Lords Sitting of 17 March 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 Salisbury.

LORD WALL
Sir John Edward Wall, Knight, O.B.E., having been created Baron Wall, of Coombe in Greater London, for life—Was, in his robes, introduced between the Lord Hill of Luton and the Lord Campbell of Eskan.
The Earl of Ilchester—Sat first in Parliament after the death of his father.

OVERSEAS STUDENTS' FEES
2.47 p.m.
Lord GLADWYN: 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 agree that, as asserted by several High Commissioners of Commonwealth countries, any increase in fees payable by overseas students in this country, over and above that dictated by an increase in costs, would be a violation of the fundamental principles underlying the Lomé Convention and the Commonwealth Heads of Government Conference in Kingston, Jamaica, and would be contrary to our obligations as a member of the European Economic Community.
The PARLIAMENTARY UNDERSECRETARY of STATE, NORTHERN IRELAND OFFICE (Lord DONALDSON of KINGSBRIDGE): My Lords, the question of fees for higher and further education courses in the United Kingdom is a domestic matter and lies outside the scope of the Lomé Convention. It was not raised at the Kingston Conference and the United Kingdom has no obligations in this field
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under its EEC commitments. It is worth adding that the last increase in fees was not over and above but was commensurate with the increase in educational costs.
Lord GLADWYN: My Lords, do not the Government really feel that any discrimination—for such it will be—against poorer students, particularly from the Commonwealth countries, would be contrary to the whole spirit of Lomé and of the declaration of Ministers at Kingston, Jamaica, whereby it was said they would do everything to favour the poorer countries? As regards the European Community, surely charging very large fees for French students when they do not charge anything for us is contrary to the whole spirit of the thing, even if it is not a technical violation of Article 48?
Lord DONALDSON of KINGS-BRIDGE: My Lords, the noble Lord is putting a hypothetical case, one which has not arisen. A differential was made some time ago and the recent increase was made for all.
Baroness GAITSKELL: My Lords, would it not be true to say that the very best kind of overseas aid is to give education to these students from the Commonwealth and African countries? Is not this form of aid for a number of students, who surely are not millionaires, the most practical one and the one which pays the highest dividends in good will and friendly relations between countries?
Lord DONALDSON of KINGS-BRIDGE: My Lords, my noble friend is quite right. It is because we think this is such a valuable kind of aid that so much is being given.
Lord AVEBURY: My Lords, would the noble Lord explain why, if the full economic costs were charged both to home and overseas students, the fees should not be reimbursable by the Ministry of Overseas Development in the case of those who come from the poorer countries to which my noble friend referred, thus imposing no greater burden on them than they have to bear at the moment?
Lord DONALDSON of KINGS-BRIDGE: My Lords, is the noble Lord

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referring to the increase of 30 per cent. put on in December? This was overall for everybody concerned and is not at the moment an unreasonable addition. There have been various noises in the Press about much larger figures; but they are quite unrelated to anything in my right honourable friend's mind—at any rate, anything that he has disclosed to me.
Lord AVEBURY: My Lords, I apologise for this; but the noble Lord has not answered my question, which was that if these increases to something approaching the full economic costs are warranted—and they may be so from the point of view of the costs to the universities—why should they not be wholly paid for under the Ministry of Overseas Development Vote so that they are not borne by the students from the developing countries?
Lord DONALDSON of KINGSBRIDGE: My Lords, that is another hypothetical question. The off-the-cuff answer is that if a very large increase were thought necessary it would be possible, although not necessarily desirable—and this remains to be seen—for it to be subvented in this way.
Lord SANDFORD: My Lords, while certainly some of us would consider that a 30 per cent. rise for home and overseas students is not inappropriate in these hard times, could the noble Lord say when his right honourable friend is going to announce the steps proposed to be taken to mitigate the effects of this rise upon overseas students who have already started on their courses?
Lord DONALDSON of KINGSBRIDGE: My Lords, I am not aware that any immediate action is intended, but I will make further inquiries.
Viscount ST. DAVIDS: My Lords, the noble Lord has said that the recent increase in fees is exactly in line with the recent increase in costs. That is very reasonable but, to put the thing in exact perspective, can he tell us whether the increase in fees to our own students is also in line with the increase in costs?—because this would tell us exactly the position.
Lord DONALDSON of KINGSBRIDGE: My Lords, this is an easier one to answer because the increase was the same for both; the increase in educational costs was the same for both.
Lord SAINSBURY: My Lords, would not my noble friend agree that one of the best ways of helping exports of plant and machinery to developing countries is to train overseas students in the appropriate branch of engineering? Secondly, is he aware that this is the view of the West German authorities, and it is the reason why they treat overseas students so generously in these matters?
Lord DONALDSON of KINGS-BRIDGE: My Lords, my noble friend is repeating in different words what my noble friend Lady Gaitskell said. I agree that this is an admirable way of aiding the people who are concerned, which will bring benefits to ourselves. This is not in dispute.
Baroness VICKERS: My Lords, could the noble Lord say how many students have withdrawn their applications from educational establishments in this country since learning of the increase in fees?
Lord DONALDSON of KINGS-BRIDGE: My Lords, I do not have that information. I will write to the noble Baroness.
Lord BROCKWAY: My Lords, would the Minister consider as a suggestion to the forthcoming Secretary for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, that an approach should be made to the richer Commonwealth countries, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Nigeria, to pool resources with us to enable students to attend universities not only in this country but in Asia and Africa?
Lord DONALDSON of KINGS-BRIDGE: My Lords, my noble friend always makes interesting suggestions; this one will be passed on to my right honourable friend.
Lord ANNAN: My Lords, would my noble friend agree that if there were to be any diminuation of the differential between overseas students' fees, and, indeed, the abolition of a differential, this would have to be paid for by a cut in the vote in higher education? Would he not also agree that in the efforts of the Government to contain inflation, it

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could be done in no other way? Would he also agree that if it were to be done, and cuts were to be imposed in higher education, in a labour-intensive profession of this kind, in which 80 per cent. of the Vote is spent in salaries and wages, they would be bound to come in substantial cuts in academic, secretarial, administrative, and technical staff and public employees, and that the unions concerned would have to be consulted?
Lord DONALDSON of KINGS-BRIDGE: My Lords, I agree with every point my noble friend has made. That is why I said it is such an extremely difficult matter.
Lord GLADWYN: My Lords, would the noble Lord agree that, irrespective of all that has just been said on the Government side with which the noble Lord has agreed, nothing has so far emerged which justifies any discrimination against the poorer students coming to this country?
Lord DONALDSON of KINGSBRIDGE: My Lords, nothing has been said.
Lord LEATHERLAND: My Lords, may I ask—I do so as one who, for over 10 years, was honorary treasurer of a university—whether my noble friend will agree that we ought not to be too pernickety on this question? Will he also agree that if we do anything to discourage students from the Third World from coming to our universities, they may go to the University of Moscow instead?
Lord DONALDSON of KINGSBRIDGE: My Lords, I agree with my noble friend; it is always a mistake to be pernickety. I do not think there is any sign of my right honourable friend being pernickety. There are some real, rather weighty financial problems which have to be dealt with here, and they will not be made any easier by describing them in that way.
Lord ANNAN: My Lords, would my noble friend agree that it is unlikely that the large numbers of overseas students at present coming to this country will go to Moscow because they are treated in one way in Moscow and in a very different way in this country? In this country they benefit greatly from the fact that they come to a country with the
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lingua franca of the world at the moment, which is English, and because of the very favourable staff/student ratios which at present exist in this country.
Lord DONALDSON of KINGSBRIDGE: My Lords, I am most grateful to my noble friend. Once again I entirely agree with him.

UN CONFERENCE ON HUMAN SETTLEMENTS
2.57 p.m.
Lord PARGITER: My Lords, I beg leave to ask the Question which stands in my name on the Order Paper.
The Question was as follows:
To ask Her Majesty's Government how many representatives will be appointed to attend the United Nations' Conference on Human Settlements, in Vancouver from 31st May to 11th June; and of that number how many will be chosen directly from local government sources.
The PARLIAMENTARY UNDERSECRETARY of STATE, DEPARTMENT of the ENVIRONMENT (Baroness Birk): My Lords, my right honourable friend the Secretary of State for the Environment is in the process of appointing a delegation of 21, which he will lead. Two delegates will be nominated by the local authority associations. The others will reflect the involvement of central Government, including Scotland and Northern Ireland, and the professional and voluntary organisations engaged in the formulation and implementation of planning policies in this country.
Lord PARGITER: My Lords, is my noble friend aware that the Secretariat of the United Nations suggests that the composition of the delegation should be at least one third from local authorities? How does this square with only two out of 21? Is my noble friend further aware that, instead of consultation with local authority associations, two bodies have been told they will be permitted to send delegates—there has not been the usual consultation which takes place on these matters between the associations concerned? Does my noble friend think the matter needs to be looked at again with a view, so far as local authorities are

