Lords Sitting of 5 July 1976

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

IATA: AGENCY LICENCES
Earl AMHERST: My Lords, I beg leave to ask the Question which stands in my name on the Order Paper.
The Question was as follows:
To ask Her Majesty's Government whether they are aware that the Agency Investigating Panel of IATA are circularising some of the smaller travel agencies to the effect that, if they do not produce ticket sales to a figure prescribed by the Panel, their licences will be in danger of being withdrawn and whether, in view of the fact that this step will tend to drive the travel industry into a monopoly by a few big agents, they will consider referring the matter to the Monopolies Commission for detailed monitoring.
Lord ORAM: My Lords, I understand that the International Air Transport Association has been taking action on the withdrawal of the appointments of travel agents whose turnover does not reach the minimum level prescribed by the Association. The Association's procedures are agreed by its member airlines, and include provision for arbitration in the event of dispute. It is not considered appropriate to refer this matter to the Monopolies and Mergers Commission.
Earl AMHERST: My Lords, while thanking the noble Lord for his reply, may I ask him whether he is aware that in this instance the IATA Panel seem to be acting as judge, jury and prosecutor; and that, while a complaining agent is invited to go to arbitration, arbitration is an expensive matter, probably beyond the financial reach of many small agents but of course well within the reach of IATA?
Lord ORAM: My Lords, I do not think more can be done than to lay down a
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reasonable arbitration procedure which is open to all who have any complaint. I do not think it is possible to go beyond that.
Baroness BURTON of COVENTRY: My Lords, is the Minister aware that what has been going on would seem to be quite disgraceful? Is he aware that, recently, 25 small travel agencies have had their licences withdrawn, all of them efficient agencies, offering personal service and making a profit? Is he further aware that the reason for the licences being withdrawn is because these agencies are small? Is he further aware that IATA has refused to disclose the names of the 25, so that they cannot band together to take legal action? Is he also aware that two firms, of which I have personal knowledge and the papers, who have been in existence for 44 and 42 years and have made a steady profit throughout, have had their licences withdrawn at five weeks' notice?
Lord ORAM: My Lords, I think it is reasonable that the Association should require a certain minimum size of operation by its appointed agencies.
Several Noble Lords: Why?
Lord ORAM: I also think that this problem should be kept in proportion. It is true, as my noble friends says, that 26 agency locations have had their authority withdrawn; but this should be seen against the background that there are at present about 4,5000 travel agents in the United Kingdom, of whom 760 are approved by IATA, and who operate from over 1,500 locations.
Earl AMHERST: My Lords, is the noble Lord aware that, understandably, with rising costs of servicing agents, the airlines are anxious that costs should not overrun revenue benefits; but that in some cases the Panel have demanded that these agents increase their sales over the present period, in one case as much as almost double, or else?
Lord ORAM: My Lords, of course I would willingly look at any particular case that the noble Earl wishes to call to my attention, but I think due note should be taken of the arbitration machinery for dealing with any case which seems to be unjust.
Lord HAILSHAM of SAINT MARYLEBONE: My Lords, are not the views expressed by the noble Lord on behalf of the Government somewhat disquieting? Why should this body have a right to demand that a viable organisation should be of a minimum size to please this body; and why should this body withhold the names of those who are victimised in order to prevent them organising?
Lord ORAM: My Lords, I would point out to the noble and learned Lord that the procedures governing IATA's operations in these matters were approved by the Department of Trade and Industry in 1972. I will look into the last point raised by the noble and learned Lord. I was not aware of this failure to disclose names.
Lord HAILSHAM of SAINT MARYLEBONE: My Lords, when can we expect that the Government will stop trying to justify the sillier mistakes of the bureaucracy on the basis that they were made under their predecessors?
Lord BYERS: My Lords, is it not possible that some of the larger agencies started as small agencies? What is the justification for trying to kill off the small agency just because it is small?
Lord ORAM: My Lords, there is full opportunity for a small agency to start and to build up its operations, and all due consideration is given to the small agency at the beginning of its career. This kind of circularisation and action takes place only after the passage of a number of years, when the agency has failed to build up its operations to a reasonable size.
Baroness BURTON of COVENTRY: I am sorry, my Lords, but that really and truly is not true. I know the Minister believes it to be true, and I am sorry if somebody on my Front Bench does not like what I am saying, but I think these 25 firms have a right to some representation. Would the Minister not agree that this is the most blatant form of restrictive practice, and how much longer is it going on? Does he realise that these firms—and I am speaking only of the ones of which I have knowledge—have had a steady, efficient, prosperous practice for 40 years, and have made profits; that the
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figure which they have been given is one which is totally impossible of achievement, and that they have been given no opportunity to make representations? What is going to be done about it?
Lord ORAM: My Lords, there is an opportunity to make representations. I have repeated that three times.
Lord DERWENT: My Lords, I cannot understand the criteria here. A company which is small has been run properly and profitably for some years. What has that got to do with taking away its licence because it has not grown as fast as some of the others?
Lord ORAM: My Lords, it is not for the Government to enter into the question of particular sizes. It was for the previous Government and it is for this Government to agree or otherwise the procedures adopted. That is as far as the Government's responsibility goes.
Lord SLATER Lord SLATER: My Lords—
Lord HAILSHAM of SAINT MARYLEBONE Lord HAILSHAM of SAINT MARYLEBONE: My Lords—
Lord SLATER: My Lords, noble Lords opposite seem to have the idea that they can do anything they like; but there are other people in the House who have an interest in this matter. The supplementary question I would put to my noble friend is this. Do I take it that the conciliation machinery was set up by the previous Administration? If so, why, when it has been in being for all these years and now, when the conciliation machinery is brought into effect and these people are brought to arbitration, should they object? Is it not true that they have an opportunity of presenting their case and, if they have a good case, that they will be looking to success?
Lord ORAM: Yes, my Lords, the present version of the IATA resolution was approved by the Department of Trade and Industry in 1972—and included the provision for arbitration machinery.
Lord CARRINGTON: My Lords, would the noble Lord be prepared to agree that his replies have met with less than satisfaction in all quarters of the House?

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Would he be prepared to look at this again and to make a Statement to the House?
The LORD PRIVY SEAL (Lord SHEPHERD): My Lords, in view of the time and of the intervention of the noble Lord, Lord Carrington, may I say that I will expect my noble friend to look into the system that has been adopted by legislation agreed by Parliament during the régime of which the noble Lord, Lord Carrington, and the noble and learned Lord were most distinguished Members. I would suspect that the best way of handling this would not be by Question and Answer but that, before the weight of business becomes too heavy, we might perhaps have the opportunity of discussing this matter by way of an Unstarred Question. That might be a better way than by Question and Answer.

IMPROVEMENT GRANT SCHEME
2.45 p.m.
Baroness PHILLIPS: My Lords, I beg leave to ask the Question which stands in my name on the Order Paper.
The Question was as follows:
To ask Her Majesty's Government whether they will consider extending the Improvement Grant Scheme in order to allow private individuals, constructing a house from scratch, to obtain the same grant for incorporating special provision for a disabled person as they could obtain under Section 56 of the Housing Act 1974 after the building was completed.
The PARLIAMENTARY UNDERSECRETARY of STATE, DEPARTMENT OF THE ENVIRONMENT (Baroness Birk): My Lords, this is currently under consideration, and I can only add at this stage that what is suggested would require new legislation. I will write to my noble friend as soon as we have completed our consideration.
Baroness PHILLIPS: My Lords, while thanking the Minister for that rather unsatisfactory reply —
Lord SHEPHERD Lord SHEPHERD: Again?
Baroness PHILLIPS: Yes, my Lords, again and again! Is the Minister aware that for a year a member of the Working Party on the integration of the disabled set up by the Government has been seeking to get a reply and has been unable to do so? Can my noble friend tell me what is the delay in dealing with this very straightforward matter?
Baroness BIRK: My Lords, I do not think that my reply was at all unsatisfactory. I was telling my noble friend that it is under consideration and that it would probably require new legislation. I thought that the tone of the reply showed a good deal of sympathy for it. So far as the question of the letter is concerned, it is true that the National Fund for Research into Crippling Diseases wrote, according to them, a letter on 2nd December 1975. I have had this investigated within my Department, and I am assured that unfortunately the letter did not arrive. We received a letter from the organisation on 2nd May which set out all the points raised by my noble friend and it is currently under discussion. I am very well aware that there is an anomaly here and we really are trying to do what we can about it.
The Earl of LAUDERDALE: My Lords, would the noble Baroness say whether the letter that did not arrive was mailed first class?
Baroness BIRK: My Lords, as it did not arrive, I do not know.
Baroness PHILLIPS: My Lords will my noble friend speed up this matter? In addition to the matter of the letter, I understand that there have also been telephone calls to which the reply has been made that the matter is under consideration. May I ask that some urgency be attached to it?
Baroness BIRK: My Lords, certainly I will do what I can, because I appreciate the point made by my noble friend.

CABINET PAPERS: DISCLOSURES
2.47 p.m.
Lord CAMPBELL of CROY: My Lords, I beg leave to ask the Question

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which stands in my name on the Order Paper.
The Question was as follows:
To ask Her Majesty's Government what further action they intend to take concerning the security of Cabinet documents.
Lord SHEPHERD: My Lords, I suspect that my Answer will be less satisfactory, because I have nothing to add to the Statement that my right honourable friend the Prime Minister made in another place on Thursday, 1st July, and which was repeated in this House by my noble and learned friend the Lord Chancellor. I would remind noble Lords that the Prime Minister undertook to report further to the House.
Lord CAMPBELL of CROY: My Lords, we were grateful for that Statement last Thursday informing Parliament that the Government Are no nearer to finding out who was responsible for the leak of material from recent Cabinet documents; but as more than one noble Lord on that occasion raised the question of the status of the new category of political adviser, is the noble Lord aware that this is an opportunity fully to clarify this point? Most of those political advisers presumably have access to Cabinet papers because they work personally for senior Ministers. Have all political advisers now employed signified, in the way that civil servants have to, their acceptance of the fact that they are bound by the Official Secrets Act?
Lord SHEPHERD: My Lords, special advisers are civil servants and are bound by all the rules which govern the Civil Service in their responsibility for security in regard to papers, discussions and debates that may occur within their Departments. I believe that in respect to positive vetting what is required of civil servants in that position applies also to them.
The Earl of LAUDERDALE: My Lords, will the noble Lord clarify one point that was left open the other day; that is, which were the three Departments which were guilty of having breached the rules of handling these documents? Everyone would want to know that.
Lord SHEPHERD: My Lords, the noble Earl might wish to know, so would I. I will see whether I can find the information and let the noble Earl have it.
Lord SHINWELL: My Lords, in view of the suggestion if not the innuendo—and I would not regard the noble Lord, Lord Campbell of Croy, as blameless in the matter—that the political advisers were responsible for the leak, is my noble friend aware that long before any political advisers were associated with Ministers there were many leaks? Is he also aware that most of the leaks have taken place when a Labour Government were in office and there are very few leaks when the Convervatives are in Office?
Lord SHEPHERD: My Lords, there I have to disagree with my noble friend. The record shows that Administrations, whether Conservative or Labour, have about the same number of leaks. I suppose it may depend upon the nature of the leak. I am glad to have the intervention of my noble friend because there is no evidence that special advisers themselves were involved in this matter. The inquiry which is now taking place will encompass all those who were questioned and maybe others: Ministers, special advisers and civil servants. As I said in the earlier Statement, I hope that we can bring this matter to a proper conclusion. I hope that we are able to identify the person who broke the breach of trust because, as the Minister responsible for the Civil Service, I am deeply conscious that there are many who serve us most faithfully who are under a sense of cloud and will remain so until the person who made this particular breach has been found.
Lord CAMPBELL of CROY: My Lords, is the noble Lord aware that I intended no innuendo concerning any particular category? This was a matter about which several noble Lords were concerned because it is an innovation in our system. Will the noble Lord comment on reports that a number of bodies outside Parliament have stated that from time to time quantities of classified information from the Government have been delivered to them anonymously?
Lord SHEPHERD: My Lords, I saw some of these allegations. I must say that

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what I read did not come in any way into the category of the material we are now discussing; and much of that material could well concern matters between local authorities and central Government. I am grateful for what the noble Lord has said about special advisers. They are in no different category than those whom the previous Administration appointed from business to advise them. They are civil servants and in this regard they are hound by all the rules and conventions of the Civil Service. There are no exceptions whatsoever.

POST OFFICE: PARLIAMENTARY MAIL DELIVERY
2.53 p.m.
The Earl of LAUDERDALE: My Lords, I beg leave to ask the Question which stands in my name on the Order Paper.
The Question was as follows:
To ask Her Majesty's Government whether they have statistics to show how many Members of both Houses of Parliament have recently been exposed to undue delay in the delivery of officially-franked first-class mail despatched from the Houses of Parliament and who thus belong to the 7 per cent. of postal users admitted by the Post Office to suffer such inconvenience.
THE PARLIAMENTARY UNDERSECRETARY of STATE, DEPARTMENT of INDUSTRY (Lord Melchett): No, my Lords. This is a matter for the Post Office, but I understand they do not keep statistics showing delays in delivery of first-class mail posted from the Houses of Parliament. I would expect the incidence of such delays to fall within the scope of the continuous sampling of deliveries on which the Post Office base their quality of service figures.
The Earl of LAUDERDALE: My Lords, in thanking the noble Lord for that expected reply, and not wishing to belabour the Government more than they can take in one afternoon, may I ask whether he considers that, in addition to other matters, I am also unique statistically because I now have a second example of a first-class franked envelope
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sent from the Houses of Parliament taking four days to reach me. Is the noble Lord aware that the noble Baroness sitting beside him has now admitted that another letter sent from her Department did not reach its destination at all? Is he aware that there are other cases of this kind? Are we to believe the Post Office when they say that only 7 per cent. of the letters are not delivered the following morning when posted first class? Are we to believe that?
Lord MELCHETT: My Lords, I am sure that the noble Earl is unique in many respects. It is of course a matter for him to decide whether or not he believes the figures given by the Post Office.
The Earl of LAUDERDALE: My Lords, is the noble Lord aware that I do not believe them?
Lord PARGITER: My Lords, is my noble friend aware that my experience is precisely the opposite? Papers coming from the House—on one occasion at any rate—were franked at 6 a.m. and delivered to me before noon in Caterham.
Lord MELCHETT: My Lords, my experience accords with that of my noble friend; but I am sure that the Post Office are not showing any political bias in this matter.
Lord IRONSIDE: My Lords, is the noble Lord aware that I sampled my mail last week, too, and that the performance varies from very bad indeed to very good indeed? Would he not agree therefore that there is no rhyme or reason to deliveries these days, despite the fact that theoretically we are supposed to have a first- and second-class mail service?
Lord MELCHETT: My Lords, as the noble Earl's Question on the Order Paper implied, the Post Office's quality of service figures show a considerable difference between first- and second-class mails, and show a continuing improvement in the quality of service so far as first-class mail is concerned.
Lord SLATER: My Lords, is my noble friend aware that the area head postmasters, the sub-post office postmasters and the postmen would be only too

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delighted to receive any representations that are made to them by noble Lords and Members of the other place? Is my noble friend aware that never has there been an organisation that has been subject to so much direct criticism and objection than that of the Post Office ever since it was founded?
Lord MELCHETT: Yes, my Lords; I think that what my noble friend says is true. While undoubtedly much of the criticism is justified, there is much criticism which could be directed to those people who address envelopes incorrectly. I think that the Post Office show great forbearance in failing to criticise the consumers.
The Earl of LAUDERDALE: My Lords, would the noble Lord be so kind —since I failed to get in touch with the managing director of the Post Office on this matter—to forward to the Post Office the envelope about which I am complaining, which is clearly addressed?
Lord MELCHETT: My Lords, I am always happy to do whatever I can to help noble Lords opposite in their relationship with the Post Office.

DINNERS
Baroness LLEWELYN-DAVIES of HASTOE: My Lords, with the leave of the House, may I say a word about dinners. On 14th June I announced that dinners would be available to Peers and their guests every Tuesday when the House was sitting during this Session. Because the House has not been sitting late, the experiment has not been as successful as we had hoped. Dinners will be available tomorrow as planned but, in consultation with the noble Lord the Chairman of the Refreshment Sub-Committee, we shall reconsider arrangements for future Tuesdays when we know how many Members of your Lordships' House dine here tomorrow. I will make another announcement later in the week.
BRITISH TRANSPORT DOCKS BILL
Read 2a, and committed to the Committee on Unopposed Bills.

STATUTORY INSTRUMENTS
The PRINCIPAL DEPUTY CHAIRMAN of COMMITTEES (Baroness Tweedsmuir of Belhelvie): My Lords, on behalf of the noble Lord the Chairman of Committees, I beg to move the Motion standing in his name on the Order Paper. I must apologise, both to the House and the two noble Baronesses whose names appear in the Motion, for the fact that last week in error I moved a Motion appointing the noble Baroness, Lady Pike, to be a Member of the Joint Committee on Statutory Instruments instead of the noble Baroness, Lady Vickers.
Moved, That the order of 24th June, appointing the Baroness Pike to be a member of the Joint Committee be discharged and that the Baroness Vickers be added to the Joint Committee in the place of the Lord Reigate resigned.—(Baroness Tweedsmuir of Belhelvie.)
On Question, Motion agreed to.

POLICE PENSIONS BILL [H.L.]
2.59 p.m.
The LORD CHANCELLOR (Lord Elwyn-Jones): My Lords, I understand that no Amendments have been set down to this Bill and that no noble Lord has indicated a wish to move a manuscript Amendment or to speak in Committee. Unless, therefore, any noble Lord objects, I beg to move that the Order of Commitment be discharged.
Moved, that the Order of Commitment be discharged.—(The Lord Chancellor.)
On Question, Motion agreed to.

ADOPTION BILL [H.L.]
3 p.m.
The LORD CHANCELLOR: My Lords, although it appears from the Order Paper that the noble Earl, Lord Ferrers, has taken over, and indeed adopted, the Adoption Bill, I understand he is perfectly happy to return the parentage to me. I understand that no Amendments have been set down to this Bill and that no noble Lord has indicated a wish to move a manuscript Amendment or to speak in Committee. Unless, therefore, any noble Lord objects, I beg to move that the Order of Re-commitment be discharged.

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Moved, that the Order of Re-commitment be discharged.—(The Lord Chancellor.)
On Question, Motion agreed to.

FOOD AND DRUGS (CONTROL OF FOOD PREMISES) BILL
3.1 p.m.
Earl FERRERS: My Lords, in view of the fact that this Bill is in my name and not in the name of the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor, 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 a Committee.—(Earl Ferrers.)
On Question, Motion agreed to.
House in Committee accordingly.
[The BARONESS TWEEDSNWIR OF BEL-HELVIE in the Chair.]
Clause 1 [Closure of food premises or stores dangerous to health]:
Lord WELLS-PESTELL Lord WELLS-PESTELL moved the following Amendment :
Page 2, line 15, at end insert ("(unless the local authority are unable after reasonable inquiry to ascertain his identity) ").
The noble Lord said: This Amendment seeks to rectify a technical defect in the Bill. As at present drafted, a closure order cannot be made unless the local authority have given fourteen days' notice to the actual owner of the business as well as to the operator. But it may be very difficult for the local authority to identify the actual owner. The authority have power to require the occupier to give the name and address of the owner, but it is certainly conceivable that operators of businesses threatened with closure might be deliberately obstructive or even might not know who the ultimate owner is because of the complexity of the businesses.
The Amendment provides that the local authority may be discharged from the obligation to give 14 days' notice to the owner if they are unable, after reasonable inquiry, to ascertain his identity. It will be for the court to determine whether the local authority have taken reasonable steps to find out who the owner is. In
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any event, the 14 days' notice must still be given to the person prosecuted which, in the absence of the owner, would be the occupier. We understand that this is necessary in the circumstances. I beg to move.
Earl FERRERS: The noble Lord, Lord Wells-Pestell, is always helpful and I am very grateful to him for having gone through this Bill with an even finer toothcomb than I have myself. I appreciate the fact that he has put down this Amendment, which is, as he says, a technical Amendment and will improve the Bill. I think the noble Lord is quite right when he says that there could be occasions where an environmental health officer goes to give notice of a closure order to an operator and, when he asks the operator the name of the person concerned, the operator might well be obstructive and deliberately prevent the environmental health officer from knowing who the owner is. In those cases this Amendment will certainly improve the Bill. I am very grateful to the noble Lord for having noticed this defect and put it right.
On Question, Amendment agreed to.
On Question, Whether Clause 1, as amended, shall stand part of the Bill?
Lord LEATHERLAND: I notice that this clause, like others in the Bill, refers to food sold from premises or from a stall. There are occasions, particularly at this time of the year, when one foodstuff, to wit, ice cream, is sold from premises and from stalls and also from vehicles which parade the streets. Do the terms "premises "or "stall "include a van which goes round the streets selling ice cream?—because it is quite improper that ice cream vehicles should be excluded from the supervision laid down by this Bill. It could be that a stall means a stall standing in a market or one that is mobile and travelling in an ice cream van. All I want to know is whether ice cream vans are covered.
Earl FERRERS: The whole of this Bill comprises premises of any description from which food is sold. They include cafes and restaurants and also stalls and barrows. I think I am correct in saying that they would also include premises even if they were on wheels. I hope that

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will satisfy the noble Lord that this particular Bill covers all premises, whatever form they take, from which food is sold.
Lord LEATHERLAND: It seems odd to me that something running on wheels can be described as "premises ". I accept what the noble Earl says but it occurs to me that the courts might take a different view.
Clause 1, as amended, agreed to.
Remaining clauses agreed to.
House resumed: Bill reported with an Amendment.

