of surname. This will enable a person to produce a birth certificate in the name by which he is generally known. This follows Scottish practice; there is no English provision at present, but perhaps Scotland and Northern Ireland are ahead here. The methods of changing name (by deed poll, for example) are not affected; we are speaking only of consequent amendments to the birth certificate after the name has been changed by the due process.
In future, the name of the father of an illegitimate child will be entered in the register, provided the mother and father attend together, or the mother attends and produces specified documents. Here again, this is a useful innovation. At the time of registration of a birth, information other than that required for registration may be obtained, but this information together with all information on stillbirths is to be safeguarded and disclosed only in limited circumstances. This Order contains the transitional provisions necessary to ensure that arrangements for

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marriage started under the existing law may be completed under the new system. My Lords, I beg to move.
Moved, That the Draft Births, Deaths and Marriages (Northern Ireland) Order 1973, laid before the House on January January 24, be approved.—(Lord Windlesham.)
LORD SHACKLETON: My Lords, there is little that I can say on an Order the complexity of which only increases my admiration for Parliamentary draftsmen and the officials in Stormont or the Northern Ireland Office. Even though I am fairly accustomed to reading Acts of Parliament, were it not for the Explanatory Memorandum with which the noble Lord was good enough to provide us this would have totally defeated me. Quite clearly, this is a useful measure. Having read the debate in another place I was interested in two points. One is that it appears that the arrangements for the marriage code in Northern Ireland were said to be (I cannot quote directly from a speech by an honourable Member in another place) very complex. In so far as this very complex Order helps in this, I am all for it. But there seems to be some doubt as to whether rationalisation and the reduction in the number of officials could be absorbed. I notice that the Parliamentary Secretary, in replying, undertook on no fewer (than three occasions to write to honourable Members saying that he wanted to make sure he got it right, that he was looking into the situation but that it is complex. Another similar reply was that he would write to the honourable Member.
My Lords, I find this rather unsatisfactory. This is a situation that all Ministers are in. I could now start to ask all the questions which were asked in another place and to which I passionately desire to know the answers. May I suggest to the noble Lord that it could be helpful in these interesting matters—we have never got it quite right; we should have Written Answers on every one—for him to consider whether these Answers could be circulated to the comparatively few Members who are interested. The number of Members in this House who have taken part in these Northern Ireland debates is few. I think it is important (and I am sure the noble Lord thinks this) that, although we are very much a "proxy parent" at the moment
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—we are not really able to do our job as well as we should—those who are prepared to do so should seek to continue to keep an interest and make themselves as fully informed as possible.
One particular point was raised which aroused some interest. It was noteworthy that apparently the death rate in Northern Ireland is lower than anywhere else in the United Kingdom. This may be due to the intrinsically healthy nature of the lives they lead. It may be the strength of the stock; but curiously enough the births trend (as opposed to the death rate) is also contrary to that everywhere else in the British Isles. This point was raised in another place and no explanation was given. There may be no explanation and it may be that the figures (taken, I think, from the Ulster Commentary, a valuable document which some of us read) may have related merely to a single period. If the noble Lord feels like commenting on that I shall be grateful: but it may be it is not important. Perhaps the former Prime Minister of Northern Ireland could explain why the health of the people, or the death rate, is lower there than in the rest of the British Isles and why, since he ceased to be Prime Minister, it seems to be going up.
LORD O'NEILL OF THE MAINE: My Lords, I must rise to that challenge and say to the noble Lord who deals with Northern Ireland affairs in this House that I know very little about this, although I believe it is true that the death rate and the birth rate in Northern Ireland are more favourable than in any other part of the United Kingdom. I will add that I hope that the noble Lord, the Minister who deals with Northern Ireland in this House, realises how fortunate we are to have as Leader of the Opposition someone who has actually lived in Northern Ireland and knows what he is talking about.
LORD WINDLESHAM: My Lords, the arrangements for marriages in Northern Ireland should not be interfered with in any way by this Order. It makes changes only concerning the registration of marriages, not the marriage services or any other aspects of marriage. So far as the point about the death rate is concerned, I believe it is right to say that although the death rate may be lower, it does not necessarily mean that there

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are fewer deaths in Northern Ireland. The death rate is lower; but, as the noble Lord, Lord O'Neill of the Maine, said, the birth rate is higher. One depends on the other—what is known in the pyramid of population as a "broader base". We might perhaps need to think that out.
In concluding the debate on both of these Orders, let me say that I will certainly consider with my colleagues whether there is some way of communicating information which is sent by Ministers in reply to Questions raised in another place to those noble Lords who might be particularly interested in this House. I hesitate to give an outright assurance. I have a feeling that there may be some convention which says that a letter written by a Minister in the House of Commons to a Member of the House of Commons should not be bandied about whether by me or by anyone else. But I take the point of substance. There may be some other way of overcoming this particular problem.
On Question, Motion agreed to.