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concerned, to conforming rather more with the suggestion of the United Nations' Secretariat?
Baroness BIRK: My Lords, so far as the delegates from local authorities are concerned, the Scottish Convention were selected because, as well as adding to representation from Scotland, they represent both levels of local government in Scotland. The Association of Metropolitan Authorities was the natural choice from England since this habitat Conference will be focused on urban areas. In addition, the representative nominated by the Royal Town Planning Institute is one of the two delegates from the professional associations and is a senior county council planning officer, which adds local authority interest to representation on the delegation. Regarding my noble friend's question about the authorities being told from where the representatives would come, my understanding was that there were no applications from other local authority associations, and that this was understood. There was a conference in January at which the voluntary organisations were represented. I understand some local authority representatives were there. When the habitat Conference is over it is intended to hold a further conference—and this has already been budgeted for—for the voluntary organisations and also local authority representatives, if they wish to attend.
Lord PARGITER: My Lords, is my noble friend aware that a non-Governmental conference will be taking place prior to the habitat conference, to which many of these bodies are being invited, which will prepare a document for the conference itself? Is she also aware that her statement about the associations making an application is not correct, because the secretary of one of the associations made an application on behalf of all of the associations? Perhaps she would like to look at the corespondence, in order to correct this matter.
Baroness BIRK: My Lords, if my noble friend will allow me, I should certainly like to look into this. If I have been wrongly informed, I will certainly let him know and apologise.
Lord PARGITER: My Lords, may I also ask my noble friend whether the Minister will look into this question of
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the very small representation, and endeavour to conform more to the arrangement provided for by the United Nations?
Baroness BIRK: My Lords, in view of the economic situation, the Government have tried to keep the delegation as small as possible. The delegation also includes officials who are necessary in order to cover all the activities of the conference. These include officials from my own Department, the Foreign Office, Overseas Development, the Scottish Office and the Northern Ireland Office. So it is not a very large delegation, and it was extremely difficult to get as many people as would have liked to be in it.

CIVIL SERVICE ESTABLISHMENT
3.1 p.m.
Lord INGLEWOOD: 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 which Government Departments show a reduction in the total of: (a) industrial; and (b) non-industrial civil servants in post as between October 1975 and March 1974, or between similar convenient dates.
The LORD PRIVY SEAL (Lord Shepherd): My Lords, the following seven Government Departments showed a net reduction in the total number of industrial civil servants in post as between 1st March 1974 and 1st January 1976, which is the latest figure available: Ministry of Defence; Department of the Environment; Department for National Savings; Scottish Office; Foreign and Commonwealth Office; Civil Service Department, and the Inland Revenue.
Between the same dates, the following five Departments showed a net reduction in the total number of non-industrial civil servants in post: Ordnance Survey; General Register Office, Scotland; Public Trustee Office; Civil Service Pay Reseach Unit, and the Scottish Record Office. The Department of Energy showed a net reduction in both the number of industrial and non-industrial staff in post.
Lord INGLEWOOD: My Lords, I thank the noble Lord for that reply. May I ask him to use his best endeavours

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to see that that list is longer the next time I have a chance of asking a Question? The Departments concerned are, by and large, only those whose staff is in smaller numbers, whereas in these times it would surely be very much in the interests of the economy that those who employ large numbers of civil servants should also figure in the noble Lord's next list.
Lord SHEPHERD: My Lords, I have a good deal of sympathy with what the noble Lord has said. He will be aware that my Department and I are at the present moment looking to find ways by which we can cut the continuing growth of the Civil Service. I can only say to the noble Lord that perhaps the greatest growth in public servants is a consequence of the past Administration's legislation on the reform of local authorities. It is what Parliament puts upon the Service, and not what the Service itself creates, that influences the position.
Baroness GAITSKELL: My Lords, may I ask the noble Lord the Leader of the House, with all this clamour to reduce the number of civil servants, what we are to do with these unemployed civil servants?
Lord SHEPHERD: My Lords, at the present moment I am not anticipating redundancy within the Civil Service. What we are seeking to do is to curb the continual growth within the Service.
Lord McCARTHY: My Lords, does my noble friend agree that figures about the growth or reduction of the Civil Service from year to year tell us nothing? What we want to know is the trend in the size of the payroll in real terms, because we know that whenever there has been pressure to reduce the Civil Service in the past, what has happened is that the Civil Service has used part-time, temporary and contracting-out services in order to obviate the trend. When are we likely to get figures for what is happening to part-time, temporary and contracting-out services?
Lord SHEPHERD: My Lords, my noble friend will appreciate that I have to answer the Question on the Order Paper. If he wishes to know the trend and puts down a Question, I will certainly give it to him. I agree with my noble
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friend that there is little point in seeking to cut the number of full-time civil servants, as has been done in the past, only to employ people through outside agencies. One can always cook the books, but I should not want to be party to such an operation.
Lord SLATER: My Lords, may I take it from my noble friend's Answer that the trade unions have been taken into consultation about this cut-back? Also, is such a cut-back in accordance with the Whitley machinery, which operates on behalf of the Civil Service unions in this country?
Lord SHEPHERD: My Lords, consultations will be through the Whitley procedure, and they are now going on with the Staff Side. But I would say to my noble friend that at the present moment no decision has been taken as to where this curb will take place. We are seeking to identify the areas where cuts can be made in the growth, without in any way damaging the general service that is provided by the Civil Service.

FALKLAND ISLANDS: CONSTITUTIONAL PROPOSAL
3.5 p.m.
Lord BROCKWAY: My Lords, I beg leave to ask the Question which stands in my name on the Order Paper.
The Question was as follows:
To ask Her Majesty's Government what reply they have made to the proposal forwarded from the Falkland Islands that the Legislative Council should be composed of eight elected members, two ex-officio members and the Governor, and that the voting age be 18 years.
The MINISTER of STATE, FOREIGN and COMMONWEALTH OFFICE (Lord Goronwy-Roberts): My Lords, Her Majesty's Government have agreed to the constitutional changes recommended by the Falkland Islands Legislative Council, and intend to implement them as soon as possible.
Lord BROCKWAY: My Lords, while welcoming that Answer, may I ask the Minister whether he agrees that the extension of democracy will increase the self-respect and self-confidence of the people

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of the Falkland Islands, in meeting the rather controversial issues which are likely to arise in the near future?
Lord GORONWY-ROBERTS: Yes, my Lords.
Viscount THURSO: My Lords, can the noble Lord give us any inkling of what is meant in this instance by the words "as soon as possible "?
Lord GORONWY-ROBERTS: My Lords, we are anxious not to postpone the implementation of these changes, which have been asked for by the Falkland Islanders, for longer than is necessary. The noble Lord will, of course, recall that there will be a General Election in the Falkland Islands in May, and it seems to us appropriate that these changes should then be the subject of discussion and confirmation by the popular vote. Secondly, my noble friend Lord Shackleton has rendered very great service to the Islands by visiting them and reporting back on certain economic possibilities to help the islanders. These recommendations are now expected fairly soon. They may require further constitutional changes for their implementation. For those two reasons, it therefore seems that we should postpone the implementation, at least for the next few months.
Viscount THURSO: My Lords, am I to take it from the noble Lord's Answer, therefore, that the implementation has been postponed pending further discussion, or have Her Majesty's Government agreed that this is the figure which is to be implemented after the General Election?
Lord GORONWY-ROBERTS: My Lords, there will be no further discussion. It seems right that, as a General Election is coming in the Islands, they may wish to discuss this among themselves and no doubt confirm it; and there is the added reason which I have given, in relation to Lord Shackleton's visit and report. As to the figure, my noble friend Lord Brockway—inadvertently, I am sure—put down in his Question the figure of eight, but it is an increase in the elected members of the Legislative Council from four to six. That will, of course, give an elected majority on the Legislative Council.

ALLOTMENTS AND HOME FOOD PRODUCTION
3.8 p.m.
Lord WALLACE of COSLANY Lord WALLACE of COSLANY rose to call attention to the need for encouraging home production of vegetables and fruit by greater provision of allotment plots and similar facilities including the restoration of waste land; and to move for Papers. The noble Lord said: My Lords, it is said, with truth, that when one rises to speak in this Chamber there will always be at least one expert present during the debate. I do not pretend to be an expert, but I freely confess to being a great enthusiast, always willing to learn. As a former allotment holder, I have received plenty of advice from the old hands on the allotment sites. There is plenty of friendly rivalry from old hands and others, as well as good fellowship on allotment sites. I would also add that, of course, I am still busy in my own garden, doing my best to produce the vegetables and fruit needed for the family and many friends.
In rising to speak in this debate, it has given me great pleasure to find that two maiden speakers are included in a short list of speakers. This is most satisfactory to me, and we all look forward very much to the contributions of the noble Baroness, Lady Dudley, and the noble Lord, Lord Broadbridge. The purpose of the debate is to draw attention to the urgent need for home food production, not only on economic grounds but more important still, on a social and recreational basis. This latter aspect has been overlooked for far too long. For too long a period the provision of allotments has been the Cinderella of local authority services.
I am sorry to say that in many areas allotments are regarded as more of a nuisance than a civic amenity. I well remember many years ago entering a council for the first time. The idea was to put all the young councillors on what they termed the cabbage and greens committee to pick up the work of the council. It was a committee which had no vote. One always tried to put forward to the treasurer and the council claims for water supplies and allotments, but invariably it was a long and hard battle to provide such essential commodities. Unfortunately, even today this attitude of mind

