Lords Sitting of 23 January 1975

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

GRAIN POWER STATION
Lord DAVIES of LEEK: My Lords, I beg leave to ask the Question which stands in my name on the Order Paper.
The Question was as follows:
To ask Her Majesty's Government what progress is being made with the power station at Grain, which is scheduled to be the largest oil burning power station in Europe by the year 1978.
The MINISTER of STATE, DEPARTMENT of ENERGY (Lord Balogh): My Lords, I am informed by the Central Electricity Generating Board that the present programme of construction of Grain Power Station envisages that the first two 660 MW units will be commissioned in 1976, the third unit in 1977 and the fourth and fifth units in 1978.
Lord DAVIES of LEEK: My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend for that reply. Are we to understand that this power station is on schedule for 1978? Amid the large rise in the price of oil, may I ask my noble friend whether there is any change of plan? Will this mighty power station, which would have been the biggest in the world, use more coal than oil in this transitional period?
Lord BALOGH: My Lords, so far as the first part of the supplementary question of the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Leek, is concerned, may I suggest that there has been a slippage of a year in the first generating sets. On the other hand, it is now expected that the third, fourth and fifth sets will be commissioned a year earlier than originally envisaged, so one can say that the power station as a whole is on time. With regard to the second part of the supplementary question, of course it will depend on the availability
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of coal. The Central Electricity Generating Board is burning as much coal as it can get.
Lord POPPLEWELL: My Lords, would not the noble Lord agree that it is silly to remark that the Electricity Board are burning as much coal as they can get? There is ample coal in the country, provided it is won. Instead of pinning our faith on import oil, with all the additional costs that that would involve—particularly when one thinks of what has taken place in the last few months—would it not be advisable to investigate the prospects for the coal that is available, provided it is won?
Lord BALOGH: My Lords, my noble friend should look at the report of the expert committee which has been investigating the coal industry and its prospects, and which was fully supported by all the unions.
Lord DAVIES of LEEK: My Lords, I am grateful for the reply of my noble friend the Minister. But on the law of probability, are we not entitled to say that we are more likely to win enough coal at an economic price than oil?
Lord BALOGH: My Lords, that is a very hopeful statement, and I join with my noble friend Lord Davies of Leek in his hopefulness.
Lord WYNNE-JONES: My Lords, can the noble Lord say whether any provision is being made for dual-firing in this power station?
Lord BALOGH: My Lords, in some of the power stations there is such a provision. In others, which are so situated that they favour one or other of the fuels, the answer is, No.

UN: ECONOMIC RIGHTS AND UK VOTE
3.10 p.m.
Lord BROCKWAY: My Lords, I beg leave to ask the Question which stands in my name on the Order Paper.
The Question was as follows:
To ask Her Majesty's Government how their delegation at the United Nations General Assembly voted on the

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Charter of Economic Rights and Privileges on 12th December 1974, and what the reasons were for their vote.
The PARLIAMENTARY UNDERSECRETARY of STATE, FOREIGN and COMMONWEALTH OFFICE (Lord Goronwy-Roberts): My Lords, a substantial proportion of the Charter was unacceptable to Her Majesty's Government and, in company with a number of other countries, the United Kingdom delegation voted against the resolution incorporating the text of the Charter of Economic Rights and Duties of States.
Lord BROCKWAY: My Lords, when the Minister says, "in company with a number of other nations" is it not the case that in fact this Resolution was carried by 120 votes, with only six against, and unfortunately the British vote went against? Is it not the case that the object of this Charter was to affirm the right of every State to choose its own form of society without outside interference, coercion or threat? Should not the British vote have gone in favour of that principle?
Lord GORONWY-ROBERTS: My Lords, the figures given by my noble friend Lord Brockway are subject, perhaps, to addition, in that apart from the six who voted against, 10 abstained. The number of votes for the Resolution was 120, among them not only members of the Third World but other members such as the OPEC countries. On the second point raised by my noble friend, that this Charter sets out to ensure that member-States have control over their own economic destiny, I am afraid this is not the interpretation which I and, indeed, Her Majesty's Government, place on this document. Its fundamental flaw, so far as we are concerned—and we have a good record in these matters in the United Nations—is that in toto it seems to be at variance with the rules of international law.
Baroness GAITSKELL: My Lords, may I ask my noble friend the Minister whether it is not time for us to express our honest view in the United Nations on these matters, and not dedicate ourselves to a phoney consensus?
Lord GORONWY-ROBERTS: My Lords, I entirely agree that it is time for frankness. Among the countries which found it impossible to vote for this
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Charter, however well meaning, were not only the United Kingdom but countries like Canada, Israel, Ireland—a number of countries whose votes count for one but whose opinions, one would hope, carry certain weight in the committee stages and certainly in the full debate in the General Assembly.
Lord BROCKWAY: My Lords, while recognising the necessity for some change in the United Nations so that votes represent peoples rather than small States, is it not the case that this Charter sought to define the right of each State to determine its own kind of society, and is that not a principle which the British Government should have supported?
Lord GORONWY-ROBERTS: My Lords, that right is already very adequately enshrined in a number of other Charters, and indeed in the central statement of the purposes of the United Nations. With all respect, I do not see that that is the purport of this document. No doubt my noble friend has read it, as I have, and it might be useful if he and I were to discuss our very varying views on what it sets out to do.
Earl COWLEY: My Lords, can the noble Lord say whether any of the industrialised Powers voted in favour of the Charter?
Lord GORONWY-ROBERTS: My Lords, I find great difficulty in thinking of an example on those lines. I will look at the list. I do not think an industrialised Power outside the Communist group voted for it.
Lord HAILSHAM of SAINT MARYLEBONE: My Lords, would it not be better if the nations of this world kept to the Charters they have already signed, instead of inventing new ones?
Lord GORONWY-ROBERTS: My Lords, I quite agree. This country has as good a record as any in keeping to the Charters to which it has acceded. We want to see a Charter on this subject to which we can honourably accede.
Lord BROCKWAY: My Lords, in view of the fact that the Minister has repudiated my interpretation of this Charter, is it not the case that these are its terms:
"Every State has and shall freely exercise full permanent sovereignty, including possession,

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use and disposal over all wealth, natural resources and economic activities, and has the right to regulate and supervise the actions of trans-national corporations."
Is that not a principle which a Labour Government should have supported?
Lord GORONWY-ROBERTS: My Lords, it was not in dispute in regard to this document, and never has been in dispute. What is in dispute is how that is translated in relation to the rules of international law. I will not go into detail, but I think that in due course the British view will be found to be well founded by a number of well-meaning countries who, indeed, put their signatures to this Charter.

SUBVERSIVE ORGANISATIONS
Lord SHINWELL: My Lords, I beg leave to ask the Question which stands in my name on the Order Paper.
The Question was as follows:
To ask whether Her Majesty's Government have any information in their possession to indicate the existence of subversive organisations or groups, other than those associated with the Ulster situation, in the United Kingdom, and if so whether they are regarded as an immediate danger to our political system and way of life.
The MINISTER of STATE, HOME OFFICE (Lord Harris of Greenwich): My Lords, there are a number of organisations and groups in the United Kingdom whose activities may include subversive activities. We do not believe that any of them constitute an immediate danger to our political system and way of life.
Lord SHINWELL: My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend for that Answer. Is he aware that recently in the course of a speech a noble Lord on the Cross-Benches made a statement, which was loudly acclaimed by noble Lords in various parts of your Lordships' House, to the effect that there exist in this country subversive organisations which constitute an immediate danger to our way of life? Is he also aware that on that occasion I described those remarks as being in the nature of extravagant language, and can my noble friend say whether the observations of the noble
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Lord who made that speech were justified?
Lord HARRIS of GREENWICH: My Lords, I think I have stated the Government's position on this matter. I did not have the good fortune to hear the speech to which my noble friend has just alluded, but as I indicated in my initial Answer, we do not think there is any immediate danger to our political system and way of life.
Lord AVEBURY: My Lords, if there is no other organisation apart from the IRA which is a threat to national security, how does it come about that the Home Secretary has recently exercised his powers under the Immigration Act 1971 for the first time, to give notice of deportation of an individual because of his supposed membership of certain organisations—not the IRA? Will the noble Lord consider whether it is consonant with the principles of natural justice that a person should be deported in this manner without being given details of the charges made against him, and without an opportunity of replying to those charges and being represented at a hearing open to the Press and public?
Lord HARRIS of GREENWICH: My Lords, I am sure the noble Lord will recognise that that is a rather different question. It would be impossible for me to comment on an individual case.
Lord JANNER: My Lords, would my noble friend say what investigations have been made of those organisations that are at the present time carrying out violent attacks on individuals and groups, with rifles and other weapons—organisations not directly connected with Ulster? Will he make a thorough investigation into the position so that our way of life will be properly protected?
Lord HARRIS of GREENWICH: My Lords, these matters to which my noble friend has referred are at the moment being investigated by the police.
Lord ORR-EWING: My Lords, in view of the assertion of the noble Lord, Lord Shinwell, and the discussion with the noble Lord, Lord Chalfont, during the debate just before Christmas, is it not in the interests of the whole House and the country that perhaps this offer to give

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names and "sources" of such organisations operating in this country should be explored, as the noble Lord, Lord Chalfont, suggested? Perhaps we could have a full-scale debate on this subject at an early stage, so that the whole of it could be properly discussed. I suggest that it would perhaps be more appropriate here than in another place. It might be of tremendous importance to the industrial welfare and wellbeing of our country.
Lord HARRIS of GREENWICH: My Lords, I think that is a matter for the usual channels.
Lord HAILSHAM of SAINT MARYLEBONE: My Lords, will the noble Lord bear in mind that such a request as has come from my noble friend would meet with the full support of the Opposition in this House? Will he also bear in mind that it is all very well to take a relaxed view of subversive organisations, but that within the last week two attacks with automatic weapons have been made on London hotels? Does that not constitute a threat to our way of life?
Lord HARRIS of GREENWICH: My Lords, as I indicated, the police are investigating those questions at the moment. It is obviously impossible to know what organisations were involved until the miscreants have been detected.
Viscount MASSEREENE and FERRARD: My Lords, is the noble Lord aware that a stitch in time saves nine?
Lord SHINWELL: My Lords, is my noble friend aware that I should also welcome the opportunity for a debate? But if there is to be a debate, instead of indulging in extravagant language and seeking to make our flesh creep, would it not be advisable that those who take part in it should state the facts which are beyond dispute and not indulge in exaggerations? Will he discuss with my noble friend the Leader of the House in order to ensure that an early debate shall take place, perhaps on the initiative of the Government themselves?
The LORD PRIVY SEAL (Lord SHEPHERD): My Lords, perhaps I may intervene here, particularly in the light
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of what my noble friend and the noble and learned Lord have said. The noble and learned Lord sits as close to the usual channels as I do. He has been a Leader of your Lordships' House and is well aware that if a debate is thought necessary it can be arranged. A little bird whispered to me as I came into your Lordships' House that a debate is highly possible on a Motion that is to come from the Cross-Benches. If we are to have a debate of such a nature, I hope it will be of a constructive character and if there are certain facts that ought to be disclosed I trust that they will be disclosed.

SMOKING AND HEALTH
3.23 p.m.
Lord AIREDALE: 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, in view of the 65th Report of the Commissioners of Her Majesty's Customs and Excise that "despite the sluggish trend in the economy generally, domestic consumption of tobacco … continued to increase", whether they remain satisfied with their campaign to discourage smoking.
Lord WELLS-PESTELL: My Lords, although the consumption of tobacco increased in 1973–74 over the previous year, the weight of tobacco consumed in 1973–74 was still lower than ten years earlier. Furthermore, the weight of tobacco consumed in the first half of the current year 1974–75 was about 4 per cent. lower than in the corresponding period a year earlier. Nevertheless, I think that every one of your Lordships will agree that the serious risks to health of cigarette smoking continue to cause very grave concern.
Lord AIREDALE: My Lords, I am very much obliged. Whatever the precise figures, are the Government firmly resolved that any kind of rise in the domestic tobacco consumption is an absolute disgrace, and that this trend has to be reversed by intensifying the Government's campaign to discourage people from smoking?
Lord WELLS-PESTELL: My Lords, my honourable friend the Minister of

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State met representatives of the cigarette manufacturing industry last July and had a very full and frank discussion, from which has resulted a number of things. I think that the noble Lord and other Members of your Lordships' House will be interested to know that a further meeting with the industry has been arranged to take place early next month, and the subjects under discussion include smoking and health education, cigarette advertising in cinemas, the health warning notice on cigarette packets and advertisements generally, and gift coupon schemes and sports sponsorship. Perhaps I may add in relation to the second part of the noble Lord's supplementary question that there is a great deal being done, as noble Lords will know, by the Health Education Council in this matter. We are not unmindful of what needs to be done.
Baroness WHITE: My Lords, could my noble friend say what progress is being made in the manufacture of cigarettes which are less dangerous than the conventional type?
Lord WELLS-PESTELL: My Lords, the Hunter Committee is keeping under review research into less dangerous forms of smoking, including the development of tobacco substitutes. Since the testing of cigarettes for tar and nicotine yields began in July 1972, something in the region of a two milligramme drop in the average tar yield per cigarette smoked had been achieved by mid 1974.
Lord PLATT: My Lords, while not wishing to express any views on the personal habits of many of my friends, is it not nevertheless a principle in dealing with any addiction that it is not much use appealing to the addicts so long as the drug pushers go scot free?
Lord SHINWELL: My Lords, do I understand from my noble friend that he interprets the substance of this Question to be applicable solely and exclusively to cigarette smoking? Is he aware that if that is his interpretation I accept it wholeheartedly, but that if he refers to tobacco smoking as meaning smoking a pipe, any attempt to discourage it can only happen over my dead body?
Baroness SUMMERSKILL: My Lords, as my noble friend's Answer was intended to allay fear, is it not a fact that the
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incidence of cancer of the lung has increased among women?
Lord WELLS-PESTELL: My Lords, I am not in a position to say whether my noble friend is right, but knowing her I am sure that she is. Perhaps I ought to explain that in 1973 there were about half a million fewer cigarette smokers than in 1970. However, those who continued to smoke were smoking on the average about 20 cigarettes a week more in 1973 than they did in 1970. Figures for last year are not available.
Lord AMULREE: My Lords, would it be possible for the Government to think again about the suggestion that I have made several times, that they should encourage local authorities—not force them—to prevent people from smoking in cinemas and other places of entertainment, and so conform with what is done in most civilised countries in the world?
Lord WELLS-PESTELL: My Lords, this factor is contantly borne in mind. There are an increasing number of public places where smoking is not now permitted, but perhaps I could again remind my honourable friend of what the noble Lord has said.
Baroness GAITSKELL: My Lords, surely we should exonerate the National Health Council on this and blame the sluggish trend in the economy?
Lord HAILSHAM of SAINT MARYLEBONE: My Lords, would the noble Lord bear in mind that there is another aspect of this matter? If the acreage devoted in the world to growing tobacco could be devoted to growing food, there would be fewer people dying of starvation.
Lord SEGAL: My Lords, would my noble friend accept that a certain age can be attained, say 90 or 95, at which tobacco smoking no longer constitutes a hazard?
Viscount MONCK: My Lords, is the noble Lord aware—and I have at last managed to get up—that about 27 minutes ago we were praying that we should lay aside all private prejudices? Is he aware also that the latter part of this Question would, if it was brought into fruition, take away from a great many of us one of the few pleasures left in this life?
Lord WELLS-PESTELL: My Lords, it is also true that Members of your Lordships' House are entitled to ask questions, and that is all that the noble Lord has done.

GOVERNMENT STATEMENTS
Baroness LLEWELYN-DAVIES of HASTOE: My Lords, with the leave of the House, at a convenient moment after 3.30 p.m. my noble friend the Leader of the House will make a Statement on the proposed referendum on the EEC. This will be followed by a Statement by my noble friend Lord Hughes on the unemployment situation.

WATERWAYS BILL [H.L.]
Lord FEVERSHAM: My Lords, I beg leave to introduce a Bill to make provision for the conservancy and management of inland waterways; for conferring powers of management and charging upon navigation authorities by statutory instrument; and for other purposes. I beg to move that this Bill be now read a first time.
Moved, That the Bill be now read la. —(Lord Feversham.)
On Question, Bill read la; and to be printed.