HOPS AND POTATOES MARKETS: 32nd EEC REPORT
3.8 p.m.
Lord RAGLAN Lord RAGLAN rose to move, That this House takes note of the Thirty-Second Report of the European Communities Committee of this session on the Hops Regime (R/471/76), and the Potatoes Market (R/238/76). The noble Lord said: My Lords, I beg to move the Motion standing in my name on the Order Paper, and I should like to thank the usual channels for allowing or encouraging this debate to be held early in the afternoon for the greater convenience of the people who wish to speak on the Motion.
Your Lordships' Sub-Committees beaver away week after week—the Agriculture Sub-Committee not least—and we report on matters of considerable economic importance to agriculture in this country and try to do our best to draw our conclusions to the attention of the Government. We feel our efforts are better rewarded if we can hold our debates at a time when other Members of the House can be encouraged to attend.
In introducing this Report on hops and potatoes—which your Lordships may think is a highly technical subject. as indeed it is—may I say that I am doing so against the background of British marketing techniques as they have developed over a century, in contradistinction to those which have developed on the Continent. I want to indicate why the proposed common régimes in these two
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commodities are arousing some apprehension. In contrast to the other eight States in the Community. Britain has not been self-sufficient in agricultural produce for some 150 years; that is, ever since our population outstripped the capacity of our land to support it. With the policy of allowing imports to make up the balance, the Government moved gradually to that of importing food bought as cheaply as possible from all parts of the world, in return for the sale of manufactured goods. British agriculture was unable to compete, it was demoralised and starved of capital and, except for a brief period in the First World War, discouraged, so that in the late 1920s and early 1930s it had sunk to the lowest point to which it could have sunk.
It was recognised by the Government that they had to take some positive steps to maintain home supplies, if only as a strategic resource. Even so, whatever action was taken could be only in respect of those commodities in which we could be self-sufficient, and which were of such a nature that they did not interfere with the then freely available supplies of food grown by our established overseas suppliers and imported into this country at below our domestic costs of production. So it was not politic to interfere with imports of, say, North American wheat, Argentinian beef or New Zealand lamb. But it was politically safe, and economically wholly desirable, to encourage home production of commodities which we imported very little and which, moreover, were awkward to move round and import, such as milk and potatoes.
It seemed right that the Government's action should be drasticand comprehensive, so the idea of the statutory agricultural marketing boards was born and, under the leadership of the late husband of the noble Baroness, Lady Elliot, Sir Walter Elliot, marketing boards for milk, potatoes, hops and wool were established. The essential feature of a marketing board is that all those who produce more than a certain quantity have to belong to it. In return for this element of compulsion, the Government, advised by the boards and the farmers' unions, set a price and guarantee a sale. In this way, the farmer can be encouraged to invest and plan longterm in reasonable confidence, while the Government, whose job is also to protect

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the consumer, can by their involvement better hope to ensure continuity of supplies at a reasonable price.
The situation on the Continent among the other eight is quite different. I think I am right in saying that it has never been the policy of any of the other eight not to be self-sufficient in food production, if that could possibly be avoided They have no history of making a virtue of dependence upon foreign food supplies. On the whole, their tradition in marketing is one of organisation of voluntary producer groups, and direct statutory interference in the marketing of agricultural products is little known. Therefore, any common regime which is formulated in Brussels is not only liable to ignore, but is directed to discourage, our type of statutory marketing board and to exhibit in contrast a commitment to voluntary producer groups as the best way to encourage efficiency in marketing.
The proposed common régimes for both hops and potatoes, adverted to in this Report, are of that nature and what British farmers and consumer organisations fear is that if a concession is given to Brussels in respect of either of the two commodities, for no better reason, as they see it, than that we should fall into line, then at risk from some future régime will be the Milk Marketing Board and, perhaps, the Wool Marketing Board, which right from their conception have been a staggering success; and, in the case of the Milk Marketing Board and, I believe, of the Hops Marketing Board, too, the basis of a highly efficient industry. The belief in this country is that we know the right way to do things here, and it is Brussels which is out of line, or up the creek, or whatever metaphor of disapprobation one feels in a mood to express.
In fairness to Brussels, things appear, to me at any rate, not to be so simple. Most of the formulators of the CAP are totally unacquainted with agricultural depression of the character which inspired the creation of our marketing boards. Their problem, as must be the case in any self-sufficient agricultural economy, is one of controlling surpluses which inevitably arise if the policy is at no time to tolerate a deficiency. If you do not want a deficiency you must have occasional surpluses and, in a self-sufficient agricultural economy,
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paying for surpluses is an insurance premium against a deficiency.
In any case, in not all commodities have marketing boards in this country been successful. I can think of the Egg Marketing Board and the Tomato and Cucumber Marketing Board, both of which had rather painful deaths. However, it remains the case that the Milk Marketing Board and the Wool Marketing Board and—one of the subjects of the Motion this afternoon—the Hops Marketing Board have been most advantageous to producers and consumers. I will leave it to the noble Earl, Lord Selborne, to describe exactly why he thinks the Hops Marketing Board should be retained, with its constitution substantially unaltered, within the framework of the Commission's draft Directive, because the Sub-Committee make out the same kind of case in their Report.
The noble Earl is chairman of the Hops Marketing Board; he and his manager gave evidence to the Sub-Committee, and we were unanimous in agreeing that the board does an excellent job with its highly specialised commodity, where the nature and capital requirement of its product require that all producers must belong to the hoard if output and quality are to be maintained, and very long-term investment protected, against the risk of disruption by the possible activities of one or two rogue producers who might feel moved to stay outside the ambit of the board if they do not have to join it compulsorily.
With respect to the potato régime, the Sub-Committee were not so united. This really arose from the fact that the Potato Marketing Board is not really a marketing board at all and should more aptly have been called the Potato Control Board. Together with the farmers' unions, the Potato Marketing Board advises the Government upon the support price that should be set for any one year; that is, the price level below which the Government should buy any potatoes. But it does not market potatoes, except in so far as it may purchase them for stock feed if the market price falls below the support level. Under the Community Directive, this function would be performed by the producer groups and, evidently, Continental experience is that they perform this function adequately.
The other main function of the Potato Marketing Board is to set an acreage

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quota, which is intended to prevent the over-production of potatoes. In practice, however, since 1971 this quota has not been taken up, and it appears to the Committee that the acreage grown has been a function of the market price which producers expect to get, rather than of the guaranteed price. What is more, the quota system does not seem to he working in another respect because the penalty for growing potatoes outside the quota is not enough to discourage people from growing more potatoes than their quota.
Whereas some of the Committee believe that the comparative stability of the market price of potatoes in this country is a result of the Board's functions and activities, there seems to he evidence to suggest to others of us that the new found stability in the market would as likely be the result of the high capital cost involved nowadays in growing potatoes on an efficient scale and the resulting reluctance of producers to venture in and out of production in the way that they previously could when so much of potato planting, harvesting, grading and storage was carried out by hand and the capital equipment involved was negligible.
One significant difference which would arise under this Directive is that whereas at present imports are controlled—and as a general rule the import of all main crop potatoes is banned—under the proposed regime there would, of course, be a free market in potatoes. But not all the Committee were convinced that these imports would he a sufficient threat to undermine the stability of the home market, bearing in mind the cost of transport and the efficiency of home producers. Other members of the committee—and this opinion may be voiced this afternoon—believe that the very presence of the Potato Marketing Board may do a lot to secure the stability of supply and price and that it is better to keep a hold of nurse for fear of getting something worse. Speaking as an individual member of the Committee, I feel myself that the proposed régime might allow more instability into the market, but I am not personally convinced about it.
As for the postulation that the demise of the Potato Marketing Board would be the thin end of the wedge, which would in time wreck the other marketing boards
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which work so well to the benefit of everybody, I think it is not good policy to defend an organisation whose efficacy is in doubt in order to protect the principle of retaining an organisation whose efficacy is not in doubt. Therefore I am saying that I do not believe in the thin end of the wedge argument but that the regime in each commodity should be studied on its merits and in relation only to the nature and production of that commodity. I think that we have much to teach our Common Market partners in regard to the marketing of milk, hops and wool, but I would not go to the stake in defence of the Potato Marketing Board.
May I conclude by referring to a recent draft Instrument in reference to the production and marketing of hops, Instrument R/1473/76 of 15th July 1976, which lays down levels of income aid to producers of the hops of the 1975 harvest and special measures for stabilising the market in hops. Perhaps I may read part of the first paragraph of the Ministry of Agriculture's Explanatory Memorandum which says that:
"The Report concludes that the world hop market continued to be oversupplied in 1975, with an adverse effect on producers' returns. It notes especially the problem of assuring a fair income to Community producers at the same time as restoring a quantitive and qualitative balance between supply and demand ".
As I read the proposed regulation, apparently the Commission's solution is to encourage producers to produce more and then to pay them for keeping their extra production off the market. I believe that this is a perfect example of where the Community could benefit by our marketing board experience. The best thing that the Community could do to regulate the marketing of hops would be to institute marketing boards for hops throughout the Community. With those final remarks, I beg to move the Motion standing in my name.
Moved, That this House takes note of the Thirty-Second Report of the European Communities Committee of this session on the Hops Régime (R/471/76), and the Potatoes Market (R/238/76).—(Lord Raglan.)
3.26 p.m.
Lord SANDYS: My Lords, the House will be very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Raglan, for bringing before it two

1037
debates on the very important matters of agriculture and consumer affairs. As chairman of Sub-Committee D of the European Communities Committee, it is most suitable that the noble Lord should do so.
In regard to the first of the two draft Directives that we are examining this afternoon, that of hops, I agree entirely with the noble Lord that this is a most technical subject. As I was driving yesterday through the hopyards of Herefordshire, I wondered what I should be able to tell your Lordships, but I was comforted by the fact that my noble friend Lord Selborne, who is Chairman of the Hops Marketing Board, is to participate in this debate. We shall greatly benefit from his intimate knowledge of how the marketing procedure machinery works.
The hops industry is very interesting. I know a little about the industry as I live in that part of the country. It is centred upon two areas, one of which is on the West hank of the Severn: the Teme Valley in Herefordshire. In this country there are approximately 450 growers of hops, which is a remarkably small group when one realises that the growers cover a total of approximately 15,000 acres. The real difficulty is the absence of elasticity of demand, which is due to the fact that the sole outlet is the brewing industry.
When one looks at the proposals contained in the documents before us today, one's immediate reaction is that once again the Commission's proposals are unsuitable for the industry in this country and that the intention is to achieve too much too quickly. Reading through the report of the Committee, I was very much struck by how quickly the real nub of the issue was reached. The question centres upon the Hops Marketing Board and its future. I think that everybody who participated in those discussions recognised the great value of the Hops Marketing Board and we hope that in future it will continue to be of great value to the industry.
Perhaps I may quote one important question that was asked by the noble Baroness, Lady Tweedsmuir of Belhelvie. She drew out the point when she said:
"I wanted to ask why you really find this difficulty about the continuation of the Hops
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Marketing Board, because this particular instrument says that the prerequisite to the recognition of a producer group is that the total production of associated members must be sold through that group which is exactly what happens ".
In reply, it was said that the main difficulty is one which requires:
"the organisation, the producer group, to permit its members to resign after three years and subject to certain conditions".
Turning, as one must, to title 2 of the document, on page 10, set out there is the Schedule whereby producer groups may withdraw, and looking at this in detail I cannot see why this should be such a substantial problem. The rules proposed do not make for simplicity in discussion at this present moment, and as arranged in the draft Document it appears to our advisers that this may be a difficulty. From this side of the House, it is our advice that this is where the draft Order should he revised, and in our view there is opportunity to do this, between now and the time when this Document comes up before the Council of Ministers, which I understand is to be in August this year, or possibly a little later.
One should not complain, perhaps, of the complication of legal documents because we frequently have to surmount many hurdles. But in the Preamble to the Document we have to surmount no fewer than 33 "whereases ", and of course one of the most important of them relates to the "whereas "which deals particularly with poor harvests. This is where one should stop in one's tracks because it is a situation with which one is presented today. I am not going to digress on the situation with regard to the hop harvest, because I am not in a position to do so, and I feel certain that the noble Earl, Lord Selborne, will be able to tell us about it. But generally in regard to both the wheat situation and the potato situation, to which I shall come in a moment, this is a crucial problem.
I am very glad that in the list of pieties shown in the Preamble there are arrangements whereby measures can be made, derogating from the application of strict rules on the quality standards. It is obviously essential that in years such as 1976, when the harvest will undoubtedly be particularly difficult, the system must be flexible. This is what we say over and over again to Brussels: "Please build into the regulations a degree of adapta-

1039
bility for circumstances which we may not be able to foresee even a matter of a few months ahead. "
I turn to potatoes. I was very glad to hear what the noble Lord, Lord Raglan, said about the Potato Marketing Board, and to hear his views generally about marketing boards, because I feel that there is no division whatever here between the two sides of your Lordships' House. We are strongly in favour of the retention of the marketing boards, with possibly some variation in their scope and activity in order to bring them into line with the Common Agricultural Policy, but undoubtedly they will form the focal point of the arrangements for the future.
Your Lordships will be well aware that there are over 445,000 acres of potatoes in this country. Although at the present moment we import approximately 250,000 to 300,000 tonnes from abroad, this is really a seasonal crop. Later in the year we nearly always export about 100,000 tonnes of seed potatoes. If one looks with care at the document, Food from our own Resources, the Government White Paper, which is really the guide to the whole of their agricultural policy, it will be seen that over and over again the question of self-support comes up, and we are informed that we are self-supporting in potatoes. This is true in a manner of speaking, but it is not true in a manner of speaking so far as demand is concerned because, of course, in the very nature of things, people wish to acquire new potatoes rather earlier than they are available in this country. If it is possible under the future marketing arrangements for consumers to be able to do so, surely it is highly desirable that this flexibility should be retained.
Looking further at the situation with regard to potatoes, it is very much a matter of considering the situation so far as the drought conditions are concerned. I hope the noble Lord, Lord Strabolgi, in his reply, may be able to give us some reassurance with regard to the likelihood of the harvest this year. It must be remembered that ever since January the potato has commanded a fantastically high price. In the Sunday Times rather late in that month the fact was recorded that the price of a potato had exceeded the price of an orange. This, surely, is a situation which
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cannot be contemplated in a marketing system. Of course, weather conditions, and many other conditions, with reference to the transporting of potatoes and marketing arrangements, do enter into it. But if it is possible to arrange the potato crop for next year in a better manner than was done for this year it will be of very great benefit.
3.37 p.m.
The Earl of KINNOULL: My Lords, I rise to support the Report and recommendations of Sub-committee D, and to congratulate the Committee, and their chairman, the noble Lord, Lord Raglan, on their report. I also congratulate the noble Lord on his speech just now in introducing it. The noble Lord, Lord Sandys, and I are the only two nonmembers of the Committee who are daring to speak on this subject. I hope the Committee will not feel aggrieved by this. I should declare my small interest in potatoes, as I am a registered grower of 12 acres of potatoes, and I should like to concentrate my few remarks on this Report on the question of potatoes.
The European proposal to do away with the support prices for the home growers and to rely in future on the market forces and the European producers, I believe could not have come at a more sensitive time. Indeed, I think the Committee particularly picked up this point. I find that the potato is quite an emotional issue at present. In the British diet the potato has been one of the staple foods; it has been a staple diet for families, schools and hospitals. Yet last year we saw the tragic reduction in the crop, and a situation where one perhaps was not only unable to afford a lamb chop but could not afford a potato. What one could afford was a bowl of rice and some pasta. I think there is nothing better than the British potato, and I hope very much that with the help and support of the Committee who have been examining this problem the Government will take a very strong line on the European proposal.
I would ask the Government whether we have learned anything from the results of the failure of the crop last year. I say this particularly because it seems, with the present exceptional weather, that we could well have another failure

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this year. I would ask the Government whether they think it is a reasonable accusation against the Marketing Board and their agents. Last year, because it was the one in eight years where we suddenly had a deficit, as against either a normal crop or even a surplus as in 1971, the Government stood by, almost actionless, almost without a positive policy. I say this because the Government imported last year only 200,000 tonnes out of a deficit requirement, the normal consumer requirement, of 1½million tonnes. I understand that we normally consume 6 million tonnes but because of the price and because of the scarcity we consumed only 4½million.
Secondly, I would ask the Government whether it is satisfactory, when the Department is asked to control prices, simply to say to all the housewives and to all school managers and hospital authorities who cannot afford the potatoes, "We are satisfied that the middle-man is not making too much profit". Is there not a case in these conditions for having some sort of emergency powers whereby the Government can purchase at a price which gives a fair return to the producer and a fair price to the consumer? I believe that for the majority of the large potato growers, if they were asked the question last year, "Do you really wish to sell your potatoes above the price that British children can pay and are prepared to pay for your potatoes? ", the answer would have been, "Certainly not ". But it was the conditions of the market. I believe there should be a much closer examination of the relationships between the producer and the consumer. The powers of the Potato Marketing Board, which were established in the 1930s and were updated in the 1950s and 1960s, and indeed the Government's powers, should be looked at to see that we have a better relationship between producer and consumer.
The other point I would put to the noble Lord, Lord Strabolgi, is the European proposal. I was very kindly sent a copy of the European Parliament's proceedings, and I have it here. I found it very illuminating. One had the British member Mr. Osborn, saying:
"I thank Mr. Schwabe, who is acting for Mr. Muller, for raising this point. "
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Then I look to see what Mr. Schwabe had said, and I find:
"Ich mache darauf aufmerksam…"
Then one looks to see what Mr. Howell has said:
"Speaking on behalf of the Conservative Group, I feel that we should support Mr. Cointat's suggestion…"
and Mr. Cointat's suggestion was:
"J'avoue que, tout comme mes collegues …."
What I am trying to say to the noble Lord is that I hope at some time we can have an English translation of what the European Parliament are saying.
My final point to the Government is in the form of three questions. I hope the noble Lord can give some reassuring answers today. First, how do they assess the present crop of potatoes. I know this is an almost impossible question, but I wonder whether the noble Lord can give us figures of the number of acres sown on the British market and how the crops are looking. Secondly, I should like to ask him whether, in collaboration with the Potato Marketing Board, the Government will consider taking much quicker action on the question of imports. And my final question is to ask whether they will examine, again with the Potato Marketing Board, the very stringent rules on the health requirements of imported potatoes, and I particularly have in mind potatoes from Poland for human consumption. I cannot believe that potatoes which will be eaten almost from the sack can cause any great health hazard in the future. I hope the noble Lord will be able to say something on that. I should like to end by congratulating again the Committee and their Chairman, the noble Lord, Lord Raglan, on their work.
Lord SAINSBURY: My Lords, before the noble Lord sits down, may I beg leave to ask him a question. If I understood him rightly, he said that middle-men had made a great killing, or made profits, as a result of the drought shortage. From what I hear—and I happen to live, not being a farmer, in a potato growing area —the farmers who held back the marketing of their potatoes until late in the season when the price was very high made very considerable sums of money and are boasting about the large sums they have made. So I do not think it is fair to suggest that middle-men, whoever they

1043
may be, took advantage of a short supply position.
The Earl of KINNOULL: My Lords, I am not sure whether the noble Lord was wishing me to reply or whether he was making a statement. I think when he reads Hansard tomorrow he will see that I was not accusing middle-men of making a great killing. What I was saying was that the Department's defence, when the housewife is angry, is simply to say that the middle-men are not making a great killing.
3.46 p.m.
Baroness ELLIOT of HARWOOD: My Lords, I rise to take part only quite briefly in this debate; being a member of the Committee over which Lord Raglan presides with such excellence, I should like to pay a tribute to him and to the fact that he is a very practical farmer and understands what it is to be a practical farmer, which I am myself. I should also like to thank him very much for referring to the commencement of the Marketing Board. Lord Collison, who follows me, and is also a member of the Committee, will remember very well, at that time when he was leading the National Union of Agricultural Workers, the beginnings of the Marketing Board in 1931, 1932 and 1933.
As Lord Raglan has said, it was my husband who was the Minister of Agriculture at the time. Faced with the enormous variation in prices which people could get for milk or any other commodity, he saw that what would make more difference than anything else to the farmer and the consumer was some stability in price. You could only get stability in price by organising the commodity in a way which would be as fair as possible to both sides. It was not at all easy. At the beginning of the Milk Marketing Board those farmers who had been producing milk rather expensively in the East of England were very annoyed because their prices came down, and the people who were producing in the West country, where milk was being poured down the drains because it was so cheap and because it was not distributed in a successful way, were delighted because their prices went up. The net result, after a lot of to-ing and fro-ing, was the idea of marketing.
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Of all the Boards which I have watched from the beginning, the Milk Marketing Board was the most successful. The Hops Board about which we are concerned today is, equally, a very successful enterprise. I was present during the discussions which took place in the Committee and during the evidence, which is recorded in the Thirty-second Report. It seems to me that it is important for British agriculturists, and also for the EEC, to consider, having got a very good method of selling, whether it can be enlarged and continued within the EEC itself. I was present when the Committee visited Brussels last year for about 48 hours. We went over, led by Lord Raglan, to talk to M. Lardinois and other people in Brussels about agriculture.
It seemed to me that the problem was not so much a problem of production but a problem of selling. In the EEC the problem of production seems to rush madly from a meat or butter mountain on one side to a shortage on the other. That is exactly what happened in this country before we took the important step of organising agriculture and certain products of agriculture through marketing Boards. I think that the EEC might well take a leaf out of our book, to see whether or not the methods which they are employing for selling could be greatly improved. My impression, in talking to M. Lardinois—I do not know whether my colleagues had the same impression—was that they have no selling agencies in Europe at all. It is difficult to know where you can buy food unless it is at an ordinary market. Of course there are markets in every town in France, Germany, or Belgium, which I imagine operate about once a week, but it is much more difficult to have a selling policy for agricultural products in Europe. That is how it seemed to me when we were discussing this matter with M. Lardinois.
Certain commodities they sell very well. The French sell wine very well. They have wonderful advertisements all over France about buying wine. But you never see any kind of advertisement about buying milk. In fact, they consume little milk as compared with consumption in this country. This is partly because they have not got the same methods nor the same ideas of selling. I would hope very much that our representatives in Brussels will stress this point very strongly.