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continues, yet the value of allotment plots to the nation cannot be ignored, especially in these days of expensive imports of fresh vegetables.
It is estimated that an average plot of 10 rods can yield produce valued at between £50 to £75 per annum, and nationally can provide a production figure of at least £20 million to £37 million, based on the number of plots at present in use. Those are figures which I and others conclude is the average figure, but the Royal Horticultural Society say the figure is very much higher. Whatever the figures are, they are considerable and a vital contribution to the national economy.
Today there is considerable public interest in growing one's own vegetables to help out the family budget. It is significant that the growing army of vegetable growers includes a large proportion of women, who in my own local horticultural society are beginning to take a large proportion of prizes at the annual shows. This is all to the good. In many cases today we find husbands and wives working together on allotment sites and gardens in order to produce food, from which they derive a great deal of satisfaction. Despite the growing interest—and it is obvious that there is a tremendous interest today—many thousands of people are frustrated entries on council waiting lists for allotments. In my own London Borough of 13exley there is a waiting list of over 600. Indeed, a few years ago in Bexley they grassed over a number of plots, destroying in the process one old chap's beautiful fruit trees. They grassed over these plots at great expense and now they are busy restoring them because of the tremendous demand, yet they still have a waiting list of over 600 people. In the nearby London Borough of Bromley, a borough with a very good record for the provision of allotments, the waiting list is well over 400. In fact, all over the country, mainly in large centres of population, the picture is the same. I believe that the total national waiting list is rapidly approaching 60,000.
Why is there this growing demand? The first reason is an economic one: the family budget. There is no doubt that the high price of vegetables and the comparative cheapness of a packet of seeds means that, provided the land is available
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there is an incentive to help out the family budget. A few spring cabbages can yield to the family budget a considerable return, as my wife knows only too well because we are using them at the moment. They cost us a matter of a few pence. One ignores the labour involved because of the recreation and the satisfaction. There is no doubt that for economic reasons there is a demand for allotments.
Another reason is the media. For a change, one can praise the media, particularly television. I am certain that programmes on television, especially on BBC television—for instance, "Gardeners' World", which is a "must" for most gardeners, "Pebble Mill Plot" and even my favourite children's programme "Blue Peter Garden"; and ITV's "Kitchen Garden"—many of them in colour, are programmes which have brought home visually to people the attractiveness and cheapness of growing one's own food. The media, whether or not they intended it, have helped to create a demand. Although it does not have the same impact as television, because one cannot see the lovely green lettuces and other beautiful vegetables and fruit, radio also provides an incentive. There is no doubt that radio has given to the public a taste of the cheapness and freshness of home-grown produce. Therefore, I claim that the social impact of these programmes has been very significant.
I come now to the third point, which is the most vital and important of them all. Apart from the obvious examples of tower blocks and maisonettes, the building policy of recent years has led to houses being built by both public and private enterprise with the absolute minimum of garden space. Usually gardens are about the size of a pocket handkerchief. This is a vital and substantial factor. People earnestly wish to get out into their gardens and grow something. I well remember paying a visit to some lovely maisonettes in the City of Norwich when I was the Member of Parliament for that City. They were beautiful maisonettes with every possible amenity, but one old boy said to me, "Well, my boy, I suppose I should be grateful but I would love a little bit of land to grow something on."
Much to my astonishment there has been a degree of publicity over this debate, especially in the Daily Telegraph. This morning I received a letter which came from Uckfield in Sussex. I think it is signed by a Mrs. Steel; it looks to me like a lady's handwriting. It says:
"Dear Lord Wallace, I have read in Peterborough's column in the Daily Telegraph that you are speaking on Wednesday about greater provision of allotments. I enclose a relevant cutting from our local paper. Usually council houses have gardens "—
that is not necessarily so today—
"but Uplands and Lealands are blocks of unfurnished flats provided by the council for retired people. Tenants who want to garden are dependent on the provision of allotments which, as you will read, are being taken from them this year."
I turn to the Sussex Express in order to quote an example of what is taking place. It appears that the local authority wishes to have this allotment land on which to build houses. I assume that they will be houses with very small gardens or no gardens at all, which will increase the demand for more allotments. And, of course, there is also the problem of the displaced elderly people to deal with. I understand that one person is approaching his local Member of Parliament. Certainly the letter and the Press cutting will go to the Minister with my blessing after the debate. There are many quotations here of what the old people feel about it. Many of them are absolutely heartbroken. A Mr. Ferris says this:
"Gardening helps to keep a man fit and mentally alert after retirement. The biggest killer for the over 65s is the armchair and the television. I have always treasured my little plot'.
There is a photograph of an enthusiastic couple digging their allotment and enjoying themselves, happy in their retirement. Yet, for the sake of building more houses with inadequate gardens, this land is to be taken away from them. And the Council say that they will try to accommodate the pensioners as vacant plots become available. But many of them will be dead of a broken heart, or something else, long before the provision is made.
This may not seem much to your Lordships, but I would ask you to put yourselves in the place of these old people. They have found something to give them satisfaction and to help their meagre incomes. They are happy; they are healthy; they have something to do, and
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an interest in life. Take it away and provide modern housing for some elderly people and you are creating more misery and unhappiness, instead of giving these old people what they really want—something to do. A piece of garden is the finest therapy for elderly people—I must confess I am somewhat elderly myself; I have suddenly realised that.
This later point has created a social need, which will continue to grow unless action is taken to meet it. Only recently it has been realised that gardening is a valuable form of recreation. This has now been accepted officially but, so far, no grants have been made as are made to other forms of recreation and sport. Why not? There is no reason at all why this recreation, most valuable to the nation and to the individual, should not receive a greater amount of financial support.
Yet, at this time of growing demand—I have quoted one example already which was sent to me today—some local authorities are seeking powers to set aside covenants covering allotment land. As a case in point, I quote the Southgate Chase site in the Borough of Enfield although in that borough there is a waiting list. There are active and vigilant organsations these days, and the London Association of Recreational Gardeners are actively opposing this and other eases which arise. It is taking up a great deal of their time. Local authorities are not doing their job in this connection. I say most emphatically to the Government and to the House that, at this time of clearly indicated need, no local authority should be allowed to dispose of allotment land where a waiting list exists. The Government should take immediate action to request local authorities to carry out a survey of land suitable for allotment provision and to indicate what steps are being taken to meet the need expressed in lengthening waiting lists. This review should include all waste and unused land, because there is plenty of such land that could be used.
Throughout the country there are large areas of unused waste land. Any of us can travel to any London railway terminus and before we reach the centre of London along the sides of the track we can see many areas of derelict land, unused marshes, clay and gravel pits and, unfortunately, far too many industrial dumps. Land is precious; we cannot

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afford to waste it. We are, therefore, entitled to ask what steps the Government are taking to set up co-ordinated schemes of land reclamation. Our Continental neighbours, particularly the Dutch, can set us a very good example. Why, therefore, should Britain lag behind in this important field?
Returning to the subject of allotments, there is an obvious need to make these sites more socially attractive. There is no need for sites to be haphazard eyesores, with tin huts, wastebins, bonfires and heaven knows what else to clutter the landscape! Where this state of affairs exists it is the fault of the local authority and not of the plot-holder, who often has to cope under great difficulties, lacking such essentials as water and a basic toilet. A new approach is, therefore, needed on the lines advocated by experts like Professor Harry Thorpe and others. Turn allotments into attractive leisure gardens with a water supply, toilets and a social centre, with surrounding flower beds maintained by the plot-holders and many other amenities, and so provide a centre for elderly people to get together.
Having been an allotment holder, I know one often saw the little wooden seats made by pensioners, who, after they had done their bit of digging, and sometimes accompanied by their old dog, used to have their lunch there in peace and happiness—but under primitive conditions and often without a toilet. Not much imagination is needed to improve this state of affairs. Why should it not be done? In fact, some authorities have already started—there are always good examples. For instance, Coventry and Sheffield have pioneered such schemes and Professor Harry Thorpe can provide plenty of examples and plans. This is creating a civic amenity. I would go further and say that all future planning development should include such facilities. Failure in the past is part of the reason for the increasing waiting lists for plots today.
Another interesting thing has happened in connection with growing food. Just over a year ago, the Friends of the Earth launched a campaign to turn derelict land into allotments. They have now come forward with a scheme for garden sharing which they term "Crop and Share".
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There are many people and institutions with under-used gardens, and particularly gardens owned by elderly people. I know, and some of my former House of Commons colleagues will know, that we have often had elderly people come to us asking for help in obtaining a housing transfer. In such cases when one asks the reason it is frequently because they have a large garden which they cannot cope with; old people are very proud and are conscious that it is becoming an eyesore, and is full of weeds, and they want to transfer to somewhere with a small garden or none at all. Yet, under the scheme put forward by the Friends of the Earth, this problem could be overcome. I know there would be difficulties, but the old people who live in the house could share the produce in return for allowing the other person to cultivate the ground. I strongly commend this idea; but, on the other hand, it is, of course, no substitute for the provision of allotments. Local authorities could usefully run this scheme. I am fully aware that there are obvious difficulties; but, even so, it is well worth while, and with good will it could prove valuable in providing benefit for both parties involved.
I am now reaching my conclusion. There is, indeed, an old song that some of your Lordships may know:
"One is nearer God's heart in a garden than anywhere else on Earth".
Certainly as a recreation it can bring peace of mind. I know that, and hundreds of other people know it, and, what is more, it can provide a wonderful, satisfying sense of achievement in creating life from the earth.
I want to make taste buds water in this House. Just imagine, having worked on a summer evening on the allotment plot or in your hack garden, you are tired out, and you cut yourself a beautiful fresh lettuce, pull a handful of spring onions; you have some nice crusty bread and cheese and, perhaps, a pint of cider. My Lords, it beats all the caviar you can buy at expensive prices, and I think I have made a few mouths water. I believe that a social change is taking place. I believe firmly there is in being a movement to return to simple values, such as the quiet cultivation of a piece of land. We hear much talk about increasing leisure and the problems of retirement.