GENERAL RATE BILL
3.32 p.m.
Lord MELCHETT: My Lords, I beg to move that this Bill be now read a second time. As noble Lords are aware, revaluations of property for rating purposes should take place every five years. The last one came into effect on 1st April 1973, and so the next one should take place on 1st April 1978. The purpose of this Bill is to postpone the revaluation until 1980. The Bill also provides for my right honourable friend to make Orders delaying it further, one year at a time, if that proves necessary.
This is a short Bill and the reasons for postponement can be stated briefly. A Committee of Inquiry chaired by Mr. Frank Layfield, QC, is at present examining the whole question of local government finance. We expect the Committee to report at the end of this year. Then
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my right honourable friend will consider the recommendations and consult with the local authorities and others. This means that he may put forward proposals for legislation during 1976, or possibly depending on the complexity of what is involved. All that time the Valuation Office would have been working on preparations for a revaluation in as these preparations take about three years. There are 17 million domestic properties to be revalued and 3 million others. To revalue these takes a long time and is a detailed and expensive job. We do not know what the Layfield Committee will recommend, but if a changed basis of valuation, or an entirely different way of financing local government, is the answer, much time and effort would have been wasted if we had proceeded from 1974 with the preparations for a 1978 revaluation.
In these circumstances, 1980 is the earliest possible date upon which a revaluation could come into effect. We intended, in the first place, to postpone the revaluation to 1981, but it might be just possible to bring the date forward by one year. To bring the date forward to 1979 would not be possible because it would mean preparations for the revaluation beginning before the Layfield Committee Report. There are a number of precedents for this postponement. In fact the history of revaluations is also a history of postponed revaluations. The provision for five-year regular revaluations first appeared in the Rating and Revaluation Act 1925. Between that date and 1948, there were only two revaluations instead of the four that one would have expected. One was delayed because of the war, and the other was postponed while the Fitzgerald Committee deliberated.
Following the Local Government Act of 1948, new valuation lists should have come into operation in 1952. But the then Conservative Government, after their election in 1951, postponed the revaluation until 1953 because of disagreements on the basis of assessment. In 1953, however, that Government changed their mind again and provided for a new valuation to operate from 1956. In 1959, the next Conservative Government again postponed revaluation—this time until 1963—because of the lack of rental evidence available in time. And in 1966 the Labour Government postponed the

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revaluation due in 1968 until 1973, because of
"a shortage of valuers and the increasing commitments of the Valuation Office".
I hope, my Lords, that you will accept that on this occasion it is only the existence of the Layfield Inquiry, and our intention to give the fullest consideration to its recommendations, that makes this postponement necessary. I know there are those who are not happy with the postponement. The local authorities, in particular, feel that they should have been consulted beforehand. I can well understand these feelings. Very full consultations take place on a variety of subjects, and I think I can say that my right honourable friend can be proud of the close working relationship with the local authority associations that he and his predecessors have fostered over the years. Therefore, if we propose to postpone revaluation by a further year my right honourable friend the Secretary of State will certainly consult the local authority associations beforehand.
It has been said that by postponing revaluation we are eroding the rate base of rating authorities—in other words, that whereas extra rateable value would have accrued to them in 1978, this extra value will not now accrue until 1980 or later. I find this argument somewhat difficult to follow. Certainly rate base is increased when a new rateable value is created, but merely increasing the rateable value of existing property through revaluation does not affect the rate base. Postponement of revaluation has no effect on the taxing capacity of rating authorities. Presentationally, it may look better that the rate in the pound is lower; the amount that the ratepayers as a whole have to pay, however, is not affected.
Having said that, there is one criticism of postponement which has more substance in it. It is true that the postponement of revaluation causes anomalies as between one ratepayer and another. Since the rateable values are not up to date, postponement means that some ratepayers bear a greater share of the rate burden than perhaps they ought, while others bear less. A good example of this problem is illustrated by Section 21 of the Local Government Act 1974 which provides that, from 1st April this year, the installation of central heating or an improvement to property that would
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result in a rateable value increase less than a prescribed limit (of £30 at present) shall be disregarded until the next revaluation. It is true that the effect of this is that those who enjoy the concession will enjoy it for longer because the revaluation is postponed, and therefore they will pay a lower share of the rate burden than is absolutely fair. I concede this, and I also concede that our present rating system has certain disadvantages. This is why a fundamental review was badly needed, why it is now being carried out, and why we hope that the Committee of Inquiry will be able to recommend a better system of local government finance. If we embarked on a revaluation now, it would be tantamount to saying that we had no confidence in the Layfield Committee, and it would, in all likelihood, turn out to be a complete waste of time and money. My Lords, I beg to move that the Bill be now read a second time.
Moved, That the Bill be now read 2a. —(Lord Melchett.)
3.37 p.m.
Baroness YOUNG: My Lords, I should like to thank the noble Lord, Lord Melchett, for explaining this Bill to us. As he has said, it is a short Bill, one of only two clauses, and as such it has not attracted much attention in or outside this House. I regret to say that local government does not generally attract interest, although it is of vital importance to the life of everyone in this country. The issue in the Bill is important. It is, as the noble Lord, Lord Melchett, said, proposed to postpone revaluation from 1978, when it should have taken place, to 1980. Clause 2 makes provision for a further postponement each year at a time.
Local government is provided annually with £2,850 million from rates. I know only too well that it is a much criticised tax. Nevertheless, rates are there until they are abolished. Much of the criticism arises from anomalies of rates, in particular the fact that many people who make use of local government services do not pay rates at all. It is not part of our debate today to discuss the whole rating system, but, as the noble Lord, Lord Melchett, has said, this Bill adds to the anomalies of the rating system and to the sense of unfairness felt by the ratepayers. By postponing revaluation from

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1978 until 1980 the Government will be deliberately causing further distortions in the rating system.
I accept entirely, as the noble Lord has said, that this Bill will not alter the total amount of rates paid or raised by local government. Nevertheless, the distortion means that rates as between one ratepayer and another will increase year by year and that a great many people will come to believe, quite rightly, that they have not been fairly assessed and that they have an unfair assessment in relation to others. I believe this fact to be indisputable. Furthermore, rates are not a buoyant tax. They were never meant for an era of rampant inflation such as we have at present. If they arc in any way to meet the present inflation, then there ought to be more and not fewer re-valuations. It has indeed been put to me that, with modern computer techniques, there is no reason at all why there should not be an annual revaluation. I understand that one particular anomaly, to which the noble Lord, Lord Melchett, has not referred at all, arises from the fact that there was to be a bringing up to date of the rating assessments of the nationalised industries, due in 1975, which will undoubtedly affect a number of authorities.
My Lords, I very much regret that the Government did not consult any of the local authority associations before introducing this measure. Indeed, it seems extraordinary that, despite all the Government's fine words about the independence of local government—and this is something about which I have no doubt we shall hear a great deal on Monday afternoon when we shall be talking about the Housing Rents and Subsidies Bill— the local authorities were not consulted at all on this occasion. Yet what could be more important to local government than finance? Though I listened very closely to what the noble Lord, Lord Melchett, had to say, I did not understand the reason why there was no consultation. However, I am glad to hear that, if there is to be a further postponement of revaluation, there will be consultation then. That leads me to ask whether the committee under Mr. Frank Layfield, QC, which is now reviewing the whole question of local government finance, has been consulted about this matter and, if it was consulted, what it
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had to say, because it appears that some of its conclusions are being pre-empted by the Bill. After all, it is common knowledge that many people believe that the continuation of the rating system in one form or another is inevitable, and they have given evidence to this effect. Does this Bill mean that the Government have decided to ignore all this evidence and to act regardless of what the committee has to say?
My Lords, this is not a Bill that we shall oppose. Nevertheless, I think that it is a regrettable Bill, which I believe leaves great distress and worry in local government. It is a fact there has never been a rating revaluation under a Labour Government and I fear, as many people do, that the real reason behind the proposals in the Bill is that the Government want all the valuers for their proposed land nationalisation. More important, the fact is that it is an attempt—or so it appears—to pre-empt the findings of the Layfield Committee. It is unhelpful and unfair to local government, of which a great deal is being asked at the moment, and I believe it to be unfair to ratepayers.
3.43 p.m.
Lord MELCHETT: My Lords, I should like to thank the noble Baroness for the fact that she does not intend to oppose the Bill. I thought that I made it quite clear that the only reason for the postponement was to await the outcome of the Layfield Committee's review. If we embarked on a revaluation now, it would be tantamount to saying to the Committee that, whatever it decided or recommended, revaluation on the present system would nevertheless take place. If we decide to accept some radically new recommendations of the Committee, a great deal of time, effort and money will have been wasted in the meantime on a revaluation which will never be used. It is for that reason that the Bill is necessary. It certainly has nothing to do with the White Paper on land. These fears are quite misplaced, as the Explanatory Memorandum to the Bill makes clear. The number of professional valuers who will be released is minimal and there is a great deal of other ongoing work to be done. The Valuation Office is already understaffed and these savings are, in a sense, notional and they will not release

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any extra staff. In any event, the valuers who will be needed for the land proposals will be local authority valuers and not revenue valuers.
My Lords, on the question of local authority consultation, I think it is right to say that local authorities have not been consulted in the past when these postponements have taken place. Certainly one of the reasons why there has been no revaluation during a Labour Government is that there have not been enough Labour Governments. I do not think that it is to our discredit, and, as I have pointed out, there have been a great many postponements under both sides in the past.
Finally, my Lords, I should like to recommend the Bill to your Lordships' House. It is one that will save a great deal of time and effort on the part of valuers and people who already have far too much to do. I am grateful to the noble Baroness for the fact that she does not intend to oppose the Bill.
Baroness YOUNG: My Lords, before the noble Lord sits down, could he just answer my question about the committee under Mr. Layfield; was it consulted?
Lord MELCHETT: My Lords, if I may, I will write to the noble Baroness about that before the next stage of the Bill. I am afraid that at the moment I do not know the answer.
On Question, Bill read 2a, and committed to a Committee of the Whole House.

EEC: BRITISH MEMBERSHIP
3.46 p.m.
Lord SHEPHERD: My Lords, with the leave of the House, I will repeat the Statement about the means by which the British people will decide the issue of our membership of the European Community, just made by my right honourable friend the Prime Minister in another place. His words were as follows:
"It is the declared policy of the Government that, once the outcome of our renegotiation of the terms of membership is known, the British people should have the right to decide, through the ballot box, by means either of a General Election or of a Referendum, whether Britain should continue in
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membership of the European Community or should withdraw.
"The Government have decided that this should be done by means of a Referendum. Prolonged uncertainty and delay on the decision of the British people are in the interests neither of Britain nor of other members of the Community. After fifteen years of discussion and negotiation, it is an issue which all of us in this House and in the country want to see settled; and uncertainty about the future of British membership is inhibiting the work of the Community.
"The Government are committed to putting the issue to the people before 10th October this year. Provided that the outcome of renegotiation is known in time, we intend to hold the Referendum before the summer holidays, which means in practice not later than the end of June. We shall therefore propose to the House arrangements which would make it possible to hold the Referendum on that timetable, tight though it will be.
"When the outcome of renegotiation is known, the Government will decide upon their own recommendation to the country, whether for continued membership of the Community on the basis of the renegotiated terms, or for withdrawal, and will announce their decision to the House in due course. That announcement will provide an opportunity for the House to debate the question of substance. That does not of course preclude debates at any earlier time, subject to the convenience of the House.
"The circumstances of this Referendum are unique; and the issue to be decided is one on which strong views have long been held which cross Party lines. The Cabinet has therefore decided that, if, when the time comes, there are members of the Government (including members of the Cabinet) who do not feel able to accept and support the Government's recommendation, whatever it may be, they will, once the recommendation has been announced, be free to support and speak in favour of a different conclusion in the Referendum campaign.

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"As to the arrangements for the Referendum, I told the House on Tuesday that the rules for the test of public opinion must be made by this House. The Government propose within a very few weeks to publish a White Paper on the rules and arrangements for conducting the Referendum.
"The White paper will set out the various possible courses and the Government's proposals on such matters as the information policy of the Government during the Referendum campaign, broadcasting arrangements during the campaign, the question of expenditure by campaigning groups, the form in which the question is to be put to the British people, and arrangements for conducting the poll, the counting of the votes and the announcement of the result. The Government will find time for a debate on the White Paper on Referendum procedure in this House before the Easter recess. That debate will of course be separate from, and will precede, the Parliamentary debate which will be necessary on the outcome of the negotiations.
"The debate on the Referendum White Paper will enable the Government to take full account of the views expressed by right honourable and honourable Members of this House"—and, of course, in your Lordships' House here—
"and by public opinion generally in drafting the necessary legislation for the Referendum. The Government propose to introduce the legislation around Easter-time. We shall of course propose that all stages should be taken on the Floor of the House. If we are able to hold the Referendum before the summer holiday, the Bill will need to complete its passage through both Houses and to receive Royal Assent by the end of May."
My Lords, that concludes the Statement. Perhaps I might add that arrangements for debates will be made here through the usual channels to meet the convenience of your Lordships.
Lord HAILSHAM of SAINT MARYLEBONE: My Lords, in the absence of my noble friend Lord Carrington, who is temporarily indisposed, and of my noble friend Lord Aberdare,
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I have been asked to comment upon this Statement. I am sure that the House would wish me to begin by thanking the noble Lord the Leader of the House for repeating here this most important Statement, in order to give your Lordships the opportunity of a brief comment. I have not had an opportunity of consulting fully with my Party, but I think that what I say will commend itself to, at any rate, a substantial majority of it. I must say that I regret the decision of the Government to proceed by Referendum rather than by General Election. I believe that a Referendum is incompatible with the doctrine of Government responsibility and collective responsibility, and I think it substitutes demagogy for responsible constitutional Government. Should there be—I do not know whether there will be—any members of the Government who choose to speak or campaign in public against the recommendation of the Government, we on this side of the House will demand that they should resign in order to vindicate the correct doctrine of collective responsibility.
Secondly, I regret the Statement on the grounds that I believe that a Referendum on a Treaty which has been endorsed by Parliament is contrary to the honour and interests of this country. The Treaty was passed by the same method that all Treaties in the past have been passed, including those which led us into two World Wars and into NATO, and the idea that Treaties can be treated ex post facto as scraps of paper is not one which I believe conduces to the honour of Great Britain. I can conceive of no greater disaster that could befall this country than that its reputation for reliability and its economic interests should be subjected to an ordeal of this kind. I say that as a member of a Party which is as deeply committed to a negotiation of changes in the structure and policy of the Economic Community as any other Party in the land.
May I also make this comment? The Statement which the noble Lord the Leader of the House has given us this afternoon is totally silent upon a matter which greatly disturbed me when I heard it canvassed on the radio this morning; that is, the question whether votes will be counted by constituencies, or by the country as a whole. I was gravely disturbed to find there were elements in the

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Government which were going to demand it on a constituency basis; in other words, that one vote should count in one constituency for more than one vote in another constituency. My Lords, I think we will demand that the votes should be counted on a national and not on a constituency basis, as we would regard the latter as wholly contrary to democracy. Needless to say, we shall not obstruct, in either House of Parliament, the need for legislation, because if we are to have this, to my mind, wholly discreditable procedure, we had better get it over and done with quickly, and the Party to which I belong, at any rate, will campaign vigorously in the country if and when the Referendum is held. That is what I say at first blush on hearing the Statement.
Lord BYERS: My Lords, I must make clear to the Government that I and many of my noble friends deplore the introduction of the Referendum into our Constitution. In that we are fully supported by the present Prime Minister who described it as an "alien introduction" in 1970, and I think it is regrettable that we should have gone back on that. I want to put two questions to the Government. First, how is it proposed to avoid a series of possibly, and almost probably, conflicting and irreconcilable decisions by the House of Commons on a free vote—and I hope by this House on a free vote—by the Cabinet and the Government, the National Executive of the Labour Party, the special conference of the Labour Party and the national Referendum in the country? What chance is there of all those six decisions being exactly in agreement with one another? I should like to ask, in the event of conflict among any of those, which decision takes precedence—that of the Cabinet, Parliament or the country?
My second point—I want to follow the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hailsham, and put a straight question to the Government—is this. Will the noble Lord the Leader of the House explain the Statement that:
"… members of the Cabinet who do not feel able to accept … the Government's recommendation … will … be free to support and speak in favour of a different conclusion in the Referendum campaign."
Does this mean that they can do so while remaining members of the Cabinet? This is a vitally important principle of
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collective Cabinet responsibility. We, too, shall campaign against this and demand their resignations, but, in my view, it is up to the noble Lord to tell us what is the policy of the Government and the Prime Minister on this vital constitutional principle.
3.58 p.m.
Lord SHEPHERD: My Lords, I am not certain when the noble Lord is not blushing. First of all, in regard to the question of a Referendum or a General Election, the Government, in two Election campaigns last year stated in their Manifesto that they would consult the British people through the ballot box. There have been two General Elections in one year and, taking the general state of the country as we inherited it, I would not have thought it in the interests of the country to have called a General Election on this specific point. Therefore, that leaves us the Referendum. In regard to the Treaty and the honour of this country, the Labour Party both in Opposition and in Government have made it quite clear that we intended to renegotiate, in the hope that we would achieve terms which we could commend to the British people, and could remain in. But it has always been accepted—also among the other eight countries of the EEC—that the Government would refer this matter to the British people, and so I do not believe that there is any question of honour.
In regard to collective responsibility in the Cabinet—this is a matter to which the noble Lord, Lord Byers, referred—the Referendum, as has been mentioned in the Statement, is unique. It is a matter of great issue that has cut across not only the Labour Party but all the political Parties of this country. We felt that it was right to recognise this point. Once the Cabinet has made up its mind on what recommendation to make to the country—since it is a Referendum cutting across Party lines—members of the Cabinet should be in no different position from that of any other member of the community.
The noble Lord may grunt; but he asked a question and I should have thought I was entitled to reply. We felt it right that they should have the same opportunity as any of putting their own personal views to the country. Unless they are able to do so it is very difficult to see how a fair Referendum, a fair