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Selling is what we agricultural producers badly need. Through the Boards we can sell here in this country milk, hops, or potatoes, or whatever. We can also, I suppose, sell independently; but if you are a dairyman, I think you sell 100 per cent. through the Milk Marketing Board because it is so good and so well organised. It has a really brilliant organisation for selling not only milk, but cheese and all the produce which comes from milk.
I should look with great sorrow upon the future if we were to find that we were being pressed to adopt the methods, or, I might almost say, the non-methods of selling of the Community when our own methods of selling are so much better. The Community are urging people to go into co-operatives. It would not suit us in this country nearly so well to go into co-operatives for production and selling. To begin with, our units are much bigger than those on the Continent. When one talks about the size of agricultural farms one is staggered to find how tiny are the farms in France, Belgium, or Germany, compared with the average farm in this country. Here they are getting larger, and, with the improvement in technology, with the improvement in management and with the improvement in machinery, farmers can produce much more. It would therefore be a retrograde step for us to say, "Well, we must go into the same type of organisation as the EEC ". I really do not think that it would work as well as our present system.
I am a strong supporter of the EEC so I do not want to appear to he "knocking it "on its agricultural policy, but I very much hope that the Government will try to persuade the EEC to adopt some of our methods. We can do so by showing success. I believe that about three weeks or so ago there was a deputation from Brussels, I presume at the request of the Department or the Milk Marketing Board, to study the Milk Marketing Board methods. I was told that the deputation from Brussels was enormously impressed by its visits to the Milk Marketing Board centres and by what had been done by way of this system. I very much hope that we press strongly to keep our methods while at the same time trying to see whether they can be so adapted as to be utilised on the Continent.
The noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, spoke about agricultural futures—about being
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able to obtain an idea, or some figures, for future production. That is exceedingly difficult. At present in some parts of the country we have a very serious drought, yet in other parts—where I live, for instance—we had the wettest May on record. It is difficult to be able to say what is going to happen when we are entirely dependent on the Almighty for whether or not the rain or sun is with us in appropriate measure to make production possible for us. With all the technology we possess, we still depend on the weather. It is something for which no amount of planning is possible.
I have just spent the whole of last weekend at home driving tractors in a hayfield, and never in my life have I seen hay like we have in the South of Scotland today, because for ten days we have had the most glorious sunshine and terrific heat while we had such a wet May that the grass grew like nothing on earth.
We have about three times as much hay in a fortnight as we expected to get in the whole year. It is impossible to forecast this sort of thing. Therefore, it makes agriculture an exceedingly difficult industry to organise. That is why I come back to the point that if we can persuade the EEC to adopt the kind of organisation that can help, albeit not completely, to level out the variations which emerge from differences in climate and conditions, and so on, we shall be doing something to help enormously in production and also in selling.
The Minister of Agriculture is an extremely able person, one who has done extremely well by British agriculture all the time he has been Minister. I hope he will be backed up by the Department in endeavouring to keep as much as we can of our own marketing organisation and in trying to persuade our colleagues in Europe that ours is the best way of doing things. If we can do that it will help the CAP, it will help farmers and also consumers. I very much hope that some of our words from this short debate may reach M. Lardinois and his colleagues in Brussels.
3.58 p.m.
Lord COLLISON: My Lords, it is always a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Elliot of Harwood. Although we sit on opposite sides of the

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House I find that we are more often than not in agreement about agricultural matters, and so it is today. I entirely agree with her when she says that she feels that the marketing hoards have done a magnificent job, and that we should try to persuade our Continental friends to follow our pattern within the Community. However, I am not qualified, and do not propose, to pass any opinion about hops. I know nothing about them. I come from Lady Elliot's West Country, Gloucester-shire, where they are not grown, except right on the border of Hereford, and I was far from that. But I wish to say a word or two about potatoes. Before I do that may I also offer my thanks to the noble Lord, Lord Raglan, and congratulations to him for his chairmanship of the Committee. I am sure that that chairmanship enables the Committee to do whatever good work it does. So much depends upon the chairman; I have found after long experience that this is true.
I think too that it is rather a pity that we had to discuss this matter about potato marketing now. Incidentally, the noble Lord, Lord Raglan, is quite right in saying that the Potato Marketing Board is not a marketing board; it is a kind of planning, or control, board as he has said. It is a pity that we had to try to discuss this matter at a time when we had suffered the worst shortage of potatoes we had ever known. As has been said, prices went sky high and housewives were, naturally enough, taken aback. As a result, the tendency is to blame everyone—the farmer, the middle man and the Potato Marketing Board—a point I make because I believe that over the years the Potato Marketing Board has achieved a very good balance indeed between the consumption and production of potatoes.
The Board has been able to do this because it has had responsibility for deciding what acreage shall be planted. The Board allows somewhat of an overestimate in doing this and, although we have been told that the full permitted acreage has not been taken up, I feel satisfied that the Board, through its planning activities, has enabled demand and production to be kept in reasonable balance; and clearly if we want stable prices we must keep production and consumption in balance.
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Last year things went terribly wrong and—I do not know—they may go wrong again this year, but nobody could have foreseen what was going to happen to the potato crop last year; it happened out of the blue. There may have been some under-planting and that, combined with the weather we had, could have created the conditions I have been describing. However, in support of my claim that the Board has achieved stability between demand and production over the years, I will quote from what we on the Committee were told when we interviewed Brigadier E. B. Forster. I asked about the situation and the shortage. I then asked if he thought that, with the more open market that the Community proposals would allow, we should be better off than under our own system. He replied that the difficulties had arisen completely out of the blue and he made the obvious point that we had a ban on the import of main crop potatoes only when we were not short of them, and that whenever we were short of potatoes the import barriers were lifted and imports could come in. He then quoted from an EEC document. I appreciate that Brigadier Forster represented the Potato Marketing Board and was therefore anxious to support his own case. Nevertheless, the facts as given to us by the EEC support the point I made about stability. Brigadier Forster said:
"The EEC themselves, the Commission, published some figures at the end of last year showing the prices in units of account for all the Members of the Common Market. Statisticians can play around with figures in all sorts of ways, I appreciate, but we have taken "—
and at this point he said that if the Committee was interested he would leave the document that he had mentioned with us, which he did and which is published as an appendix to the Report—
"the average over the 14 years with which these figures are concerned, 1959–60 to 1972–73. These are taken from the Commission's figures, not our own—we have not produced any. If you take an average of these figures and if you take either the full width of these figures or an average above and an average below, you will see that the United Kingdom has had the steadiest and most reasonably priced products—I am talking now of potatoes—in the Common Market. Have I made this point clear, that what I am trying to say is that the price of potatoes has varied less in our country than in any other of the Common Market countries? The sort of figures I am talking about are these: if you take the variation between the highest and lowest mean years around the average, whereas our

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figure has varied about 31 per cent. both ways, you have figures of 72 per cent. and 76 per cent. in Belgium, in Holland 71 per cent.—twice the variation ".
That evidence seems to support the point I have been making. As I have said, supply and demand, if equated, gives stability to the producer and the consumer in terms of what the producer can get for his product and what the consumer must pay for it.
I wish to make it clear that I am not speaking critically against the Common Market. I realise that we are in the Common Market. I am simply saying that the proposals must be looked at carefully. Maybe we must make some concessions. We are in the Market and I think noble Lords know that I am a firm supporter of it ; I have made that clear in the past. However, the proposals, accepting that they are aimed at freedom to trade within the Community—which is in line with the general objectives of the Treaty of Rome—nevertheless would result in the Potato Marketing Board losing its power to plan the target acreage, and to give support to farmers through the guaranteed price, so that either the Board would have to disappear completely or we should have to consider how its activities would have to be amended. The proposals only propose to provide support in terms of dehydration for animal feed and in terms of providing money to enable farmers to store their surplus potatoes, and they are the only two forms of aid given. The present support would disappear, so the Potato Marketing Board would lose that particular function. The Government and we as a Committee had to make up our minds as to what we thought was the right thing to suggest and it is true that the Committee was divided on this issue.
As I have said, we are in the Common Market. I have also said that perhaps concessions must be made. Nevertheless, I am sure that we in this country must, in terms of our marketing boards and the Potato Marketing Board in particular, agree that we have in these boards very sophisticated machinery which works well for us. In their place we should be accepting a system which would undoubtedly be helpful to the other Members of the Community, whose activities in the sphere of potato production and consumption vary from country to country. While it would also
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create a certain uniformity, I must say, because it should be said, that whatever we do about it—and it is of course for the Government to decide—I am satisfied in my own mind that the machinery which we have is good. It has worked well for us, as I have pointed out. It has given stability and confidence to the farmer and has produced stable prices to the housewife, given the fact that other things are equal. That is the decision that has to be taken.
My Lords, I have spoken because of my view that what I have said must be said. I fear that in a sense we should be taking a step backwards. We could be affected by gluts on the Continent, prices could fall and there could be a failure to maintain the stability that we have enjoyed in the past. That might be the price the Government decide we have to pay. I would rather we used all our persuasive powers, in this and other respects, to bring the Market countries into line with what we have here because I believe that what we have here has been worked out on the basis of long experience, and practical experience shows that it works.
4.10 p.m.
The Earl of SELBORNE: My Lords, first I wish to join others in congratulating the noble Lord, Lord Raglan, upon the way in which he has initiated the debate. It is indeed a most timely moment for this subject to be discussed, particularly for the hop growers. It is as a hop grower and as a member of the Hops Marketing Board that I have a particular interest in the debate, and I should explain that I am the vice-chairman, not the chairman, as the noble Lord, Lord Raglan, was kind enough to describe me. I say that in case the chairman thinks that I am trying to usurp his job. This Regulation from the EEC—I refer to the Hops Regulation—has very good intentions; that must be clear to all hop growers, be they in this country or on the Continent. The régime recognises the predicament which the hop market is in, particularly in Europe. There is weak selling created by a multitude of small growers, particularly again in Germany, who are in no position to organise their own market.
There is also overproduction which creates the present particularly low prices. The Community's partial solution to

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date, under a Regulation dating back to 1971, has been to look at the income that growers have derived from hops, draw a line at a certain point, and say that any grower earning an income below that point needs aid, and the Community has been generous in giving that aid. The result, of course, is that there has continued to be overproduction of unwanted hops, but the reason why these hops have been low priced in the first place is because no one very much wanted them. This regime again recognises that this is certainly a fault, and it makes suggestions as to how it can partly be rectified.
Therefore, so far no hop grower in this country or anywhere else would do anything but praise the good intentions of this draft Regulation. The proposals take the form of giving aid through producer groups; that is, unless one markets one's entire crop through a recognised producer group, one will not be eligible for any further aid which may be forthcoming from the Community. Again, in so far as that will improve the marketing position of producers, it must be highly laudable. It also proposes to give aid to groups of varieties rather than just to any variety which happens to be below this magical line to which I referred. Again, in so far as one can differentiate between groups of varieties that are in demand, and those groups of varieties that are not wanted, which therefore should surely be discouraged, this again must be progress.
I hope that what I have said about the West German producer indicates that there is certainly good reason to suppose that much encouragement is needed for him to improve his marketing strength. Of course, one must realise that the West German hop grower is very much the largest producer within the Community; the English producer is certainly large, but not by the standards of the West German producer. I say "large "realising of course, in all humility, that hops as a crop in this country are almost insignificant in terms of their value and output. Nevertheless they are an important ingredient in what is an absolutely essential part of our diet, and without hops, I suspect, a very large industry—the brewing industry—would find itself with total problems.
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Where the régime runs into difficulties, as the noble Lord, Lord Raglan, very fairly and clearly pointed out, is that we have in the United Kingdom a very much more sophisticated method of marketing hops than anywhere else in the Community. We have the Hops Marketing Board, and I am most grateful to those noble Lords who have referred, I think, with accord to the success of the Hops Marketing Board. I think that this is generally recognised, and I am quite sure that a very large majority of hop growers would be most anxious to make sure that the Board retains its powers.
It is successful because it prevents surpluses accruing in this country. It does this by operating a quota system. It tries to determine what the market will be in any one year and then proportions a quota to producers which is based on previous performances of previous years. It is also successful because it is the ultimate in a producer group. It has a 100 per cent. membership. Not only do we market our hops through the Marketing Board but everyone does it; I say "everyone ", except the brewers who are in a special position and they are excluded.
Therefore, as growers, trying to sell competitively in our own market and more recently elsewhere, we have the ultimate marketing strength. We have a position where we are all in the cooperative together. It is this 100 per cent. membership which is our greatest strength, and this is the facet of the Marketing Board that, though perhaps rather by the back door, nevertheless appears to be under threat by the draft Regulation. Therefore it is an irony that the Hops Marketing Board, which seeks to improve the producers' returns in Europe and to increase the marketing strength and to remove surpluses, is under threat by a Regulation which tries to achieve exactly what, it is recognised by everyone, including, I suspect the Community, is achieved by the Board in this country far more successfully than elsewhere.
This difficulty in which the Community finds itself with the Hops Marketing Board arises because of the Community's definition of what a producer group should be. It wishes a producer group to be voluntary, by which it means that growers should be both free to join and

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after a period of years—perhaps three years—free to leave. The Hops Marketing scheme requires growers to market through the Board and there is no provision for individual growers to opt out. The only way that this could happen would be if the majority of growers decided that the Board fulfilled no further useful purpose, and the majority of growers asked the Minister to wind up the Board. To that extent one must recognise that it is a statutory producer group, brought into being in the first place at the express wish of growers, and kept in being, perhaps in a negative sense, again by the express wish of the growers who have not, as yet, asked for a poll to be taken to see whether it still commands the support of the growers. To my mind there appears to be very little likelihood that such a poll would be demanded by a large number of growers.
The effect of the Board is that not only is there a quota on production to which all growers find themselves disciplined; they also find themselves being rewarded with an equal price for an equal article. Why is it, therefore, that this compulsory element of membership is so dear to the heart of the hop grower? Why can it not be that we gracefully allow ourselves to change to an EEC voluntary producer group, with people having the right to opt in and out as they wish?
Perhaps I may go back just a little in time. My noble friend Lady Elliot of Harwood referred to the early days of the marketing boards when Sir Walter Elliot brought them into being. But I should like to go back just a little earlier than that, to 1925, when there was another cycle—very much the same as there is at the moment—of over-production in hops, and there were very great economic difficulties, particularly in this country. The English hop growers decided that they must do something about it, and they formed themselves into an association called English Hop Growers Limited. They were most successful in that they got 90 per cent. of the acreage to join. This association disciplined its members by asking them not to pick all their hops so that the surpluses would not he added to. The members were also asked to hold out for a sensible price for what was, after all, a very expensive crop to grow—many growers were being bankrupted at that time.
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The association was wrecked by 10 per cent. who remained outside. By 1928 the association had to dissolve because those people who had remained outside—as I said, they represented 10 per cent. of the acreage—continued to sell the crop from their full acreage, and in order to make sure that they got the sales they were looking for they were always prepared to undercut the big group of 90 per cent. of the people. Not unnaturally this created considerable dissatisfaction among growers, who then vowed that this was not a situation to which they would return.
My noble friend Lord Sandys has referred to the fact that the hop crop is unique in having no elasticity. We should like to influence brewers as to the amount of hops which they use in their beer, but we cannot. The demand is something over which we have no control and, by bringing down the price, we cannot increase the consumption of hops. We might be able to sell more abroad, but that is a separate subject. I believe that one must accept, therefore, that what we are trying to do is to get a fair reward for all growers in competition with other producers from other parts of the world, and to sell the hops as competitively as possible.
Going on from 1928, when the Agricultural Marketing Act 1931 come into being, hop growers leapt on the measure as their salvation. It is no coincidence that, in March 1932, the hop growers were the first body of farmers who, backed by a poll which showed a very large proportion of hop growers in support, went to ask the Minister to bring in a hop marketing scheme. That scheme came into being in 1932, in time for that year's new crop. It was the first of all the marketing schemes. It has remained in existence ever since. There have been modifications, as there should be in any organisation, but it remains to this day a body which commands very wide support from the growers and the industry. I am proud to say that my great-grandfather played a large part in getting the scheme through your Lordship's House, and in another place my grandfather did the same job at the same time. However, it is not through filial loyalty that I now say to your Lordships that this is an organisation which should be maintained. I say so because it is demonstrably doing

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a job which others on the Continent have failed to do.
As has been indicated by others, the hop market is a fickle one. It is the Hops Marketing Board which has brought stability to it. The English hop grower has traditionally supplied the English brewer and, until recently anyway, English beer was rather different from Continental beer. I suppose that, if the hot weather continues very much longer, the trend towards lager beers will accelerate, as will the move towards the Continental brews. It is for this market that the Board finds itself doing all in its power to encourage growers to produce the very different kind of hop that is needed. But, again, it is the Board, fulfilling a slightly different function, that is able to co-ordinate and give the impetus to sell the hops which the individual, fragmented groups of growers would not be able to achieve. Again, it is the marketing strength which the Board is able to give to the grower which is so important.
The grower must accept that the commercial risks are his. I do not believe that any farmer expects the taxpayer or EEC funds automatically to bring up his income to a satisfactory level. It is true that this is happening on the Continent. It is not the English grower's wish to be subsidised. As I say, he has been managing without subsidies until we went into the EEC, and he would prefer the system of trying to equate production with demand to be tried out in Europe. However, I believe that one must accept, however much we should like to see others try to bring their own house into order, that the administrative machinery simply is not there. There is a widespread body of growers in Germany, and the idea of trying to get them to pick only 80 per cent. of their crop, or whatever, in one year is one at which the mind boggles. I believe, therefore, that one must accept that a Marketing Board as such simply will not occur in Europe.
However, that does not mean to say that, where there is a Marketing Board which gives the great strength I have mentioned to the producer, we should be deprived of the advantage because others cannot conform to this high standard and this sophisticated machinery. After all, the Board is an organisation
1056
existing at the express wish of growers and funded by them. There is nothing to stop people from other countries selling hops in this market. It is not a closed shop. Brewers may buy where they wish.
The regulation as such does not refer to the Hops Marketing Board, but simply says that aid will be given to producers who market through recognised producer groups. That is the rub; what is a "recognised producer group"? Of course, as I have already said, a recognised producer group must be an organisation which is entered into voluntarily. This creates a complication. Why is it that the Board—which is compulsory in this country—cannot work alongside voluntary producer groups elsewhere? What I suggest should be done to the regulation is that two alterations should be made. One has already been suggested by the European Assembly.
There is one rather sinister paragraph in Article 5 of the regulation which says that producer groups,
"should refrain from occupying a dominant position in the Common Market or a substantial part thereof".
The critical words there are, "or a substantial part thereof ". The European Assembly—very sensibly, I feel—suggested that the paragraph should read:
"should refrain from occupying a dominant position in the Community ".
Clearly, this is important because, otherwise, even if we somehow conformed to a voluntary producer group, we should still have to fragment ourselves by Statute in order that we should not dominate a substantial part of one of the areas in the Community. Again, it seems utter nonsense, when we are trying to organise producers into groups, voluntarily to recommend groups to fragment themselves.
Far more critical, however, is the question of the compulsory element of the Marketing Board. Here, there is a very important precedent which has been created elsewhere. If, in order to get the grants which he must have if he is to be competitive with other growers producing on the same market, the English hop producer finds himself having to be heavily subsidised—and clearly, he must have the subsidies or he will be driven out of business—I think that he would ask that a country should be allowed to

1057
recognise as a producer group any organisation in one of the Member countries which appears to be successfully fulfilling the object of the EEC hop policy, notwithstanding the fact that such a body might have powers to compel the minority to join if the majority so wished. In other words, I suggest very strongly that, for the purposes of this hop regulation, powers should be given for the minority to be coerced into membership of the group if the majority wish it.
That would effectively give all that would be necessary of the powers of the Marketing Board that we hold so dear. It is the element without—the small body of growers with this great disruptive influence quite disproportionate to their size—against which it is so important to protect ourselves. It might be asked why, if there is such a wide body of support from growers as a whole, one need be so worried about the few. I say again that it is a fact which was proved in the 1920s that a small number of growers can exert great influence in sliding the market away from the firm prices which are needed.
If, however, the individual hop grower finds himself unable to benefit from grants and finds himself competing from a position of disadvantage and having to come back to Parliament and ask for the Hops Marketing scheme to be repealed so that he can be allowed to form voluntary groups recognised by the EEC, that will be a very damaging precedent for other Marketing Boards. As a result, I believe that hop growers, small in number though they are, have an influence well outside their numbers. Once opponents of Marketing Boards—and there are many of them in Europe—say that Boards are incompatible with the way in which the market should operate and we have the precedent of the Hops Marketing Board being dissolved in order to benefit from EEC aid, that will be a very embarrassing precedent for other Marketing Boards. For that reason and for the specific reason that hop growers want the Board to continue, recognising that it is doing a good job, I hope that the Council of Ministers will find itself able to amend the regulation as I have suggested.
4.30 p.m.
Lord STRABOLGI: My Lords, I think we have had a most notable and
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particularly well-informed debate, even by the standards of your Lordships' House, and we must be very grateful to my noble friend Lord Raglan for giving us the opportunity to debate this Report of Sub-Committee D. I think the House and Parliament, and indeed the whole of the United Kingdom, is very well served by these Committees of your Lordships' House, which sift the proposals coming from Brussels. I wish that more was known about them outside this House, because I think they fulfil a very important function indeed, although I know they make a great deal of work for their Members, which is given selflessly. My Lords, I think we must also be grateful to the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull—and I am particularly grateful—because he had down an Unstarred Question on potatoes which he kindly agreed to take off and have combined with this debate. I am very grateful to him for doing this, and I think we shall be able to deal with the points he has raised a little later. I was very glad, too, that the noble Earl, Lord Selborne, took part, with his unrivalled knowledge, which perhaps I may he allowed to say appears to be inherited. As he has told us, he is the third Earl of Selborne to interest himself in these matters.
My Lords, if I may deal with hops first, I may say that I appreciate the concern expressed during this debate, and particularly by the noble Earl, Lord Selborne, about the role of the Hops Marketing Board in the common organisation proposed for hops. It has always been appreciated that membership of the EEC would involve changes in our arrangements for many commodity sectors as a consequence of adopting the Community system. We need to consider, and consider very carefully, the effects on the functions and operations of the Hops Marketing Board of the proposed regime, and seek to maintain those functions which are essential to the orderly marketing of hops, while at the same time ensuring that United Kingdom producers will benefit fully from the Community aid schemes.
The Commission's proposals for a revised régime recognise the need for a much more closely organised hops market than has hitherto existed in the Community. The marketing of hops in some

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other areas of the Community has not hitherto been as well organised as in this country, as has been pointed out today; and, clearly, the prosperity of the United Kingdom producer depends not only on the conditions obtaining in the domestic market but on the levels of supply in other major hop-producing countries. The Coin-mission are hoping to achieve greater market discipline by encouraging the development of producer groups and increasing their attraction for individual growers. This approach is similar to that adopted in the United Kingdom in the 1930s, but despite the fact that the Hops Marketing Board provides a more than adequate means of equating demand with supply, the Commission have difficulty in accepting it as a producer group in the way that they look on these groups.
The problem at the moment appears to be that the compulsory membership of the Board is difficult to reconcile with the concept of voluntary organisation envisaged in the draft regulations. Depending on the final form of the regulations, some adaptation of our present marketing arrangement as operated by the HMB may be necessary so as to secure the maximum benefit from the modified regulations. Clearly there may be practical difficulties involved. However, we believe that it is in the interests, not only of our own growers but of those growers in the rest of the Community that these difficulties be overcome. I am sure, my Lords, that, given good will and an understanding of all the circumstances, they will be. In this respect we must recognise that the United Kingdom, as the Community's second largest producer, must be concerned with finding a solution to the problem of hop producers throughout the Community, and not merely with trying to maintain the status quo at home. We are, and have been, in close touch with the representatives of our growers and with the Commission at all levels in order to seek some arrangement which will ensure the greatest benefit from the Commission's proposals to growers here and in the Community, and we shall continue to be so.
My Lords, before I leave hops, I should like to answer a few questions of detail which have been raised both in your Lordships' House by the Committee and sometimes outside. First of all, it is asked
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whether the Minister is prepared to make acceptance of the HMB as a producer group a condition of agreement to the regulations. I would not wish to anticipate our negotiating attitude towards a regulation which is subject to discussion with other member States and the Commission, and which could be changed as a result of these discussions. We are asked, too, whether United Kingdom growers would lose by belonging to the HMB if aids were channelled through these new types of producer groups. We cannot see how the HMB as at present constituted could he recognised as a producer group under the regulations as drafted, and it would follow that aid would not be available to British growers unless they were revised. There is of course provision in the draft regulation for a transitional period to July 1978.
Could the Board qualify for recognition as a producer group? As I have said, it is not possible under the present draft, but this draft is still under discussion in Brussels, and we shall need to consider the position of the Board in the light of the version which is finally agreed. Could the Board maintain control over its members without compulsory membership? This was a point raised by the noble Earl, Lord Selborne. The concept of group discipline is inherent in the Commission's proposals, in that they provide minimum membership and resignation periods. The Board's powers go further, but in practical terms there may not be much difference. The proposals provide for transitional arrangements for member States, as I said, down to July 1978. Most producer countries seem likely to require some transitional arrangements.
My noble friend Lord Raglan asked about the question of non-harvesting grants, and what progress is being made. Proposals for non-harvesting grants are being considered by the Commission following criticisms from member States about the timing of the measure and the conditions attached to it, and the Commission have undertaken to reconsider their proposals. Before I turn to potatoes, may I say at once to the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, who gave us examples in several European languages of the Commission's proposals, that I will at once take that up with the European Office, because I absolutely agree with

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him that these should be produced for your Lordships' House in the language of this country. I am very grateful to him for drawing attention to this.
Perhaps I may turn now to the Commission's proposal for a common organisation of the Community market in potatoes. When one sees the diversity of conditions in the nine member countries, it is hardly surprising that the Commission appears to have had a rather difficult task in trying to draw up a common régime. Potatoes are very late-comers in the field of agricultural commodities to be considered for a Common Market organisation. I must admit that potatoes have been headlines in the past twelve months, and I shall be dealing with some of the matters raised by the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, in a moment; but I think this underlines the fact that they are a very basic crop. When Sir Walter Raleigh and Thomas Herriot brought the potato to our shores, I doubt whether they for one moment imagined that it would become the staple food that it is today.
Most countries in the Community have evolved their own methods of marketing designed to suit their own particular needs. Compared with the Dutch, who have no regulatory mechanisms other than grading requirements, the arrangements we have operated in the United Kingdom are highly structured. These are described in the Committee's Report. I think it fair to say that, generally speaking, these arrangements have suited us very well; but this is not to say that they could be operated efficiently and effectively on a Community basis; because the potato industries of our European partners are very different.
The Commission proposal envisages a free market in potatoes and potato products conforming to enforceable grading standards, regulation of supply by adjustment of the grading standards and encouragement to producers' groups to hold potatoes off the market in times of assessed surplus. There would be provision for aid for the eventual disposal of surplus production by producer groups at low prices for dehydration into animal feed. On new potatoes, imports would be subject to reference price arrangements and a high tariff of 21 per cent. ad valorem from April 1st instead of May 15th as at present. As the Committee have said, and
1062
as your Lordships have also said today, such a régime would involve a fundamental change in our national régime. Discussions in Brussels are still at an early stage and to date have been confined to obtaining clarification of certain aspects of the proposal.
It is clear to Her Majesty's Government that there are various points which we regard as unsatisfactory. Some of these have been touched on by noble Lords today and I will come back to one or two a little later. The Commission is bound by certain guidelines in Article 39 of the Rome Treaty in the type of régime it can propose for agricultural commodities. There are obvious difficulties in reaching a régime which will meet these conditions and actually be an improvement over present internal arrangements in Member countries but we are still at a very early stage and it is possible that further examination of the complex problems can reconcile some of the difficulties. Our aim must be to find a solution which takes account of' the particular circumstances of potato production and marketing in the Community and of the interests of both producers and consumers. This is our objective and the Government will cooperate fully in the search for a satisfactory solution which meets our basic requirements while at the same time honouring the rules of the Community that we have joined.
My Lords, I should like to turn now to one or two points which were raised by the Committee, first on the need for a régime. Here, as I have indicated, there are Treaty provisions which set out the objectives of a common agricultural policy for commodities. There are arrangements for all basic commodities except sheepmeat and potatoes; and, clearly, it would be tidier if the whole of the agricultural centre was covered. But this does not mean that just for tidyness we must accept an unsatisfactory arrangement. We shall work for an acceptable Community solution. The Committee also pointed to the need that any common organisation should maintain confidence among producers, encourage the orderly marketing of the crop and provide consumers with relatively stable prices. They expressed the opinion that the proposal offered producers less security than they enjoy under our national régime.