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In this debate, we can provide a practical and positive answer. My Lords, I beg to move for Papers.
3.30 p.m.
Baroness DUDLEY: My Lords, as this is my maiden speech, I trust your Lordships will be patient with me. I feel very deeply about waste of any sort, especially land, of which we are so short. Every square metre should be put to good use. Constantly, we see towns and cities encroaching upon the countryside as boundaries are extended, while within these same towns and cities are many acres of waste land which could be used. I am told that in Birmingham alone there are many thousands of acres which have been bought up by different authorities and which, owing to the squeeze and various other reasons, are just being left to go to waste. I am sure that Birmingham is not alone in this.
My Lords, in my own village there are two pieces of land amounting, possibly, to some 10 to 15 acres, which have been unused for the last 10 years or more. Some of this land is owned by the authority, and some of it is privately owned. Surely this land could have been put to good use during this time. As I came up in the train this morning, I saw large areas of land lying idle, much of which could be turned into allotments. In these days of high prices, more and more people are finding that growing their own vegetables is one small way in which they can save money. Apart from keeping the family in vegetables, many people find a new and wonderful interest in watching things grow. This can be a great help to those who do a very demanding job and need to relax and unwind after work, or, indeed, those people who are unemployed, or with similar worries. Thus, while helping themselves and their families, they may also help to make a piece of waste land a joy to behold instead of an eyesore.
My Lords, perhaps with larger pieces of land it would be possible for a number of people to get together and have an allotment, with an area in the middle for wives and children to picnic in when not helping with the garden. Or perhaps an orchard could he planted, with vegetables growing beneath the trees until the trees are ready to produce fruit. Another possible use for some of this land in large industrial areas, on a short-term basis
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if necessary, would be the provision of more adventure playgrounds. Children brought up in high-rise flats or in heavily populated areas cry out for some kind of escape and these playgrounds would seem to be the answer. Much of today's vandalism must be caused by children not having enough to do out of school hours, and this could so easily be prevented by providing somewhere for them to "let off steam" in their own way.
Finally, remembering that large oak trees grow from tiny acorns, would it not be possible to enable couples wishing to marry and with nowhere to live, to buy some of this land—on a mortgage if necessary—and to start building their own houses? They could begin by building a kitchen and living room downstairs, with a bedroom and bathroom above, with planning permission to build on later as they were able to afford it. Many men must have some knowledge of building and I am sure that local authorities would give all the advice and encouragement they could. My son-in-law, who is a schoolmaster, bought a small cottage when he married my daughter some years ago, and has now nearly finished an extension he has built with no professional help at all. This has doubled the size of their original cottage at less than half what it would have cost had a builder agreed to do the work. Surely land is one of our greatest inheritances, and we should make the most of it for ourselves and for our children.
3.34 p.m.
Lord SANDYS: My Lords, we are indeed grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Coslany, for introducing this Motion this afternoon. It is particularly apposite in the climate of the serious need for the correct use of land, and the severe need, in present circumstances, to improve our food supply. I think the noble Lord will be particularly pleased that he has given the opportunity to noble Lords to speak for the first time. It gives me very great pleasure to speak immediately after my noble friend and neighbour Lady Dudley and to say what pleasure she has given your Lordships' House in making a speech upon this important subject this afternoon. She has touched on many matters which are very closely associated with the whole of this problem. They are not specifically related to the production of fruit and

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vegetables. The noble Baroness mentioned in her speech the question of adventure playgrounds, and I shall come on to this aspect a little later in my speech. When it comes to allotments, I believe she has touched on a very serious and important point, concerning involvement by the whole family, rather than by only one member of it. We shall look forward to hearing her on many other occasions.
Your Lordships must be awaiting the maiden speech of the noble Lord, Lord Broadbridge, with great anticipation, but I am afraid your Lordships will have to listen to my own speech for a little time meanwhile. This is the first time we have been able to discuss the Departmental Committee of Inquiry into allotments. The noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Coslany, has already referred to the Report by the expert, Professor Harry Thorpe, commissioned by the Labour Government in 1966. That Report was produced in 1969, and is Command 4166. As this is such a particularly important Report on the whole subject, I should like to refer to it in some detail because it relates to the whole state of the law on allotments.
My Lords, your Lordships will be aware that allotments and smallholdings have a very long and honourable history. But concerning this Report and, indeed, for the purposes of my speech, I shall be referring only to the current legislation, the seven Acts passed by Parliament between 1908 and 1950. The noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Coslany, referred to the state of the law. The fact that the state of the law is preventing rather than encouraging allotments to be a valuable source of land is something that I think will be of special interest to your Lordships. The first and primary problem is the lack of a satisfactory definition of "allotment". In the seven Allotments Acts no general definition exists, but there are two which crop up. For the purpose of the record, I think they should be repeated. They are, first:
"Any parcel of land, whether attached to a cottage or not, of not more than two acres in extent, held by a tenant under a landlord and cultivated as a farm or garden, or partly as a garden and partly as a farm."
The second definition is:
"Any parcel of land of not more than five acres in extent, cultivated or intended to be
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cultivated as a garden or farm, or partly as a garden and partly as a farm."
My Lords lack of definition is an absolutely fundamental problem, but there are many others. Taken as a whole, there are three basic and major defects in the law: First, the anachronism of so much of it; secondly, it is over-complicated for the task it has to do; thirdly, in places it is ambiguous to the point of incomprehensibility. Those are not my words, but the words of Professor Harry Thorpe who studied this subject in great detail. It would be a particular advantage if we looked to see how the law operates.
The allotment authority has a difficult task. It must first refer to the Act of 1908 to learn about its obligations. Then it has to look at the Acts of 1922 and 1950 to discover the extent of their operation. Then it must turn back to the basic Act, the Act of 1908, to understand how it may acquire the land to fulfil those obligations, and then move forward to the Act of 1925 to find the rules relating to the disposal of such land. No wonder there is a problem in managing land in this particular field.
But that is not the whole story, because since 1969, and so very recently, we have had the advent of the Community Land Act. It would perhaps be trespassing on your Lordships' time to bring out a large number of examples; nevertheless I think that Professor Harry Thorpe said something which was of really outstanding importance on page 265, at paragraph 665:
"Far more serious, however, is the fact that the current law is largely irrelevant to the allotments situation today."
"Today" of course was 1969. Add another seven years, and it is, of course, totally out of date.
The noble Lord, Lord Wallace, referred in considerable detail to the problems caused to local authorities, and he rightly castigated many of them for indifference. One of the strongest indictments in the whole Report occurs on page 96, when again the same body, the Select Committee, says this:
"The strongest indictment of the attitude of some local authorities came from the students working on our behalf".
They give these quotations from their research:
"Allotments are treated in a very cavalier fashion".

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"The local authority takes little interest in allotments".
"Administration is very haphazard".
"The local authority seems out of touch with allotment affairs".
That is a really clear indictment of local authorities, and I think that the case is made.
But there are some notable exceptions and these must be mentioned. I think the authority which drew attention to itself, with an example of its own activity in this sphere, was Grimsby. It may he invidious to quote one local authority, but Grimsby certainly deserves it, because in this same Report, at page 108, table 28, we have the story of what Grimsby decided to do. They had a poor and badly-sited statutory allotment site. Fortunately, two industrial concerns said they would like to buy. Grimsby rightly chose the opportunity to obtain permission from the Ministry. They obtained permission, sold the site for a sum of money which enabled them to purchase a much better alternative site, which they equipped with all the necessary water supply, fencing, roads, greenhouses and so on. That was all done without the need to obtain a loan or incur a deficit. That is an example of a local authority taking a bold decision; it makes use of its existing site. It may, admittedly, uproot a number of existing tenants, but surely their long-term benefits are safeguarded if they are admitted to a new and properly equipped site.
I think waiting lists are the meat of our discussions. Particularly significant is the rapidity with which the waiting lists have grown. If one looks at the situation in London alone, the best information I have is that in 1972 there were over 2,000 people registered as wanting allotments. There may have been a vast number in addition who had not actually registered but probably intended to do so should other applicants have been successful. By 1974 the 2,000 had grown to 9,000. Taking the country as a whole, we are assured that in 1973 no fewer than 27,000 applications had been listed, and by 1974 the number had risen to 57,000—more than a 100 per cent. increase in that time. So we have a spiralling demand for allotments. A substantial number of people are seeking land on which they can grow crops, land upon which
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they may be able to cultivate bees, to care for and look after pigeons or rabbits.
I will digress at this point to refer to one Act, the Allotments Act 1950, in which the restriction on keeping hens and rabbits was set aside. This restriction was abolished with a deliberate intention, which subsequent years may have proved to be a mistake. It is now felt that it would be very much better to segregate the holdings where there are livestock other than bees, and in such a way that they are grouped together and do not interfere with each other.
My Lords, I should like to pass on to the question of the Community Land Act in this whole context, because I feel the Government have compounded the difficulties of local authorities. The White Paper Land which, we know all too well, was published on the 12th September 1974, was closely followed by the debate on the humble Address when my noble friend Lord Colville of Cuirass made the following remarks:
"Secondly, we shall have no hesitation at all in pointing out where there is room for a change of heart back to moderation, because for these extreme policies we have no time. We have time for the moderate; we have time for things that unite."—[Official Report, 31/10/74, col. 262.]
It was unfortunate that the Government did not heed his wise advice. They pressed ahead with their highly controversial Community Land Bill, which has deeply complicated the issue. Is it any surprise that a number of local authorities look upon allotments as a form of land bank, a sort of strategic reserve of land which they can draw upon and use, with the permission of the Department of the Environment, should need be?
I return to the question of dereliction, a matter mentioned by both previous speakers. The question of dereliction in London deserves our attention, because there are thought to be no fewer than 20,000 acres of derelict land. A sum has been done. Even if only half of that land, 10,000 acres, were set aside and divided un into 10 yard by 30 yard plots—I am afraid I am not going to turn these into metres—this would yield a total of 160,000 extra allotments; and in a year, if productive, they would give over 100,000 tons of potatoes or 95,000 tons of cabbages—the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, referred to his cabbages; no doubt they were Savoys—or 160,000