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judgment, could be taken by the electorate on an important issue. There is no intention of asking any colleague in the Cabinet or Government to resign on this issue over the matter of putting forward his personal view on this important subject.
The noble Lord, Lord Byers, then asked what was the position of the House of Commons, the Cabinet, the National Executive of the Labour Party and the Labour Party Conference, and whose voice, whose judgment, in the end will count. My understanding is this. All the various bodies—Parliament, the Cabinet, the Parliamentary Parties, the Labour Party Conference—will be making recommendations to the country as to what in their view should be the conclusion of the Referendum. The final decision, as we have made clear on many occasions, is that this Government will be bound by the decision of the British people, the British electorate, through the Referendum. That will be the decision.
Lord BYERS: My Lords, in the event of the country deciding not to accept the recommendations of the Cabinet, will the Cabinet resign?
Lord SHEPHERD: My Lords, I would suggest that that is a hypothetical question.
Lord SHINWELL: My Lords, with great respect to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hailsham of Saint Marylebone, and to the noble Lord, Lord Byers, Leader of the Liberal Party—whose sincerity is not in question and whose remarks one could hardly agree were objective in character, because they obviously indicated their point of view and how they would vote in a Referendum, if such were to take place—is my noble friend aware that when Mr. Heath was Prime Minister he made a declaration which made it quite clear to the ordinary people in our country, the general body of electors, that the full consent of the people was essential before a decision could be taken; and that that was not interpreted as meaning that the decision should be left to the Members of Parliament in another place? Is he also aware that I have in my possession a letter which was signed by Mr. Heath and sent to a particular constituency Party which had returned a Conservative
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to Parliament? In this letter he made it abundantly clear that there can be no other possible interpretation than that what he meant by leaving it to the consent of the people of this country was a free vote by the electors of this country irrespective of the views of the Members of Parliament in another place? In those circumstances does he not consider that a Referendum should be interpreted as meaning that a free vote is essential?
My Lords, may I make a further point. Is my noble friend aware that some of us are not altogether satisfied with what was contained in his observations which came from the other place, a Statement made by the Prime Minister, that a recommendation would be made by the Government themselves? How does he reconcile the interpretation and definition of a free vote by the people of this country voting as they please with a decision taken by the Government in advance? Surely, in order to avoid the difficulties which have been mentioned by the two noble Lords who have already addressed the House on this matter and in order to avoid any difficulties that might take place in the Government—a split as between this member and that member in the Cabinet—it is better that the Government should not make a recommendation but should merely submit a question, a simple question, to the electors of this country and ask them to vote accordingly.
Lord SHEPHERD: My Lords, I am well aware of the pledge Mr. Heath gave which was very quickly forgotten by the noble Lords opposite. In regard to the free vote, my understanding of a free vote is that which we normally see in this country, an opportunity to vote freely through the ballot box. I do not see that a Government decision in any way infringes a free vote. This is a question of supreme importance to this country whichever way the decision is made. I should have thought that the British public, in exercising their democratic rights, were entitled to receive the fullest possible information upon the Common Market itself and upon the consequences of renegotiation. I believe, too, that they are entitled to, and would expect, the considered view of the Government of the day or the Cabinet of the day. That is what we intend to do.
A Noble Lord: A split Cabinet!
Lord SHEPHERD: My Lords, the noble Lord is merely speculating, if I may say so. We have not yet completed our renegotiations. It may be that there is a full and united Cabinet. All that we are doing is anticipating, as a consequence of long and hard discussions on this issue, that there still may be those who may not be able to go along with the majority of their colleagues.
Lord GLADWYN: My Lords, are we to understand that it is the proposal of the Government that the renegotiation terms will be put before Parliament, presumably some time in April; that Parliament will then take a decision one way or the other and that then, presumably in the light of this decision, the question will be put in a Referendum to the people who will decide? Will it be by a simple majority or by, say, 20 per cent. of the total vote to accept or reject? Will the result of that Referendum be binding on Parliament and on the Government, or must it not be, whatever the results of the Referendum, that the final decision will come back to be made by Parliament?
Lord SHEPHERD: My Lords, Parliament is sovereign; but, so far as the Government are concerned, the decision taken by the British people will be binding on the Government. In regard to the question put by the noble Lord, Lord Gladwyn, of whether it will by simple majority or whether there will be a fixed percentage before a Referendum has effect—this is similar to the three questions that the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hailsham, put to me and which I am sorry I did not answer. These are matters of detail which will be considered in the White Paper. It will be for Parliament to discuss and decide these matters both in connection with the White Paper and when legislation is before the House.
Lord ROBBINS: My Lords, may I ask the noble Lord whether the Cabinet in coming to this decision have fully considered what will be its possible effects on the economic position of this country at the time when the Referendum takes place? Your Lordships will surely be unanimous in the view that with regard to the economic position we are passing through a period of anxiety without parallel since the war, and in some respects without parallel in our history. I say in
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all seriousness that it seems to me that the uncertainly which will prevail in the world at large while these matters are being debated in this way will certainly not improve our chances of being supported in our present standard of life by a continued inward flow of finance.
Lord SHEPHERD: My Lords, the noble Lord asked whether we had considered the economic situation. Of course it is always in our minds. There is only one firm date to which the Government are committed in regard to the Referendum and that is 10th October. It is hoped that the renegotiation will be completed early in the spring. If that matter is completed I should have thought it is very much to the advantage of the Common Market countries and of ourselves that a decision is taken on this matter once and for all, so that our friends in the EEC will know what our position is, and we ourselves will know what steps are necessary to take as a consequence of the decision taken by the Referendum.
Lord GORDON-WALKER: My Lords, could my noble friend tell me whether it is likely that the question to be put in the Referendum will be part of the Bill and therefore amenable to amendment in either House?
Lord SHEPHERD: Yes, my Lords.
Lord WINDLESHAM: My Lords, may I put this point to the noble Lord? I think he will accept that if there is a departure from the principle of collective responsibility, we then enter into very deep water indeed. Would he comment on the proposal advocated in The Times this morning that the arrangements for a Referendum—if there is to be one— should be conducted by a Royal Commission, or a Commission which would deal with the very difficult issues that are going to arise of broadcasting coverage; of finance; how much money is to be spent; on whose account, and the technical arrangements for the counting of votes and how they are to be declared, whether by constituency or nationally. Normally, these matters can be left to the Government of the day, because it is accepted as a fair, impartial instrument of the public will, but if the Government are to be divided is there not a great deal to be said for appointing a Royal Commission?
Lord SHEPHERD: My Lords, perhaps the noble Lord will go to the Library and read the history of 1932 when he will see that there was a divided Cabinet on the question of tariffs. The campaign was fought, and the Cabinet, or any part of it, did not resign. Therefore I would suggest that there is a precedent for what we are putting to Parliament. The noble Lord spoke of the difficulties that are bound to arise in setting up the Referendum procedure and also in making sure that it is as impartial as possible. I would say to the noble Lord that I do not believe that the fact that there is possible disagreement in the Cabinet on what decision may be taken will in any way affect the impartiality of the Government service.
My Lords, of course we could set up, through a Royal Commission or some other body, methods for conducting this Referendum, but I come back to the answer I gave to the noble Lord, Lord Robbins—we expect and hope that renegotiation will have been completed in the spring. I should have thought that it was in the interests of all, whether they are supporters of Britain remaining in the EEC or whether they feel that we should leave, that Parliament and the British people should reach a decision on this matter as soon as possible. I have no doubt that when the legislation is before the House, when we have looked at it and have been able to discuss it in Committee, Parliament will be satisfied that it is a fair form of machinery set up solely for the purpose of giving the British people an opportunity for exercising their voice fairly and impartially through the ballot box.
Lord AIREDALE: My Lords, would the noble Lord give an assurance that any Referendum form will contain the preliminary question: "Do you wish this issue to be decided (a) by referendum or (b) by Parliament?" Surely the Government do not want to foist upon the British people a Referendum which they do not want, having decided by a majority of themselves that they want to leave the matter to be decided by Parliament.
Lord SHEPHERD: My Lords, the noble Lord will have an opportunity to raise this matter when the legislation is
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before the House and I would refer him to the answer I gave to my noble friend.
Lord GORE-BOOTH: My Lords, while I do not feel justified as an individual in making many remarks on this Statement, I cannot avoid saying that in our history there have been many decisions of supreme importance which have been entrusted to Parliament. May I ask the noble Lord the Leader of the House whether he can assure us that in considering the rules for a Referendum—assuming that there is to be a Referendum—the Government will seriously consider ending the disenfranchisement at least for the purpose of an important section of the community; namely, the Members of your Lordships' House.
Lord SHEPHERD: My Lords, again this may be a matter for legislation. Your Lordships are debarred from voting in Parliamentary Elections. This will not be a Parliamentary Election; this will be a Referendum. A new situation has arisen and if, as I said earlier, I were to express a personal view, I should have thought that this would be the right opportunity for your Lordships to mix with the commoners and to express a view and vote on a national issue.
The Earl of LAUDERDALE: My Lords, could the noble Lord take us a little further into his thinking about the new doctrine of collective Cabinet responsibility? He has referred to the case of, I think, the National Government in 1932 or thereabouts, which was known at the time as "an agreement to disagree". As we understand the noble Lord's Statement, it is that the Cabinet will make up its mind, but dissenters—presumably a minority in the Cabinet—will be allowed to express a contrary view in public. What happens if the dissenters and the conformists are in equal numbers and the Cabinet is completely divided?
Lord SHEPHERD: My Lords, I suggest that that is a very hypothetical question and not one that I am anticipating since there is an odd number, if my memory is right, in the Cabinet.
Lord HAILSHAM of SAINT MARYLEBONE: One might abstain!
Lord SHEPHERD: Collective responsibility. The noble Lord referred to the

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definition of 1932, and I would suggest that on this occasion it will be to differ.
Lord O'NEILL of the MAINE: My Lords, could the noble Lord the Leader of the House tell us whether he appreciates what the Government mean by the word "campaign". Under the present system, so far as I know, television time is allocated by Party. To what Party will the dissident members of the Cabinet belong? Further, are we now going to come to the American system where people can buy time on television? The noble Lord, Lord Windlesham, touched on this. It is a most important part, as I see it, of a "campaign".
Lord SHEPHERD: My Lords, the noble Lord is quite right, but I think he is wrong—as have been so many in questioning me—in assuming automatically that there will be those who disagree. It is possible. I am glad noble Lords are laughing and enjoying themselves, but it is still hypothetical. This is a matter which we shall have an opportunity to discuss when we have the White Paper before us. This is a matter to which we are giving careful consideration. It involves one's relationship with the media; the freedom of the Press. We need to strike a right balance here and I think this is something we may be able to discuss a little more frankly and easily when the proposals are before the House.
The Lord Bishop of LEICESTER: I hope the noble Leader will forgive me if I have missed the point of the discussion. May I ask him whether, in addition to discussing the methods of conducting the Referendum, both Houses of Parliament will be given an opportunity to express their views on the principal subject—in other words, the view the Government will eventually put before the nation—before the Government's decision is taken?
Lord SHEPHERD: Yes, my Lords, What we have in mind is that when the negotiations have been completed the terms should be made available for the widest possible discussion. Certainly, it would then be the intention of the Government to have debates in both Houses of Parliament before coming to their own final decision of substance.
Lord HAILSHAM of SAINT MARYLEBONE: My Lords, it is
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obvious that we shall want to debate this question and therefore I do not want to prolong this discussion. I think perhaps the House would agree with that sentiment. I do not wish to embarrass the noble Lord the Leader of the House personally, because I believe that his heart, although perhaps not his voice, is in the right place in this matter. The voice may have been the voice of Jacob, but I suspect that what he was reaching out was the hand of Esau. I prefer the silver-tongued voice of Jacob to the horrible hairy hand of Esau!
But I cannot forbear saying two things which have arisen out of the points which have been raised. Perhaps the noble Leader will take it on board that, in our view, this is a recipe for constitutional and economic chaos, done in order to satisfy not merely the unreconciled but the irreconcilable differences inside the Cabinet; and I should just like him to concentrate on this short point in this connection. How can it be honourable, in a matter which he has conceded to be of supreme importance for this country from the point of view of policy, for Ministers who do not agree with the decision of their colleagues on a matter of supreme importance to remain in the Government at all? He deliberately recalled the 1932 "agreement to differ"—which incidentally, without I hope being thought guilty of filial impiety, was at that time attributed to my father—so may I ask this? Is he aware that almost every constitutional theorist since then has condemned that as a departure from desirable policy?
Lord SHEPHERD: My Lords, I did not know that the 1932 reference had any connection with the noble and learned Lord. The date was, in fact, slipped into my hand by my noble friend Lord Goronwy-Roberts, who was hoping to be helpful. Of course we shall have an opportunity of debating this matter in depth when we have the White Paper. I would only say to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hailsham of Saint Maryle-bone, that I can see there is a case for arguing that, in a Cabinet where there is disagreement on an issue, those who disagree should resign, in normal circumstances. But a Referendum is of a different order. It is of a unique character and, perhaps for the first and last time, it is the only method by which we can

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obtain the views of the British people on a subject of this importance.
I would suggest to the noble and learned Lord that the difference is that we have reached this decision to disagree or to differ before the decision has been taken by the Cabinet. We have recognised that there may be differences, and I myself do not believe, taking the sense of the Cabinet as I have done, that in this instance there is any question of the Government's not being united on all the other issues which are of very great importance to this country.
Lord WIGG: My Lords, leaving aside that one question of personal honour, it seems a little odd that the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hailsham, should find it dishonourable for people who hold different views from his own to utter those views as and when they can, when the Leader of his Party gave the most honourable undertaking that before we entered the Common Market the fullhearted consent of the British people would be gained, when obviously he meant not a single word of that. Furthermore, when the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hailsham, talks about irreconcilable differences, has he not noticed that it is Mrs. Shirley Williams and Mr. Roy Jenkins who have laid down the formula that they must have control of bat and ball, keep the wicket, take the money at the gate, keep the score card and then, if they do not get the answer they want, they take the bat out? Whereas all the people I know (and I know most of them) who are actively associated with the determination that the British people are sovereign and should exercise that sovereignty until defeated in war, have always said that if the decision went against them they would accept it?
Lord SHEPHERD: My Lords, I have no criticism of the intervention of my noble friend, and I agree with him that "honour" is an emotive word, because I believe we are all honourable people and to refer to "honour" tends to reduce the position and standing of the rest. However, we have now discussed this matter for some 40 minutes and perhaps this is now the time when we should move to the next Business. Does the noble and learned Lord wish to intervene?
Lord HAILSHAM of SAINT MARYLEBONE: My Lords, I should like to say that I endorse what the noble Lord has been saying; but since an attack has been made on Mr. Heath perhaps I may put this point interrogatively to the noble Lord. Is he not aware that on the only occasion when both Houses of Parliament had a free vote in another place the Ayes had it by 136, and the Contents in this House had it by, I believe, 8 to 1? Is that not wholly in accord with what Mr. Heath has always said?
Lord SHEPHERD: My Lords, I go very much by cricket scores and suggest that I should now declare the innings closed and move to the next Business.
Lord HAILSHAM of SAINT MARYLEBONE: Follow on for the Government!

EDUCATION BILL
4.28 p.m.
The MINISTER of STATE, DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION AND SCIENCE (Lord Crowther-Hunt): My Lords, I beg to move that the House do now resolve itself into Committee on this Bill.
Moved, that the House do now resolve itself into Committee.—(Lord Crowther-Hunt.)
On Question, Motion agreed to.
House in Committee accordingly.
[The Earl of LISTOWEL in the Chair.]
Clause 1 [Awards and grants by local education authorities]:
Lord CROWTHER-HUNT Lord CROWTHER-HUNT moved Amendment No. 1:
Page 2, line 10, at end insert "including, in relation to a person undergoing training as a teacher, any course which he attends as such training and which is for the time being designated under section 4 of the Education Act 1973 (postgraduate courses) ".
The noble Lord said: This is a drafting Amendment. It is designed to make it clear that the power conferred by Clause 1(3) of the Bill on local education authorities to pay grants to students attending teacher training courses extends to certain postgraduate courses. At present, teachers may attend these courses as part of their further training and

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receive financial support from local education authorities under Section 2(3) of the 1962 Education Act, which is to be repealed by this Bill. The intention is that these payments should still be made by local education authorities in the exercise of their discretionary powers, but under another provision of the 1962 Act, Section 2(1), which is accordingly extended by Clause 1(3) of this Bill. However, Section 4 of the Education Act 1973 debars an authority from making grants under Section 2(1) of the 1962 Act to ordinary students attending these postgraduate courses. So we want to make it clear that this does not prevent local authorities from making grants to a teacher attending a course of this kind as part of his further training. That is the purpose of this Amendment, which I commend to your Lordships. I beg to move.
On Question, Amendment agreed to.
4.30 p.m.
Lord CROWTHER-HUNT Lord CROWTHER-HUNT moved Amendment No. 2:
Page 2, line 14, after (""training"") insert ("and "person undergoing training"").
The noble Lord said: This is a purely formal Amendment consequential on the Amendment to Clause 1(3) to which the Committee have just agreed. Section 4(6) of the 1962 Education Act, which is applied by Clause 1(4) of the Bill now before your Lordships in relation to Clause 1(3), defines the meaning of the expressions "training" and "person undergoing training". In the Bill as originally introduced into your Lordships' House, only the meaning of the expres-cion "training" was relevant. As a result of the Amendment to Clause 1(3) the meaning of "person undergoing training" is also relevant, and the Amendment accordingly inserts a reference to that expression in Clause 1(4). I commend this Amendment and beg to move it.
On Question, Amendment agreed to.
On Question, Whether Clause 1, as amended, shall stand part of the Bill?
Lord ELTON: May I at this stage remind the noble Lord opposite of his remarks during the Second Reading debate concerning his inclination to take an early opportunity of removing the present system whereby married women students—indeed, all married students according to the noble Lord—are
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penalised and, in some cases, deterred from embarking upon courses by the spouse's contribution. He said, if I recall correctly, that there being no extra money available, this end must be achieved by reallocation of existing resources, and in this he was following the words of his right honourable friend in another place. On Second Reading in another place his right honourable friend said that the current stringent economic situation presented in the educational world a challenge to, among other people, the Government and the local education authorities to,
"… find ways of providing a more efficient service and, in some cases to reallocate resources…— [Official Report (Commons) 15/11/74; col. 782.]
He further gave us to understand, albeit in guarded terms, that this is an anomaly in an area in which he would wish to make improvements. Your Lordships as a whole will approve of that since it is in accordance with declared aims of all three Parties represented in this House towards the equalisation of the status of women in financial and other terms. I assumed that he would be looking into ways and means of so doing at an early date. Finally, he told us that if such a change was to be brought about, it would be achieved not by legislation but by regulations made under the Act. Would he therefore please tell us what has been the fruit of his inquiry into ways and means, in so far as he has been able to pursue it, and from whence precisely springs his power to make those new regulations which he holds up to our eager gaze?
Lord CROWTHER-HUNT: While the noble Lord, I am sure, appreciates that I would not accept all the implications of his remarks about the contribution of the spouse and the inequalities which he suggests lie therein—and I would not accept those for one moment—I also know the noble Lord appreciates that the question of the regulations affecting the spouse's contribution has nothing at all to do with the Bill now under consideration. The fact of the matter is the regulations which affect the spouse's contributions, and the other student grant regulations, many of which I promised to consider, are being reviewed as a matter of urgency. But, as the noble Lord has pointed out, this has to be done