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Our policy is, and that of successive Governments has been, that the United Kingdom should be self-sufficient in main crop potatoes except in seasons of unusually low yield. This, I am glad to say, has been successfully achieved through the operation of cur guarantee and marketing arrangements. The Commission have said in the European Assembly that their objective is to establish a regime that would guarantee European consumers regular and adequate supplies of quality potatoes. We support this objective and, given efficient production, there is no reason to be unduly concerned, bearing in mind that we are in an early stage in the negotiations. We are not satisfied that the proposals in their present form cater adequately for a situation where farmers' confidence could be badly shaken by a season of abnormally high yields when prices would slump. This could lead to reduced plantings. Yields naturally vary from year to year but consumption is relatively static and does not greatly increase when prices fall; and, as has been seen this year, prices have to be very high indeed in times of shortage to cut back consumption.
Potatoes in excess of those needed for consumption would depress producers' returns below a reasonable level. Our present arrangements, we believe, provide a means of avoiding this situation. The confidence placed on producer groups, as defined, to ensure stability is open to serious question given the very small share of throughput on a Community basis that they control. While they can assist in orderly marketing, it is unrealistic to foresee the expansion of such groups to an extent that would represent a viable mechanism for surplus disposal. Nor do we consider that the aid for dehydrated surplus potatoes at the end of the season would alone provide a satisfactory overall solution to the problem of surplus disposal. The Commission's proposal does not meet the bill and we hope that they will think again. We shall seek full examination in Brussels on this matter.
The noble Baroness, Lady Elliot, and I think also the NFU, have made a suggestion of a facultative list of measures. We will support the provision of flexible arrangements which, with Community backing, can be invoked to deal with the
1064
problems as they arise and wherever they arise in the Community, This, I am sure noble Lords would agree, would be a sensible approach but it needs detailed examination.
Concern has been expressed at the prospect of the United Kingdom being required to remove the ban we maintain except in years of scarcity on imports of main crop potatoes. One of the basic philosophies of the Common Market is free trade between Members, and it is difficult to see a case for exempting potatoes from this concept after a transitional period. The Committee have reported their view that imports seem unlikely to have a great impact on the United Kingdom market in normal years, given the cost of transporting them from the Netherlands and elsewhere.
The proposed reference price system for new potatoes, coupled with a high tariff from 1st April, instead of 16th May, as at present, could result in an unnecessarily high level of protection at this season of the year and, in our view, is in the interests of neither our producers nor consumers; since producers stand to lose their seed trade with supplies of new potatoes and consumers will have to meet additional costs at a time when there are insufficient Community supplies to meet their needs. Much depends on the timing. We understand the problems of the producers in the Southern parts of the Community, but it must be recognised that the United Kingdom has a traditional demand for imported new potatoes in the spring and I can see no prospect of this being satisfied from within the Community. This whole question will, therefore, have to be fully examined. But I must make it perfectly clear that we cannot accept any proposals which could blatantly work to our disadvantage.
Noble Lords and the Committee, I think, have agreed the case for a reasonable transitional period, and we agree this as well. Clearly whatever arrangements are agreed, these will entail significant changes in existing régimes operated throughout the Community and it is essential that these are phased in an orderly way to minimise disruption to the market.
I was asked about the future of the Potato Marketing Board and I can see from the debate that different views are

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expressed about this. I may say that the negotiations are at a very early stage and I think that our first priority should be to seek arrangements which are satisfactory from the viewpoints of producers and consumers alike. Then we can consider in the future what role the Board may have in its operation.
The noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, mentioned the events of the past season, and he raised the question of the adequacy of the powers of the Potato Marketing Board as of course he was perfectly entitled to do, and I am glad that he did. The shortfall in supplies from the 1975 crop was due to the hot dry summer last year which reduced a United Kingdom yield by about one-third and also affected the crops in other Northern European countries. All practicable steps were taken, both by the Government and by the Board, to alleviate the supply situation, but no amount of administrative action could make good our shortfall of some 2½ million tonnes compared with the previous year. The Board did what it could by relaxing the normal riddle sizes and encouraging orderly marketing. We are satisfied that it took the action open to it and acted responsibly in the very difficult situation we have experienced.
The Board has no powers to import potatoes. This is the function of the trade. Unlike other marketing boards, it is not a monopoly buyer. The Board regulates the area related to potatoes by means of its quota powers. Plantings in 1975, like those in the previous years, were fewer than the total of the quota issued and below the target determined by the Government and the Board. I am happy to say that the downward trend in plantings has been reversed this year. But even in 1975 the area planted would, had the yield been normal, have been sufficient to enable requirements to be met without significant supply difficulties. I must emphasise that the conditions of the 1975 crop were exceptional, and I am sure that it would be wrong to over-react to the events of that season in looking at our potato policy generally.
I should like now to come to the prospects for 1976 where we are having another hot summer. The 1976 crop was planted, as I said, in ideal conditions and the recent downward trend in plantings
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was reversed. The area planted by registered producers in Great Britain is estimated to be at least 10,000 hectares more than last year. The recent very high temperatures have cast serious doubts on the prospects of our achieving a normal yield over the United Kingdom as a whole. While rainfall in the North and West of England, Scotland and Northern Ireland has been reasonably satisfactory the crop in the Southern, and Eastern parts of England, including the main growing area of Lincolnshire, badly needs rain. The weather in the next fortnight or so will be a crucial factor. We shall almost certainly this coming year obtain more potatoes from our home crop than we did in last year's adverse conditions—I would say "certainly "were I not made cautious by the recent weather phenomena—but supplies are not now expected to be so plentiful as they were in the 1974 season. As on many other fronts at present, we must hope for rain. We shall continue to keep the estimated supply position under careful review during the forthcoming critical weeks.
The Earl of KINNOULL: My Lords, I am most grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Strabolgi, for giving way. Could he advise those of us who are not familiar with hectares what that means in acres? How does the total acreage for planting this season compare with last season?
Lord STRABOLGI: My Lords, there are two and a half acres to a hectare. The noble Earl also asked for some figures. The actual targets in 1973 for the whole of Great Britain were 206,000 hectares, and in 1974 204,000 hectares. They were down, as I said, in 1975 to 200,000 hectares. They are probably going to be up again this year, but I cannot give the actual figures. Regarding the production there were 215,000 hectares in 1974 which yielded 31·6 tonnes per hectare. This dropped last year to 22 tonnes per hectare. It is too early to give the figures for this year. They will certainly be up on last year, probably nearer 27 tonnes, or something like that.
The shortfall in the 1975 crop of course resulted in high prices, as the noble Earl said. At the retail level, prices of home produced potatoes reached

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a peak in the last week of April when they averaged from 16p to 17p per pound, though there will have been some higher quotations. The high levels obviously raise the question of whether some form of price control was appropriate. The noble Earl mentioned this. The possibility of freezing prices was given careful consideration; but the Government concluded that it would not be in the consumers' best interests. Imposing price controls would have been a very complex administrative task and, more important, it would not have overcome the shortage. On the contrary, fixing prices at an artificially low level would have encouraged consumption to continue unchecked thus exhausting the available supplies more quickly and indeed that might well have discouraged the import of supplies from overseas which, in the event, helped to alleviate the shortage. The noble Earl asked about Roumania. I believe that potatoes are not allowed to be imported from Roumania for health reasons. We were enabled to import them from many other countries last year in the emergency.
I hope that has answered the various questions. It is most useful to have had the opportunity to debate these important proposals and hear the views of noble Lords upon the complex issues involved. I appreciate the constructive attitude which all your Lordships have taken to these proposals. I will ensure that my right honourable friend the Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, is aware of all the points raised this afternoon.
Lord SANDYS: My Lords, before the noble Lord sits down, may I thank him for his very careful and detailed replies on many matters which my noble friends have raised? May I tell the Government that from this side of the House we are particularly distressed to note that the Government believe that the Hops Marketing Board will not be able to fulfil the qualifications for a voluntary producer group. As the noble Lord said, this is an early stage of negotiations and I hope that the Government will give an urgent and high degree of priority to this particular issue, the subject of which has been so much at the heart of this debate.
Lord STRABOLGI: My Lords, I am very glad that the noble Lord raised
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that point. I should like to stress that the words I used were:
"As at present drafted it would not be possible for the Hops Marketing Board to qualify for recognition as a producer group ".
As I said, the draft is under discussion in Brussels and we shall be considering this point with the other Community Members. I am very glad he raised it; it gives us the opportunity to clarify the matter.
4.59 p.m.
Lord RAGLAN: My Lords, I should like to thank my noble friends on the Committee for their kind compliments; they are delightful people with whom to work. The noble Lord, Lord Strabolgi, praised us for holding such a well-informed debate. I would inform him that it is very difficult not to be well informed from the enormous amount of paper received and the length of evidence which we took. We all knew the subject very well by the time we had finished. I should like to thank my noble friend for his thorough reply. He has taken the point which was unanimously put forward that we think that it is vital to the hops industry that it remains in its present organisation, and we hope that they will induce the Commission to accommodate their Directive to understand how we are organised in this country. I do not see, reading the Directive myself, that it should be very difficult for them to do so.
I do not think I have anything else to say before going on to the next Motion, except to point out that the problem about potatoes is knowing what the devil to do with the surplus production. It is the same problem that we criticise the Common Market for so frequently—in other words, the enormous surpluses that they have and do not know how to deal with. I can hear my noble friend saying, "That is a very big problem with the potato industry ". The question is: What do we do about shortages and what do we do about the enormous overproduction which can come about in a very good year? It is an interesting fact that abundance makes a producer worse off than shortage. With those remarks, my Lord, I commend the Motion.
On Question, Motion agreed to.

WHEAT: TWO-TIER INTERVENTION PRICE
5.1 p.m.
Lord RAGLAN Lord RAGLAN rose to move, That this House takes note of the most recent decision of the Council of Ministers to implement a two-tier intervention price for wheat. The noble Lord said: My Lords, earlier this year Sub-Committee D reported upon a proposed common regime in respect of a two-tier intervention price for wheat, one price being for wheat judged suitable for bread-making and the other for wheat which is judged suitable for animal feed. We had a debate and as I spoke to the Report on 4th February and explained the Commission's proposals to the House as best I could then, I feel I ought not to go over that ground again.
Our Sub-Committee opposed these proposals in their Report, but the Commission have gone ahead with them just the same, and now the Council of Ministers have agreed to institute from August of this year a test for wheat considered suitable for bread-making. Perhaps I might quote from paragraph 13 of the Report, which reads as follows:
"…no quick or certain test had been developed which could determine whether a sample of wheat was suitable for making British type bread. Hence no quick and cheap system exists of identifying the suitability of wheat for bread-making at the point of sale into intervention. The only reliable method appears to be to test-bake, which is lengthy and costly. This difficulty in the opinion of the Committee appears to render impracticable any two-tier intervention system of the sort suggested in paragraph 12 above."
However, the Commission's scientists have now devised a test based not upon baking a sample of the dough but on the stickiness of that dough. The Regulation states that the wheat should qualify as being of bread-making quality if the dough produced from it can be kneaded mechanically. I understsnd that is called "the test of machinability ".
Much criticism has been made of the reliability of that test. The Home Grown Cereals Authority says it has considerable doubts about its suitability under United Kingdom conditions, and the instituting of these tests was much opposed last week in another place. The burden of the evidence given to our Sub-Committee last autumn impressed upon us the differences of types of wheat used in Common Market countries which are thought
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suitable for making bread. The Sub-Committee, of course, are not technically qualified to argue the pros and cons of a test of such suitability. We have to depend upon advice. It might be, though I doubt it, that this test could be adapted to discriminate accurately between various types of flour.
However, my purpose in moving this Motion today is to endeavour to impress once again on the Government the total undesirability and impracticability of having a two-tier system for wheat in any case. I should like to draw their attention to paragraph 14 of our Sub-Committee's Report—that is, the final sub-paragraph (d), which indicates that the Committee:
"…considers that the problem would best be solved by fixing the intervention price at a level which would enable different wheats for bread-making to compete with other grains as animal feed, allowing wheat of assured bread-making quality to command what premium it can in the market."
In other words, millers buy their own wheat, do their own tests and then pay the premium. This question of differentiating between different types of wheat which are thought suitable for bread-making or for animal feed is exceedingly complicated, and we took a lot of evidence on it. In addition, the question is vexed further by emotional attitudes which I acknowledge may be difficult to change, but which I think we should try to change.
We in this country have traditionally grown wheat for animal feed. Most of the wheat we import—mainly from North America—is used for bread-making because the kind of bread we have become accustomed to eating is nearly all made from types of wheat which grow best in North America and do not grow well in this climate. In other words, we have become conditioned in our taste for bread by the age-old policy now of importing wheat from abroad. They can grow this kind of wheat in the States: we cannot grow it here.
But I must emphasise that there is nothing at all superior in the nutritional quality of bread-making wheat. In fact, some of the high-yielding wheats which are grown in this country and added to the traditional imported wheats in increasing quantities (I believe it is now up to 50 per cent.) mainly differ in such technical ways as differences in alpha-amylase content and other characterìistics

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which are very difficult to quantify. It is a question of protein quality, though not necessarily protein quantity.
So let us not proceed with the belief that by instituting a two-tier régime we are helping the nutrition of the population and defending them from attack by purveyors of an inferior product. I emphasise this point because it was stated in a reply last year given by my honourable friend Dr. Gavin Strang in another place that this wheat used for bread-making was of a superior kind; at least, he inferred that it was. It is not superior and neither is the animal feed inferior: it is simply inferior for turning it into the particular kind of bread that we eat. Therefore the high-yielding domestic wheats we have here are not inferior; they are simply different, and so are not suitable for making the long-life British bread, though they make excellent cakes and biscuits.
The tradition in some Member countries of the Community, notably France and Italy, is that wheat is not an animal food. It is not right to feed it to animals. That is what conditions their attitude. It is called the "noble cereal "and other similar names, and pressure to institute this two-tier price stems from this attitude and not from a desire to maintain a quality standard. In our Committee's belief, the two-tier price system will lead to distortions in the market, it runs the risk of encouraging the production of wheat of a type which is not needed and which will not necessarily save FEOGA anything, although the Commission say that they hope it will, and in my view the whole elaborate scheme is entirely unnecessary and potentially expensive.
If millers want suitable wheat, it is always open to them to offer a premium for growing it. At present in this country, millers are paying a premium for bread-making type wheat of 30 to 40 per cent. over the home grown product, with imported Manitobas at £95 a tonne against home-grown wheat at £65 to £70 a tonne. There is no reason to think that Continental millers would be unable to offer adequate premia for that type of bread-making wheat. What will happen, if this scheme for two-tier Government support goes ahead, is that the taxpayer may be required to fork out if the wheat goes into intervention—which it possibly will not
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do this year because of the drought, but if we have a good season and one of those embarrassing surpluses it may—for wheat which will not necessarily, in any case, be used for its avowed purpose and may find its way back into animal feed.
I should explain that the two-tier system is a test for finding out whether wheat is suitable for making bread. It does not differentiate between what goes for bread-making and what does not. It is merely testing what might be suitable for making bread, if anybody wants to buy for that purpose. So it seems to me that the price will be paid only for keeping up appearances. The premium will be paid for a superior wheat which should not suffer the indignity of being classed as animal feed.
So I urge the Government to oppose the institution of this test and keep up their pressure against the two-tier intervention idea. It is the view of the Sub-Committee, as well as my own strongly held view, that one level of intervention set at the feed grain price will cope very adequately with the situation, leaving the market to set the premium. Any other scheme is fraught with difficulty, open to abuse and quite unnecessarily expensive to operate. My Lords, I beg to move my Motion.
Moved, That this House takes note of the most recent decision of the Council of Ministers to implement a two-tier intervention price for wheat—(Lord Raglan.)
5.14 p.m.
Lord SANDYS: My Lords, once again, from this side of the House, I should like to support the noble Lord, Lord Raglan, very warmly in bringing forward this further issue of two-tier wheat. In view of the fact that we debated the subject on 5th February, and there was a Statement by the Minister of State in another place on 16th June, it appears that it will have been very fully discussed by the time we have completed our deliberations today, and I propose to say only a very few words.
I speak with some trepidation on this subject of very considerable technicality, but I should like to say this. It must be very clear that everything depends upon this year's harvest, so I should like to ask the noble Lord, Lord Strabolgi, what

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assurances he can give us in present circumstances. Do the prospects for the 1976 harvest appear bright? Does it seem that the circumstances in which intervention buying would have to take place might be obviated? Is it possible that the intervention price is likely to be set at a very much lower rate than the United Kingdom price, which is what we believe to be the case?
The Minister of State in another place referred to the difficulties and mentioned one variety, which is a very good one. He quoted Maris Huntsman and said that this being a hard grain it will mill well but make poor bread, which bears out very clearly what the noble Lord, Lord Raglan, said. It is most inappropriate that we should have a situation in which certain varieties are subjected to tests knowing full well that they will not be conclusive, because part of the tests will be satisfactory while the other half will not. I do not wish to go into further detail, but I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Strabolgi, will be able to satisfy us that the circumstances in 1976 may prove that it will be possible to postpone this situation, through the force of circumstances and the fortune of circumstances, until next year when some more satisfactory system may be evolved.
5.17 p.m.
Lord COLLISON: My Lords, I took part in the earlier debate and, like the noble Lord, Lord Raglan, I do not want to go over the ground which I covered then. I would again thank the noble Lord for presenting so ably this Report of the Committee. As we have heard, the Council of Ministers confirmed the Commission's proposal to fix a single intervention price for wheat of bread-making quality, and a lower intervention price for feed wheat. The agreement of the Council of Ministers to a two-tier intervention arrangement for wheat reflected the Commission's view that, with the spread of high yielding but poor bread-making quality wheats, such as Maris Huntsman and Clement, it was necessary to discriminate within the intervention arrangement between good bread-making wheat and other wheat. The French, in particular, had expressed misgivings about the spread of the high yielding varieties which they feared might replace much of the better quality wheat.
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The debate had gone on within the Community for a year, and the difficulty for us lies in the simple fact that our classification of wheat is based upon variety. We have determined what is hard wheat, which is used for making the type of bread we eat in this country, and soft wheat, which goes to produce animal feedstock. On the Continent, they make a different type of bread and simply speak of wheat of bread-making quality. The great problem for them, as well as for us, is to devise tests which will satisfy the need to know which wheat falls within the bread-making quality, and as we have already heard these tests are not very satisfactory; we cannot be sure of them.
For example, the Home Grown Cereals Authority feels that the stickiness test is very dicey. One cannot be really sure. The only way of knowing whether one has a bread-making wheat is to make bread out of it, which takes time and trouble. One has to have a miniature grinding mill in order to reduce the grain to flour. One has to bake it, and that takes time. To do this around the country for each selection of wheat, perhaps in smaller quantities from the farm, is obviously quite impossible.
At this point I must declare that I am a member of the Cereals Authority. Clearly this matter concerned us very deeply and we discussed it at great length. We discussed the possibility of the scientists being able to devise an easier but nevertheless more determinate test. That has not yet happened, although they are still working upon it. Therefore the position of the Authority, having looked at the problem—and today I am speaking as a member of the Authority— is that, while it still doubts whether a two-tier intervention system is necessary in the United Kingdom to ensure the continued production of reasonable quantities of wheat of bread-making quality, it states:
"Given, however, that there is to be a two-tier intervention system for wheat, the Authority would prefer to see a simpler method of distinguishing wheat of bread-making quality, based possibly on its own classification scheme "
under which wheat for breadmaking is classified according to type. The Authority goes on to point out:
"however, the Commission evidently desires a Community-wide scheme for this purpose and the Authority considers that a scheme involving a bread-making test, although creating certain difficulties, would be workable in UK conditions ".