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tons of carrots. Here is a valuable resource standing idle. Here is an opportunity for the GLC to make use of its land survey, which it conducted in 1972, and promote a valuable further addition to the food supply of this country.
I turn from the GLC to railway allotments. Nowhere, I think, has there been a more remarkable change in the last 25 years, because in 1950 British Rail owned 75,000 plots, whereas in 1975, last year, it owned only 15,000 plots. So what happened to the other 60,000 plots? Development took its toll—closure of lines; sale of a very substantial area of acres—but they have not been replaced. Today there is a total of 5,000 plots in London and I understand that there is a particularly active railway allotment group.
I come now to a number of points on which I hone to receive a reply from Her Majesty's Government (and of which I have given notice) because I think there is a real burden of responsibility which rests with the Government in implementing the recommendations of the Thorpe Report which their predecessor Labour Government of 1966 commissioned. This valuable Report has been sitting on the shelves and accumulating dust, and I hope that the noble Baroness will be able to tell us what she has in mind. Secondly, I wonder whether the noble Baroness and her Department recognise—I feel sure that they do—the substantial fund of good will and enthusiasm stemming from voluntary help anxious to bring derelict land held by local authorities into production. The Friends of the Earth scheme has been dealt with in some depth and I feel that it would be repetitious to go further. Nevertheless, the point is whether the Government have had discussions with the local authorities into the possibility of short-term lettings under licence, or other means, on a basis of the next two to five years, of land which could not conceivably be develoded during that period. Finally, do the Department intend to discuss the shortages of allotments and the long waiting lists with both the GLC and other local authorities, and what plans have they for bringing allotments forward because there is no question or doubt that the demand for allotments is growing day by day?
I turn to the question of rents and rates because here is an aspect of the allotment
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scene to which some attention should be given. Professor Thorpe suggested in his recommendations on page 223:
"Each tenant should be required to pay a fair rent, giving power to the Authority to allow a reduction of 50 per cent. in the rent of any tenant who in its opinion merits concesionary treatment."
Here is an opportunity for local authorities to charge a realistic rent on the majority of their plots, but to make special concessions for the very large number of pensioners and others, such as the disabled, who most certainly deserve to be considered in the long waiting list. Professor Thorpe also recommended that no water rate should be levied, and no rates on the structures, be they pigeon crees or glasshouses, erected on those sites.
Finally, we come to a question of the legislative options. We have facing us, growling at us, the seven Acts on the Statute Book. The first option I suppose will be to leave them well alone and do nothing—a counsel of despair if ever there was one. The second option is to consolidate the operative parts into a single Act; thirdly, to consolidate and add amendments; fourthly, to add a new Act, making a total of eight Acts on the Statute Book in all. But the fifth, and, I think, the best recommendation of the Thorpe Committee, was to repeal the seven Acts in toto and to replace them with a single new Act. The sixth option they suggested would be to repeal the seven Acts and replace them with nothing. That sixth and final one they rejected out of hand because within the Statute Book's seven Acts at the moment there are valuable protections both for the statutory allotment holders and for the local authorities.
I think that we are well aware that rust and weeds among the legislation are such considerable factors that they may be preventing both Her Majesty's Government and local authorities from taking active steps. But if your Lordships have been persuaded by the few remarks that I have made this afternoon and, most significantly, have been encouraged by the views of the noble Lord. Lord Wallace of Coslany, on the role of allotments in the life of the population, and especially by what my noble friend Lady-Dudley said, I think your Lordships will

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feel that there is a burden upon Her Majesty's Government to do something.
3.56 p.m.
Lord BROADBRIDGE: My Lords, I crave your indulgence during this, my first dig in your Lordships' House, and immediately declare my interest in this matter. I am the holder of an allotment, one of standard size, that is 10 rods or 300 square yards and, indeed, located not far from this House. Perhaps it would be helpful in concentrating the minds of noble Lords if I were to say that I measured this Chamber one evening last week—when I hope no one was watching—and I am able to report that, from the Bar to the Throne, it occupies about 500 square yards, making it equivalent to nearly two allotment plots of the commonest size.
In this important matter of the encouragement of provision of allotment plots we are in need of a policy for the allotment, or leisure garden as it is increasingly coming to be called. There is no lack of a policy document: we have it in the 1969 Report of the Departmental Committee of Inquiry into Allotments—as we have just heard from the noble Lord, Lord Sandys—widely known as the Thorpe Report after its Chairman, Professor Thorpe. The Report is here in my hand, and Professor Thorpe is in the Gallery listening to our debate. There is some allotment legislation, as we have heard—the seven allotment Acts—but legislation is in this case not of its essence a policy. Perhaps the ultimate objective should be freedom from legislation, but for reasons I shall mention later I believe we need stricter legislation to enforce provision of allotment plots in the short term. The seven Allotment Acts comprising the present operative legislation, as we have heard, do not manage to give even a general definition of the word, "allotment"—at least not a statutory definition—the first having been enacted in 1908 and the last in 1950.
However, a fundamental change in attitude to the allotment is taking place and, if for no other reason, we need a policy backed by legislation to acknowledge and encourage this. The Allotment Acts, except perhaps that of 1950, were designed to provide and administer the allotment plot as an act of charity. This economic motive is not now of prime
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concern, although the present estimate of 450,000 allotments yielding produce to a retail value of up to about £100 each could contribute, as we have heard, some £45 million to our people and our economy; about £30 million might be a more realistic estimate of likely actual achievement.
Allotments are now in demand primarily for leisure and recreational requirements. Thorpe found 45·1 per cent. of holders placed one of the reasons "for physical recreation" and "for the love of gardening as a hobby" first as their reasons for having an allotment. They are certainly my own reasons. This conclusion of the Committee was based on a survey sent to one in five of all allotment holders and is statistically valid nationally. Although conducted in the late 1960s it is confirmed by subsequent evidence, and we should not he distracted by the claims of some that the so-called wine and cheese set are taking over—or, as a well known satirical magazine captioned a cartoon recently, "Darling, I wish we were rich enough to grow our own vegetables." This is amusing, but irrelevant froth.
On a fine day, particularly to somebody living in an inner city environment, as I do (I live in Islington) there is something invigorating, stimulating and unashamedly joyful in digging the land, smelling the earth, planting seeds and seeing some of them come up. The more so if you live on the 16th floor and your contact with the ground is with tarmac, concrete and car exhaust fumes. It is most important seriously to establish this recreation and love of gardening motivation. It is not new; the Penny Magazine in 1845 said:
"…but the object of making such allotments is moral rather than economic: the cultivation of a few vegetables and flowers is a pleasing occupation…".
However, more recently, two world wars and the Dig for Victory campaign have understandably obscured these underlying motivations with justifiable, indeed laudable, but temporary, economic motivations. Although not new, the recreational motivation for having an allotment is the developing one. As the Minister said in another place in 1973:
"The increased demand is due to changes in leisure habits coupled with the fact that Birmingham, Bristol, Coventry, Sheffield, Waltham Forest and Brent have gone ahead with the provision of a new type of allotment—the leisure garden—recommended by the