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within some existing financial limitations and restrictions. These matters are being urgently reviewed, but they have nothing whatever to do with this Bill. Those regulations depend on the 1962 Act, as amended, and there is nothing to prevent me, except in financial terms, from revising them in the way in which I hope the review may turn out.
Lord BOWDEN: May I follow up this point, without being thought out of order, by pointing out to my noble friend the astonishing consequences which have flowed as a result of the way these grants have been administered in the past two or three years. Men on social security are finding that they have to pay income tax and, at the same time, make a contribution towards the upkeep of their children at universities, which is a significant reason for the decline in the undergraduate student body in this country. Secondly, the even more catastrophically small grants available to postgraduate students have had the result that many post-graduate schools have now been taken over almost entirely by foreign students who alone can afford the fees. It is terrifying to discover that some of my own departments which were three-quarters full of Englishmen only three years ago are now three-quarters full of foreigners. English students cannot afford to attend. This is a matter of desperate urgency and, unless something is done about it, all the regulations which my noble friend is discussing, will be totally void for lack of effect since there will be no English students left who will be able to take part in the operation he is describing. I hope that these facts may be borne in mind when my noble friend frames the regulations to which he has referred.
Lord ELTON: May I pick up the threads from the earlier reply and say that the relevance to this Bill of my remarks rested upon the possible absence of another means in another Act of remedying the situation. The noble Lord referred us to the 1962 Act. He says that he will try to alleviate the situation if he can. We will not go into the question of equity between husband and wife; the points were made on Second Reading. Therefore I merely wish to draw attention to what we regard
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as a sore point and an inexpensive point. I think the noble Lord will agree the maximum cost of removing altogether the contribution of the spouse will be only £3 million, according to statements in the other place. From my arithmetic, working on those statements, it is more like £3¾ million. In any case, these are relatively small figures which could be found in administrative savings elsewhere.
Lord CROWTHER-HUNT: I am aware of many of the anomalies in the student grant regulations to which my noble friend, Lord Bowden, has drawn attention; I could not be more aware of them in view of the amount of correspondence we receive on these matters within the Department. It is for that reason that I am carrying out a review which I hope will do something to alleviate at least the worst of the anomalies. I assure the noble Lord, Lord Elton, that I have these matters in mind, and that I am doing the best I can within the limited resources available. I hope that whatever changes can be made will be made, and will be effective from the beginning of the next academic year.
Clause 1, as amended, agreed to.
On Question, Whether Clause 2 shall stand part of the Bill?
Lord ELTON: May I refer, in passing, to an exchange that we had on Second Reading on this clause, when the question of the length of long courses was raised. No terminus ad quem was then suggested. I accept the assurances of the noble Lord opposite, privately given, that the question of subsidising a professional student up to middle age does not arise.
Clause 2 [Awards by Secretary of State for students at adult education colleges]:
Clause 2 agreed to.
Remaining clauses and the Schedule agreed to.
House resumed: Bill reported with the Amendments.

RENT ACT 1974
4.40 p.m.
Baroness YOUNG Baroness YOUNG rose to ask Her Majesty's Government how the Rent Act 1974 has worked in practice. The noble Baroness said: My Lords, I have put

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down this Unstarred Question on the Rent Act because I believe that now that the Act has been on the Statute Book for five months it is time to review its working. This may seem a very short time after which to consider reviewing it, but at the time of its passage through this House and another place it was much criticised. In particular the fear was expressed that, once security was given to all tenants of furnished accommodation, then there would be—as the Francis Committee, set up by the Labour Government between 1964 and 1970, which looked into rented accommodation, predicted—a decline in the total amount of accommodation to let.
Housing, next to food, is the most important factor in a person's life, and it is essential therefore that legislation should take account of this fact. Furthermore, a variety of housing is required. Not everyone wants to, or can afford to, own a house. Not everyone wants to be a tenant all his life, particularly as tenants continue to pay rent but do not acquire any capital appreciation. But many people, particularly the young, whether married or single, need rented accommodation. The young married couple need it because they cannot afford to buy. Often young people, whether married or single, need rented accommodation only temporarily because of the nature of their work, for, after all, young people are the most mobile. Students want "digs" for a time in their university town. It seemed to me it was right that we should debate at least one aspect of housing and consider the effect of the Rent Act on the housing situation generally. For today there is a situation in which there are more empty properties, both flats and houses; more homeless families; more squatters; longer council house waiting lists, and at the same time a static population. To this extraordinary situation the Rent Act has been a contributory factor. Indeed, it reminds me of the situation described in that well-known novel written in Oxford, Alice in Wonderland—but, alas! this situation is not a comedy but a tragedy.
As a member of the Opposition I have not the means to make a comprehensive survey of the detailed work of this Act, although I hope that the noble Baroness when she comes to reply will confirm that its effects are being monitored by the
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Government so that we may all know precisely what they are. In preparation for this debate I have consulted all the estate agents I have been able to reach, and the unanimous view of those both in Oxford and in London, when asked, is that fewer flats are now available for letting than were available last year. Once the announcement of today's debate appeared on the Order Paper I received a number of letters from total strangers, each giving examples of flats being deliberately kept empty because of the Act. No one interested in housing can have failed to read the articles in the Observer by Christopher Booker and Bernie Gray. They claim that there are now more empty flats and houses than at any time since the end of the war, including an estimated 100,000 empty houses and flats in London alone. They make it clear that the Rent Act has contributed to this situation. Even the most casual look at the correspondence columns of the national Press give example after example of people being unwilling to let.
It was said during the passage of the Bill through this House that Shelter had estimated that as a consequence of it there would be 5,000 fewer units of accommodation in London to let each year. I have read with interest their latest Report, Bed and Breakfast, which shows clearly that this kind of accommodation is being used extensively by local authorities for homeless families. It is estimated that in March 1973 15,000 people were being placed in bed and breakfast accommodation or temporary accommodation. By March 1974 the number rose to 30,000. Today it is thought that there are 50,000 homeless families in temporary accommodation. I hope very much mat the noble Baroness, Lady Birk, will not take the view that because I cannot give precise figures my argument is not sound. It may well be that some of the information I have received is not completely accurate, but it cannot all be wrong and the quite extraordinary unanimity of professional opinion about this situation suggests that basically it is correct.
So the question is: Is there anything constructive we can do about the present situation? I do not propose this afternoon to ask the Government to repeal the Rent Act—not simply for the completely practical reason that I know perfectly well they would not consider such

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a course. Far more important, I believe that, having given security of tenure to a group of people, it would be quite wrong to attempt now to take it away. However, I would make five practical suggestions and propose three Amendments to the Act which I hope the Government will consider seriously. My first suggestion is that they should produce a simplified form of the Act. It was bad enough that this important measure was on the Statute Book for two months before anyone was able to obtain a printed copy of it. It was left to my honourable friend Mr. Rossi to produce a book which included the Act and an explanation of it, and in so doing I believe he performed a great public service. The Government ought to produce such a booklet. During the passage of the Bill through this House they promised me that one would be produced. I hope they will do so because it will be invaluable both to tenants and to landlords. The fact that there is no understanding of this Act at all has created a climate of fear so that no one will let. Many people who have spare accommodation to let in their own homes are frightened to do so because they fear they will not be able to regain possession of part of their home should they so wish. So that is my first suggestion.
My second suggestion concerns students. I was pleased to see a report in The Times last week that the Government are considering amending legislation to this Rent Act so that all students will be excluded from its provisions. I hope the noble Baroness, Lady Birk, will have something to say on this matter this afternoon. The Act recognises the special position of students, because all students who are living in colleges or in halls of residence and are not tenants but are there under licence do not have security of tenure, for the sensible reason that, of course, the university and the colleges could not continue if their rooms were permanently occupied by one group of students. But this does not apply to the many thousands of students who live in "digs" or who nowadays prefer to share flats. On 1st July, during the Report stage of the Bill, the noble Lord, Lord Shepherd, said:
"Clearly I cannot commit a future Parliament, but what I can say is that when the adequate framework for a registration system has been worked out it would be our inten-
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tion to take the first opportunity of introducing enabling legislation."—[Official Report, col. 84.]
I hope very much that we shall see some such provision, because there has been a crisis in the university world this autumn. Others will have more detailed figures, but certainly there were reports of at least 1,000 homeless students at the start of the academic year in London alone. I have looked at the position in Oxford, with which I am familiar, and am glad to say that after a difficult start the situation appears to be easing. But I think this is because the colleges are in the special position of being able to add to their buildings and many of them have bought up houses already converted into bed-sitters. This is not a possibility open to universities without endowments. The fact is that landlords and landladies would be encouraged to let to students if they thought the students had not permanent security of tenure, and that they in turn could regain possession of their rooms or flats.
My Lords, my third suggestion is that the Government should consider amending that part of the Act which gives security of tenure to a tenant on a second fixed term letting where the landlord is resident. This does not go against the principle of the Bill. It seems to me that it would be in line with what the Government were saying, at any rate when the Bill was passing through this House, because they gave the impression that in future tenancies were to be divided not between those let unfurnished and those let furnished, but between those where the landlord was resident and those where the landlord was not resident. In the former case there would be no protection for the tenant.
I understand that the Bill was amended during the Committee stage in another place to give security of tenure to a tenant on a second fixed term letting where the landlord is resident. I believe that such an amendment as I have suggested, by encouraging landlords and landladies to let, would help the good tenant and, if I may say so, the British tenant, as there is increasing evidence that resident landlords and others prefer not to let only to foreigners. If I may illustrate my point, I think that every Member of your Lordships' House will know of people whose

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families have grown up and who therefore have spare rooms in their homes. Particularly in university towns but in other towns as well, often they are quite glad to let those rooms. If we suppose that they let their rooms to students, they will do so from September to July. Under the terms of this Act, if they let these rooms for the next academic year on a second fixed term letting, those students have security of tenure for the rest of their days. It may well be that a couple, who had let a room to such a student because their family had grown up and they had a spare room, would decide five years later that they no longer wished to let that room or would discover that they had an elderly relative to whom they wished to let the room. They could not do so, however, because the tenant would have security of tenure. This is such a simple and obvious case that I find it very difficult to believe that it was ever the intention of those who framed the Act that this kind of situation should arise. I quote this example because I think it is typical of thousands of cases up and down the country. I believe that because of this particular provision there is a great deal of unoccupied accommodation that could be used by many people who want furnished accommodation for a short time only.
My Lords, I believe that my amendment could be met by deleting from the Act paragraph (5)(b) on page 26. This comes under Schedule 2. I may not be right because I am not a lawyer, but that is the subsection which I understand applies to this particular provision for security of tenure on a second fixed term letting where the landlord is resident. Therefore I should like to ask the Government whether they would consider this particular point.
My fourth suggestion is another amendment which arises out of a particular case that I came across quite recently. It is a more technical amendment than the last. Under this Act, if the owner of a house dies leaving a tenant in part of a house, under Schedule 2, paragraph (2)(c), the executors have only one year in which to settle matters, otherwise the tenant has full security of tenure, so far as I can see, for ever. May we consider the length of time that takes place after somebody dies. In the particular case I
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heard of, a widower died and his son was the executor. By the time the family had recovered from the distress of the death, some four to five weeks had elapsed. Then they began to look at the house and the property. They knew about the tenant, who was a very good tenant and who had been there for a long time. They were then advised by their solicitor that if they did not take steps to remove the tenant immediately, they might not get him out within the year; he would then have security of tenure and no member of the family could have the house. We are all well aware of the long time that probate takes, of the very long time it takes to settle all these matters, and of the distressing circumstances involved in taking somebody to the county court or to the rent tribunal. Therefore it seems to me that it would be of benefit to everybody if this period of time were increased from 12 months to 24 months to make it easier for families to settle these cases. I have made these three particular proposals about the Rent Act because I hope the Government will view them as constructive suggestions. They are meant to be constructive and they are meant to help the situation.
My Lords, my last proposal has nothing to do with the Rent Act but with the problem created by it—that of empty properties. My suggestion is that the Government should consider a scheme of short leases so that empty properties will be let immediately and will not stand empty, thus encouraging squatters. I believe that many people would let their property very quickly if they believed that they could regain possession of it after a short period of time.
My Lords, time on this Unstarred Question does not allow me to go into this scheme in detail, or, indeed, into the detail that I should have liked on my other suggestions, but I should be very happy to talk to the noble Baroness, Lady Birk, and her advisers on any of these matters if she would like me to do so. I have made these suggestions because I believe them to be constructive. I do not believe that they go against the principle of the Act. I believe that all of my suggestions will help tenants. I think that all of them will help and encourage landlords to let their property and, as a consequence, will help all those who are

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now desperately seeking accommodation but who are unable to find it.
My Lords, this debate must take place against the very serious economic background that we face to-day. I hope very much that when the noble Baroness replies she will not say that the answer to all housing problems is to municipalise all houses. If I may say so quite frankly, I think this is far too simple an answer to far too complex a problem. Nor, indeed, do I believe that even if it were to take place it would work, because the Government issued a very important circular to local authorities on local authority expenditure and I think it is worth quoting to the House what they have to say about housing. They say:
"The Government continue to give high priority to housing".
They go on to say:
"There must, however, be restraint in expenditure on housing repairs, maintenance and management which has increased substantially in recent years. Local authorities are therefore asked to hold this expenditure to the same amount per dwelling as in 1974–75".
Then the circular goes on to say:
"The Government recognise that additional responsibilities such as the care of the homeless and the cost of managing acquired dwellings in scattered locations away from housing estates will add to management expenditure and that these factors will be particularly relevant in certain areas. However, they look to authorities to provide for this by making savings elsewhere ".
It seems to me that the two paragraphs are somewhat contradictory; but, leaving all that aside, the one thing that local authorities need to do in this critical situation is to have good management. Half of the houses standing empty to-day are local authority houses, and the fact is that unless there is very good management indeed we shall have ever longer queues, even more homeless families, ever more large families trying to get into houses and large houses under-occupied by a few old people. And, above all, if greater responsibilities are to be thrown upon local government they must have the people to manage effectively the properties that they already have.
I do not think—and I say this with all sincerity—that it is a good policy to drive out the private landlord so that he no longer exists and at the same time say to local government: "You must econo-
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mise on management, although of course we are going to ask you to look after a great many more houses". This is not a policy which will help this critical situation. I ask the House, and I ask the Government particularly, to consider the practical suggestions that I have made, for above all this is a time to consider the individual and not the doctrine.

UNEMPLOYMENT SITUATION
5 p.m.
The MINISTER of STATE, SCOTTISH OFFICE (Lord Hughes): My Lords, with the permission of the House, I will now repeat a Statement being made in another place by my right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Employment. His own words are these:
"As I informed the House on 13th January, the dispute which has pre vented the compilation of unemployment figures for December and for the scheduled date this month has been settled. Figures for future months should become available at the usual times. I promised to consider whether it would be possible to make an approximate estimate of the current level of unemployment and I now have this estimate.
"Last Monday, 20th January, the level of unemployment in Great Britain is estimated to have been about 742,000, an increase of 121,000 since the count last November. Of course, I do not minimise the seriousness of these figures, but part of this increase is what would normally be expected at this time of the year owing to seasonal factors. The increase since November in the seasonally adjusted level, excluding school leavers and adult students, was approximately 67,000.
"Further details of the estimates, including regional figures, are being issued by my Department and I have arranged for a copy of the Press release to be placed in the Library."
My Lords, that concludes the Statement.
Lord LYELL: My Lords, from these Benches we should like to thank the noble Lord for his detailed and informative Statement, but he may be able to settle one or two points that arise in our minds at this time as a result of these figures. First, according to some

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of the calculations we have been able to make, the rise in the total number of unemployed in Great Britain since the last figures were available from the Department of Employment is of the order of 121,000, which we believe is about 22 per cent. up, and is about 19 per cent. up on the corresponding figures for January 1974, which of course covered the worst problems of the three-day week. We consider that these figures are serious and would welcome any further comments that the Minister can make.
Another point that concerns us is whether the Government have any plans to alleviate unemployment by fostering and increasing business confidence and willingness to invest in British industry at this time. Have the Government any further plans to nurture and foster industrial investment? In spite of past statements we should be grateful for any information on this subject.
Thirdly, have the Government any further plans to step up the retraining of unemployed people and various workpeople who may lose their jobs through the advance in technology? I should like to draw to the attention of the Minister a statement made by Mr. Clive Jenkins on BBC Radio 4 on Sunday, 12th January, when he said that many more efforts should be made to re-train workers who, for one reason or another, lost their jobs.
Finally, can the Government comment on the statement made by Sir Denis Barnes who, I am sure the Minister is aware, is Chairman of the Manpower Services Commission. I understand that he said as recently as last Tuesday that the employment situation is currently showing signs of deterioration and that in his opinion there could be a total of over 1 million workless people by the end of 1975, although he thought that to forecast a figure of that magnitude by March was a little too gloomy. We do not wish to burden the Minister with any further questions at this time, but we should be grateful if he could say something on the points I have raised.
Lord ROCHESTER: My Lords, from these Benches we should also like to thank the Government for having repeated this Statement in this House. We naturally deplore the increase in unemployment to
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which the Statement refers. I should like first to follow up what has been said by the noble Lord, Lord Lyell, regarding the importance of training in this situation. If at any time a man cannot work, then the next best thing is for him to be able to prepare himself for a job in the occupation in which he is then likely to gain employment. We should very much welcome any undertaking that the Government are able to give, or any consideration they are willing to give to the possibility of the existing facilities in Government training centres and elsewhere being extended to cover this point in the very difficult employment situation in which we now find ourselves, and the even more serious employment situation which may shortly be upon us.
Secondly, I should like to ask a question relating to short-time working. There is no reference in this Statement to the effect on employment of current short-time working in industry, and therefore I should like to ask whether the Government can give any information as to the extent to which there is this hidden unemployment to which short-time working gives rise.
Lord HUGHES: My Lords, I should like to thank the noble Lords, Lord Lyell and Lord Rochester, for the way in which they have received this, I am afraid, rather gloomy Statement, but as the noble Lord, Lord Lyell, has said, at least it has the merit that it was not nearly so bad as the more gloomy of the pundits had predicted.
On the subject of investment, and also in reference to what Sir Denis Barnes said, I would draw the attention of your Lordships to the statements which have been made by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, in which he stated quite clearly that it is no part of the Government's policy to allow unemployment to be a factor in dealing with the situation, and it will remain the principal part of Government policy to make certain that unemployment does not reach what would be regarded as unacceptable levels. If anyone should wish to ask me to define my contention of an "unacceptable level" I do not propose to do so; I suppose we all have our own ideas on that.
On the subject of retraining, the Government are considering urgently the proposals on job creations which have been put forward by the Manpower Services