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The Authority also takes the view (this point was made just now) that:
"it is improbable that there would be widespread use of intervention for high quality British wheats in this country."
To sum up, the Authority dislikes the idea of the two-tier system. It does not think it is necessary for the United Kingdom, but if there is to be one the Authority would like it to be based on wheat classification, which is very easy. Thirdly, if there is to be a bread testing scheme, the only one which the Authority knows at the moment as absolutely certain is the actual baking of the bread. It has doubts about the stickiness of the dough test. In those circumstances, although the Authority would be willing to work some kind of adequate scheme for testing, at the moment it has very great doubts about the possibility or advisability of doing so.
5.23 p.m.
Lord STRABOLGI: My Lords, as the noble Lord, Lord Raglan, has said, it was on 5th February that the House debated and took note of the Report of the European Communities Committee on High Yielding Wheats and we are grateful to him for giving us the opportunity once again to debate this matter. The House then accepted that support for feed wheat should be at a feed grain level. Following from this, the Council of Ministers on 2nd and 6th March agreed that for the 1976–77 marketing year the intervention price for common wheat will relate to wheat of breadmaking quality, with a lower support price for feed wheat. In order to operate this two-tier system it was clearly necessary that before the beginning of the 1976–77 year on 1st August 1976 scientific experts in the various Member States should agree on a satisfactory test to distinguish breadmaking from non-breadmaking wheats.
At this point I should like to remind your Lordships that, as has been said, the proposed test is for use only in an intervention situation and need not therefore affect normal trading practice. I think it has been agreed that this dough handling test will be satisfactory for the 1976–77 year. It will also prove a useful step towards the introduction of a full baking test for use during the 1977–78 marketing year. As your Lordships will recall, in the
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1977–78 marketing year support for bread-making wheat will occur at a "reference price "set above the feed wheat intervention price at a level reflecting the difference in yield of the two types of wheat.
At the March Council of Ministers an intervention price of 131 units of account per tonne for the 1976–77 marketing year was agreed for common wheat of breadmaking quality, with a drawback of 15 units of account per tonne for non-breadmaking wheat. In addition, the present system of regionalised wheat intervention prices is being replaced from 1st August by a single intervention price. The United Kingdom intervention price for wheat of breadmaking quality in August of this year will be £64·04 per tonne and support for non-breadmaking wheat will be at the lower level of £56·12 per tonne. These prices are subject to monthly increments of about 81p per tonne.
I was asked which United Kingdom varieties of wheat will qualify as bread-making quality. I am confident that the dough handling test will distinguish wheat which is of bread-making quality. Until details of the test have been finalised, it is not possible to say which wheat might qualify for the higher intervention price, but I would expect those varieties of wheat which appear in List A of the Home Grown Cereals Authority's wheat classification scheme to pass the test. On the other hand, Maris Huntsman which, as was mentioned this afternoon, is not regarded as a breadmaking wheat is more likely to be eligible for intervention support at the lower level.
The noble Lord, Lord Sandys, asked about the prospects of intervention of wheat in the United Kingdom from the 1976 harvest. It is too early to be certain about the likelihood of intervention in the United Kingdom following this year's harvest. However, we are in deficit both for breadmaking wheat and feed wheat, and as a result the price for imported grain, which enters the country at the threshold price, tends to keep market prices well above intervention levels. Much will depend on the weather and the world harvest generally, but our present estimates suggest that there are unlikely to be substantial offers of bread-

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making wheat into intervention in the United Kingdom from the 1976 harvest.
I was also asked whether or not there are tests which are more reliable than the dough handling test. Obviously the best test to distinguish breadmaking wheat is to mill the wheat and bake the bread. Failing this, one can proceed on the assumption that good breadmaking wheats tend to be high in protein and low in an enzyme called alpha-amylase which, as was mentioned, produces a damp and sticky crumb. There are a variety of tests for one or the other—for instance, the Zeleny test for protein content or the Hagberg test for alpha-amylase. These tests are fairly simple and quick to do. But the fact remains that performance under these tests is rather an indication of, than an absolute test of, breadmaking quality. The inequality of such tests is underlined by the fact that the variety Clement—a feed wheat widely grown on the Continent—would qualify as being of breadmaking quality if tested solely on alpha-amylase and protein quality, while Maris Huntsman, the most significant United Kingdom feed wheat, would fail.
The Hagberg test and protein tests give reliable assessments of particular aspects of individual qualities in wheat, but neither singly nor together do they give a complete or infallible assessment of overall bread-making quality. The dough handling test is much closer to a realistic assessment of overall suitability for breadmaking. Hag-berg and protein tests in addition to the dough test add little to the sum of knowledge. The proposed test is sufficiently objective for the purposes for which it is intended, that is, to distinguish bread-making wheat from non-breadmaking wheat.
It may be asked why we do not postpone the new support arrangements for wheat until the 1977–78 marketing year, when a full baking test will be ready. It is unlikely that the new arrangements for supporting wheat could have been postponed without the risk of reopening the entire price package agreed at the Council of Ministers in March. This is something we naturally wish to avoid. Furthermore, other Member States who will be more concerned than the United Kingdom with sales of wheat into intervention agree that the proposed decision will be sufficient
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to determine whether wheat is of the breadmaking quality.
The Flour Milling and Baking Research Association, which is a partly Government-sponsored organisation, for some years has been using a baking test as indication of breadmaking quality in wheat. In general, the trade would prefer to see a postponement of the new measures until the next marketing year, but understands the reason why this cannot be done. The trade has accepted that the proposals regarding machinability tests are as watertight as is possible at the present time. Moreover, they do not dissent from our view that there is unlikely to be any substantial offer of breadmaking wheat into intervention in the next marketing year.
In answer to my noble friend Lord Collison, I should like to say that in view of the relatively small risk of intervention taking place in the United Kingdom during the next year, we think one test centre will be sufficient for foreseeable needs. This is likely to be based at the Flour Milling and Baking Research Association at Chorleywood. I hope that has answered the various points raised by noble Lords.
Lord RAGLAN: My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Strabolgi for his reply. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Sandys, that this matter has been ventilated, but the time to come back at it again, so important do I consider it to be, is when we have heard news that this is really to go forward. We could hardly believe our ears. I agree with my noble friend that, of course, with the drought as it is in Europe this year, it is unlikely that wheat will go into intervention, but even if it does not come into intervention, surely what we do not want to do is to establish the two-tier system.
I agree that we do not want to reopen what was agreed in March, but I continue to urge the Government to "have a go "at the Commission, to come back to this matter again next year, and the year after, until we finally stamp out this unreliable thing which, in my belief, is so very much open to abuse. This concerns not only the British wheat growers but many Continental wheat growers, as well, who can see all kinds of unhappy results from this if ever we come into intervention. I am glad to see my noble friend nodding his head. I hope he will take these words back to my right honourable friend the Minister, and

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that the Government will continue to oppose the two-tier system, this test and any other test.
On Question, Motion agreed to.

THE PRISON POPULATION
5.34 p.m.
The Earl of LONGFORD The Earl of LONGFORD rose to ask Her Majesty's Government what steps they are taking to reduce the prison population in accordance with the policy stated, more than once, by the Home Secretary. The noble Earl said: My Lords, I rise to ask Her Majesty's Government the Question standing in my name on the Order Paper. I yield to no one in a general appreciation of our Labour Government, and I yield to no one in my respect for the abilities and good intentions of my noble friend Lord Harris of Greenwich, who is to reply. I am delighted that he has been asked, we understand, to take over responsibility for prison questions within the Home Office. I would be happier still if he were to be publicly designated Minister for Penal Affairs, or given some such title, because no Home Secretary will ever have time to give adequate time to prisoners, although he must always retain ultimate responsibility. However, that is a matter for another day.
My Lords, even the best of Governments are subject to human fallibility. In the area selected for discussion today, the reduction of the prison population, the record of the Government is, indeed, a sad one. Obviously there is some excuse at a time when crime has been rapidly increasing, an issue highly relevant to our discussions this afternoon, but I must leave that also for another occasion. I submit that this excuse is quite insufficient, particularly in view of the declared attitudes of the Home Secretary.
When I opened a general debate on prisons in this House two years ago, the Home Secretary had recently committed himself to a vigorous attack on the numbers confined to prison. The latest figures available at that time revealed a prison population of 35,000. On 31st July last year, a year later, the Home Secretary had this to say at the annual
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meeting of the National Association for the Care and Resettlement of Offenders, usually known as NACRO. The Home Secretary said:
"The prison population now stands at over 40,500, 5,000 up on the previous figure. It has never been higher. If it should rise to, say, 42,000 conditions in the system would approach the intolerable and drastic action to relieve the position will be inescapable. We are perilously close to that position now."
We may have been rather close then, but we are a great deal closer at the present time, for now, a year later, the prison population, according to the last figures available to me, stands at 41,800, so we have practically reached the position the Home Secretary said would be intolerable. That is the position we have reached now and, of course, at this rate, we do not know where we shall be a few months from now.
We are entitled, to say the least, to know from the noble Lord on behalf of the Home Secretary whether the Home Secretary and his colleagues are prepared without delay to take the drastic action which the Home Secretary promised last year. Many suggestions have been made, and are being made, for dealing with this intractable problem. There have been a good many valuable contributions in the newspapers. There have been articles in the Daily Telegraph, discussions in the correspondence columns of The Times, and the Guardian never fails to show a deep interest in penal affairs. Mr. Nicholas Hinton, Director of NACRO, has made suggestions of particular relevance. My Lords, in addition to proposals which I shall myself be dealing with, NACRO calls—and I pick out three points in particular—for additional accommodation to be provided through the medium of both housing associations and local authority housing stock; education, especially in literacy, through facilities which already exist, and employment by the provision of occupational workshops such as the pilot model which NACRO has been running in Manchester for two years.
For a long time, a much more liberal use of bail has been widely demanded, and I am glad for that and other reasons, that the great expert on these matters, in the form of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Gardiner, along with other notables, will be speaking later in the debate. The

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new Bail Bill carries us a little way in that direction, although many of us would like to have gone forward much further, and faster. NACRO and the Howard League put forward three basic proposals for improving the Bail Bill, and I hope that my noble friend Lord Harris of Greenwich will be able to say something as to whether the Government can or intend to meet them in a substantial way.
My Lords, for reasons of brevity, I must confine myself to three topics: first, a more liberal use of parole; secondly, shorter prison sentences; and, thirdly, a rapid extension of alternative remedies to prison. Let us first take parole, which was last discussed in this House about a year ago. At that time, I accused those responsible for parole—that is, the Home Secretary, the Home Office and the Parole Board—of being far too timid. I accused them of being much too frightened of public opinion, real or alleged, to give effect overall to the ideas of humanity and wisdom which I have no doubt they share with us at heart. I must regretfully repeat that charge today.
However, I strive to be fair. I repeat my previous tribute to the benevolence and distinction of the Chairman of the Parole Board, Sir Louis Petch. I acknowledge—I could not fail to acknowledge —that the proportion of those receiving parole has risen considerably during the last year. To quote the Parole Board report:
"The percentage of favourable recommendations was 32·8 per cent. in 1974 and 39·7 per cent. in 1975."
It would be agreeable to think, but perhaps over-vain to think, that our debate here last year, which the Home Secretary was good enough to describe as very constructive, played some small part in bringing about that improvement. But whether or not that is the case, let us say to those responsible in this immediate connection, "Thank you for the small, the not so very small, mercy revealed in the improvement in the figures ".
But alas! the old confusion of mind—or should we call it the old Jekyll and Hyde mentality ?—is still distorting the practice of the parole authorities. In response to a suggestion of mine and others, here and elsewhere, the Parole Board have been good enough to publish
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the guidelines provided for the local review boards. If anybody has plenty of time to spare I suggest that he studies those guidelines, but not otherwise. They are appallingly verbose, they run to about six pages, and I would think that any normal local parole board might well be befuddled at the end. Sir Louis Petch put the matter much more clearly in a recent lecture, and I am now quoting him:
"In the case of those who have committed serious crimes of violence or major professional crimes, parole is only to be considered when there is good reason to believe that they will avoid crime in future—in other words, there must be positive evidence of a change. But in other cases "—
that would be, of course, the great majority of cases—
"parole should be seriously considered, unless there is positive evidence of a continuing antisocial attitude and an intention to return to crime ".
As I say, if you have only time to read what Sir Louis Petch wrote or the six pages of instructions, I should choose what Sir Louis Petch wrote.
The principles here stated are unexceptionable enough. The trouble is that the Parole Board so often fail to live up to their own principles. I have only time for two examples. Last year several of us raised the case of Mr. Michael Luvaglio, who had then served eight years in prison without being even considered for parole. A year later he has still not been considered, and he is a model prisoner who should obtain, is expected to obtain, an Open University degree by the end of this year. I repeat what I said last year on this subject, and what others said, with interest, in every sense. In the last few days we have read that parole has been refused to Mr. John Poulson. I can only describe that as an indefensible piece of cruelty. I have not met Mr. Poulson or been in touch with him, though I visited Wakefield recently, incidentally meeting Mr. Luvaglio for the first time, and Mr. Poulson is in prison there. The Bishop of Wakefield, who, unfortunately, cannot be with us today, sees both Mr. Luvaglio and Mr. Poulson regularly. I am assured that Mr. Poulson, like Mr. Luvaglio, is a model prisoner, though in a different sense. Mr. Luvaglio is bursting with energy, a young man full of vigour. I suppose I should not call Mr. Poulson an old man, because he is slightly younger than I am, but he is by many standards

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elderly, and he is in feeble health. No one in Wakefield, or anyone else, supposes that if Mr. Poulson were released he would represent any kind of danger to the public; no one outside a mental home would suppose that. It is the old, wretched story. The authorities—of course, I cannot distinguish here between the Home Secretary and the Parole Board; we do not know what goes on as between them—are so anxious to avoid this hypothetical public criticism that they cannot bring themselves to do what they know as well as we do is the only just and decent thing in a case like this. Or so it seems to me. Is there some other explanation? Could it be that the Parole Board are confusing their function with that of a sentencing judge and deciding for themselves that such-and-such a sentence is appropriate for Mr. Poulson's crime? If that is their state of mind, I would say they are totally misunderstanding their duty.
At this point I should mention the strong and growing demand in criminological circles that when parole is refused the reasons for the refusal should be given. It would appear that the door here is not altogether closed, to judge from what Sir Louis has written in the last report of the Parole Board, and we may hear more about that from the Minister when he replies. I add my voice with conviction to those who are pressing for a change. I think myself that the intellectual confusion of which I feel bound to accuse the Board would be largely dissipated by the change.
It may be, of course, some people say, that no individual is confused; and I do not think Sir Louis is likely to be easily confused; he is clearly not only a very honest but also a very straight-thinking man. It may be, we are told, that differences between members of the Parole Board cannot be reconciled in a coherent statement. There are rumours that the judges—and I shall have a word to say about them later; it would be unfair to say that we have none of the judges here because they are represented here—are inclined to demand a tougher line than their colleagues. Contradictions of this kind could not, I believe, long survive exposure to the light of day. Reasons for refusing parole to, shall we say, Mr. Poulson or many others like him would look so nonsensical if they were actually
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published that he and many others like him who are now refused parole would receive it, and receive it the first time round.
I am afraid that I have reached the conclusion that the confusion of thought to which I have referred is so deeply embedded in the theory and practice of our parole system at the moment that a more radical change is needed. The noble Lord, Lord Hunt, who, like Sir Louis, has done splendid work in his time as Chairman of the Parole Board, has pointed the way forward, last year and again more recently. Lord Hunt has written to me to express his regret at being absent. lie summaries his conclusions in this sentence:
"My view is that parole should be the normal expectation of eligible prisoners—those serving more than 18 months."
That would, of course, mean that a great many more people obtain parole. Without subscribing to every detail of the noble Lord's proposals, I declare my support emphatically for him in principle, that parole should become the normal expectation. I should like to ask the Minister—and he has had notice of this one question—whether legislation is necessary for such a proposal as that made by Lord Hunt, and now by me. If not, let us get on with that proposal forthwith. If legislation is required, the sooner it is prepared the better. The Minister shakes his head; so we can assume that legislation is not necessary. I beg him to get on with it fast.
My remaining two topics are shorter sentences and alternatives to prison. They cannot be kept strictly apart; they could be perfectly well combined. Precise comparisons are not easy. Perhaps Lord Gardiner will speak at greater length on this. But there seems no doubt that sentences today are a good deal higher for the same offence than they used to be. If the Home Secretary controlled the length of sentences an obvious method open to him of reducing the prison population would be to cut down the sentences. But, we are told, the Home Secretary does not in fact control the sentences and therefore cannot be blamed for not reducing them. Obviously, there is some force in that, but not, I submit. the whole truth.
It is reasonable to ask what steps the Home Secretary and his colleagues, not-

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ably the Lord Chancellor, were taking to educate public opinion, and above all, to educate the judges who are primarily responsible for the sentences which, in the opinion of most people taking part in these debates for many years, are too heavy, and getting heavier. I am sure that Mr. Blom-Cooper, QC., chairman of the Howard League, is absolutely right and it is imperative to pass legislation reducing maximum sentences. I am aware that a year ago the Home Secretary asked the Advisory Council to undertake a major inquiry into sentencing; a report is expected by the end of the year. We cannot, I suppose, expect much action before then, but can we expect it then in the light of the recent record?
At the time of our general debate on prisons two years ago the report of the Advisory Council on Young Offenders had just been published. It would have kept a large number of young people out of penal institutions and provided supervision in the community. The chairman of that committee was Sir Kenneth Younger, and may I take this opportunity of paying heartfelt tribute to one of the most unselfish and unwearying of all penal reformers. The House welcomed the report with enthusiasm, as did Mr. Roy Jenkins—then and now Home Secretary. But what has happened in the last two years? For all practical purposes, nothing. We can place the responsibility on more than one pair of shoulders. We can place it on those of the Probation Service for their reservations, or on those of the Home Office for dealing without any special rapidity with those reservations. But, from the point of view of penal progress, the result is a bad story. I can only hope that the Minister will be able to tell us that at last some positive action is being taken to follow up the main conclusions of the Younger Report.
It would be unfair not to recognise that more than one alternative to prison has been introduced in recent years, but the numbers involved are still small. A few days ago I visited a day training centre, which I visited before the debate of 1974. There are now perhaps 70 inmates in the four day training centres; but 70 inmates is not very many compared with 42,000 in prison. It is, of course, understood to be an experimental affair. I have formed a most favourable impression of the part they could play as an introduction to a pro
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longed period of probation. The clients and the probation officers spoke with equal enthusiasm about the new sense of mutual trust and shared responsibilities, so I hope that this experiment will be pushed forward and a very large expansion of day training centres follow.
Another alternative which has been expanded far more rapidly is the community service orders. Under these orders, as the House is aware, a man or a woman is required to undertake work of value to the community in his spare time, probably at the weekend. In the last full year community service orders have been imposed on just under 5,000 individuals and the rate is accelerating, with eminently satisfactory results. A high proportion, perhaps half of these, would otherwise have gone to prison, so maybe 2,500 people—not by any means a negligible figure, but a limited figure—have been kept out of prison during the past year for varying periods.
So far, so good. I am not here just to say that everything is wrong and nobody is doing anything. Far from it. But if you ask why many more thousands are not kept out of prison in the same way, the answer received is disquieting. To multiply the community service orders and, for that matter, to make use of other alternatives to prison, we should need to expand rapidly the number of probation officers and, under the latest economy plans, this is forbidden. But the folly of—
The MINISTER of STATE, HOME OFFICE (Lord HARRIS of GREENWICH): My Lords, with great respect to my noble friend, whom I am following, the Probation Service is one of the very few that is being allowed to grow in the current financial year.
The Earl of LONGFORD: My Lords, I did not say all expansion was forbidden. I am afraid that the noble Lord was not following me as closely as he usually does, because I said "rapid expansion "; an expansion of the kind that would involve many thousands more people being placed under community service orders. I carefully said "rapid expansion ". Of course I know that some expansion is permitted. Referring to what the noble Lord has just said, perhaps it is my bad articulation.
But the folly of this argument in the area under discussion becomes apparent

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when we compare what it costs to keep a man in prison, on the one hand, and out of prison on a community service order, on the other. A precise comparison here is impossible, so perhaps I had better not even attempt one; it will only lead to me being shot down by the noble Lord and we should spend time on arguing the details. I will not try to make comparisons. It is enough to say that it costs about £3,000 a year to keep someone in prison. We are all aware that it costs a small proportion of that to place him on probation, or put him under a community service order. However you make the comparison, the disparity is so staggering as to demonstrate conclusively that it is the falsest of false economies to keep men in prison if they could be given treatment outside.
I must emphasise that I am not suggesting anything that would involve an increase of public expenditure beyond what is planned. It will happen some day, but I am not arguing for that now. But the way that expenditure is allocated may prohibit for the time being an adequate expansion of the Probation Service. I am not saying it would prohibit every expansion but an adequate expansion, an imaginative expansion of the Probation Service. In that case—and I admit that I do not think that I have given the noble Lord notice of this, perhaps I should have done—why not second sufficient men and women from the Prison Service to work with the Probation Service in supervising offenders in the community? I feel confident from my inquiries that such a plan, a combined co-operation between the Probation Service and the Prison Service, would appeal to all the most enlightened members of our Prison Service. I do not say that just because I wish it were so: I have made inquiries. At present that Service earns our national respect, but it suffers from the handicap of a certain isolation which would be partly remedied by what I have suggested.
There are other alternatives to prison which I would gladly explore if there were more time, along with the ultimate issue of whether there is any place at all for prison as we know it in a just society. PROP, the organisation of ex-prisoners, insists that prison should be turned into
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a place of social education. That would involve a much more constructive role for the average prison officer, which indeed he himself aspires to, and which some of us here and elsewhere have been proposing for many years, going right back to the first debate we ever held here.
I give the Government credit for having no love of incarceration for its own sake, and for being entirely sincere in their desire to reduce the numbers in confinement. Yet these same numbers go up and up and the Government of the day, irrespective of Party, flap their hands in feeble remonstrance and seem unable to rouse themselves to action. I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Harris, will be able to tell us that the time for deliberation is over and that the Government are setting out to give effect to their own instincts, and their own promises, and to take at last the practical steps to achieve their own accepted purposes and ours.
5.58 p.m.
Lord AMULREE: My Lords, I am very pleased that the noble Earl has raised this point again, because there are one or two things I should like to add to what he has been saying. Over this weekend I have been reading a report by a lady called Charlotte Banks who interviewed 800 prisoners in the South-East of the country. She found that 90 men, over 11 per cent. of these people, who were in prison for petty offences, were homeless. When it came to people who were re-convicted, 66 per cent. were homeless as opposed to 26 per cent. of those who were not homeless. That rather makes one think that one way of reducing the prison population is to deal with the homeless situation, because we all know that accommodation, particularly for single people, is falling quickly, both in hostels and lodging houses.
A number of voluntary bodies are endeavouring to work in this connection and one, the Cyrenians, with which I am particularly involved, has 27 communities affiliated to it. It said in its annual report for 1976:
"We are concerned that no man or woman, young or old, should join the ranks of rough sleepers simply through lack of adequate housing."
In the same way, a large number of people who turn up in these houses have been for a short or long time in psychiatric