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Thorpe Committee".—[Official Report, Commons, 14/6/73, col. 1862.]
The strength of the movement is thus underlined by this action without a policy or new legislation, but we need encouragement all the more.
This is a limited debate and because recreation is the primary and developing motivation for having an allotment, I shall confine my remarks to this aspect of the subject. No organisation with an established name changes that name readily. It is significant, therefore, that the national body representing leisure gardeners changed its name in 1974 from the National Allotments and Gardens Society to its present title, the National Society of Leisure Gardeners. I am pleased to say that the chairman and secretary are both here today to hear our debate.
What is now needed to meet this recreational trend is legislative provision, backed by good design. After publication of the Thorpe Report in 1969, the Leisure Gardens Research Unit at Birmingham University received an immediate request from Birmingham Council, the largest British allotments authority, to re-design the Russell Road/Moor Green Farm site. This has become a prototype for many others. Characteristic features are the changing of the traditional rectilinear-plot layout into an attractive leisure garden by, for example, making the plots radiate from curved roads and walkways with central greens, planned disposition of summerhouses and sitting out areas, and even a community centre with a play area for small children. Ornamental trees and shrubs are included and the public are, by invitation, allowed to walk through the site. The Birmingham and District Allotments Council as a result received many requests to visit this leisure garden from groups of plot-holders, councillors and parks and allotment officers from other areas. Professor Thorpe and his co-workers showed me several leisure garden sites in Birmingham last week, and I commend them to your Lordships.
This does not mean that plot-holders are going to be overtaken and processed by some sort of leisure machine for organised pleasure. To make the point, my own allotment has no toilet facilities,
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which make a day's gardening a poor proposition for my wife and two little girls. Only 22·3 per cent., or about one in five, of all sites belonging to allotment associations affiliated to the NAGS, as it then was, had any such facilities in the late 1960s. This simple but basic fact was quoted by these holders as the second most important difficulty in cultivating and enjoying their allotment gardens. Of these holders, 91·7 per cent. were married and 66·3 per cent. had children living at home. Also, we have only a very few water taps and hoses are strictly forbidden. These are but two examples of conditions which both reduce pleasure and make cultivation inefficient. I nearly went crazy during last year's dry summer—the loneliness of the long-distance runner with a watering can!
Early pioneers of leisure gardens, mentioned earlier, have been followed in congested London by Greenwich and Croydon, which have had discussions with the Leisure Gardens Research Unit about providing re-fashioned and improved sites. The NSLG has been told by associations abroad that in many aspects of site design—in particular, the break from monotonous rectilinearity—our new sites are ahead of Continental thinking. They have been studied by Japanese and West German television as well as by several organisations in the United States.
This year, 1976, is one of opportunity for our leisure garden movement. The choice of Britain as the centre for the biennial conference of Die Grüne Internationale, whose English name is the International Federation of Leisure Gardeners, means that we can show the expected 1,000 delegates what we are doing. The Government have generously provided a reception at the National Exhibition Centre and the officers would, I know, be grateful for any further support, perhaps along the lines of that given by the Dutch Government, who met half the cost of the 1974 Amsterdam conference. The potential international sales arising from the associated large exhibition of horticultural equipment might be further justification for more assistance.
While speaking of encouragement and support, it may be mentioned that delicate negotiations have been going on with the Minister for Sport and Recreation for a permanent subsidy for the NSLG. I must not trample on these with

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my maiden gardening boots, but I should like to say how much such support would be appreciated and used. In view of these protracted negotiations and the possible important future role of leisure gardens in the sphere of recreation and mental relaxation, it is sad to have to state as a matter of record that the NSLG was not circulated with the recent Consultative Document prepared by the DOE on the subject of the formation of Regional Councils for Sport and Recreation to replace the Regional Sports Councils. Nor did the possible contribution of leisure gardens receive a mention in the recent paper, Food From Our Own Resources.lb/>
The Motion before us this afternoon suggests the restoration of waste land as a means of provision. Perhaps British Rail, which, as we have heard, reduced its allotment provision from almost 75,000 plots in 1950 at a rate of about 3,000 per annum to 26,000 in 1967, could be persuaded to provide again on a greater scale on its huge statutory land holding; for example, by extension backwards of adjacent back garden fences towards the permanent way. Similarly, the British Waterways Board's canalsides and the National Coal Board's areas reserved for future tipping might supplement this. The inherent difficulty of the Friends of the Earth's present plans for the community running of unwanted back gardens is that the period of land tenure is likely to be transitory, although it is an interesting initiative. Local authorities might also make available land reserved for open spaces but not yet scheduled for conversion. However, the Brains' recommendations on local government management and structure mean that, at the local authority level, leisure gardeners have to compete for their recreation committee's time and funds, particularly with sport, a justifiably popular recreation offering stiff competition.
Legislation to encourage the provision of leisure gardens is desirable both corporately and to meet individual problems. The 1972 Local Government Act removed the statutory default powers of the Secretary of State on allotment authorities. The statutory obligations on an authority to appoint allotment committees have also been removed. Until local authorities have made such provision of land for recreational gardening that parity is
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achieved with that made for other forms of recreation, a measure of greater compulsion than exists at present should be placed on them. I hope that structure plans will in future say more about proposed provision. A few do—for example, Birmingham—but on the whole the structure plan, which commonly covers a very large area, has been considered too blunt an instrument, while in the local authority detailed area plan it is likely to be assumed that somebody else is going to provide, especially in densely urban areas where housing need is also so important. As a result, the leisure garden may, between the two, become forgotten.
There is no need to be unduly apprehensive about specifying leisure gardens in an area plan. If the present increase in demand were to prove a flash in the pan, which I do not think it will, then the land can be very quickly re-zoned for building; the ex-tenants will probably have even levelled it for the builder. Far easier to re-zone a leisure garden that is not wanted and effect the change of use than to know what to do with, for example, a lot of highly rigid office buildings that nobody wants. All this is corporate legislation.
There is an individual matter which I wish briefly to mention. It would be of great encouragement if leisure garden and allotment societies could specifically be exempted or relieved from value added tax on purchases of power-driven gardening implements, their spare parts and servicing, such as rotavators. Tax on these is at the recently increased 25 per cent. level. Relief on their sales from site shops of seed, fertiliser and the like similar to that which applies to annual sales of over £5,000 would also help. May I remind your Lordships that the price of seed potatoes is now six times what is was when VAT was introduced?
I said in opening that, since 1969, successive Governments have had a policy document—the Thorpe Report—but little policy. The policy stems, or could stem, from the Report's 48 principal recommendations, the first two of which are for a retention of a measure of compulsion in the provision of land and for the repeal and replacement of existing legislation. The compulsion to provide is still there, but only if the resident specifically asks for it first—a rather back-to-front situation. Anticipated legislation has

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been the subject of seven Ministerial Statements in another place, starting with one on 14th April 1970, which stated that further action on the Thorpe Report would be decided on when the comments of interested parties had been received and examined, and concluding, so far as I am aware, with the statement on 7th November 1974 that—and this refers to the Secretary of State for the Environment—
"My right honourable friend is reviewing his general policy on allotments in the light of the recommendations made by the Thorpe Committee of Inquiry into Allotments…"—[Official Report, Commons, 7/11/74; col. 222.]
That was a year and a half ago, since when, as we heard from the noble Lord, Lord Sandys, demand has risen from 27,000 plots to nearly 60,000.
We allotment holders—or "leisure gardeners" as many of us now like to be called—are not a militant body. Like Winston Churchill, writing of his years at Chartwell between the world wars, we wish simply to dwell at peace in our habitation and to get on with our digging. By encouragement, we here have the opportunity to bring pleasure to hundreds of thousands today and maybe to millions tomorrow. I believe it was Churchill, again, who, speaking of realising our natural resources, observed that we are an island built on coal and surrounded by fish.
A Noble Lord: It was Nye Bevan, my Lords.
Lord BROADBRIDGE: My Lords, I thank the noble Lord for that correction. Is it too much to hope that in, say, 10 years' time we may add the words, "and carpeted by leisure gardens"?
4.13 p.m.
Lord GISBOROUGH: My Lords, it is a very happy duty to follow the noble Lord, Lord Broadbridge. His was a most measured and well-researched speech and it contained much good sense. I believe that one might call it a great "House of Lords speech". If that was the quality of the noble Lord's maiden speech, what may we expect when he has more experience? I should like also to congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Dudley, on her fresh ideas. I was particularly happy that she mentioned the planting of trees and the provision of playgrounds. I
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hope we shall often see both the noble Baroness and the noble Lord in the House and hear them speak.
I must declare an interest in this matter because not only do I, though I am not an allotment holder, grow my own vegetables, but I am an allotment landlord. I therefore see the matter from both sides. For many years, allotment holders have suffered from being the first to have their land taken for development, being on the edge of towns. This has caused inconvenience bordering on distress. However, during their relocation, it has been noticeable how many allotment holders have had multiple plots and were keeping pigs, carrying out car repairs and running garages, sawmills and other occupations of that nature. I must specifically exclude pigeons from criticism, as that occupation is so well established and is in great demand, though I believe that much progress and benefit could be achieved by the encouragement of centralised lofts to reduce the space required and to help security against vandalism, which has become quite a problem.
Apart from pigeons, the uses which I have mentioned are totally alien to the basic purposes for which allotments were first intended. They deny the land to others who would use it for food production. One of the reasons for the growth of these uses has been the unrealistically low level of rents payable for allotments. This encouraged multi-occupation, low production and consequent wastage of land in a great number of cases. Further, the high cost of collecting low rents from multitudinous tenants has discouraged the provision of new land for allotments and it may well contribute to the idle acres which we have heard about from the noble Lord, Lord Sandys.
The corollary is that the raising of rents will encourage the provision of more land and will allow more people to have allotments. Also, payment of realistic rents will encourage the tenants to use the allotments to the full and to achieve maximum production. There is, of course, no control over these rents other than the counter-productive feeling that they should be kept low.
One of the chief problems of higher production is the provision of adequate water supplies. This has been mentioned