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Commission and they will be discussing these with the Commission as soon as possible. There is of course a range of measures which the Government might take in the event of high unemployment, and the job creation scheme to which the Manpower Services Commission has referred is obviously one of these.
Also on the subject of retraining, raised by both noble Lords, the Government are in favour of people taking training to enable them to get new jobs instead of remaining unemployed, and I can say quite definitely that if the Manpower Services Commission ask for more resources to expand training in the event of higher unemployment the Government will certainly consider any such proposals very seriously.
The final point raised by the noble Lord, Lord Rochester, was on the question of short-time working. From the way in which the noble Lord framed his question, I think he is aware that temporarily unemployed people have for some time now been excluded from the unemployment figures; and because of the circumstances which have compelled an estimate to be made of these figures I am afraid I could not give him any indication. I will however make inquiries in order to find out whether there is any way of ascertaining at this time what is short-time working. One knows of quite a number of places where the three-day week, and even, I believe, the two-day week, is temporarily in operation. If it is possible to get that information, I will write to the noble Lord, Lord Rochester, on that point. If the noble Lord, Lord Lyell, also wishes for the figures, I would be happy to send him a copy of the letter.
Lord HAWKE: My Lords, I never thought that the overall figures for Britain were really very valuable. They may mask different situations in different parts of the country. We may well find in the figures that there is a serious situation in, perhaps, the North-East or the North-West, and that the gross over-employment existing in certain parts of the South-East still continues. Moreover, we know that in the figure of 700,000, there are several hundred thousand unemployables, and several hundred thousand others who are mentally,
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physically, or by inclination not suitable for work. So really, the overall figure for the British Isles, in my opinion, is completely meaningless. Unless these things can be broken down, I do not think they ought to be taken as showing a serious or a non-serious situation.
Lord HUGHES: My Lords, I appreciate that obviously within these figures there will be people who fall into both the categories mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Hawke. However, I think we would be risking a series of strikes among the people concerned with taking these counts if they themselves had to undertake the invidious task of deciding, among other things, who was mentally and physically incapable of taking employment.
Lord PEDDIE: My Lords, quite apart from the point raised by the noble Lord opposite, I am sure he would agree that the overall figure in itself is no true indication of the employment situation at any particular moment. In fact, it is utterly misleading. I would be grateful if it were possible to give a breakdown of those figures which show the number of people who had been unemployed for a period of a month, two months, three months or six months, so that the House will have some indication as to what is the true trend of the employment situation. If that could be done, I am sure it would be far more illuminating than just giving a figure for unemployment at this moment.
Lord HUGHES: My Lords, in the normal course of events when the figures are available and can be examined, it is possible to do it in this way. Perhaps my noble friend Lord Peddie would wish to ask that question next month when we are dealing with the figures in the normal way. To attempt to do it on these figures in the way he put forward, when the basic figure given is, in itself, merely an estimate—as reliable an estimate as can be achieved; it is not just a figure plucked out of the air, but is based on a count, but without all the refinements which normally take place to make the figures as meaningful as possible—would be of very little value. But in the normal course of events, Yes, I agree. I will pass the request to my right honourable friend.
Lord HAILSHAM of SAINT MARYLEBONE: My Lords, having regard to the fact that the original Statement contained the word "estimate" and the last answer of the noble Lord underlined the fact that, due to the unfortunate dispute which we had this month (and which has now been settled), this is an estimate and not a figure or figures, can he tell us when we will have confirmed the figures for this month?
Lord HUGHES: My Lords, I am not quite certain whether in fact it was intended to do so, but it could be possible. I think the reason why this Statement has been given was because in another place there was anxiety to get something as quickly as possible. Perhaps I might explain how the figures are dealt with, because I myself was interested to know why, if there was a count, the figure still remained an estimate.
This is the position, as I was informed. On a particular Monday in a month, a count is made of all those who are unemployed. That count indicates the position not, as my noble friend said, at a particular moment, but on a particular day. It is adjusted in the course of the succeeding week (before the figures then are compiled) by taking into account those who it becomes known later in the week are in fact unemployed, but who have not registered as being unemployed on the actual day of the count. Someone might have been displaced on the Friday; he might spend the Monday looking for a job in places where he might think he can get one, but fail. He then goes to register as unemployed, perhaps, on the Tuesday or Wednesday.
It has been felt by the Department for a considerable time that it would be quite false to exclude these when the statement was actually issued. So the numbers of the count on Monday are increased by those known to have become unemployed during the days that follow. At the same time, the figure is diminished by those known to have taken up employment within the same short period. We then get the figure which is accepted, as near as may be, as the reliable statement of those who are unemployed at that time. We know definitely the count which was available on the Monday, but the normal refine-
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ments are not available which would make this a strictly comparable figure with those issued at other times. That is why it remains an estimate. I would suggest to my right honourable friend that if these refinements have been taken, if the refined figures are available, then a Statement should be made about them.
Lord HAWKE: My Lords, a local manufacturer tells me that if he applies to the local labour exchange for someone to work in his factory, somebody comes along, works for three days and then goes back again, because he is one of those who has no inclination for work. Will such a person be included in the figures or not?
Lord HUGHES: My Lords, if that person happens to be unemployed on the day when the count is taken, Yes, he will be included in the figures. A person is regarded as being temporarily unemployed and is excluded from the figure if, for some reason, he has been laid off by his employer for a brief period but has a job to return to. That is why people on part-time working are excluded, but, of course, the man who takes a job and then leaves it is unemployed. It will depend entirely on how frequently he flits in and out of employment. If he were unemployed on the Monday, if he took the job referred to by the noble Lord on Tuesday and was unemployed again on the Wednesday, or, perhaps, reemployed by someone else on the Friday, he probably would be counted as unemployed in those circumstances. I can almost understand how these firms have difficulties if I thought the country were infested with too many people like that.
Baroness FISHER of REDNAL: My Lords, can my noble friend the Minister clarify the position with regard to women who work on twilight shifts, and on the shift system? Are they included in any of the figures? From what he has just said, I presume they are not included in the unemployment figures; would they be included in the employment figures?
Lord HUGHES: My Lords, I regret that the only question to which I have no conceivable answer should have come from my noble friend. I will endeavour to find out the answer, and pass it to her in due course.

RENT ACT 1974
5.20 p.m.
Debate resumed.
Lord ROBBINS: My Lords, I believe that we now resume the debate which was so ably initiated by the noble Baroness, Lady Young, regarding the effects of the Rent Act. It is always a pleasure to take part in debates in which the noble Baroness participates. Her exhaustive knowledge of the subject and the felicity of her exposition always make me feel that further comment is otiose. On this occasion she certainly gave us a masterly survey of the problems and of the way in which they might be eliminated. I almost feel that, had there not been that intermission of questions and instructions regarding the unemployment statistics, the most graceful thing for me to do would be not to rise. But perhaps it may be worth while underlining certain principles involved, pointing out one or two morals and giving one example.
The general background of the doubts which were expressed regarding the effects of the Rent Act of the summer—and I was one of those who expressed doubts; this is not a case of hindsight—was the principle, almost universal in its application, that if the conditions of supply of goods or services are in some way or other made more onerous, either by direct operation on prices or profitability or by way of indirect operation on the conditions of the contract, then there will be a tendency for a diminution of the supply of the goods or services in question. As we all know, the rate at which this tendency manifests itself depends, of course, upon technical considerations. If the price of a foodstuff is fixed far below the profitable level, it is a very short time indeed before that foodstuff disappears from the shops. If the higher price of something very durable, like a house, is fixed below the equilibrium level or if the conditions of renting are made more onerous, it takes some time for the deleterious consequences to manifest themselves.
Rent restriction in general began in this country round about the outbreak of the First World War and successive Governments, of whatever degree of ingenuity, have not yet succeeded in clearing them up; in some cases what they have done
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has made matters worse. This generalisation certainly applies to the renting of private dwellings in general, to the renting of unfurnished dwellings, and—what was the subject of the debate last time—to the renting of furnished accommodation. I think that noble Lords should agree that the platitudinous remarks which I have been making so far are in accordance both with our knowledge of human nature and of history.
So far as human nature is concerned, it is scarcely logical to base whole political programmes on the assumption that landlords are apt from time to time to be influenced by pecuniary motives, to depict them as being from time to time rapacious in this respect, and then not expect them to take measures to adjust their position if restrictions of one kind or another are placed upon profitable operation in that area. So much for our knowledge of human nature. As regards history, reading around this topic I hit upon some really quite surprising statistics. I beseech your Lordships not to think that in quoting them I want to draw any moral for immediate legislation, or indeed to make any pronouncement upon the more general aspects of policy in regard to housing.
Looking around the House, I fail to see anyone who will have a very vivid recollection of the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. I was 8 in that year, and I am bound to say it was not a circumstance that was drawn to my urgent attention. But we all know that there was an earthquake then. I discovered, by reading an American paper on the subject, that half the housing was rendered uninhabitable within the space of three days. The highly ingenious and technically, at least, unassailable Professor Milton Friedman, and his almost equally distinguished colleague, Professor George Stigler, had the really rather splendid idea of examining, as far as they could, the influence of this in comparison with the state of affairs which occurred after the Second World War, by looking at the small classified advertisements in the San Francisco Press.
The results were as follows: After the earthquake of 1906, the classified advertisements in that area showed, broadly speaking, one advertisement of accommodation desired for every ten advertisements of accommodation offered. Those were the

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days when there was no rent restriction and the market was allowed to redistribute the accommodation. In 1946 in San Francisco, where rent control had been imposed but where there had been no earthquake, there were 375 advertisements of accommodation wanted for every 10 advertisements of accommodation offered. I draw no moral from that. I merely suggest that it is an interesting illustration of the principle which I have been trying to elucidate.
Although the Act of June has consequences, as I think the noble Baroness has demonstrated, which give rise to some anxiety, it was of course chicken feed compared with the mass of restrictions which have been imposed on the owners of real property, generally in regard to the contracts of renting, from 1914 to the present day. There is no reason to suppose—and I am quite sure that the noble Baroness would agree with me—that the Act of last summer has created a major social problem. But there is reason to suppose, as the noble Baroness has argued, that it has created a problem for some people. The order of magnitude of this small problem is frightfully difficult at this stage to quantify. My tentative inquiries, which have not been nearly as extensive as those of the noble Baroness, suggest that there is a perceptible diminution of accommodation, especially for students. There is certainly a suggestion that some landlords in the London area who were in the habit of providing this kind of accommodation have been trying, not always effectively so far as their expectations were concerned, to put their property on the market.
I can give a very concrete example. One of my friends, a foreign academic of great distinction, is working here more or less half-time on a job which makes it convenient for him to reside in this capital city with his family. The other day I went to have a drink with him. He was quite comfortably accommodated. I looked around his flat and congratulated him. He said, "Yes, it is an excellent flat. But, you know, I had to do a great deal of looking around, and I could not obtain access to this until I had found a company which was prepared to guarantee my evacuation of the premises at the time when the landlords wished me to go".
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I ask myself why do we, just because of reports from time to time of hard cases which could be dealt with in other ways, inflict these disabilities on ourselves and on our guests from abroad; and why, in particular, when the accommodation of the student body is so anxious a matter for those of us who, directly or indirectly, are concerned with the universities and the higher education policy, do we tolerate a situation which not only results in a diminution of this accommodation, but makes this absolutely indefensible differentiation between the position of people living in college and people trying to get accommodation in furnished flats, and so on, outside. I would urge the noble Baroness, Lady Birk, who is to reply, to give especial consideration to the second suggestion of the noble Baroness, Lady Young, that, at any rate, that part of the Act should be modified. I feel that if the Government were to make that gesture it would certainly not be a controversial matter in this House.
5.35 p.m.
Lord AVEBURY: My Lords, I hope that I shall be forgiven if I do not follow the noble Lord, Lord Robbins, in detail in his arguments, except to remark, first, that the number of small advertisements in a newspaper does not seem to me a very scientific way of assessing the relative supply and demand for any commodity, whether it be rented accommodation or any of the other products or services which are offered in newspapers. I do not think that all your Lordships would agree with his description of Professor Milton Friedman as an impeccable authority on these matters. I should have thought that one could not necessarily draw any conclusions from the information that he gave, and that another possibility might be that in more recent years people have found other ways of getting in touch with the potential suppliers of accommodation, rather than by putting advertisements in newspapers, and that the phenomenon that he quoted had nothing to do with the restrictions which have been imposed by the authorities in San Francisco since 1908.
I think that it would be absurd to expect any useful conclusions to be drawn about the working of this Act, when it is less than six months since the Royal Assent was given. My first reaction when

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I saw this Unstarred Question on the Order Paper was that it would not be at all useful for us to make any contribution, having made our views absolutely clear at the time of the proceedings on the Bill. I was anticipating—accurately, as it turned out—that we should be treated this afternoon to a rehash of the arguments already deployed at some length both on Second Reading and at the Committee stage of the Bill, together with what one might describe as a ratatouille of landladies' gossip, estate agents' commentaries, and a sample of remarks made by prominent journalists such as Mr. Benny Grey, who, I may say, has not had all the arguments his way. If the noble Baroness had read the subsequent correspondence in The Observer she would have seen that not all the readers agreed with every word of his conclusions.
I think that all the noble Baroness succeeded in doing before the Bill was given the Royal Assent was to frighten a good many landlords so badly that her prophecies stood a very good chance of being self-fulfilling. She is now, if I may say so, repeating that act of disservice to those who are seeking privately rented accommodation by driving a few more landlords out of the market.
Baroness YOUNG: My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, is spending his entire time making accusations that I repeated the speeches that I made at Second Reading and Committee stage, when in fact I have done quite differently. I have made three constructive suggestions to increase the supply of furnished accommodation for those who want it, and I wonder whether the noble Lord would recognise that fact
Lord AVEBURY: My Lords, I have only just begun. I have been on my feet for only a few minutes. I am going to deal with the suggestions made by the nobe Baroness, if she will allow me to do so. Before I do that, may I say that she led on to them by remarking that there are now more empty flats and houses than at any time in the past, and that this is in spite of the fact that we have a static population. That is a complete non sequitur, because babies are not in the market for dwellings. The rate of increase of the population today has no
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effect whatever on the demand for acommodation, rented or otherwise. It is the rate of formation of households that the noble Baroness should have been thinking of, and there is no reason why that should have varied because there have been recent declines in the fertility of women of childbearing age.
As regards the suggestions she made, I must agree wholeheartedly with the first one; that there should have been a simplified description of the Act published immediately so that both landlords and tenants could know the implications so far as they were concerned. I am surprised that this has not been done. Until the noble Baroness said so, I did not realise that the undertakings, as I thought, which were given by the Government on Committee stage had not yet been fulfilled. I recall that after the passage of the Rent Act 1965 a useful little booklet was issued entitled, The Rent Act and You, which many of us used at our Advice Bureaux, and I daresay the CAB and others concerned with the problems of landlords and tenants found that document most useful as a rough guide to the workings of the Act, although it did not go into the legal details. I hope that the noble Baroness who is to reply will be able to give us some assurances on that point.
The noble Baroness, Lady Young, then made the suggestion that students should be excluded in any amendment of the Act and said, to use her own words, that there was a crisis in the university world this autumn. I simply do not believe that. I do not think that the noble Baroness purported to give the House any figures, and I believe that she is merely repeating what has been said to her by some academics and others in the City of Oxford and elsewhere, who are concerned with the provision of this type of accommodation and who have repeated to her either their own experience, or what they have heard from others in the same field. I do not consider this to be a very scientific way of approaching the problem.
If the universities have information from their own records about the volume of accommodation available this year and in previous years, then let it be produced and we can all examine it. But simply to take information at random from one or two university towns and