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hospitals, while quite a number of them have been in prison for offences which should not now be imprisonable. I am thinking particularly of drunkenness by itself, and we should like to see the repeal of the Vagrancy Acts and the Licensing Act 1872, which I think created the offence of simple drunkenness. I have no wish to defend those who are drunk and disorderly, but it seems shocking that a person should go to prison merely for being drunk. I am pleased to note that the Home Office has given help to a number of hostels—I think nearly 200 hostels have been helped by grants from the Home Office. That is a good way to reduce the number of people who may go to prison.
Baroness PHILLIPS: My Lords, being a magistrate sitting in Central London, I am very interested in what the noble Lord is saying about drunkenness. I cannot off hand remember the last time when somebody was actually sent to prison for being drunk. I therefore wonder from where the noble Lord gets his figures.
Lord AMULREE: My Lords, I do not know of anyone having been sent to prison for that offence, but I know someone who was arrested and kept in custody for 24 hours merely because he was drunk. There was no question of the person in question being drunk and disorderly; just drunk, and indeed he was drunk at the time. That shows that what I said can occur and I should like to see that possibility being removed, even though it may not occur often.
There is another way to reduce the prison population, though perhaps not greatly. One comes across mentally ill prisoners, people suffering from some sort of mild psychiatric trouble, who are not bad enough to be sent to Broad moor or the other place, the name of which escapes me, which is for dangerous psychiatric prisoners. However, great difficulty is found in finding hospitals prepared to take them, so they are sent to prison, perhaps not for long, when really they need some sort of mental treatment.
While I do not wish to appear unkind or unfair—and I do not think it is the fault of my medical or nursing colleagues —perhaps much is due to the fact that
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some of those who work in hospitals (I will not say which type) say that they do not want such a man to come into their hospital because he may be dangerous or cause trouble. That sort of thing is what one must accept if one decides to work in the Health Service; one is liable to a certain amount of danger, and that danger may come from a patient injuring one or by one getting an infectious disease from a patient. I should like to see that attitude changed so that it would be possible for a court to send a man or woman for medical treatment and not be obliged to send him or her to prison simply because the hospital authorities say they cannot admit the person.
Another, perhaps minor, point I wish to raise may not have much bearing on the prison population, although it might. So far as I know, there is at present no de-toxification centre in National Health Service hospitals for those who are drunk to get detoxified. Things have been promised about this and the matter has been discussed, including the question of the homeless and the drunk. I support the noble Earl, Lord Longford, in asking this Question in the hope that we can find ways of reducing the prison population. I will not repeat the various examples which the noble Earl gave—they are on the record—but he quoted a number of cases which I would support. I therefore hope that when the noble Lord, Lord Harris of Greenwich, replies, he will be able to give us some encouragement.
6.7 p.m.
Lord SPENS: My Lords, I ask for your Lordships' indulgence on this occasion when I am addressing the House for the first time. I hope to contribute occasionally in future to discussions which affect the rights and freedoms of individuals as contrasted with the rights demanded by organised groups of people. In that context, this is an apropriate subject because even prisoners have some rights left to them. There is a second reason why this subject is appropriate for me: I have been in prison and so I speak to your Lordships literally with inside information.
I do not think one realises how utterly precious and priceless the basic freedoms are—the freedoms of action, of movement and, possibly more especially, of communi-

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cation—until one has been deprived of them; and I believe that it is the right of prisoners to have those freedoms restored to them at the earliest possible moment. I start by drawing attention to two examples of what I would describe as administrative casualness in relation to the granting of parole. The first appears in the actual licence to prisoners released on parole and is illustrated on page 23 of the report of the Parole Board for 1975, the relevant piece of which I will quote:
"The Secretary of State hereby authorises the release on licence of…within 15 days of the date hereof."
What could be more casual than that? Why not say, "at the earliest possible moment "? It is a horrible example of the casual attitude which creeps into the administration of parole.
The second example covers a much larger proportion of prisoners. I am not saying that the first example covers anyone, but the second example affects a very large number of prisoners. It is a small but very important effect. It arises from the eligibility rules which are laid down in Section 60 of the Criminal Justice Act 1967 and, again, it is illustrated in the report of the Parole Board (page 16):
"The Secretary of State may, if recommended to do so by the Parole Board, release on licence a person serving a sentence of imprisonment other than imprisonment for life after he has served not less than one-third of his sentence or 12 months thereof, whichever expires later."
This relates to the 12 months limit rather than the one-third limit because 12 months is 52 weeks and one day. If it were exactly 52 weeks, it would not matter, but 52 weeks and one day means that, for every prisoner sentenced on a Friday who is eligible for parole under the 12 months' rule, the earliest date of eligibility will fall on a Saturday in the following year. Prisoners are not released from prison at a weekend, so every prisoner sentenced on a Friday has to spend an extra weekend in prison—that is, 52 weeks and three days instead of 52 weeks and one day. I faced my judge on a Friday and I spent that extra weekend in prison.
To turn to more serious matters, I do not understand why 100 per cent. of those who are in open prisons are not given parole at the first review. They are not, however, and it is chiefly those with
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longer sentences—those of four years and over—who do not get their recommendations at the first review. It appears almost as though there were an unwritten rule that prisoners with longer sentences should serve at least half their sentence. Your Lordships will see that the statistics of the Parole Board tend to confirm this. Page 27 of Appendix 3 contains Table 2, which sets out determinate sentences, sentence cases considered at first review by the Parole Board in 1975, showing the percentage of favourable recommendations according to the type of offence and length of sentence. The type of offence is not what is interesting here; rather, it is the length of sentence. Of those who receive sentences of under four years, over 66 per cent. are recommended for parole at the first review because it is the only review they have. However, as soon as one reaches the sentences of four years and over, successful recommendations on first review drop right down to 39·6 per cent. for four years and 20·7 per cent. for four years 11 months and thereafter. So it appears as though the Parole Board were acting according to some unwritten rule. I should like to suggest that what the noble Earl, Lord Longford, said is right and that the Board appear to be acting in a semi-judicial capacity.
My final point is the question of reporting for parole. The reports have to be put in by all sorts of officials. It is a very difficult task for them. They have to report positively on each case. It is arduous for the prison officials making the reports; it is sometimes alarming for the prisoners who are subject to those reports. I want to give my own example. I faced an interview with a very senior prison officer who was very friendly. He welcomed me and, when I had sat down, asked me how I was getting on in job X. It is true that I had applied for job X six or seven weeks before the interview. I did not get it until seven weeks after the interview, yet there was a senior official reporting on me—favourably, I hope and assume—to the Parole Board and he did not know what I was doing in the prison.
I should like again to support the noble Earl, Lord Longford, in his last proposition. I believe the time has come for the guidelines to the Parole Board to be reversed. I believe that the reports should

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only be negatived and that prisoners should be assumed to be suitable for parole at the first opportunity unless the negative reports against them have built up to the extent that the Parole Board have to recommend that parole should not be granted. My Lords, I hope that what I have said tonight may help one or two prisoners to get their parole a little more quickly than happens at the moment.
6.18 p.m.
Lord GARDINER: My Lords, it is a great pleasure to me to be the first to be in a position to congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Spens, on his maiden speech. We usually say of a maiden speech that it should not be too controversial and we always welcome any speaker with knowledge of his subject. I felt that the noble Lord's speech was the most moving and courageous I have heard. It will assist the House in the serious questions before it. The noble Lord spoke with experience and I hope that he will not feel that this maiden speech is, in the view of the House, sufficient. In this House, we cannot have too many of those who have personal knowledge of the field of penal reform and I hope very much that we shall hear the noble Lord speak again before long.
I suppose that I must start, as do most of us who approach this subject, with the same facts as were mentioned by the noble Earl, Lord Longford. May I say at once how indebted we all are to him for having put down this Question? therefore begin with the unacceptable number of 42,000 to which the noble Earl referred and with the fact that we have only 193 to go to reach that figure. I also return to the fact that something really must be done to reduce the appalling overcrowding in our prisons.
There are many categories to which one might refer. The cases which depress me most are those of young people of 14, 15 and 16 who are being given custodial treatment in ever greater numbers. The proportion of crimes which they commit in the community has increased, but it has not done so in more than the proportion in which crimes committed by adults have increased. So really they are only following their elders and betters in their example. There must be a more sensible way of dealing with 14-, 15- and 16-year-olds than
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sending them to custodial institutions. During almost all my time at the Bar I heard the tedious repetition of approved school, borstal, prison, almost as though the second and third were bound to follow the first. I think that society may yet have to pay a heavy price for the extent to which it is now herding young criminals together.
There are many other categories whom we ought seriously to consider whether they should be sent to prison at all. I cannot conceive what sense it makes to send drunks to prison—either for being drunk or for not paying a fine which they have not the money to pay; and very often there are cases where time to pay is refused—nor prostitutes, debtors, the passive inadequates and those of whom the noble Lord, Lord Amulree, has spoken, who obviously need psychiatric treatment but cannot get any hospital to take them. Naturally, I fully agree with what my noble friend Lord Longford said as to the need to develop the alternatives, particularly community service orders and day training centres, which have already thoroughly justified themselves, but whose expansion is so very slow.
There is also the question of improving parole. Here I hope that the Home Office itself will be grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Spens, for the practical points he raised; and of course I agree with everything which my noble friend Lord Longford said on that matter. There is also the matter of bail, which we have recently discussed at some length in this House. I do not know whether my noble friend Lord Harris of Greenwich will be able to tell us whether the Government felt able to move any further in the other place, particularly on the question of not refusing bail for an offence which is not an imprisonable offence.
Furthermore, there is a subject which I believe has not yet been referred to—decriminalisation—which a number of countries have considered. A Justice Committee is now sitting, dealing with the question of decriminalisation, and considering whether there are not matters which are criminal offences at the moment and, whether or not they are good conduct, really ought not to be criminal offences at all. The Committee has experienced a little delay because it did not know how many criminal offences there are. The Committee

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asked the Home Office, but it said that it could not find out. The Committee now has a grant in order to start making the first inquiry which apparently has ever been made into how many criminal offences there actually are.
Personally I should place more stress on that which has already been referred to both by my noble friend Lord Longford and the noble Lord, Lord Amulree—namely, the reduction of sentences—than on any of the other methods of decreasing the prison population. I would not myself at all approve of the Home Secretary being able to direct judges on what sentences they were to pass. We need our independent Judiciary. But it is a mistake, I think—subject to what the noble and learned Lord, Lord Morris of Borth-y-Gest, may think—to say that judges do not receive with appreciation helpful information. After all, considerable research work has been done by the Home Office Research Unit, the Cambridge Insitute and other bodies over the past 20 years as to what are the comparable effects of treating people in different ways. This type of material is not regularly given by the Home Secretary to the Judiciary for its information.
Why is it, for example, that such a far higher proportion of our population is in prison compared with the proportions in the populations of, say, Norway, Denmark, Holland and Belgium? Have our judges been made aware that when Holland, a few years ago, reduced sentences there by 50 per cent. it had no adverse effect of any kind on the crime rate? If every judge, when thinking of passing sentence, would reduce the sentence he had in mind by one-sixth it would have an enormous effect on the overcrowding in our prisons and on the financial position, because my noble friend Lord Longford has already pointed out that all the alternatives to imprisonment are so very much cheaper than imprisonment.
My Lords, I do not want to say anything further on any ground already touched upon, but I wish to say few words on a subject that is not usually dealt with in this kind of debate; namely, the prison rules. I am delighted to hear that my noble friend Lord Harris of Greenwich is now the Minister in charge of prisons.
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A year or two ago I attended a rather long conference on detention, which was the first one organised by the British Institute of Human Rights. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Kilbrandon, was the chairman of the conference and we had three committees: one on detention before trial, conviction or acquittal, of which Sir Kenneth Younger was chairman ; one on detention in emergency conditions, of which Sir Leslie Scarman was chairman ; and one on detention after sentence, of which I was chairman.
My committee's report and recommendations were accepted by the conference as a whole. The conference comprised mainly judges, lawyers, probation officers, justices of the peace and men with considerable knowledge of their subject, and it unanimously agreed to the following. I am not going to mention all the points, but, first, my committee felt that the Home Office should give some thoughtful study to the question how far our prison rules conform to the standard minimum rules of the United Nations. Secondly, we said that, naturally enough, we were appalled at the degree of overcrowding. Thirdly, we said
"We invite the Home Office to appoint a body to inquire into the present system of boards of visitors; we are of the opinion that their two functions of (1) inquiring into the administration of a prison and hearing complaints and (2) hearing and determining disciplinary proceedings ought to be performed by different bodies. We think that such inquiry should also cover the questions: whether disciplinary proceedings should not be an oath; whether prisoners and prison officers should not be entitled to be represented…"
and so forth.
The Home Office took no action on that. But the Howard League for Penal Reform and NAC Justice and NACRO appointed a committee, of which the noble Earl, Lord Jellicoe, was chairman. The committee made a long and careful report which bore out very much what we had said. It is quite incompatible for a body which is, so to speak, the prisoner's friend, hearing complaints on Monday, then on Tuesday determining disciplinary complaints in which its powers are considerable—because if it orders loss of remission of six months, that is equivalent to sending a man to prison for another nine months. That careful report was made more than a year ago and I should be grateful if my noble friend can tell me what progress the Home Office has made in giving consideration to the report.

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My committee also said :
"We hope that the Government will implement the recommendations of the Franks Committee on the Official Secrets Act and so diminish the extraordinary degree to which secrecy is maintained by the Home Office about everything which goes on in our prisons."
I shall not disguise from your Lordships that I am not a very strong supporter of what I think is called investigative journalism. At the same time, I think that in some respects we are not as open a society as we should be. What goes on in prisons is, or ought to be, clearly of interest to the community as a whole, just as one of the first things I think I did with the assistance of the present noble and learned Lord on the Woolsack was to issue a call for more criticism of the administration of justice. It is good for everybody to be able to criticise, and in a democracy they ought to be able to do so; but everything to do with prisons is so wrapped up in a veil of secrecy. Why on earth should the prison chaplain be subject to the Official Secrets Act? Why should any welfare officer who finds something very wrong in a prison be unable to mention it to a soul except the Home Office? This covers really everybody in our prisons.
Then we said:
"We also welcome the steps taken to free from censorship mail in women's prisons and open prisons, and believe that, save for very clearly defined exceptions, all mail in prisons should be free from reading and censorship except that incoming mail should be examined for contraband in the presence of the prisoner."
Of course, there is a topical example in this field in the case of the man who was refused permission to write to a solicitor about legal proceedings, in consequence of which we got into difficulties because of a breach of the European Convention. Some of us, I must say, are very disappointed that, while the Home Secretary has altered a prison rule to allow a letter to a solicitor for legal proceedings, this has been so narrowly framed as not to include a prisoner who wants to petition the Home Secretary, perhaps to ask him to refer his case back to the Court of Appeal—and, as your Lordships know, too often lately the truth in a case has come out not on the appeal but only when the Home Secretary has referred the case back to the Court of Appeal subsequently; and I explained the reasons for that in the debate last week. But here is an
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important occasion on which a man may quite properly, I should have thought, want the advice of his solicitor in the framing of his petition: but as I understand it the Home Secretary says, "No, a petition is not a legal proceeding, and therefore we cannot let prisoners write to a solicitor except to the very minimal extent provided by the decision at Strasbourg."
Then we said:
"We strongly urge the Government to look again at the difficulties placed in the way of discharged prisoners by their having unstamped insurance cards. We believe that the case for their cards being stamped, which has for so long been pressed on successive governments by all those concerned with the difficulties of discharged prisoners, is an unanswerable one."
Then we said:
"We consider that, except on security grounds, a prisoner should be entitled to buy, or order through the public library, any book or publication available to the general public ".
I really cannot see why not. I noticed from an Answer in the other place quite recently that at one prison a prisoner was entitled to receive the New Statesman, whereas at another prison he was forbidden to receive it. I do not put the point merely as an ex-chairman of the New Statesman, but it would not, I hope, be thought to be an extraordinarily subversive publication.
Then we said:
"We hope that steps will be taken to ensure that the rights of prisoners under the Legal Advice Act are made available to them without their having to petition the Home Secretary… We would welcome an extension of contacts between prisoners and the local population…In our view "—
and this is a thing, I am afraid, on which I have spoken in your Lordships' House before—
"the prison medical service should form part of the National Health Service and prisoners should have a right to independent medical advice ".
Then we said:
"We would emphasise in conclusion the extent to which proper standards of treatment are all affected by the degree of overcrowding in our prisons. A relatively small reduction in the average length of prison sentences is the only way in which the degree of overcrowding could speedily be reduced ".
As those were all unanimous recommendations of men and women of considerable experience in this field, if the Home Office happen to have read the report, and if my noble friend can tell me what conclusions they have come to, I should be grateful.
6.35 p.m.
Viscount AMORY: My Lords, I am sure we are all very grateful to the noble Earl, Lord Longford, for having introduced this subject to us, and for having enabled us to have this debate. We all enormously respect the amount of thought and study that the noble Earl has given to these problems of the penal system over many years. I should like to strongly support what the noble and learned Lord, Lord Gardiner, said in offering our congratulations to the noble Lord, Lord Spens, on his thoughtful and frank speech, which we found very interesting indeed.
These brief remarks come from one who, apart from membership for 18 months of an abortive Royal Commission, has no direct knowledge or experience of this subject. However, during those 18 months, as the noble Baroness, Lady Serota, will remember, we paid visits to a good many institutions, and certainly during the course of those visits I formed a very definite view that the whole philosophy and the policies underlying the use of prison sentences were in urgent need of rethinking, and that in the process of such rethinking the public must be brought, somehow or another, into full participation. Successive Home Secretaries have for decades declared themselves in favour of a wider substitution of sentences alternative to the custodial sentences in a great many cases, but in spite of that the prison population continues to rise. Obviously, a large number of offenders are in prison solely because the sentencing and the administrative authorities do not really know what else to do with them. It is significant that today, I think, there are 7,500 persons serving prison sentences of less than four weeks' duration. That really makes one think.
In passing, it is worth remembering that there is, I believe, a prison rule which is a reminder that people are not sent to prison to be punished there. The rise in crime, both in grave and in petty offences, over recent years must have aggravated the problems terribly, but the lack of progress in achieving an aim which has been for so long an agreed aim is deeply disappointing. Though my own view is clearly, from what I have already said, largely an uninformed one, I think I ought to declare my own conviction that
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the protection of the public ought to be the first and dominating aim of the penal system. Treatment and rehabilitation of the offender, if they conflict with that aim, must be secondary, though they should be pursued with energy and with a dedicated sense of purpose; but effective deterrents are essential.
Often, of course, these two aims of deterrence and treatment go together, and can be reconciled because the successful rehabilitation of an offender protects the public by eliminating the probability of a repetitive offence. The aim must be right, my Lords, that only those ought to be sent to prison who must be held in custody for the protection of the public or because the particular treatment they need cannot be obtained in any other way. If that aim could be achieved, the prison population would shrink dramatically, of course. Unfortunately, the authorities seem a very long way indeed away from finding themselves in a position where they can adopt such criteria entirely. I suppose the main reason is that in many cases it has proved very difficult indeed to devise alternatives to prison sentences which, in existing circumstances, are thought to provide equally effective deterrents. The notion of prison is understood and traditionally feared by most potential offenders, and it carries with it in a very marked way, of course, the disapprobation of one's fellow citizens.
Therefore, I suppose, arising from that, alternatives are apt to be regarded by the general public as soft options and, therefore, regarded with a certain degree of suspicion. Myself, I am not suggesting softer penalties for breaking the law. Indeed, I think a prison often presents inmates with too soft and undemanding challenges. I am not really suggesting lighter sentences—sometimes they seem to me to be not severe enough—but different sentences. I am suggesting that if we mean what has been so often said by successive Home Secretaries, that prison sentences should progressively become a means of last resort, then we must adopt far more readily a variety of alternatives which may involve certain limited risks to the public. Because of that, I think it is of crucial importance that the public should understand the reasoning behind the changes involved in the penal policies.

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I have no new ideas myself, far less any panaceas, to propose. All I suggest is that which I think the noble Earl, Lord Longford, too, was suggesting: that having obtained a wider understanding by the public of the need for changes, then every public authority involved in sentencing or in treatment must push ahead, making use of all the various forms of non-custodial treatment already known even at some risks which I think are of a minor order. This, particularly, for that numerically large body of relatively minor offenders known as social inadequates, who need some degree of individual support but very seldom, one imagines, full custodial treatment: more bail, more use of parole, still more use of fines—and one wonders sometimes whether larger fines might not be used and fines the payment of which would be spread over a much longer period—more use of open and semi-open prisons and different kinds of hostel; continued use of suspended sentences; further experiments with day treatment and community service in appropriate cases. I was glad to hear the noble Earl, Lord Longford, say that the record to date of community service had been encouraging. That, I think, is a very good thing indeed—the kind of case where, if we get the door open a little and find the going is good, we ought to push for harder.
These are not heroic remedies; but if a much higher proportion of offenders could be treated out of prison, living in their own homes, earning their own livings, fulfilling their family responsibilities and being kept in normal circulation, the gains would be enormous. Treatment and rehabilitation would become more effective, large sums of public money would be saved and those really needing to be kept in custody would not interfere with the treatment of others.
My Lords, above all, I should like to support what the noble and learned Lord, Lord Gardiner, said about the juveniles. Let us do everything we can to keep them out of institutions, if it is possible. I know how difficult that must be for magistrates and that often it is not possible for magistrates; but penal institutions, whatever new names they may be euphemistically given, really ought not to be places in which juveniles are put unless it is absolutely essential. They should
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be places, again, of last resort; because young people, adolescents, really do need desperately the natural challenges of home and jobs and normal life.
I think that while keeping before us the dominating importance of ensuring effective deterrents, all these various alternative forms that we have been talking about surely do offer the road to some further progress and the changes involved should be sought by trial and error and practical experimentation. Some of them will succeed; some of them will fail; but it seems to me that the price that has to be paid for following that route is so much less than the price that will have to be paid if we simply sit and accept the present position which is eminently unsatisfactory. My Lords, that is all that I have to say, and far more than I have any right to say, on this subject.
6.45 p.m.
Lord SOPER: My Lords, this is not the first occasion in this House when I have been grateful as have we all for the initiative of the noble Earl, Lord Longford. I want to thank him again for the opportunity he has given us of considering one of these vital matters in our common life. It may be necessary, and I think it is, for me again to state my own position. I believe that the prison system, in itself, is wrong and that, sooner or later, it must be abolished in order to give place for something more creative, less cowardly and much more effective. In the meantime, I am quite sure that sentences in one parameter of more than (shall we say?) six years are likely to irremedially and irreparably damage those who suffer those sentences. If your Lordships regard these opinions as far-fetched, may I say that I fetch them myself. As a prison chaplain for many years—which does not entitle me to say to the noble Lord, Lord Spens, that I understand fully (as I was fully moved by what he said) that deprivation of liberty that he suffered but I have a little more imaginative insight into what it must mean, having been within the walls of prisons for many hours and believing as I do that sooner or later a civilised community must supplant the whole system which is now called the prison system.
It is therefore with alacrity that I leap to the opportunity of saying a little about the alternatives and the prospects. If I may use one illustration as a catalyst, as a