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over and over again. The council or other landlord could easily provide a mains supply and recoup themselves from the realistic rent, but a problem arises when the water is left running or a burst occurs. In a few weeks, the water bill becomes astronomical. The water is then turned off and the allotment holder suffers. I do not know the answer to this but, somehow or another, the allotment holder must be provided with access to water without an open-ended liability upon the landlord for wastage. Perhaps the Allotment Holders' Association should work out an agreement, acceptable to landlords and tenants, to enable local associations to enter into an agreement with their landlords to achieve the amenities which they require while at the same time accepting the responsibilities which they themselves must shoulder. I shall be interested to hear whether the Allotment Holders' Association has an answer to this problem.
Land which is not at present used often suffers from poor drainage and is therefore left derelict. A Ministry grant is available to drain farmland, yet the drainage of land for allotments is not eligible. As the potential food production from allotments far exceeds the production from farming proportionate to its acreage, drainage grants should surely be extended to cover new allotment land. I hope that the Minister may be able to give encouragement on this point, as also on the question of scrub clearance grants where appropriate.
My final point refers to amenity. We constantly see allotments which are full of semi-derelict, black huts, each worse than the next and made of all sorts of scrap material. They form an eyesore to the community and are often in full view of nearby houses. Compare that with Holland, where I have seen neat rows of allotment buildings, all painted in bright, clean colours and forming an attractive picture. The control of and attention to amenity by allotment holders in this country must at present be totally inadequate; but the need for huts is there and must be accepted, particularly when the land is not close to the holders' houses.
It is indisputably necessary to provide more adequately serviced allotments. The waiting lists are there, and, particularly in these times of high food costs,
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increased unemployment and greater leisure, the demand should be met by encouraging their provision. However, thought must be given to the problems to ensure that future land allocated is an asset not only to the tenants but also to all aspects of amenity.
4.19 p.m.
Lord DAVIES of LEEK: My Lords, if I may trespass upon the patience of the House and apologise for not having put down my name, may I nevertheless say that the inspiration of my noble friend's debate had a magnetic effect on me and has kept me here right through. Despite the fact that it may seem an insignificant debate, I consider the subject to be one of the greatest importance in relation to this country's inflationary problems.
As a person who was brought up as a wild country boy and who never bought a sprig of holly in his life, but went to cut it, I do not make all this fuss about water. On the old man's farm and on the land around, we had a few old empty beer barrels which were filled with water during the rainy season. One can always find the answer to securing a water supply, even in the smallest home garden or allotment, if one makes provision. Noble Lords need not get too hot under the collar about local authorities not supplying water, therefore, when, with a little intelligence, those of us who have lived in dry parts of the world know that, if we will collect it, the water is there. Nevertheless, I am completely on the side of people who want recognition of these allotments.
I wish to say in passing how much I enjoyed the maiden speeches of the noble Baroness, Lady Dudley, and the noble Lord, Lord Broadbridge. Clearly much research was put into those speeches, and they will prove to be a much more valuable contribution to the debate than will my speech. I want to get rid of some of the pseudo-sepulchral gentility of suburbia in regard to allotments and the backs of houses. Consider, my Lords, the pathetic by-laws made by local authorities. I suspect that about three-quarters of those councillors who pass by-laws prohibiting the keeping of pigeons, poultry or chickens are frightened to death of the strident cry of a cockerel in the morning. The sound of a cockerel is becoming as scarce as the sight of

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a beautiful violet or cowslip. Cockerels, cowslips and violets are disappearing from many people's lives. Those people brought up in high rise flats do not know the realities of living. Much of today's vandalism and vagabondage, with louts going around the streets of Britain, arises from the fact that mankind is divorcing itself from the sources of life and energy; namely, the land and the production of food.
I should like to see, if only for a transitional period during inflation, a lifting of many of these pseudo local bylaws which prevent a man keeping a few chickens in the back yard. The eggs we buy today are anaemic-looking. One cannot raise gladiators, all-in wrestlers, or people on the kind of eggs sold in the shops today. For heaven's sake, let Britain be free and let our housewives have a few chickens in the back yard. What is the matter with the country? I agree with what my noble friend says about this, and I again thank him for raising this matter.
I wish to make two further points. I found one of the remarks of the noble Baroness, Lady Dudley, rather fascinating and constructive, if a little off-beat. She asked whether authority could sometimes lay aside pieces of land for young couples who are to get married and who have the courage and the guts—if I might use that unparliamentary phrase—to start building a house themselves, brick by brick and, at the same time, retain a little piece of land for growing food. Some of the regulations should be loosened, because our land and our heritage is one of the most precious things we possess.
I wish to mention one other matter before I sit down. The artificiality of life could be relieved by a spread of the provision of allotments and the provision and the restoration of waste land. I point out to my noble friend who is to reply to the debate that there has been a cry from both sides of the House concerning grants. Grants might be given for recreational activities and to bodies such as rugby and football clubs. I do not mind grants going to rugby clubs. Here is an avenue where a few million pounds spent by the Government, whatever their shade of politics may be, would mean a return of a
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thousand-fold to the country in terms of the value of what is produced. There is another factor to be considered; namely, the wonderful social effect which would be achieved through people growing things together.
The noble Lord who spoke from the Front Bench opposite made a charming speech, but I thought it was rather sad when he referred to allotments on railway property. Was the figure 75,000? The British railwayman was one of the finest "allotmenteers"—I do not know whether that word is in the dictionary, but everybody knows what it means—in the land. His allotments were beautiful to see. Today, all that has disappeared. I do not know whether Dr. Beechingor—or anybody else—thought about this when he closed some of the railway lines. I cannot measure the value of all this in terms of food, but I hope that people might again be able to develop allotment plots, perhaps on old railway sidings, even in areas near towns, where railways have closed. There is a lovely story about an old guard in Wales whom we used to call "Dai Swallow" because he had a big red nose through swallowing too much. He was a great flower and vegetable grower. It is said that when he retired he was presented with an old railway carriage. One day he was found smoking outside the carriage. People asked: "Dai, why haven't you gone inside?" He said: "The damn silly people presented me with a non-smoker!"
In the wicked life which I led in Wales during the depression years in the 1930s, the allotment huts formed a great social centre. Occasionally, there was, I admit, an illegal game of crown and anchor, or an illegal game of cards. But there was also much happiness which enabled people in the North-East of England, in parts of Scotland, and in the mining valleys to get through the depression years. In that time, during the strikes, people played rugby and football with the police. Much of the balance which was achieved was due to the fact that 80 to 90 per cent. of the people at home produced between 70 and 100 per cent. of their needs in the form of vegetables, poultry, and other food. Now we have the electric tin opener and the magic of a huge deep freezer. Artificiality is one of the things which are undermining what was at one time true Britishness.
4.26 p.m.
Baroness BIRK: My Lords, it is quite clear from the speeches of all who have taken part in this debate how grateful we all are to my noble friend Lord Wallace of Coslany for initiating it. It is also interesting to consider how timely and topical this debate is. There were references to it yesterday on the "Today" programme, and it has been mentioned in the newspapers. It is also extremely British that, at this moment when there is so much excitement in the general political pattern of our life, we should be able to discuss this topic and find, too, a return-to-the-earth feeling. This matter has been discussed this afternoon with much interest and passion.
First, I wish to add my congratulations to those already extended to the two maiden speakers, the noble Baroness, Lady Dudley, and the noble Lord, Lord Broadbridge. They made such interesting speeches, giving specific examples from their personal experience. The noble Lord, Lord Broadbridge, took the opportunity—although I do not think that I shall be able to give him a specific answer—of asking in the most charming way for more money for the allotment movement. I shall certainly pass on his request to my right honourable friend in another place, the Minister who is responsible for sport and recreation.
We are all agreed that the contribution from allotments or leisure gardens to our total food supply is very small; that is, in the region of 2 per cent. But this is quite a different matter from the argument regarding the saving to the family. As a fairly recent recruit to the kitchen garden—not an allotment—I believe that today there is a considerable economic saving to the family. It is probably much greater than it was at the time of the excellent Report of the Thorpe Committee. The fresh ideas of that Committee helped to lift and enliven the whole image of the allotment movement and gave it a new spirit. Although many of the recommendations of the Committee have not been implemented in legislative form, it is doing the Report less than justice to say, as the noble Lord, Lord Sandys, said, that it is accumulating dust on a shelf, because much of what was recommended has infiltrated into the whole movement, the whole spirit, and the whole approach.
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I go further and say that with regard to the surge which has developed, which has come from a number of factors, including inflation, which has been referred to by many noble Lords, the jumping off ground for a great deal of the increase in interest and the putting of that increase into practice was triggered off by the Thorpe Report. So I do not think Professor Thorpe need feel too depressed that it takes many years (in fact, it always does, does it not, with Government Reports?) for it to be implemented in firm or statutory terms.
Secondly, I think we are all very much more health conscious and probably eat more vegetables more willingly than we did before. I certainly eat more vegetables than I did as a child. I think one of the factors is the increase in the number of home freezers, which means that people find that they themselves can freeze and store what they grow which is surplus to their daily demand. Again, I can speak only from my personal experience, which is that when you grow and freeze your own vegetables they certainly taste quite different from the frozen vegetables which you buy. I also agree with my noble friend Lord Davies of Leek, who again had us spellbound by his wonderful alliteration and rhetoric. He referred to vandalism, and to trying to turn the energy behind the violence into more productive and creative channels. I believe there is no doubt that there is an urgent need, which I think people are expressing—it has been expressed in different ways in this House and it has been expressed all over the country—to find a counterbalance to the technological achievements of our sophisticated society, which make our lives enormously complicated.
I think a return to the land in this particular form fulfils many physical and emotional needs as well. It is an antidote to sitting in an office all day or to standing in a factory; it is an antidote to the tensions of driving a car or commuting, whether on road or by rail; and it is an antidote to the placid leisure activity of watching television. If Mrs. Whitehouse is so concerned about the programmes we watch I think she might do more positive good by encouraging viewers to switch off their sets and get out of their chairs and into the garden or allotment. I was encouraged in this view when the