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to inflate it by describing it as a "crisis" is, in my opinion, really irresponsible. It is calculated only to drive even more landlords and others concerned with the provision of student accommodation out of business, if they believe that the risks of letting their property to students are as serious as the noble Baroness has described. I do not believe that that is the situation. Obviously, one cannot produce any evidence, because it is too soon after the passage of the Act. But, on the grounds of common sense, a person with accommodation available for letting is far more likely to look towards the student population, because at least he knows that once a person has obtained his degree he is likely to go elsewhere.
The noble Baroness will remember that we discussed this in Committee and I said that few students these days went to a university that was within daily travelling distance of their homes. For example, my eldest son has gone to the University of Birmingham, and I do not imagine that he is likely to settle in Birmingham for the rest of his life. Presumably, once he qualifies, he will look for a job wherever employment is available. It might as well be any other city in the United Kingdom than Birmingham. Just because he happened to have some rather substandard accommodation which is all that is available to students, and obtained security of tenure of it would not be sufficient inducement to persuade him to remain in Birmingham for the rest of his life. The argument of the noble Baroness on this point does not stand up to examination.
She then made two minor suggestions about the second fixed-term tenancies with residential landlords and the position of executors who have to make a decision in 12 months. If we are talking about hundreds of thousands of houses, I do not think that small modifications of the Act along the lines the noble Baroness has suggested will make any difference. But, certainly, let us consider them if it is shown that there is a problem. However, does the noble Baroness not think that six months after the passage of an Act is rather too soon to be considering detailed technical modifications of that kind?
Her last suggestion of short leases to encourage owners to rent empty properties requires a reply. If this could be done
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without creating an enormous loophole through which the whole of the privately rented sector of 750,000 furnished properties would pass, then I am perfectly prepared to consider it. When the noble Baroness has thought out this plan in more detail—which she will obviously have to do if the Department invites her to go and discuss it as she proposes—then I will be glad to take a completely unbiased and impartial look at it. But I think it rather premature to come to the House with a half-baked scheme which, as I understand her, is not ready to put in front of the Department.
May I now get some facts straight. In every year since the 1957 Rent Act the number of privately-rented dwellings in England and Wales has declined. I do not think I shall be contradicted on that statement. The rate of decline was rather steeper in the years prior to 1965 when the main Rent Act was passed, than between the passing of that Act and the 1971 Census. Therefore, if the additional security of tenure which was conferred on the tenants of unfurnished properties by the 1965 Act had any influence at all on the market, that influence was certainly outweighed by the other factors in the situation. In my opinion, the main influence has always been financial, as the noble Lord, Lord Robbins, said. Even when unfurnished rents were outside control, the owner of a dwelling was generally better off if he could sell with vacant possession and then invest the proceeds elsewhere than if he continued to let that property. In addition, of course, the more profitable investments would seldom have involved him in anything like the same responsibility as he incurred by being a landlord. The extension of regulation, and what I call "proper security of tenure" to the people who are living in furnished properties, by the 1974 Act did little to change the fundamental economics of landlordism.
One may say that there is a marginally higher incentive to sell if vacant possession can be obtained, but that, I should have thought, is counterbalanced by the greater difficulty which landlords now have in obtaining possession in the first place. So one might expect that the next effect would be a continuing decline in the privately rented sector at very much the same rates as before. That is what I

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imagine the figures will show once they can be produced. But of course we are still arguing in the absence of any hard and fast data to show whether or not the noble Baroness's case is right.
I think that instead of continuing this dispute about the precise effects of the Act, in isolation from all the other factors which affect the supply of privately rented accommodation, this House would do much better to address itself to the question of how to boost the amount of rented accommodation provided by local authorities and housing associations. Let us accept that private landlordism is no longer in business to cater for the needs of the broad mass of the people, and that in future the role of landlords will be largely confined to satisfying demand for luxury accommodation in the larger cities. In saying that I want to emphasise that I am not making any ideological point. I happen to be a landlord myself and perhaps I should have declared an interest, although I do not own any furnished property. I am merely talking about the practicalities of the situation. Why do we go on deluding ourselves into thinking that private landlords have an important role to play, when since 1957 all the evidence proves the opposite?
Therefore, I present six suggestions of my own to which I hope the noble Baroness will similarly give her consideration as I will to hers. First, we have 56,000 unsold new houses. What has happened to the Government's proposals that these should be taken over by the local authorities and used to shorten the waiting list? As the noble Baroness said, if we have these longer and longer waiting lists at the same time as these 56,000 houses remain empty, then that is indeed Alice in Wonderland. I agree with her. Let the local authorities be empowered to take over these houses and reduce the length of their waiting lists.
Secondly, let us consider the position of involuntary landlords, the people who own one or two houses, and the "classical widow", who always appears in our debates on private landlords, who does not want to continue in the position of being a landlord but finds the local authority unwilling to buy her property. Why not say that local authorities should be compelled to buy out unwilling private
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landlords at prices agreed by the district valuer, not based on the investment value of the property but on some reasonable figure with a discount by reason of the fact that the purchaser is not getting vacant possession, and with sufficient inducement to persuade an old lady that she should give up her property to the local authority, which in most cases she will be only too willing to do?
Thirdly, let us abolish the housing cost yardstick, which has inhibited local authorities from building more dwellings of their own. Fourthly, let us see whether the Government cannot persuade local authorities to add to their building programmes, particularly in 1975 when every newspaper one opens contains words of doom about the building industry and the building materials industry and speaks of vast stocks of unsold bricks and so on. The resources being wasted could easily be brought into productive use, provided the Government would encourage and finance local authorities to increase their building programmes.
Fifthly, I should like to sec greater emphasis on the modernisation of older properties. An enormous amount remains to be done here and, if I may, I will interpolate a little story. I was talking to somebody from the firm of architects of Ove Arup, which assisted voluntarily in helping the inhabitants of Chorlton-cum-Hardy, a suburb of Manchester, to resist a compulsory purchase scheme under which the local authority was intending to knock down 111 houses. When architects from Ove Arup went to look at those properties, they said that 108 of the houses could be made fit with the minimum of expenditure in such a manner that they would last at least 25 years. After a great deal of work, they proved this to the local authority and 108 of the dwellings were saved. As I told my informant, this is happening all over the country and even in Greater London—for instance, in Deptford. Hundreds of acres of houses have been compulsorily acquired by local authorities and then left vacant to rot for years. This is a scandal and one that should be eliminated. I believe that the Secretary of State has expressed himself fairly strongly on this point, but I am afraid that his words of wisdom have not yet percolated through to some local authorities, including some of our London boroughs, which have all this vacant

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property which they acquired with a view to grandiose schemes of redevelopment with multi-storey blocks which have now gone out of fashion. Let those properties be brought back into productive use.
Sixthly and finally, my Lords, local authorities, particularly in Greater London, should come together and agree among themselves on a comprehensive tenancy exchange system. Some London boroughs have rudimentary provision in their own areas for tenants to exchange and for lists to be provided for tenants if they want to move, with a view to minimising under-occupation as well as giving the tenants the kind of accommodation they want in the places where they need it. Why not extend the scheme to the whole of London, so that if, for instance, somebody wants to move from Bromley to Redbridge or Haringey, proper lists of the accommodation offered by tenants in each area would be available and tenants could be put in touch with each other and thus enabled to make much better use of the accommodation which the local authorities already possess? I believe that this idea could be very simply implemented on a computer system which would give virtually immediate information to the tenants wishing to exchange, at minimum cost. It might even be possible to use the computer system which is used for a rather similar application—that of job banks, where one has to compare the qualifications of an application for a job with the needs of the employer who is asking for staff. I believe that the London job bank system has some spare capacity and that might be used by local authorities for this purpose.
My Lords, those are six practical suggestions which I believe would go some way towards solving the problems which the noble Baroness, Lady Young, and I, and, indeed, the noble Lord, Lord Robbins, believe demand the attention of the House. I conclude by agreeing most heartily with the final sentiment which the noble Baroness expressed: let us consider the individual not the doctrine and let us finally end these sterile disputes across the Floor of the House and consider what is best for the tenants.
5.57 p.m.
Lord BALERNO: My Lords, with one exception, with which I shall deal later, I do not propose to follow the arguments
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of the noble Lord, Lord Avebury. Indeed, I found them somewhat involved and very much to be contrasted with the excellent clarity of the disquisition on the law of supply and demand given by the noble Lord, Lord Robbins. I was particularly struck by the San Francisco illustration.
My Lords, my intention is to deal with the student problems arising from the workings of this Act as they have come into effect and as they can be seen at the present time. This Act got off to a very bad start. It was literally rushed through Parliament, the greater part of it during a period when Parliamentary Papers were not being printed; and, as my noble friend Baroness Young has said, while it came into effect in the second week of August, it was a matter of months before printed copies were available for the lawyers or the public. Furthermore, it came into effect at the start of the holidays. Very little publicity was given to the Act in the Press. Confusion was confounded by your Lordships. I expect that your Lordships will recollect that we passed an Amendment excluding students from the scope of the main purpose of the Act. I suppose that we can take it as flattering to ourselves that this Amendment received a significant amount of publicity from the Press, whereas the Amendment subsequently passed in another place restoring the inclusion of students did not receive the same publicity. This led a number of owners of furnished accommodation to let their flat as usual, so that, although our Amendment was not successful, it did enable some students to rent furnished accommodation which would not otherwise have been available to them.
The student accommodation problem will also in some degree have been mitigated by the fact that there has been a decline in the market value of the type of flats and houses in question. This was largely due to many owners being so fearful of the terms of the Act that they put their property on the market. This I have checked and it is true. Even though the advertisements were small, they were there in the papers and they were counted. This is not landladies' gossip, as the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, has hinted. Most universities have a director of student accommodation or some such office as that. These people are qualified graduates whose job it is to make a close study of

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the problems of accommodating students, and their information is available for those who ask for it. I am only speaking from knowledge of the eight Scottish universities.
My Lords, although the Act does not alter the fixing of a rent, the publicity given to the rent officer has frightened many landlords out of the market. When the rent is registered for three years, at the current rate of inflation, it makes a most difficult proposition for any landlord. The remaining owners who have to rent out their furnished flats are now looking very closely at their prospective tenants. Such owners seek final year students, especially those from overseas, for they are really only willing to rent until such time as they can get a proper value for their property, which in a year or two will most certainly sell at a much higher figure than they could get at present. In this connection, landlords are naturally wary of letting to students since, as a class of people, they know far more than most other tenants about their rights and the law. It is no exaggeration to say that, come next autumn, the vast majority of flats available for letting will be those owned by persons intending to retire to them at the termination of their present employment. By then it will be almost impossible for first or second year undergraduates to become tenants of furnished flats.
There is one point on which I should particularly like elucidation by the Government. The new rent allowance system in Sections 11 and 12 of the Act seems to me to be of no help at all to students, as it has worked on an assumed rent derived by the local authority. If the assumed rent is a lot less than the actual rent the students will soon realise that if they go to the rent officer then they will have to pay only a rent similar to the assumed rent. These two sections have exactly the same effect as in the case of people being led up the garden path—in this respect one that goes round in a circle.
Returning to the problem of the acute shortage of accommodation for students, there is, I think, one rather narrow way round, and perhaps the noble Baroness when she replies may care to make a comment on its legality. The trick is for the universities themselves to rent
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furnished flats and then to sub-let them to individual students by name. A vary tentative start has been made on this—no names, no pack drill—and it is too soon to predict the extent to which this may ease the problem, which is certainly not helped by those students who, rightly or wrongly, refuse to pay the economic rent occasioned by such a procedure.
I can speak only for the Scottish universities. The public seem to think that the universities have a duty to provide residential accommodation for students, just as they are now expected to provide day nurseries for the children of staff and students. Yet support for this idea by the State is exiguous in the extreme, and the only way that the universities can provide accommodation is by borrowing money and by refunding from the charge made to students. When money was cheap this could just about be made to work, especially where it was eked out by some private donations— where the pump was primed by some such means as that. Now this is not possible. The new universities are especially hard hit. Recently, Heriot-Watt University has had to turn down an offer of nearly half a million pounds given for the construction of a hall of residence for 150 students—that was the condition of the gift. The cost of such a building is now about £1 million, and on the half a million pounds that the university would have to borrow there would be an interest charge of something of the order of £70,000 to £80,000 a year, requiring a rent from each student occupier of around £10 per place per week. That would be for the accommodation only. The costs of heating, servicing and lighting the building would also have to be paid for. In those circumstances, and despite taking in this gift, the economic charge to students would have to be something of the order of £17 or £18 per week per student, and that without—to use the English word—amortisation of the capital.
The prime functions of a university are to provide education and to conduct research, and so to advance learning. Inflation is eroding the academic work. For lack of cash posts, when they become vacant, are not being filled. Money directed to student accommodation can only be at the expense of sound learning. I entirely agree with the word my noble

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friend Lady Young has used in this connection—there is a crisis here, and it is a crisis of the first magnitude. "Crisis" is not too strong a word. With the rise in the general standard of living, with the fantastic rise in the wages of certain classes of our society, it surely is the duty of this or of any Government to make provision for the adequate housing of students at our universities. This Act does just the opposite—it makes the position more difficult. The noble Lord, Lord Robbins, asked why we tolerate the situation. I re-echo that question. I have one last Parthian shot for the noble Baroness to deal with when she replies. It is a question which interests me greatly. I wish to know whether the Government have received any representations, officially or otherwise, about the workings of this Act from the National Union of Students.
6.6 p.m.
Lord JANNER: My Lords, I have listened with particular interest to the debate today because it has assumed a rather different aspect from the kind of debates I have heard since the 1915 Act was passed, with the constant attack on the whole principle of attempts to protect tenants. I am glad that that has happened. I could not quite understand what the noble Baroness was driving at when she put down the Unstarred Question. Now, of course, I realise that what she is saying is that the Act is very good, because she has not criticised the Act itself, but that there are some features of it which might be reconsidered, and on that nobody with any reasonable approach—I am not saying that her arguments are right—would object to a reconsideration of some of the points involved.
I do not disagree to a reconsideration of the student question, which I am quite certain the Government would do in the light both of what has been said and of their own knowledge. But I am interested that the noble Lord, Lord Balerno, was the only one in the course of the debate who criticised the action of the Government in introducing this measure. He was wrong, if I may say so with the greatest respect. A Party which goes into an Election saying it is going to do something is expected to do it. The Opposition may grouse about what is not done, but only when the Government's Election Manifesto has said that they are going to do it. The Opposition cannot be
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heard to grumble about the fact that a Government acted as speedily as possible, particularly in view of the peculiar circumstances which existed at that time, by introducing legislation which they adumbrated in their Election programme. I do not see that there is any answer to that. The Government were placed in a position where they had promised to do this very thing—which they did.
Obviously, there may be slight errors. These occur in every Act that has ever been passed. I have found it so in the course of my legal experience. If any noble Lord can show me an Act where slight errors have not occurred, I shall be happy to see it. It will be a new experience for me to read an Act of that description. The Government certainly did what the public knew they were going to do. Was that right or wrong? The public voted in favour of it; the public wanted furnished tenancies to be protected and they said so by returning the Government. The Government said, "Thank you. You have accepted our policy. We will proceed with it." The noble Lord cannot complain about that, or at least ought not to do so.
It is all very well for us to talk about these exceptional cases. Of course, there are exceptional cases. The truth is that millions of people in this country have benefited—not in an unfair way at all— in consequence of the Rents Acts that have been put into force. I can remember the debates in the other place, which I heard time after time. A spirit of gloom was brought into the whole proceedings —not so, I am glad to see, by the noble Baroness today; though she was a little gloomy about certain aspects. The things the opponents used to say in the course of those debates were enough to shatter the nerves of the most strongnerved person: "Ruin stares us in the face! The landlords will be ruined; they will be going round cap in hand begging for some kind of help!" It is all nonsense. We know that the result of the Acts has been that millions of people have been protected in their tenancies, people who would otherwise have been thrown on to the streets. For what purpose? For the purpose of speculative actions by—well, not all landlords, but perhaps a minority of them. Certainly we see this kind of thing happening today with certain landlords.

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My Lords, what is wrong with the Act itself? Let us put aside for the moment consideration of these exceptional cases. The noble Lord, Lord Avebury, is a very experienced debater. I hope that he will not mind my saying so, but I think that he showed his skill when he introduced other methods of dealing with the situation which (I think he will agree with me) are not entirely relevant. They are somewhat relevant; but not entirely so to the point that we are discussing today. We are discussing this Act. Some noble Lords may not know what he has in mind. I know; and in many respects I agree with him. But having said what I have just said, it would not do for me to comment on the subjects that he has introduced.
In effect, this Act states: If you are a landlord of furnished apartments do not charge an unfair rent. What is wrong with that? You are entitled to go to an independent person, the rent officer. He is not a vampire waiting for the blood of landlords; he has much to put up with; but certainly the rent officer is not a vindictive man, a fellow who is determined that one side or the other will be pushed out of existence. He is asked to assess a fair rent. If the parties are not satisfied they may go to a rent tribunal. I feel sure that some of the rent tribunals have Conservatives among their members. I believe so, I have never asked; but I think it probable. Therefore, a person who has a property will get a fair rent from the letting of that property. If he does not want a fair rent, what does he want? He wants to deprive the people of this country of accommodation in order that he may make some kind of speculative deal which will serve to increase the terrible inflation that is already going on.
Lord STRATHCONA and MOUNT ROYAL: My Lords, I am sorry to interrupt. I cannot follow the logic of this argument. What does the noble Lord think is going to happen to the houses from which these people get "kicked out"? Are they to stay empty? Surely that will not suit the landlord.
Lord JANNER: My Lords, the noble Lord had better not goad me. I did not want to enter into discussion on this particular topic; but if the House really
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wants to know, I think that some landlords will be happy when tenants are "kicked out" because the landlords will then try to sell in the highest market. They will wait for someone to purchase the house or parts of the house. People in a position to purchase—and only such people—will be able to live in the house and use as much space as they can; whereas the people in need will be sitting on the streets. We do not want that to happen; and that is why we introduced this Act. We do not want the affluent oil people coming here and taking over elaborate apartments. What we want is that the people of this country should have somewhere to live. So far as the landlord is concerned, if he gets a fail rent, it means that he gets a fair return on his money.
Lord BURNHAM: My Lords, can the noble Lord explain what he means by "fair rent"? It is not contained in the Act. I have never been able to discover what it was.
Lord JANNER: My Lords, I am not an assessor. The rent officers are supposed to be people who have knowledge of what is a fair or reasonable rent in a particular area. I do not know the exact scientific way or the mathematical way by which they come to their conclusions. But I am sure of this: if the tenant or the landlord is not satisfied, the rent officers have to satisfy the tribunal that it is a fair rent. What more can a person want than a fair rent for his property? I can never understand the argument that is put against that. If a rent of a certain amount were specified, it would be a different matter. I was not in the House at the time that the 1915 Rent Act was considered, but I remember that my first case before a county court judge over fifty years ago was on that particular Rent Act. At that time there were other problems to consider. People used to buy the house at a cheaper rate; it would go up in value and they wanted increased values for renting. It is not quite the same kind of thing today. Today properties are in the hands of individuals who should be entitled only to a fair rent for the property that they own.
The consumer has to be protected by not putting upon him the additional amount which the speculator wants. We