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text, a text which is at one and the same time an opportunity for expounding a theme and a gate into a much larger field, I will presume to take the hostel for which I am responsible, a probation hostel called the Katherine Price Hughes Hostel which has been in existence for 25 years. Since the Criminal Justice Act 1972 and the new bail proposals, two startling and impressive changes have taken place in that hostel. It has always been difficult to remove from those who were committed to it for a compulsory period of 12 months the distinction in their own minds between that and prison; and it had this penal context. Since 1972, those who have been sent to this particular hostel, this probation hostel, have been sent first for observation that it may be considered after a very short time whether this is a suitable place for them to recover and to be rehabilitated and to become decent citizens again. The change has been electric. The whole atmosphere of a penal settlement has been replaced by a sense in many cases of a renewed opportunity. Now that we are also finding places within that hostel for bail people, we are discovering new opportunities within this field of improving on situations which have lagged into almost complete and absolute paralysis for so long.
The fact is that of those who come to a probation hostel under these new conditions, many are for the first instance people who need to be treated for detoxification, for conditions of alcoholism and we have quite quickly realised that the detoxification programme which, if I may remind the Minister, is included in the 1972 Criminal Justice Act has, in large measure, been ignored. I have dredged what evidence I can find. I believe that there are some stirrings in Nottingham and one or two in Kent; but, apart from that, I know of no detoxification centres which are officially established. But we have the possibility within the framework of St. Luke's and St. Mary's hostels for alcoholics and the West London Mission, already made, cheaper and, in some cases more efficient method of doing the three-tier system. Detoxification is the first stage; rehabilitation is the second stage and protected housing for the permanent convalescents—which is as much as can be hoped from an alcoholic—is the third stage.
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If those who come to the probation hostel are in need of detoxification, then here is an opportunity which has not yet been seized of equipping voluntary organisations such as ours with the means of proceeding to deal with this ever enlarging, increasing younger generation of people who are the victims of alcohol. Moreover, we discover within a few days at a hostel, such as the Katherine Price Hughes Hostel, those who are mentally in need of special treatment and those who are addicted to drugs. Those people have often been able to conceal that from those who have been responsible for their sentence to the place to which they have to go.
This raises the whole question of the variety of semi-custodial, but not prison, opportunities which could, if it was amplified, redress in very large measure that over-plus of people, particularly young people, for whom prison does not help but destroys hope. That, in large measure, is the prelude to a life of permissiveness and—I am most anxious not to sound parsonic—a life which is without hope and faith, neither of which is generated within prison walls.
Regarding bail, we have discovered that long-term bail people can be accommodated fairly satisfactorily within the framework of hostel accommodation. We are certain that short-term bail people require specific hostels in which they have to be cared for. There is a startling difference between the attitude of those who are unlikely to be called before the courts —and we can think of one young fellow who has been eight months in the hostel to which I am referring. These are far more easily accommodated and far more tranquil than those short-term bailees, so to speak, for whom I am certain there is paramount need for the setting up of specific bail hostels. I know of very few of those hostels. I think this is an imperative and urgent task.
I will not delay your Lordships to say what are the opportunities and needs of parole. As a fellow Methodist, perhaps it is my responsibility to say how much I hope the words by the noble Earl, Lord Longford, about Mr. Poulson will be heeded. Mr. Poulson is a fellow Methodist, which is a moral advantage not shared by everybody. But, at the same time, I am anxious to say a word about

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the conditions applicable to chaplains. I was a visiting chaplain to Pentonville and Holloway Prisons for 25 years. I was forced to practise a sanctified amnesia about prison rules in order to have any opportunity whatsoever to deal frankly and effectively with those under my care. I did not do them much good, anyhow. I am satisfied that part of the reason for the failure was the oppressive atmosphere which denied them, as I have already said, both faith and hope.
I should like to say one other thing about the need for the initiative of the voluntary hostels and voluntary measures by which non-custodial and non-prison application may be made to this category of hopeless and helpless, and often sinful, people. It is this. The voluntary associations of which I have any knowledge are desperately short of funds and we shall be out of the market very soon unless there are generous grants made to us and unless it is made possible for us to do the work which we can do and are ready to do, furnishing the material in the sense of people who are dedicated and vocationally inspired, setting up the peripheral organisation which is imperative if the initial stages of such non-custodial, semi-custodial treatment, need to be reinforced, as they do, by setting people as quickly as possible again within the framework of the real society from which prison excludes them. These are comments which come not out of a handbook but out of deepening experience, where we are committed and continue to work. I earnestly plead with your Lordships that what has been asked for today is a greater need in the actual wealth of the community than a thousand other projects. Without being unduly provocative at the end of what I have to say, I feel that if we were prepared to spend a lot less on the means of killing people and a lot more on the opportunities of redeeming them, we should have a much more peaceable and better society in which our children could live.
6.58 p.m.
The Lord Bishop of LEICESTER: My Lords, I should like to join with others in welcoming the frank and courageous speech of the noble Lord, Lord Spens. We often say that in your Lordships' House we can get an expert on every subject; and we have heard today of another dimension of experience
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which has been frankly and honestly put at our disposal during this debate, and for that we are very grateful. When one rises to speak in general support of the point of view advanced by the noble Earl, Lord Longford, as I propose to do, there is always a risk of being misunderstood and of the view gaining ground that one is thinking only of making things easier for prisoners and offenders and forgetting the harm that they may have done to others and the harm they may yet do in society.
I should like to begin by saying that I firmly believe in the educative force of law. I have the gravest doubts about the prison system as I shall make clear in a few moments. I believe the criminal law is, sadly, the only moral code known to a large number of our fellow countrymen, and I believe that there has to be a deterrent element in the criminal code. This element does not arise from the fact that a potential offender thinks out seriously the likely cost of a certain course of behaviour and decides against it, but all society becomes aware of the community's rejection of certain types of behaviour. This rejection needs to be analysed. It falls into two separate elements which are often confused in the public mind. There are some cases —we should all agree with this—where there is a real danger to the public in allowing certain people to continue to exercise their freedom. These cases will normally require, I am sorry to say, rather long sentences.
However, there are other cases where severe sentences are a means of expressing society's abhorrence of certain types of behaviour. This distinction should always be in our minds between the element of protection in the literal sense and the element of protection in the sense of a testimony to the kind of behaviour that society will tolerate. Here we have this enormous prison population of over 40,000—a record number—in our country's custody. This cannot be entirely laid at the door of the Government, because even between 1973 and 1974 the number of indictable crimes known to the police rose by 21 per cent. The prison population did not rise by anything like that amount; otherwise it would be very much larger than it is. But only Government can assist in preventing this

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increase in crime leading to further intolerable overcrowding in our prisons, and perhaps prevent the discovery of far more creative methods of dealing with offenders.
Undoubtedly the length of sentence is one of the important elements in this matter, and these lengths of sentences have been analysed by those who concern themselves with such things. The analysis is expressed in terms of an index. If one takes 1961 as the starting point and calls that index 100, in 1967 the index for length of sentence had dropped to 93; but by 1972 it had gone up again to 128. So it seems that for one reason or another sentences have continued to rise over recent years.
We know that many steps have been taken and others are contemplated, all of which are in the right direction. They have all been mentioned today and include such things as the use of suspended sentences. the increased use of parole and community service orders. In this connection I remember so well the debate we had on the Report by the noble Baroness, Lady Wootton of Abinger, on alternatives to prison; and we now see that beginning to bear fruit in these community service orders. There is also the intended provision to make bail more frequently and easily given. I realise the importance of that, having been so often in our Leicester prison and in another prison in my diocese, and having seen those remand prisoners in the front and wondered what their future might be and how much was at stake in their lives.
All these things will help, but I return to this distinction between the idea of danger and the idea of abhorrence, because I believe that few things would help more in the situation that we have now than if the public could learn to distinguish between those two things. The element of danger, if I may say so, is a clinical matter; one that has to be judged on the record of the offender by those who are capable of estimating his or her likely behaviour in the future. It is a cold and calculating matter and should be removed from the whole area of hysteria. The element of abhorrence is a matter of psychological reaction on the part of the public, and many long sentences are given, I believe, in order to
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satisfy this hunger on the part of the population in general for some very marked denunciation of some particular action.
It seems to me that we have to educate the public in this country and I would start, as did the noble Earl, and indeed almost every speaker in the debate, with the conviction that the prison system itself is just about the worst way of dealing with offenders, apart from a limited number of cases where literal containment is necessary for the protection of the public. We all know the vast expense of keeping people in prison. We begin by saying to the offender: "All right: you need no longer work for yourself, even if you worked for yourself before. We will keep you and we will keep your family if they need support. We realise this may very well break up your family pattern and we shall be keeping you in a place with other people of a similar record to yourself so that there is every likelihood of your contaminating them or being contaminated by them."
All this seems to add up to a serious indictment of the possibilities of prison being able to cure these people merely by improving the conditions. In my diocese is one of the most modern of prisons, with every facility for education, including engineering workshops, where young men can become apprenticed to engineering. The last time I was there I saw men studying for the Open University and taking advanced classes in various academic subjects. The whole place seemed to be a thriving centre of active and creative work. Yet a few days after I had left the whole place was literally in a flaming riot—and that had nothing to do with my visit, I may say. It shows that there is something in the whole prison situation which, however well one tries to organise it, still evokes no response in general, but only the worst kind of spirit of reaction and rebellion.
I am personally very keen on the alternatives to prison, such as community service orders and the kind of hostel of which the noble Lord, Lord Soper, spoke. We have some of those in the City and County of Leicester, and they are doing most splendid work. All these things will help to reduce the excessive overcrowding, and will make the prison system a little less oppressive. They will

1109
also give the prison officers a better opportunity to do their work. But I am sure that the only immediate step we can take—and here I am not looking quite so far ahead as the noble Lord, Lord Soper, to an idealised situation where we can do without prisons altogether, because one cannot honestly visualise that coming very soon in our society—is somehow to accustom the country to expressing its abhorrence by shorter sentences. If that could be done I believe we should have taken a step forward.
At the present time, if a man is sentenced to 30 years or some enormous time like that, everybody gasps and thinks either, "That is what he deserves ", or, "That is just an impossible sentence to carry out in any humane manner ". But if we could gradually accustom the nation to the idea that 10 years was a very severe sentence, apart from those cases where absolute protection of the public is necessary, we shall have taken a step; and it is an extremely difficult one to take because we have to contend with a very confused public opinion in which there is a certain amount of rightful moral indignation against what is wrong and also a great deal of fear and often a great deal of hysteria. I believe we should try to guide the nation into thinking of these things in a creative and constructive way, but to do that involves a very difficult problem and one that we do not expect the Government to he able to answer in a few sentences.
7.10 p.m.
Baroness FAITHFULL: My Lords, may I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Spens, and say that I am grateful to him for teaching me the intricacies of the parole system which I had found it difficult to understand, and I hope that may learn much from him. Also, may I join with the noble and learned Lord, Lord Gardiner, in asking the noble Lord, Lord Harris, what became of the recommendations made at the conference two years ago at which I also was present, and have since sought to find out what happened.
Last Friday, I visited a prison, well-known to me, built in 1850 to accomodate 161 prisoners. Last week, there was a low number for that prison of only 283, but in the previous four weeks it had
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varied between 291 and 299. In the majority of cells, built for one prisoner, there were three and last Friday it was very hot. It is therefore with conviction and feeling, on this and on other counts, that I support the noble Earl, Lord Longford, both in initiating this debate and in his recommendations about the prison population, not just to reduce the numbers but in the interests of a proportion of the prisoners, and without threat to the peace of the community.
One could not but respect the staff of the local prison which I visited. Their morale and quality of work was high. Unlike a number of other prisons in the country, the number of operational staff was up to establishment allowing a five-day, 40-hour week with every other weekend off duty. But there were no supporting staff, although they are allowed for on the establishment. That meant that when men were drawn, as they have been in the last four weeks, for special duties in certain cases, other men had to double-up. In another prison that I visited not so very long ago, a prisoner was sent to hospital suffering from haemophilia. He was a danger to himself and to the community. He was suffering severely and needed three officers in 24 hours, in eight-hour shifts, to sit with him.
I have not checked my facts. May therefore ask the noble Lord, Lord Harris, whether reports are accurate that a prison in Birmingham is 16 officers short, which has, in some measure, meant that 400 men are not doing their usual work, thus diminishing the quality of life of the prisoners, causing them to associate less with each other and to do less work, which is tending over a period of time to render at least some of them more difficult to rehabilitate?
Clearly, at this time of debased currency there is a need for a cut-back in public expenditure. On the other hand, the alarming rise in the prison population cannot go on without more resources within the prisons, or without seeking alternatives to supplement the Prison Service. As an alternative for some prisoners, may I make a plea that there should be a planned alternative programme in the community, covering the country from North to South and from East to West, and that these resources should be

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costed out against the present cost of the Prison Service, and against what must inevitably become increased expenditure if the present upward trend continues. I submit that if such alternative resources within the community are to be effective, they should cover the country as a whole and not develop in pockets of the country where there is particular initiative and good will.
Walking along a street in Oxford, I saw the head of our Simon Community following a man who, quite clearly, was either a drug addict or had taken too much drink. He asked me whether I would watch the man while he fetched his car, so the man and I sat together on the pavement and by way of conversation I asked him where he had come from. He said that he had come from a Midlands town, so I asked him what he was doing in Oxford. He replied, "I was told by the people in the Midlands town that there was nothing for me there, and I had better make my way here because here I would find "—and I am sure the noble Lord, Lord Amulree, will be pleased to hear this—"a Simon Community ". In the areas where there has been magnificent voluntary effort and hostels have been set up, there has unfortunately been a spin-off if the surrounding areas do not have hostels. People say, "We do not want to set up a hostel, because if we do it will attract people to this area."It means that those of us who are trying to set up hostels have a double task, because we have to persuade the community to accept not only the people in their own area, but those from surrounding areas, and then we are faced with the city council or the county council turning down a planning application. Therefore, my plea is that, here and now, there should be an overall plan in this country for dealing with and providing alternatives.
I suppose it is true to say that some of us look back with regret to the passing of the casual wards which made provision —albeit austere provision—throughout the country for those of no fixed abode. We do not really regret their passing as they were then, although many men received a sense of security and solace from them, including the Supertramp; I have just read W. H. Davis's autobiography again. But because there was a network
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throughout the country and the problem was equally spread, and help was readily available to those in need, there was not, as the right reverend Prelate has said, quite the fear among the community that there is today. To fill this gap, a valiant attempt has been made in many areas to provide hostel accommodation. As your Lordships know, this is being done by some principal probation officers and a number of outstanding voluntary organisations, with grants from the Home Office and through housing associations. But I think I am right in saying that the contributions never amount to more than 50 per cent. of the need, and the rest of the money has to be raised voluntarily. This may not altogether be a bad thing, but it puts a tremendous strain on those having to do the work.
With diffidence, I was going to enumerate the alternatives to prison, but that has been so ably done by other noble Lords that I will not do more than make one or two comments. First, on the homeless, many men attempt to get to prison because they need shelter and accommodation. I have a great friend—by name, Jim—who used to come a week before Christmas and wish me a happy Christmas. When I said, "This is a little early ", he replied, "I have to do a job ", and it was very carefully thought out that it was bad enough to get him into prison for Christmas but not too bad to keep him there too long. He always succeeded. This cannot be right.
If I may make one comment on the community service orders, the noble Earl, Lord Longford, has said that 5,000 have been made. But may I submit that community service orders are not being used throughout the country as yet. Also I would put in a plea for many more detoxification centres for alcoholics. There are those in prisons—I think possibly in the rag shops—who are there because they possess inadequate personalities and can never sustain life in the community. May I ask the noble Lord, Lord Harris of Greenwich, what became of a report made in 1966 called, I think Quo Vadis, and written by Anglican and Roman Catholic priests then working at Pentonville Prison? The report recommended the setting up of communities where the inadequate could live and where there were sheltered workshops. I have not seen such centres in Germany, but I am informed that they are self-supporting.

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I pass over the question of the mentally ill and handicapped as it has already been covered and is dealt with in the Butler Report. I have not covered children and young persons as this subject also has been debated in your Lordships' House. Suffice it to say that if overall planning provision had been made prior to the passing of the Children and Young Persons Act 1969, possibly some children would not have had to be placed in prison.
Perhaps of greater importance is the need to look at the underlying reasons for the prison population. I link this to the plea of the most reverend Primate for the establishment of sound family life, and would recommend that we in this country should practically and positively pursue policies for the support of families and children. For two years it was my privilege to attend a prison every time there was a discharge of prisoners. I was always asked by the men, how and what: "How are we going to treat our children? "and "What are we going to say to them? "Every time they would come back to the position that, had they received understanding in early life, possibly some of them at least might not be there. Would we, I wonder, have such a rising prison population if we as a society provided a service of quality to the children in our schools, in the orbit of the family and in the community embodying the ancient precept of consideration for one's neighbour and all that that implies? Wordsworth was perhaps right when he said:
"The child is father to the man."
7.22 p.m.
Viscount COLVILLE of CULROSS: My Lords, I have some sympathy with the noble Lord, Lord Harris of Greenwich, in having to answer this debate at a time of economic stringency. I should think that among those of your Lordships who are present today we could probably amass a great deal of unanimity on the projects that we should like to see go forward. I think also that we would be a little alarmed at the amount it would cost to carry them into effect.
On the question of public expenditure, there is, unfortunately, a paradox which was referred to, among others, by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Gardiner. We complain, and rightly complain, about
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the present overcrowding in prisons. It is no joke for prisoners and certainly it is no joke for the staff. My noble friend Lady Faithful! referred to this point which manifests itself, of course, in physical overcrowding. In times of economic stringency, the position is worse still because in the evenings there is loss of association. Evening classes have to be cut out, not because there is anything wrong with the "telly "or because the person who takes the evening class has gone sick; it is because staff overtime has to be reduced in order to produce economies. That in its turn reduces the standard of living of the prison officers. They, too, suffer from the economic crisis of the country and so do their families.
It is no use blaming the Prison Service, whatever may be the millennial ambitions of the noble Lord, Lord Soper. At present they have to receive and hold for so long as is required the remanded and convicted people whom they are sent, and they have no option but to do their duty in that respect. It is right that one should remember that those are the conditions against the background of which this debate is taking place. However, I must refrain from going on about the Prison Service because the question is about alternatives.
Of course, economic stringency also means that we cannot build all the different kinds of new hostels that we should like; we cannot have the detoxification centres; and we cannot do all the things that we should like to do for those different kinds of inadequate persons who at the moment find themselves in prison—a point which was referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Amulree, the noble and learned Lord and others. These persons are a great problem for the Prison Service. I remember that there were a number of officers at Pentonville—perhaps the noble Lord, Lord Soper, knows them, too—who specialised in trying to do something for those who were in prison for a very short sentence indeed. They found that their work was cut out in trying to deal with them, but at least they tried—and I should think that they try today.
The paradox is that although I believe that we should be able to devise and, indeed, are in the process of devising a number of alternatives which are going to

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work, they have to be made to prove themselves in public opinion before they can take the place of massive numbers of sentences. While this is going on, the two systems will have to run in parallel; and while you have not the alternatives, or cannot afford the alternatives, equally you cannot cut down on the number of prison establishments and reduce your expenditure in that way.
I do not know whether the noble Lord has thought about the question of transfer of resources but it has always seemed to me that in a transitional stage it is one of the most difficult objectives to achieve and get the public to accept. In those circumstances, perhaps the Government might pay particular attention to what has been said by a number of noble Lords about the role that can be played by volunteers in the fields we should like to see go further forward, fields such as the noble Lord, Lord Soper, mentioned. I believe that money spent now on that aspect might be a very good investment indeed. It might not only achieve a great deal, but would prove to the public that a great deal can be achieved. And that is half the problem.
I do not wish to make a list of all the alternatives of which we know, any more than did my noble friend Lady Faithful!, but I should like to know how some of the provisions that we introduced in the 1972 Act—this is no Party point—are working out. I know that community service is now almost universal among the probation areas, although I expect it is slightly patchy in some of them. However, can the noble Lord tell us as a matter (it will have to be) of judgment whether the people who have agreed to and been sentenced by the courts to community service orders really are the kind of people who otherwise would have gone to prison? That was the point of it, and I think that it would be a matter of very great interest to those of us who are here this evening to know whether that is so. Again, can the noble Lord say anything about the day training centres. It may be that there are not very many of them but they were designed for a specific kind of person—indeed, sometimes the inadequate. Can the noble Lord throw any light on whether those persons have been saved from going to prison?—because again that is what we want to know.
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Everything that has been said about hostels must, of course, be right. The noble Lord, Lord Soper, spoke about them from first-hand experience and so, too, did my noble friend Lady Faithful. Those are the kind of provisions which I should think, and would expect the noble Lord to be able to confirm, keep people out of prison—like the bail hostels. These are the matters upon which I am sure that we should concentrate all our enthusiasm. After all, I believe that 15 per cent. of the prison population is there on remand, and those are the people for whom the bail hostels would really do something; and they would cut down the local population in the local prisons, where I should think a great deal of the overcrowding takes place.
My Lords, I want to say a word or so about parole. The noble Earl, Lord Longford, particularly stressed this. I, too, should like to welcome the signal maiden speech of the noble Lord, Lord Spells. I agree with him that the aim should be to restore at the earliest possible moment all those freedoms which he mentioned. The difficulty of judging what is the earliest possible moment is the one that vexes those who have to run the system. I would say four things about this. First, having had a hand in this myself for a period of time, I can genuinely tell the noble Lord that there are no unwritten rules, or, if there are, I never saw a trace of them. The problem about these cases is that each one is different. It is quite impossible, I should have thought, even if you wished to, to invent something in the way of an unwritten rule, because it would not be applicable over anything like a range of people to which a rule would apply. I do not think that the noble Lord need fear that such a thing goes on.
Secondly, if you look at the reports of the Parole Board over the years and, indeed, if you look at the genesis of the whole idea, I am sure it was wise to start cautiously. The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leicester, if I may say so, was very much on target when he was speaking about what I think I can paraphrase as a sense of outrage which sometimes underlies public reaction to crime, and is sometimes reflected in the length of sentences. The parole system was a brave step forward. The right reverend

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Prelate is perfectly right in saying that these things cannot succeed unless they go hand in hand with public education. The Parole Board has taken particular care to attempt to do this. It started cautiously, and started cautiously on purpose.
My Lords, the third thing follows straight from that: that they are now proceeding equally carefully, but equally steadily, with the encouragement of the right honourable gentleman the Home Secretary, to take what might previously have been thought of as more risks. The important thing that seems to me to emerge from the 1975 Parole Board report is that the failure rate has remained exactly the same. It is 7·7 per cent. now, and has been 7·7 per cent., despite the progressive risk-taking for a considerable period of time; in other words, parolees are responding to the trust put in them, and the Parole Board is evidently picking the right people. That, I think, is what will underpin confidence in this kind of attitude, and will prevent the sense of outrage if people are seen to be released even fairly early in their sentence, even if it was a long sentence at that.
Fourth, I would say that I am very critical of the noble Earl, Lord Longford. I have read with great care the guidelines published as the fourth appendix to the Parole Board's report. If I may respectfully suggest to the noble Earl, it is too facile to say that one can take two or three sentences from the chairman and suppose that lay people in training prisons all over the country can interpret those simple precepts, so that they can accurately assess an enormous range of different personalities, against different backgrounds of different crimes, and of different prospects, without the fairly detailed guidance that they have now been given. I am delighted to see it. It is the distillation of a great deal of wisdom and experience, and I am sorry that the noble Earl saw fit to disparage it. It will be of great guidance to all those who are taking a greater and greater responsibility in the parole world by reporting directly to the Home Secretary. I hope no one will think the less of that set of guidelines because of what the noble Earl has said.
My Lords, the last subject upon which I should like to touch is the level of sentences. I am not sure that judges and magistrates
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should be put under pressure to reduce sentences below what they think is condign to the offence. After all, they have been given the maxima by us in Parliament, and against that yardstick they tend to judge what it is in the public interest and what it is, in the case of that particular crime, suitable to impose. In fact, maximum sentences are rarely used, but they are there as the indicea of what Parliament thought about the seriousness of the offence—and, of course, again the right reverend Prelate's point about deterrence, also mentioned by the noble Viscount, Lord Amory, comes into this. I wonder whether in this we in Parliament ought not to lead the way. It is a pity that we tend to look at the sentence for each individual offence only in the context of the enactment in which it occurs. We seldom have an opportunity to look at the whole range, to make proper comparisons, to see whether as a whole the maxima are set too high, or too low, or about right.
Therefore, if we are to have an opportunity, whether by way of legislation or debate, it would be useful for us actually to take this bull by the horns, because until we do, I do not believe we can expect a great change in the level of sentences that the courts put forward, because they follow what we do by way of a lead. Therefore, I should think that the responsibility lies with us.
Finally, my Lords, what I would say on the question of sentences could take in the question of decriminalisation mentioned by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Gardiner. I should like very carefully to look at instances where it is suggested that a criminal offence is no longer apposite. So long as there are criminal offences, and sentences and convictions for them, the important thing thereafter is what has been central to this debate: that is, the incidence, for individuals at the right time, of the parole system; and I must say that I hope that those who have to operate this system will get some encouragement from the debate we have had this afternoon.
7.38 p.m.
Lord HARRIS of GREENWICH: My Lords, may I begin by welcoming the speech made by the noble Lord, Lord Spens. It was an interesting maiden

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speech which I think will repay careful study, and given my own responsibility with the Home Office, I will carefully consider what he said about the practical implementation of parole policy. Secondly, I welcome the fact that on this occasion I am following the noble Viscount, Lord Colville of Culross, who has made a characteristically thoughtful speech. I follow him with particular interest because we have both now had a similar Ministerial experience. He has had responsibility for prison matters in the Home Office when he was Minister of State, and I now assume that particular responsibility.
I welcome another point made by the noble Viscount; that is, that he pointed out the public expenditure implications of the problem we are discussing today. I think the one thing that nearly everyone had said before the noble Viscount rose to speak, was that, of course, they were not suggesting any increase in public expenditure. But I regret to say that, in quite a number of those speeches, and the speech of the noble Baroness, Lady Faithful, gave a good example, ideas were put forward that the implementation of proposals of this kind frankly carry with them public expenditure implications. If one says at a time like this that it is necessary to control public expenditure because of the grievously difficult economic situation, I am afraid it is exceedingly difficult to keep on arguing the case for special cases.
Baroness FAITHFULL: My Lords, if I may intervene at this stage, I carefully said that no alternatives should be embarked upon until costed out, and if the whole scheme could be costed out against the prison expenditure, then we should go forward.
Lord HARRIS of GREENWICH: My Lords, I will come in a moment to the point the noble Baroness made about hostels. It is a particularly interesting matter to which I have recently been devoting a certain amount of attention. But hostels are expensive, and at a time of rising crime it is exceedingly difficult to limit the size of the prison population. That is why my noble friend Lord Longford has put down this particular Question today. We are having this debate today against the background of the rapid rise
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which has taken place in the level of crime, and of the very unfortunate results of the heavy additional burden which this puts on the entire criminal justice system in this country.
Certainly I welcome the fact that my noble friend has put down this Question today. I do not, he will not be altogether astonished to learn, quite follow him in all his views on this matter. He said that the Government's record on this matter was a sad one. He was kind enough to add that there was some excuse, referring to the rising rate of crime, but he said this excuse was insufficient. I will do my best to deal with that particular argument head-on.
On 15th June—and that is the last date for which figures are available—the prison population was 41,622. I think we will all agree this is far too high. It is indeed, as my noble friend pointed out, very close to the figure of 42,000 which my right honourable friend the Home Secretary referred to only a year or so ago as being an unacceptable level. It is only fair to say that in the year 1975–76 there were an additional 1,000 places added to the prison system, and we hope to achieve something of this scale in the current financial year. That by no means disposes of the entire argument; of course it does not.
In the few weeks that I have been responsible for prisons in the Home Office I have visited a number of prison establishments, as I know the noble Viscount did most assiduously when he was Minister of State in the previous Conservative Government. Certainly when one sees the conditions in which three men live in a cell, and sometimes indeed two men live in a cell, one sees they are conditions which are, frankly, an affront to any civilised society. I in no way underestimate the seriousness of overcrowding in our prison system; it is intolerably high. But having said that, it is necessary to consider how in fact the prison population arises in the first instance. After all, the prison population is a product of two factors; the number of offenders who appear before the courts, and the proportion of that number who are sent to prison, either on remand awaiting trail or sentence, or because they have been convicted and sentenced by the court.

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We have to accept one blunt truth. That is the point I made a few moments ago: that over recent years the number of indictable crimes known to the police has been rising steadily. That is a very unfortunate fact of life. It is not something that can be willed away by a Government or a Home Secretary. There were, for example, 1·3 million indictable crimes known in 1966, compared with 2·1 million last year. That is a rise—the right reverend Prelate touched on this point—of 62 per cent. in only nine years. An increase in crime of such proportions, even if detection rates remain much the same, can only lead to an increase in pressures on all parts of the penal and criminal justice system, and that obviously includes prisons.
But while in consequence the number of prisoners has increased, it is important to underline the fact that there has been a substantial decrease in the proportion of offenders who go to prison, either on remand or following sentence. The proportion of persons sentenced to immediate imprisonment for indictable offences in the higher courts declined from 42 per cent. in 1964 to 30 per cent. in 1974. In the magistrates' courts in the same period it declined from about 8 per cent. to about 3 per cent. I think it is necessary to bear those particular statistics in mind, because they at least demonstrate how much more serious the problem would have been if the sentencing practices of the courts had not changed as dramatically as they have done.
It is a sad but inevitable fact that whatever steps we take there will continue to be a need for imprisonment. This is where, with great respect, I differ from my noble friend Lord Soper. There will continue to be a need for imprisonment to protect us from men, and increasingly, I regret to say, from a number of women—people of violence, and from those who have shown by their record that they are a menace to society and will not respond to more humane or constructive methods of treatment. The question is what steps are being taken to avoid the imprisonment of those who do not fit this particular description.
I turn first, if I may, to bail. The Government are continuing to take urgent measures to reduce the remand population to the minimum compatible with the
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interests of justice. My noble and learned friend Lord Gardiner referred to the Bail Bill, which has passed through this House and is presently being considered in another place. The Bill makes a number of significant changes in the bail system. Most important, it creates a presumption in favour of the grant of bail and requires a court to give its reasons when refusing bail. The effect of this is that a court will have to consider the question of bail each time a defendant appears before it and is to be remanded, and will have to grant bail unless the defendant is considered likely to abscond, commit offences on bail or otherwise obstruct justice.
There are other important recommendations of the Working Party on Bail Procedures in Magistrates' Courts. These do not require legislation and they were commended to the courts in a circular issued last October. I am glad to say that preliminary indications are that, following the issue of this circular, there has been a real reduction in the remand population. One of the most important elements in these proposals was the point about bail verification schemes. We have asked probation and after-care committees to consider, in consultation with the courts, how far it would be possible for them to participate, within existing resources—and I must emphasise that point—in any such schemes which might be introduced in their areas. Some probation areas are already participating or considering taking part in the schemes. There is, as is well known, the bail verification project in Inner London, which was introduced by the Inner London Probation Service with the co-operation of the Vera Institute of Criminal Justice in New York, and there has been a recent report on this by the Inner London Probation Service which I am sure will be interesting to those Members of the House who follow these matters. This scheme was begun at Camberwell Green magistrates' court and has now been extended to cover two other courts in London. And there have been some significant developments outside London.
To take one example, I was in Cleveland a relatively short time ago, and I was talking to the chief probation officer there who was telling me what they were proposing to do. In Cleveland a scheme has been introduced which has

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been supported by the Manpower Services Commission's job creation programme. Although it was only introduced earlier this year, it has now been extended to cover the two major centres of population in Cleveland. Of course, these are only a number of examples of what can be done. I must emphasise this to the House. These schemes are being introduced, these policies are being implemented, despite the existing grave economic situation. They do point the way. They do indicate that by moving in this particular direction, bail verification schemes, which certainly I regard as highly important, one can, by giving more information to a court when a man appears before that court, often on the first occasion, ensure that he is remanded on bail rather than remanded in custody and then pushed into one of our already grievously overcrowded prisons.
Finally, on the subject of bail, we are increasing the number of places in bail hostels so that courts in the areas where hostels are provided need no longer refuse bail because the alleged offender has no fixed address. So far—I think my noble friend Lord Soper was a little pessimistic about this—six of these hostels have been provided, and another two will be brought into use this year, and another 20 hostels of this character are now in the pipeline. Again, of course there is a greater need than this for bail hostels. There is a greater need for many other types of hostels, but again I come back to this: despite the current extremely difficult economic situation, we are still succeeding in making some progress in this direction.
The noble Baroness, Lady Faithfull, referred to the problem of hostels, and I very much shared her view about the problem which is created when local inhabitants discover that they are about to have a hostel on their doorstep. I suspect that the noble Viscount had the pleasure, as I have, of receiving a number of deputations on this subject. There is no doubt that when people discover that they are about to have a hostel next door to them, or on the other side of the road, they sometimes react in a very hostile way. But, with respect to the noble Baroness, I do not believe we can get over this problem by some form of overall national plan. I do not take the view that the
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"gentleman in Whitehall always does know best ". I never have taken that view. I think this is a matter for local decision. Of course the central Government have to provide the resources. That is perfectly true. But this is really a matter for local decision, and if there is a dispute it will have to take place in the local planning committee—perhaps in the local council chamber—and ultimately there may be a planning appeal. I think that that is the way in which we should proceed.
My noble friend Lord Soper referred to the question of the financial problems of voluntary hostels, and I take his point. They play a most important role, and I would not in any way want to minimise that. But, as my noble friend will be aware, the Government have fairly recently introduced a new system of financing these hostels, and I know that many in the hostel movement are to some extent satisfied; I had better not use the term "satisfied ", but some of their anxieties have at least been minimised, or reduced, as a result of the introduction of that new scheme.
Next, if I may, I will turn to the measures available to the courts when an offender has been convicted. There is a long and valued tradition in this country that the decisions of the courts and the sentences which they impose should not be subject to interference by the Executive. Our role as a Government, therefore, is to prescribe by legislation the maximum penalties for particular offences. It is for the courts to decide, in the light of all the circumstances of a particular case, what the sentence should be within the maxima provided by the law. The Government consider that the time has come to have a look at these maxima. The Advisory Council on the Penal System is at present undertaking a review of the general structure and level of maximum sentences of imprisonment available to the courts.

May I at this moment say I am delighted, as I am sure the whole House will be, to have heard the news today that my noble friend Lady Serota is taking on the very formidable job as the new chairman of the Advisory Council. It is certainly, as I am sure my noble friend will be the first to agree, too early to say what may result from its deliberations, but it has been asked to consider whether the present

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maxima represent a valid guide to sentencing practice, and whether further provision needs to be made regarding the suspension of periods of imprisonment.
My noble and learned friend Lord Gardiner, and my noble friend Lord Longford, asked about the need for some closer communication between the Government and Judiciary. As I think will be known, my right honourable friend the Home Secretary and my noble and learned friend the Lord Chancellor, together with the Lord Chief Justice, have jointly set up a Working Party under the chairmanship of Lord Justice Bridge to consider the training of the Judiciary and the communication of information to the Judiciary. I think that that is at least some move in this particular direction. We must, of course, ensure that the range of options available to the courts is such that they are not prevented, for one reason or another, from imposing a non-custodial sentence where that course of action would be most appropriate. To this end, the Government have been assessing and developing, where appropriate, a number of newer non-custodial penalties which were introduced, as the noble Viscount rightly said, in the 1972 Criminal Justice Act.
A quite wide use is already being made by the courts of their powers to defer passing sentence up to six months, to order compensation or the forfeiture of goods, and, in appropriate cases, to make a criminal bankruptcy order. But the main thrust and this has been pointed out by a number of speakers in today's debate—has been the establishment of community service schemes. I think that this is a good example of how we should move in this direction. The power to create community service orders was created by the 1972 Criminal Justice Act by the noble Viscount and his friends, who introduced six experimental schemes in six probation and after-care areas in this country. The present Government, on coming into Office and looking at the first examples of research from the Home Office Research Unit, decided to extend this to the remainder of the country as soon as resources would permit. Again I make that clear qualification. Nevertheless, community service has now been set up in at least part of 52 out of the 56 probation and after-care areas in England
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and Wales. They will be further extended as from 1st August of this year. In the 12 months since 1st April 1975, when these arrangements began to be extended, the Probation Service have estimated that between 4,900 and 5,000 offenders became the recipients of community service orders.
The noble Viscount asked what is the central question, "Well, how many of these people would have gone to prison if it had not been for community service orders? "As he would be the first to accept, it is exceedingly difficult to look into the minds of a Crown Court judge, or a bench of magistrates, whatever it might be; but in talking to people in the Probation Service who deal with these matters on a day-to-day basis, and chief probation officers and others, I think it would be right to say that they would estimate that somewhere between—and this is obviously very much a "guestimate "—at the lowest possible level 65 per cent. and arguably as high as 80 per cent. of these people would otherwise have gone to prison. Again this is another illustration of the extent to which we have already moved. I think my noble friend wishes to intervene.
The Earl of LONGFORD: My Lords, I did not wish to be overheard. I am sorry. The noble Lord gave figures very different from those which have been supplied to me, not from the Government, but from those very much concerned with the administration of these orders. I gave a figure of a half, but really fear that it is less than a half. I should like to think that it was very high in this respect.
Lord HARRIS of GREENWICH: My Lords, I would say to my noble friend—and I would defer to him in many matters —that I am responsible for probation and after-care questions in the Home Office. I have spent a great deal of my time travelling around the country and discussing this with the representatives of the Service. The estimates that I have given are the figures I was given by people with day-to-day responsibility for dealing with this matter. I have indicated that it was clearly a "guestimate". There is of course no absolute, clear figure which we can immediately adopt and say that it is a certain percentage. It is clearly a matter of judgment; but the figures which

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I have given arc the figures which I have been given by those with day-to-day dealings in these matters. I think, with great respect to my noble friend, they are at least as likely to be accurate as any figures he may have.
We are also at present assessing the results of the four experimental day training centres, and I know that my noble friend visited one of them quite recently. These, as he said, were opened to receive certain types of persistent criminals who can be sent there as a condition of a probation order. The probationers attending these centres include many who would almost certainly otherwise have been sent to prison. If my noble friend says that only a limited number of people go to these centres, of course he is absolutely right; there are only four of them, and clearly the numbers we are talking about are limited indeed. But I must point out to the House that they are extremely expensive to run; they are manpower intensive so far as trained probation officers are concerned and we cannot shrug this aside. We are dealing with this problem at a time of great national economic difficulty and we cannot just will the resources out of the skies.
The noble Lord, Lord Amulree, my noble and learned friend Lord Gardiner and my noble friend Lord Soper, referred to the question of detoxification centres. The first experimental centre which was set up by the Criminal Justice Act 1972, under Section 34, was opened in May of this year; the second is expected to open in Manchester at the end of this year, and there are one or two other proposals in the pipeline. I am sorry to say once again—and noble Lords will, I hope, acquit me of any determination to bore them—that this programme is clearly subject to the same restraints as are all other public expenditure programmes.
Lord SOPER: My Lords, Circular 21/73 puts the responsibility for detoxification centres on local authorities. Is that so, and, if so, have they done anything about it?
Lord HARRIS of GREENWICH: My Lords, I have indicated that this is not just primarily but exclusively a matter for the DHSS rather than the Home Office. I have
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indicated that two exist, but again I must come back to the point that there are very limited resources and there is no point in demanding an immediate extension of extremely expensive projects of this kind without realising that if one must add expenditure in one particular area, one must cut it elsewhere.
These are just some of the ways in which the Government are attempting to extend the non-custodial disposals available to the courts. But if the prison population is to be significantly reduced, the courts will need to choose non-custodial sentences for a large number of offenders who at the moment receive custodial sentences. The problems created by the treatment of such offenders within the community could be considerable. In these circumstances, questions must inevitably—and quite properly— arise as regards the protection of the public itself and the demands which might be made on community resources generally. It is essential, therefore, if the courts are to make the fullest possible use of the non-custodial measures available to them, that they—and indeed the community at large—should have complete confidence in the ability of the people concerned with the administration of these measures to cope with a more difficult and more demanding range of offenders.
This has particular lessons for the Probation Service. It is the Probation Service that would have to undertake the major burden of coping with any increased flow of work over the whole range of treatment in the community. It is very understandable that the Probation Service should have a particular regard to the interests of an offender. One of its main functions, within the administration of justice as a whole, is to provide objective advice to the courts on the likely response of an individual to particular measures. But this concern with the needs of their clients must not obscure the obligations which the Probation Service has to the court and to the community as a whole. It is of paramount importance, if we are to sustain a humane and caring criminal justice system, that we should have a Probation Service which not only operates within the main stream of professional social work, but also commands the confidence of the courts and of the public. I do not think that the Probation Service as a whole sees any real antithesis between

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a controlling and a caring approach. But it is essential that the Probation Service generally should be seen to be aware of its obligations to society as a whole and to be ready to exercise, in the interests of offender and public alike and in the context of their rehabilitative function, a necessary degree of supervisory control over the offenders with whom it works.
I return to the question of alternatives to imprisonment. These, I am sure, we should all agree, must have the confidence of the Judiciary and the public. There is, it is fair to say, an additional constraint, and that is, again, this question of cost. Not all alternatives to imprisonment are cheap. Indeed, very few are. Many are costly, not only in terms of money but in terms of resources such as trained manpower. Moreover, the provision of an alternative facility does not necessarily lead to an equivalent saving in prison expenditure. I fear that in these difficult times for this country, proposals for more spending on the care and treatment of offenders must satisfy the same harsh tests as other calls on public expenditure. I come to the question of parole which, quite rightly, has occupied a major part in this debate.
The Earl of LONGFORD: My Lords, I did not give the Minister advance notice of a rather important proposal which I placed before the House. Perhaps my noble friend will at least undertake to look into it. I refer to the idea of combining prison officers and probation officers for supervision. Perhaps my noble friend does not have the answer.
Lord HARRIS of GREENWICH: I have, my Lords, and I hope that I have time to answer my noble friend. As he said, he did not give me notice of it and I am sure that he will acquit me of any discourtesy in not dealing with the point. He will appreciate that I have been asked many questions and it is impossible for me to deal with all of them in the confines of this debate. However, I have been studying this particular matter with some care and I had the opportunity quite recently of visiting, as I think the noble Viscount did, two of the neighbourhood borstal projects which are particularly interesting because there is a high degree of co-operation—it is very high and it is very intensive co-operation—between
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prison officers and members of the Probation Service. One of these neighbourhood borstals deals with boys in a closed situation while others deal with them in an open one. There are obvious problems about this at a time of I am sorry to have to return to this point again —very heavy pressure on resources, but the fact that there has been quite significent progress in this direction at these two institutions is a very hopeful development indeed, and I should certainly like to move ahead in this direction as soon as we possibly can.
I am aware that I have already spoken for a formidably long period and I come to the question of parole. Obviously, parole forms an essential part of the Government's strategy for dealing with offenders in the community. In effect, a prisoner released on parole before the normal date of release with remission, is serving the balance of his sentence in the community, under supervision and with a liability to be recalled to the prison if he behaves badly. It is estimated that there are about 2,000 offenders who would at this moment be in prison if they had not been granted parole. The scheme accordingly makes a valuable contribution to minimising the size of the prison population, although this is not its central objective. Since the debate on the parole system which took place in June of last year in this House, the parole system has moved forward significantly. Most important of all is a substantial increase in the rate of parole. The noble Earl on that occasion said that the paroling rate had reached a plateau. The latest statistics available at that time related to the year 1974. Up to then, there had been a steady increase in the rate so that about 40 per cent. of the parole eligible prisoners were granted some parole before the normal end of their sentences.
This tendency was further stimulated by a decision by my right honourable friend the Home Secretary. As he said in another place on 4th August, having consulted the Parole Board, he was satisfied that more use could properly be made of parole without exposing the public to increased danger from serious offenders. This was a point which was made by the noble Viscount, Lord Colville. He said he was anxious to see parole being granted to more of those who then

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did not get it, and earlier in their sentences to those who did. In the event, during the whole of 1975 the rate of parole rose from around 40 per cent. to nearly 50 per cent. I should add that, as the noble Viscount said, the number of parolees whose licences are revoked has remained constant at about 8 per cent. That is a fairly considerable achievement so far as Parole Board is concerned.
My right honourable friend and I have reason to hope that the paroling rates will rise still further this year. On 18th December in answer to a Question in another place, he said that revised detailed criteria for the grant of parole had been agreed with the Parole Board, and would be issued for the guidance of the local review committees at prisons which are responsible for initial parole reviews. The same criteria will, of course, also be adopted by the Parole Board. Copies of the documents setting out these new criteria are available in the Libraries of both Houses.
I referred at the outset of my speech to the wider front on which the Government are promoting measures to reduce the prison population. I briefly in conclusion mention some of these. One point made by my noble and learned friend Lord Gardiner related to the work of the Jellicoe Committee. It was a most interesting report which my right honourable friend and I have read with great interest and attention. As I indicated when I spoke to the conference of boards of visitors a few weeks ago, we are considering these conclusions at the moment. Frankly, some of them have resource implications and I do not think it possible to hold out a great deal of hope at a moment like this for recommendations that have significant resource implications. I have made my position on that very clear. Nevertheless, there are other recommendations and we shall certainly consider them with great care.
We are also looking at the criminal law to see whether there is any further possibility of removing from its scope particular acts or behaviour which society now tolerates, or which should lead to treatment outside the penal system. Again, this was a point raised by my noble and learned friend. We have considered removing imprisonment as a penalty for
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particular offences. The noble Viscount asked me for an example. One might be the Road Traffic Act 1974.
I should just mention one other point before concluding. My noble friend Lord Longford and others have raised the question of individual cases. I do not think it appropriate to comment on these. The Parole Board have a difficult duty to discharge. Parliament has considered it right to set up an independent Parole Board. I am sure that that is right and that it is far better to have these powers in the hands of an independent Board, responsible to Parliament, than to have it in the hands of Ministers. That being so, I think it right at least to give the Board the benefit of the doubt in some of these difficult decisions.
Since I took up my present job I have had the responsibility of reading the details of a number of difficult decisions taken by the Parole Board. I am sure that the noble Viscount had a similar job when he was in office. I am bound to say that I am deeply impressed by the tremendous care and attention displayed not just by the Board itself but by the members of the local review committees who go through the cases of this sort most painstakingly.
Viscount COLVILLE of CULROSS Viscount COLVILLE of CULROSS: And the staff, my Lords.
Lord HARRIS of GREENWICH: Yes, indeed, my Lords. From discussions that I have had at a number of penal establishments that I have visited I know how seriously they regard matters of this sort. I have tried to survey the field in as much detail as time allows, and I see that it has already allowed 37 minutes! While we should all, including my right honourable friend the Home Secretary, like to see faster progress, I am certain that the Government have done as much as could reasonably be hoped at a time of rising crime rates and severe economic difficulty. We have succeeded in maintaining growth in the Probation Service at a time of the harshest financial restraint. I do not ever hope to persuade my noble friend that we have done enough, and it is right that the Government should be subjected to unremitting pressure to move in the direction which my noble friend favours. However, I believe that our record in this area is one of considerable progress.