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have this problem in the international sense at present. Just think of the oil situation. It is the same kind of problem, but it is local, it is social error. The blackmailers who try to drive us into a situation where we cannot get the oil commodity are setting an example to people here in respect of letting houses. I would not say that people here could possibly be quite as bad, although they like to charge as much rent as they can get even though it would be an unfair rent. How could this noble House agree to anything of that nature? We have now reached a situation where a furnished tenant must also be protected, not because anyone takes a vicious line against the landlord, but because we think that unless that is done people will have no homes.
Then we come to statistics. I am sure that many among your Lordships know how far statistics are reliable—sometimes they are, sometimes they are not. We have had only six months since the passing of the Act and the eggheads have decided in that six months that they can tell us why there is a great shortage—for example, that people are not advertising as much. That is a silly kind of argument. A distinguished newspaper in this country published an article which said that people are not advertising as much. Of course they would like more advertisements, but if people have accommodation and have not been forced to change because their rent is going up or an exorbitant rent is being asked, they will not advertise for new accommodation. I can understand why the Evening Standard complains, but there is no logic in it so far as the tenants are concerned. That does not show that accommodation is not being made available; on the contrary, in my view it shows that accommodation has been made available and consequently people are not advertising for other accommodation.
Lord BROUGHAM and VAUX: My Lords, will the noble Lord forgive me if I contradict him completely? A cousin of my wife's has just come down from Oxford. He queued for hours trying to get a flat but without success. There are just not enough flats for undergraduates who have come down from Oxford.
Lord JANNER: I agree, my Lords, but the removal of protection will not help him. Once he gets somewhere to live he will be protected, whereas otherwise he might be called upon to pay twice or three times the amount of the fair rent. Remember what I said a moment ago—there are other methods of dealing with it. I should have liked to pursue the course which the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, followed—but I do not want to go into that. Of course, there are other ways, and the Government want as much rented property throughout the country as they possibly can. I would advise the noble Lord to talk to some of the housing authorities, some of the local authorities; ask them what is being done and force them to do more.
Baroness YOUNG: My Lords, I am sorry to interrupt the noble Lord, but he says that local authorities ought to do more. Has he any evidence of any housing authority in the country which is prepared to let a house or a flat to a young couple on getting married or to a single young person? I have none.
Lord JANNER: My Lords, the noble Baroness has no evidence. She has made inquiries, I have not, so consequently I cannot give a definite answer to the point she has made. But what does the noble Baroness want? I want the local authorities to make more accommodation available. I want them to take over houses which are empty. I did not go more fully into that, because as a Member of another place I should not have been allowed to do so.
Baroness YOUNG: My Lords, may I pursue this point, because I believe it to be a very important matter of principle? If there are no more private landlords left and fewer local authorities are prepared to provide accommodation for newly married couples and young people, there will be nowhere for them to go, and like the friend of my noble friend they will be on the streets indefinitely until they find a place in a council house. This is a very serious matter.
Lord JANNER: I have given the noble Baroness the benefit of not casting gloom on the situation.
Baroness YOUNG: I am not doing that.
Lord JANNER: My Lords, the noble Baroness is doing so. She is saying that as long as this Act or similar Acts exist, the private landlords are going to stick with their places empty. You cannot have them both empty and full. That being the case, the noble Baroness is now arguing that they must charge an unfair rent in order to be able to let their places. That is not the kind of argument we can accept. Let us do whatever we can for the local councils and the housing organisations.
Today there has been an endorsement, because there has been no argument against the action taken by the Government in introducing this measure. There are difficulties which it might be necessary to consider. Of course there are difficulties and exceptions arise. Let me me say on behalf of my colleagues in the legal profession, who are always attacked from both sides of the House, that what I am saying now is not in our best interests in a professional sense, as many noble Lords on the other side and many on this side will understand. But speaking quite openly, it is not a question of supporting landlords or supporting tenants. The point now is to give publicity to the Act. This is what I would ask in exchange for what the noble Baroness wants from the Government. Let her give an undertaking that her Party will join the Government in giving as much publicity as possible so that tenants and landlords will know where they are. It is a good Act and I am sure that my noble friend will, in her customary way, reply in a reasonable manner, perhaps not entirely to the satisfaction of the other side but coming some way towards it. Let us do what was proposed here by one or two people. It is true that there has not been enough publicity. I know this because time after time I have advocated the production of pamphlets so that the man in the street will know where he is. Let the Opposition help but do not let them go out and attack, because in doing this they are ruining the possibilities created by what is a first class measure.
6.29 p.m.
The Earl of KINNOULL: My Lords, along with every other speaker I should like to add my thanks to my noble friend Lady Young, not only for raising this important subject of the 1974 Rent Act,
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and indeed illustrating the very disturbing effect it is having on the supply of furnished accommodation, but also for the clarity and the manner in which she has done so. My noble friend is always very conscientious and thorough whenever she introduces a debate in this House. I am sad that other speakers who followed her were not quite so thorough. Surely the basis of this debate is whether or not the supply of furnished accommodation available to young couples, to old people and to people in transient jobs is declining fast. I believe that this is the basis of this debate.
I was very sad that the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, seemed totally to disregard my noble friend's remarks without a trace of evidence. I hope that the noble Baroness, Lady Birk, will give some reward to my noble friend for raising this Question and for the fact that she has a well-prepared brief, and will be able to reassure the House and others who are interested that her Department are watching the position carefully, have available facts and figures which are so essential in this matter and indeed are contemplating action upon it.
Before coming to the House today, I tried to obtain evidence to support my noble friend's arguments. Individually, without exception, if one talks to owners of property and indeed to their professional advisers, the firm answer is that the ambit of the Rent Act 1974 rules out most cases of future letting. If one talks to would-be tenants—and there is a growing list of them—the answer, also quite firmly, is that there is a severe and growing shortage of rented accommodation throughout the country, particularly in London and other large cities. If one looks to local authorities, one finds they are not able to offer adequate alternative solutions. Therefore, in some ways the availability of furnished accommodation today compared with, say, six months ago when this Act was passed, is now a mere trickle. That is the case for our discussion tonight.
Lord JANNER: My Lords, will the noble Earl permit me to ask him this? Might that not be because the people who are already in accommodation have not been turned out?
The Earl of KINNOULL: My Lords, that is one possibility, but I am looking

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at the case of new tenants or would-be tenants who are without accommodation today.
Lord JANNER: Yes, my Lords, but the others have to be turned out to give them that accommodation.
The Earl of KINNOULL: No, my Lords, that is not so. If I may continue—the noble Lord has had his say and, if I might say so, he always argues with great persuasiveness even though he sometimes goes beyond the point—I believe that a great deal of hardship is being suffered today not only by students but by young and old couples, as has been mentioned, and by many of those in transient jobs. If one reads reports in the Press, as I am sure all those who have taken part in our debate today will have done, these occur almost every day and I cannot believe that all of them are wrong, no matter what other noble Lords have said.
When the noble Baroness, Lady Birk, replies, I hope she will not be tempted to say that her Department do not yet have sufficient evidence to show how the Act is working and what effects it is having. If that were her answer it would be very distressing and disappointing to many people, both inside and outside your Lordships' House. It would lead one to ask how the Department gathers evidence: is it from annual returns or half-yearly returns? From whom do the Department draw their evidence? Do they go out to see what is available in the market and what areas are worst hit? The noble Lord opposite shakes his head, but I believe we are now facing a new housing crisis, perhaps the worst for many decades.
The signs are there. The number of new private housing starts represents a mere trickle of the former number, and local authority housing is suffering from a cut-back in support from the Government. Indeed, I understand that the other day a circular was sent to local authorities by the Government, requesting cutbacks on management and on repairs to existing stock. One sees the freezing up of rented accommodation in the private sector; one sees the increase in the numbers of squatters, and this is a very disturbing sign. One also sees the local authority housing lists getting longer and longer. To meet this crisis I believe it to
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be essential that the Department represented by the noble Baroness should have accessible and up-to-date information. My suspicion is that the present system of information gathering is not geared to the problems we face. I would hope that a standing committee might be set up which could monitor all the information required, such as has been mentioned in this debate tonight. It is essential to know the numbers of those who are waiting to get into furnished accommodation. I hope that the noble Baroness will be able to give us some figures on this aspect.
Like my noble friend Lady Young, I should like to offer three thoughts on how amendments to the Act might be made. The first is possibly a major one and the other two are comparatively minor. The first, which could attract a pool of some 100,000 new houses and some 200,000 houses which are waiting for perhaps a period of one or two years for refurbishing, is that this great pool of houses should be let on a fixed term basis either to the Housing Corporation or to local authorities. This would offer an immediate supply of accommodation of a temporary kind which is so urgently needed. A variation of this—and perhaps the noble Baroness will comment on it when she replies—is the possibility that the landlord and the tenant could contract out of the provisions of the Act, with the consent of the court, as is done with business rents at present.
The second point I should like to put to the noble Baroness—and I appreciate that it is a minor one which I mentioned to her some time ago—concerns the owners of houses which are the subject of mortgages. When the owner goes abroad and wants to rent the house, the mortgagee is faced with twin problems. First, in the event of the death of the owner or of the mortgagee being forced to foreclose, the mortgagee would not automatically get vacant possession of the property. This is important and I should be grateful if the noble Baroness could tell us what is happening. This particularly affects building societies.
The final point which I should like to raise, which again is perhaps a minor one in some respects but is very important in others, concerns the case of those who have houses which go with jobs. Schoolmasters are among those affected by this situation. I believe that the Act partly

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covers this situation, but there is a great deal of doubt as to whether a schoolmaster who buys a house and rents it during term-time, and then wishes to come back and get possession of his house during the holidays is able to do so. Those are some suggestions which, if accepted, might help to alleviate the difficulty which at present hangs over the furnished accommodation market.
In conclusion, I believe that my noble friend was right to ask this Question today. I am sure that in the years to come the 1974 Rent Act, as it stands at present, will go down in history—perhaps like many others—as a piece of housing legislation which caused more harm and hardship to the very people Parliament thought it was protecting. The market has reacted swiftly and the result is a disaster for those who, for one reason or another, have no opportunity to purchase; and it is a disaster not only because the market has dried up, but because those who need housing to rent now have no alternative. The solution lies with the Government, as does the responsibility, and I hope that the noble Baroness, Lady Birk, will not duck that responsibility tonight.
6.40 p.m
Lord STRATHCONA and MOUNT ROYAL: My Lords, I shall try and resist the temptation to turn this into a general housing debate, although a number of the points that have already been raised have very much tended in that direction. I hope that if it had been a general housing debate there would have been a few more noble Lords in the Chamber to show interest in what to me is a very important subject. Let us start from the proposition—and I believe I will carry even the noble Lord, Lord Janner, with me on this—that we all genuinely want to see people housed. What we have to accept is that there is a good deal of genuine disagreement about the best way to do it. This is unfortunate. It is a pity housing has to be the subject of political argument and becomes a political football. I totally accept, however, the genuineness of those whose ideas differ from my own.
I will make one provocative remark right at the beginning and then try not to
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be provocative again. I go along with my noble friend Lord Kinnoull, and I believe that this Act is proving to be a sledge hammer to crack a nut. But it is not only cracking the nut, it is showing signs of destroying the workbench on which we are trying to operate. Despite what was said by the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, it is relevant and it is true— and I believe Mr. Crosland said it—that there is, broadly speaking, the same balance between housing and people now as there was before the war when there were plenty of houses available at prices people could afford. This is an important general background.
I need not do more than thank my noble friend Lord Kinnoull who, much more eloquently than I could, emphasised again that there is a case to answer; and, of course, I agree with my noble friend Lady Young that there is a problem. Everybody who has worked and talked to people in this field has the same impression. It is difficult to get figures, but I cannot believe the people working in the university towns are completely wrong in the feelings that they have. I was in touch today with the Society for Co-operative Dwellings. They wrote to me and said that they accepted that this Act would inevitably lead to a shrinking of the stock of privately-rented furnished housing. They did not say it had happened, but they accepted it would happen. It is a little unfair of the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, to say that one cannot suggest this is the case unless one can produce figures to prove it. I suggest the right course for me to take is to throw this back on the noble Baroness, and ask whether she can produce figures to prove our feelings are wrong. I am sure she cannot.
Lord AVEBURY: My Lords, may I interrupt? What I said in fact was that the supplies of privately-rented accommodation have been declining since 1957. The legislation enacted by Parliament had very little effect on the rate of that decline; in particular, after the 1965 Rent Act was passed in relation to unfurnished properties the decrease slowed up for a period up to the 1971 Census. The evidence from the past was that legislation granting security of tenure to tenants had little effect on the supply of accommodation.
Lord STRATHCONA and MOUNT ROYAL: My Lords, I shall not get into a long statistical argument with the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, partly because I have a feeling he might win in any case. The impression I have—an impression noble Lords have confirmed this evening —is that they are talking about the period since the beginning of last autumn. That is a short time scale. All agree that rented accommodation has quickly become much more difficult to find over the past few months.
Noble Lords will have seen articles in the Observer and The Times newspapers. These articles have suggested that there are large numbers of houses unoccupied. They further make the rather frightening assertion that a great number of these houses belong to the local authorities. This is a bad reason for suggesting that the local authorities should be given more houses to manage; all the evidence is that they are making an exceedingly poor job of managing the houses they already have. Incidentally, there is no security of tenure issue involved at all with local authority housing. I hope that the noble Baroness, Lady Birk, will be able to tell us that serious consideration is being given to the various proposals which have been put forward for making it possible for these empty houses to be occupied on a short-term basis. This is the only point I want to put to her. I do not think there is any point in elaborating on the way in which this can be done. It is difficult for an outside person to suggest it, but I believe the noble Lord, Lord Goodman, when he gave his address on housing on television, simply said that it is ridiculous that here we are in a country with many people unhoused and a great many empty houses. I can see the fear: if one puts people into these houses then those occupants become the responsibility of a local authority or a landlord for rehousing them when the houses are renovated or redeveloped.
I say this with the greatest temerity in the presence of the noble Lord, Lord Robbins, but is there not an analogy here with the building society movement? There must have been a great deal of shaking of heads in the old days when the building societies started. The economists must have thought that it was unsound to borrow short and lend long. The fact remains that it would
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appear, if one has a large enough area in which one is operating, that this works itself out on a continuous turnover basis. Is not this the way that we should look at these sub-standard houses? Is it not better for people to be living in houses with leaking windows or roofs rather than be scattered around with broken families and some people living in the streets? This is the scale of the destitution that we are trying to deal with here.
I hope that we shall not get into a Party political argument about this. It does not seem to me that any of the recent Governments have had much to be proud about in their housing record for a great many years. I hope very much indeed that the noble Baroness will be able to say that she will take note of what my noble friend has said and, in particular, I hope she will be able to demonstrate that this Government really care about the housing of the many homeless people, particularly in London. I hope that she will tell us that the most careful consideration will be given to some of the proposals which have recently been put forward which might manage to marry the number of homeless people to the number of available houses.
6.48 p.m.
The PARLIAMENTARY UNDERSECRETARY of STATE, DEPARTMENT of the ENVIRONMENT (Baroness Birk): My Lords, I must first apologise in advance if I sound as though I am speaking through my nose, as I have a heavy cold. I will try to speak as clearly as I possibly can. Although there have not been many speakers to this Unstarred Question of the noble Baroness, Lady Young, nevertheless they have all made so many points that if they had been spread over 20 speakers there would still have been just as much to which to reply. I will reply to as many points as I can manage to deal with but if, at the end of the debate, I have omitted to refer to any points I can promise noble Lords that I will be in touch with them.
I think the noble Baroness, Lady Young, put her case in an extremely reasonable and, in many respects, a very constructive manner. The fact that I think it was put prematurely and is perhaps inopportune at this moment is a different point. I was also extremely glad

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to hear her assert that she was not asking for the repeal of the Act because she appreciated that, once people had security, it would be so wrong to take it away from them. This fact is extremely important because, when it is reported, it means that people will not feel that there will be any change pressured in this way by either political Party. Some of the noble Baroness's criticisms of the Act were technical and where this is so I will deal with them in writing.
I entirely agree with the noble Baroness about an explanatory booklet or leaflet. As we all know, there were difficult printing problems when the Bill was being discussed and when the Act came into being. Some emergency leaflets were got out immediately, and the Department is now in the process of bringing out some further explanatory leaflets in question-and-answer form. But I still must say—although I am certain there must be reasons for the delay, which I shall no doubt be told later today or tomorrow—I find it difficult to explain or even defend it, because in this instance I agree with what has been said. The noble Lord, Lord Avebury, and the noble Lord, Lord Janner, among others, referred to the point that it is absolutely essential that when we have complicated pieces of legislation, and legislation which affects so strongly the ordinary person and is not just a sort of field for lawyers, the relevant information should be available as quickly and as clearly as possible. For what it is worth, I will undertake to ensure that this matter is certainly expedited. I hope noble Lords will forgive me if I say that the roaming around the subject was so great that at some point in the debate I wondered whether I had taken a jump in time and was dealing with the Housing Rents and Subsidies Bill which we shall in fact have before us on Monday next. Never mind: I felt I learned a lot myself from the debate.
The main objective of the Act, if I may return to that, was quite simple. It was to extend to those living in privately rented furnished accommodation the indefinite security of tenure and the right to have a fair rent registered which were already enjoyed by unfurnished tenants. It was not a sudden revolution in housing; it was to include an area which had previously been omitted. The Act also
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contains special exemptions for accommodation let by resident landlords and by specified eductional institutions. This point was touched on by the noble Lord, Lord Balerno, but as I shall be talking about students particularly I will return to that point later. It also gives certainty to absent owner-occupiers, and people who own homes which they intend to use upon their retirement, that possession can be recovered for their own use. The interests of the holiday landlord who lets in the winter are likewise protected. The important point is that over 80 per cent. of the 764,000 furnished tenants in the country have acquired security of tenure under this Act.
The lack of security in this sector of the housing market was a major and increasing cause of homelessness, particularly in housing stress areas. The one point I must resist is the attitude which has been stated or implied by several noble Lords that a tremendous increase in homelessness has been brought about by what is in fact a small piece of legislation which has not made much of a dent either way. But the basis of it is that, because of the lack of security, occupiers of furnished lettings too often had to pay high rents for poor accommodation; and tenants applying to the rent tribunal for a reasonable rent ran the risk that the landlord would serve a notice to quit. Therefore, they were caught in a sort of Catch-22. Before the Act, tenants of furnished accommodation could be served with a notice to quit at any moment and they lived under the appalling threat of being literally thrown out on to the street. I am sorry to spell this out in this way because I am aware that all noble Lords who have spoken are extremely well informed on the Act. It is one thing to go through it and to look at it, even in a conscientious and detailed way; I still think we ought to come back to looking at what was happening before and at the social consequences of the Act and what it was intended to do.
Nor do I think it should be assumed, as some noble Lords appear to do, that furnished lettings are occupied mainly by transient groups who require only temporary accommodation and do not need security of tenure. On the contrary, most furnished lettings are occupied by people who need permanent homes. Until

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now, although they needed permanent homes they have never had permanency of tenure. The Act has removed the threat of eviction which constantly hung over the heads of young couples, families with children, and pensioners—not just the migrant population. In fact, they are migrant but not by choice. My noble friend Lord Janner pointed out this fact and emphasised it extremely well. They now have indefinite security of tenure and are able to apply to the rent officer for the registration of a fair rent, with a right of appeal to the rent assessment committee if they consider the officer's assessment to be too high. This I should have thought is surely something to celebrate, not decry, for the Act has achieved its main purpose and remedied an obvious and long overdue social injustice.
The sharp fall in evictions from furnished accommodation—I hope this will be one answer to the question that the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, asked me concerning evidence about the effect of the Act; this is one of the effects of which we have evidence—which has taken place since the Act was passed is evidence of its success. On this point—
The Earl of KINNOULL: The sharp fall, my Lords?
Baroness BIRK: The sharp fall in evictions, my Lords, which is what the Act was about.
The Earl of KINNOULL: My Lords, with respect to the noble Baroness, there would hardly be an increase in evictions when this Act was passed.
Baroness BIRK: My Lords, there has been a very sharp fall in evictions if we compare figures for the months before this Act came into being with the latest figures we have. We are now working on figures for the current period and will be able to produce them. As my noble friend Lord Janner pointed out, one of the reasons why there is now not so much mobility in tenure is that people have far greater security and are now able to stay where they are in furnished rooms, whereas before they were not able to do so. I thought that from a different angle the noble Lord, Lord Robbins, illustrated this point when he referred to his friend who had acquired accommodation in this country. I think the noble Lord said
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that his friend had to give evidence, or get a company to say, that he would (as the noble Lord put it) "evacuate" the flat when he was required to do so. This point perhaps concerns a higher income or more comfortable group. Eviction is exactly the same for people who do not have companies to speak up for them. Indeed, if they are forced to leave their accommodation they have nowhere else to go, whereas I hope that the friend of the noble Lord, Lord Robbins, has.
However, the Act must also be seen as part of the wider approach to housing which the Government propose. The housing problems of this country are not caused by one piece of legislation, nor by this Act, nor by almost any other Act. It is a far deeper and wider subject than that, but I promise noble Lords that I will not lecture them about it tonight. To lay the blame for homelessness at the door of the 1974 Rent Act is prejudiced, unrealistic and, frankly, quite ridiculous. There are many facets to this problem. It is an economic, social and human problem.
Baroness YOUNG: My Lords, I apologise for interrupting the noble Baroness, but in such a serious matter it would be a mistake if we were to misunderstand each other. I never said that the 1974 Rent Act was the sole cause of homelessness. I made it quite clear several times in my speech that it has been a contributory cause.
Baroness BIRK: My Lords, I accept that the noble Baroness did not say that the 1974 Rent Act was the sole cause of homelessness, and I did not say that it was the sole cause, either. I said that it was a blame for homelessness. I was replying not only to the noble Baroness but also to many of her friends who have spoken. I think that anybody listening to this debate who did not know what it was about would have thought that what we were discussing was the cause of homelessness in this country, and it was to that that I was referring. Unfortunately, one of the problems is that we have lived with a severe housing shortage for a very long time. Indeed, one of the problems is that because of it thousands of people have existed rather than lived. With so many people in need of accommodation we cannot allow homes to be treated merely as items of monetary value.

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Although I quite appreciate the difference of attitude and philosophy which divides us over this question, that is why the Government believe that landlords cannot be permitted to let their property at one moment and, at the next, to sell it with the sole aim of maximising profit, if this means disregarding the misery caused to tenants who can never be sure when they might be homeless. That is why the Rent Act is so important. Quite frankly, I must say that underlying most of the arguments—and many of them are reasonable and have been very reasonably put—lies this very strong difference of opinion and approach. This is a political and social chasm, and it goes further and deeper than this particular Act. By giving security of tenure to furnished tenants the Act has ensured continuity in the supply of accommodation for those tenants. I am not pretending that it is increasing the amount of accommodation, since landlords will no longer be able to evict their tenants and sell their property when house prices rise again.
The noble Baroness suggested in one of the points she made that the Act should be amended, and, as I understand it, the way she suggested is that in certain conditions landlords could grant fixed term tenancies. That is not acceptable to the Government because once again it is contrary to the purpose of the Act, namely, to give security of tenure to tenants of furnished accommodation and to relieve them of the fear of eviction. To turn back on that would undermine one of the main purposes of the Act. What we are sure that the Rent Act has achieved the main purposes of the Act. While we about security, frankly it will not be possible for some time to reach conclusions about its detailed operation—or to estimate its effects in any reliable way—as I hope the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, will appreciate, upon the supply of furnished accommodation.
Comparisons between the supply situation before and after the Act are difficult to make, because of the dearth of recent detailed information on the stock of rented accommodation. We have hardly ever had good enough statistics on this point. The principal source of statistics on changes in the housing field must always be the Census. However—and I hope the noble Earl will feel cheered by this—
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my Department is monitoring the situation closely and is also reviewing possible interim means of securing information upon the effects of the Act. Also, it is intended to repeat the survey of Press advertisements for rented accommodation which was carried out for the Francis Committee. Furthermore, my Department has begun to assemble data on people becoming homeless in England and Wales, which again may throw some light on the effects of the Act. There have, as noble Lords have not omitted to bring to my attention—
Lord AVEBURY: My Lords, I apologise for interrupting, but it is a very interesting point which the noble Baroness has made that the Department is to assemble data on people becoming homeless. Does this mean that the noble Baroness is asking local authorities to provide her with that information? I cannot imagine how the Department would be able to do it centrally.
Baroness BIRK: No, my Lords, the Department would not be able to do it centrally. The Department would have to do it through local authorities, various housing organisations and welfare organisations. It means a comprehensive assembly of material which can be made only by the Department. However, as I was saying, as noble Lords have not omitted to bring to my attention, there have been many allegations that the Rent Act has caused a serious reduction in the number of private furnished lettings which are available, because landlords who were apprehensive of the provisions of the Act have withdrawn accommodation from the market. There is some indication that the number of vacancies for furnished lettings advertised in the Press has fallen since the Act came into operation. However, as was indicated in the to-ing and fro-ing which went on with my noble friend Lord Janner, and as he pointed out several times, the much greater stability in the furnished sector which has resulted from the extension of security of tenure will itself have led to a reduction in the number of vacancies occurring.
Also, it is true, as I think several noble Lords have pointed out—although not quite in this way since they talked about the effects of the Act and I do not think many of them will agree with what I shall say—the inaccurate and alarmist accounts

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of the effects of the Act may have caused some landlords, particularly resident landlords, to withhold accommodation. It is quite true that the unfortunate delay in the publication of the Act, which caused tremendous confusion, must have exacerbated this situation. However, we believe that any such effects will prove to be temporary and will disappear as the true nature of the Act becomes understood, and as people begin to understand what their rights are and, especially in the case of owner-occupiers and resident landlords, that many of them have nothing to fear, which at the moment they are still concerned about.
Baroness YOUNG: My Lords, I am sorry to interrupt the noble Baroness once again, but she has just made a very important point. She has said that in many circumstances the resident landlord has nothing to fear. The point about one of the amendments to this Act which I have proposed is that the resident landlord has a great deal to fear, because if he or she gives a second fixed-term letting to a tenant that tenant has security of tenure. My proposal was simply to meet what I think is the point she is making—to eliminate that fear by not giving security, where the landlord is resident, to the second fixed-term letting. I wonder whether the noble Baroness would look at this point again?
Baroness BIRK: No, my Lords. What I said was that, as I understand it, many landlords have been worried about letting and have withdrawn accommodation for letting because they have not realised that, as owner-occupiers, they have rights to get back their accommodation, if they were letting their property during holidays or were wishing to come back to their house when they retired. Therefore they took fright, which is understandable because they did not know what the Act was about. They had not seen it and they did not understand it. Once they realise this, they will feel more relaxed about it and if they want to let their accommodation they will be able to do so.
On the point of fixed-term letting which I have covered already, it is true that it is unacceptable to the Government, because before the Act was introduced fixed-term tenancies were being used in order to evade security of tenure even
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so far as unfurnished lettings were concerned. So long as the contract is made, and so long as notice is given in writing—the noble Baroness knows as well as I do, and she probably knows this even better than I do, because she is such an expert on these matters—the resident landlord is himself well protected.
But if she is asking us to do something which again puts the tenant at greater risk then I am sorry; the answer is, "No". This is what I mean when I speak about the difference in approach and in attitude, as well as in discussing the legal niceties of the Act. But as has been pointed out, when we are talking about the loss of rented dwellings—and I think the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, also made this point—the average loss has been running at about 125,000 a year during the past six or seven years. There is general agreement on the part of most housing experts that this trend is irreversible and has largely been caused by the great increase in owner-occupation, starting after the First World War, which has resulted in a much higher level of demand for houses and higher house prices, and thus considerable incentives to landlords to withdraw rented accommodation from the market and sell it.
There are also of course other contributing factors. There is the increase in the level of family incomes, particularly as a result of the growing number of working wives. I am personally convinced that in many cases, where people used to let rooms in their homes or part of their homes, wives who now go out to work find that they can earn money outside and do not have to let rooms in their own homes, so people do not want to continue to be landlords. I think this has had some effect, among other things, in areas where there are universities, on the supply of accommodation for students.
On this point, the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, put forward six interesting points, many of which were desirable objects but most of which were quite outside the scope of what we are discussing tonight, as I know he appreciates. Five of them would involve such massive expenditure that we could not possibly consider them, except as an exercise in futurology, at the present time. However, his suggestion of tenant exchange

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is a very good one and should be encouraged. In fact, several local authorities have taken powers in local Acts to run exchange agencies at a minimal registration fee of 50p. I would certainly agree that this was a very good thing, and would do anything I could to encourage it and to see that my Department did so as well.
The regulation and control of the rented housing market has not caused the most drastic loss of rented accommodation—which was, I think, some 200,000 houses a year—between the years 1958 and 1968. This was during the period of the greatest decontrol and when, indeed— and I feel I really must mention this— a Conservative Government was in Office. The present Government certainly do not accept the contention that the Rent Act is causing the private rented sector to shrink as a valid argument for depriving the occupants of furnished lettings of full security of tenure.
Turning to the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Robbins, who many years ago rather unsuccessfuly tried to teach me economics—the failure was on my part and was not due to his teaching—I was once again entranced to hear him start by discussing the natural laws of supply and demand. With the greatest respect, I would put it to him that the objective was to give security of tenure. We are aware that there may be a certain temporary decline but we believe that this is outweighed by the advantages. Our service and the only acceptable landlords, view is that housing is essentially a social apart from where we get to a very much higher income group or to the resident landlord who lets off spare rooms in his own house, are the local authorities and housing associations.
I think we must look at the whole housing problem and the question of rented housing in a new light when we are concerned with different groups of people and their different needs, and with what can be done. The failure of the present system of private rented accommodation, so far as private landlords are concerned, is what is being discussed today, because for various reasons there is this decline, and it is quite clear that the people who are at the bottom end of the financial scale need different con-
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cepts. This is what I think we are all trying to work out.
Even the Conservatives reached the conclusion that the private landlord can no longer be relied upon to meet this demand for rented accommodation, because the Tory Government's White Paper Widening the Choice: the Next Steps in Housing, which was issued in April 1973, said:
"The Government will continue to support improvement of the quality of private rented dwellings. But the decline in their number is unlikely to be reversed. The Government therefore proposes to widen the range and choice of rented accommodation by the expansion of the voluntary housing movement."
This was the trend. Also, there was a second White Paper, Better Houses: the Next Priorities, of June 1973, which said:
"The Government hopes that existing landlords will co-operate in programmes of comprehensive improvement but some may prefer to dispose of their tenanted property; in other cases it may be desirable for the management or ownership of tenanted property to pass into new hands."
That again is a realistic appraisal of the situation.
So in our view the long-term decline in the supply of privately rented accommodation—and I emphasise the words "long-term"—makes it especially important that we should continue with and increase our programme of social ownership. The Government have already taken steps to increase the supply of dwellings made available by local authorities and housing associations, and to encourage the transfer of privately rented dwellings into social ownership. In the current financial year we have allocated £125 million to the purchase of private rented property by local authorities, and the Housing Act 1974 includes measures designed to stimulate the provision of dwellings by the voluntary housing movement.
Most of the speakers today, including the noble Lord, Lord Strathcona and Mount Royal, and the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, mentioned the need for making the fullest use in the short term of any valuable housing. I am pleased to say that my honourable friend the Minister for Housing and Construction attaches great importance to this, and the ways in which this might be achieved are at present under consideration in my Department. However, this does not

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mean any relaxation of the security which is embodied in the Rent Act.
We are also examining the part that the co-operative housing schemes can play in providing homes for occupational groups such as students, and the Society for Co-operative Dwellings recently completed a project at Lewisham—which I am sure will interest the noble Lord, Lord Balerno—for students and young single people, which shows the scope for further similar developments, and these we are anxious to encourage. We believe that not only the existing loss of accommodation in the private sector, but any additional loss which might result from the Rent Act, can more than be made up by the expansion of the sector in social ownership. But, of course, social ownership will have to take account of the needs of groups which find it specially difficult to obtain accommodation at present. This is the most tremendous problem at the present time. People with young children find it almost impossible to remain in furnished accommodation if they have no security of tenure.
Finally, I should like to mention the effects of the Act on the supply of private rented accommodation to students, which I think has been referred to by everybody but particularly by the noble Baroness, Lady Young, the noble Lord, Lord Robbins, and the noble Lord, Lord Balerno. This debate is taking place after only the first term of the academic year, and I am sure anyone who knows anything about universities will agree that the beginning of the academic year is a time when there is a great deal of sorting out. There is usually a bottleneck at that time. Students constantly have problems in finding somewhere to live. It is difficult at this stage to say whether this year has been any worse in this respect than previous years, or whether there has been any decline in student accommodation which can be quite strictly and accurately attributable to the 1974 Act. But it is true that some universities claim that that Act has had an adverse effect.
My Lords, while the Rent Bill was before Parliament, my honourable friend the Minister for Housing and Construction said in another place that he was much aware of the difficulties, and that he was examining the possibility of making special provision for student lettings. A scheme for the registration of
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student lettings and for the exclusion from full Rent Act protection is currently under consideration. My Department is at this moment consulting interested bodies, which include the National Union of Students. The noble Lord, Lord Balerno, particularly asked me about this. The National Union of Students wrote to the Department before Christmas. They did not want a registration scheme, and they will be given a chance to join in consultations which will take place before any legislation is put forward. This is under active consideration at this moment.
My Lords, in conclusion I must repeat that we believe that the 1974 Rent Act was a necessary and just measure of social reform. It is too early to judge whether the Act has had a detrimental effect on the supply of furnished accommodation, but we are not complacent about its side effects. I can assure noble Lords that everything that has been said in this debate will be kept under close scrutiny by my Department. There are enormous advantages which I have outlined. In my view, there is no evidence to suggest that even if there is a slight loss in terms of new lettings it is on a scale that outweighs the enormous advantages of the Act. People living in furnished accommodation are often the poorest, the most illiterate and the most socially disadvantaged. These are the people least able to cope with the difficulties of living, let alone finding and keeping accommodation on the open market. They are most in need of the protection given to them by the Act. The more helpless one is in this respect, the more difficult it is, as we know. These are the people who find it most difficult to stand up for themselves and help themselves through the sphere of social welfare. Proper security, lower rents and effective allowances tilt the scales heavily in favour of the 1974 Rent Act.

CRIMINAL JURISDICTION BILL [H.L.]
The LORD CHANCELLOR (Lord ELWYN-JONES): My Lords, I beg leave to introduce a Bill to create extraterritorial offences under the law of Northern Ireland, to amend as respects those and other offences the criminal law

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of Northern Ireland, to provide for obtaining evidence in Northern Ireland for the trial of offences in the Republic of Ireland and to amend the Backing of Warrants (Republic of Ireland) Act 1965, and Explosive Substances Act 1883 and the law about the prosecution of offences. I beg to move that this Bill be read a first time.
Moved, That the Bill be now read la.—(The Lord Chancellor.)
On Question, Bill read la, and to be printed.

SHEFFIELD CITY COUNCIL BILL [H.L.] STOKE PARK GUILDFORD BILL [H.L.] UNITED DOMINIONS TRUST BILL [H.L.] WESTMINSTER ABBEY BILL [H.L.]
Presented and read la.