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noble Lord, Lord Broadbridge, reminded us of the moral aspects of gardening.
People are also more conscious of their health, particularly in middle age, and gardening, especially when it produces the edible as well as the beautiful, can be a way of preventing a number of the contemporary ailments, which have statistically increased. "I dig it, man" is a contemporary expression which has nothing whatever to do with the soil. If "I dig it, man" could go back to its basic meaning of using a spade, it would be a more productive use of language. In the recent intimate revelations, which I followed with tremendous interest, about what people say to their plants, I have not noticed that anyone talks to their vegetables. I hope there is not a class consciousness which puts the flower higher up the social scale than the vegetable in terms of communication and address. Speaking for myself, I find that if I say, "Grow, grow" even to a daffodil it just sort of nods its head over, goes to sleep and wilts; and, being a person who is inclined (I put it down to a generosity of nature) to over-water everything, I cannot put myself forward as a pattern for a successful grower.
But the basic problem, which I think has been referred to by most noble Lords—or, if it has not, I shall remind them of it—is that our land is limited and that tile demands for land for housing, shopping centres, schools and hospitals grow all the time. It is paradoxical that as our built-up environment increases its amenities and its social services we deprive ourselves of other things which are essential to our quality of life. My noble friend Lord Wallace referred specifically to our building policy, which of course brings in the whole question of the problem of density. I am very happy to say that for all sorts of other reasons, mainly visual and social, we are moving away from the tower block, because we are now finding that it is possible, when building in a much more comfortable and acceptable way, to create the same density and at the same time to give the people not only better living conditions but also the opportunity to use a piece of ground, however small it may be.
Although this debate is concerned with allotments, I think it involves the whole subject of people working in their own
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gardens; and, however small the amount there are many people who seem to be able to perform miracles with a piece of ground, even in the centre of London. I think that if one starts there as well and encourages people, there is an infection, I think, which is a very happy one, because if people see that their neighbours have a nice tidy garden or are growing vegetables, and that it seems to work, then they are often inclined to follow suit. I do not think we should divide the framework of the subject between gardens and allotments, or leisure gardens.
The land which is needed for a wide variety of recreation is also needed for all sorts of other things, and this is why planning is so important, whether we are planning for our development or planning for the whole of our land. The noble Lord, Lord Broadbridge, quite rightly referred to structure plans and local plans, in which leisure gardens or allotments, whatever we want to call them, should certainly be among the recreational facilities. The noble Lord, Lord Sandys, from the Opposition Front Bench, was the only one to put a political gardening boot into this when he referred, not surprisingly, to the Community Land Act. Perhaps I could tell him, with the greatest respect, that he is talking absolute nonsense. The whole point is that one of the bases for the Community Land Act, and the philosophy behind it, is not only the question of current use value by means of the development land tax, but that it makes positive planning possible. Now when you are planning a neighbourhood or an area, this does not mean merely the development; it also means planning for your recreational needs and for the other needs of the community.
The fact is that even without the Community Land Act, public bodies, including local authorities, have always kept a certain amount of land back. They have had to do so. You cannot suddenly decide on a plan without having some land which you can use. In fact, I see it in entirely the reverse way: that because, under the Act, local authorities will have the opportunity to plan positively, and to plan not only where buildings should be but where the recreational areas should be, I would certainly hope to see more leisure gardens or more plots for gardening.
Lord SANDYS: My Lords, while being reassured by what the noble Baroness has said in regard to the allocation of land for this specific purpose, I think that she is perhaps trespassing on your Lordships' credulity a little, because during our discussions on the Community Land Bill no mention was made of allotments. I have been through the debates.
Baroness BIRK: My Lords, there was no need to make any reference to allotments. The noble Lord could get up and say that the Community Land Act was going to affect the birthrate, but that would not mean that it came into the discussions on the Community Land Bill. I did not bring in the subject of allotments; the noble Lord brought it in, and I am explaining why he is wrong about it and that in fact the reverse could be the case.
I think that one of the most interesting and inspiring points that arose from Professor Thorpe's Committee was the changing of the dreary-sounding name "allotment", the sound of which, with all its historic connotations, is so downbeat, to the very much more interesting and uplifting phrase of "leisure gardens". That these should be included in local authority plans for the use of their land is something which—and here I agree with every noble Lord who has spoken—should be pressed on every occasion. Certainly it has Government support. The type of leisure garden, like the one at Coventry designed by Professor Thorpe and Elizabeth Galloway, is a wonderful combination of productive activity, communal facilities and visual satisfaction. However, we must be realistic and accept that lack of both land and finance means that these must be limited for the time being. The important thing is that where possible the consciousness of the need for them should be built into structure plans and local authorities' own local plans, even if it means that they cannot be on an ambitious basis. A number of authorities have done a great deal in this direction in different ways; even if, again, it often has to be less ambitious.
The noble Lord, Lord Sandys, talked about London and said that if half the 20,000 acres of derelict land was used for allotments—about 10,000 acres—it would result in about 160,000 allotment holders. The problem about this is not
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the arithmetic but the fact that in September 1974 10,222 people in London wanted allotments. So this is the other side of the picture: that there is no point—in fact, it would be quite wrong, when there is a great demand for playgrounds and other facilities—in designating land for allotments if the demand is not there. This would be not only counter-productive, but wrong in local government terms. There are examples such as Haringey, which has converted a patch of derelict land at Wood Green into allotments. This has been converted by 12 young men, recruited by means of a grant from the Manpower Services Commission. Walsall Recreation Committee is spending £2,000 on providing 41 allotments on part of the airport sports ground site, which will be in use until the site is developed in ten years' time.
Here, I believe, there is great scope for authorities to rent out land which will be needed for other use, but not for some time; so that it can be used in this way. I see the problems which have been stated this afternoon and particularly that of the elderly person who wants to go on with the same patch of ground. I accept that. But there is a far greater degree of mobility in the country today, particularly among young people. If local authorities could give security of tenure for up to five years, it would surely be better than leaving the land visually unsightly, derelict and unused. I believe there is great scope for utilising the gardens of houses which have been bought by the local authorities and which cannot be rehabilitated or redeveloped for the time being. This is something which I hope local authorities will bear in mind.
I feel that one of the reasons why allotments fall into ugly dereliction is that very often, because of their size, they are too much for a man or woman alone to manage. Like the noble Lord, Lord Broadbridge, yesterday I was pacing my own office deciding that a plot of that size was far too big for anybody but an expert gardener to garden. It is not that the office is so enormous; but so much work would have to be put into it. I think that the general size of allotments is very often too large for the individual person, or even a family, to work in. I was delighted when my noble friend Lord Wallace of Coslany referred to the

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number of women working their allotments because I notice that, in 1966, Professor Thorpe's Committee found that about 97 per cent. of allotment holders were male. Since so many women are green-fingered, and now that we have the backing of the Sex Discrimination Act, this situation has obviously changed considerably—although I, personally, see a great many advantages in deciding what vegetables we should have and letting my husband deal with the production side of it.
I was moved by the story told by my noble friend Lord Wallace of Coslany. Going out on a summer evening cutting lettuces is exactly what I do, but I have not had to have the trouble of planting and growing them. Sometimes I am forced into watering them, but I believe that is having the best of both horticultural worlds. Some councils are reducing their allotments in size but a great deal more could be done to meet the demand. Another way of getting maximum use and satisfying more people is for plot-holders to share. Some councils are doing this. I am aware of the scheme of the Friends of the Earth. There are a great many advantages but, as I am sure they appreciate, it has to be based on great good will and understanding, otherwise a great many problems can arise over this and lead even to legal action if carried too far. This is something which perhaps could be looked at in terms of the way in which some young people today have founded communes for living, although not many people would want to take the idea that far. But it could be a commune approach on the agrarian side.
When we come to the difficult problem of waste land, derelict land and reclamation land, it is for the local authorities to survey their areas and to search out land which could be acquired either by purchase or lease and laid out for allotments. They would obviously need to pay particular attention to land which is neglected, uncared for and obviously underused or not presently used for any purpose. In some parts there may be a good deal of land of this kind which could usefully be brought into use for allotments. We cannot afford to let such areas stand idle and be a blot on the local environment. Waste land is a fluctuating and shifting class of land and it is the local authorities, with their local knowledge,
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who are best equipped to identify areas of this kind which would be best used for allotments. The Government's job, certainly at this time, is to encourage so far as we can this aspect of land use by the local authorities.
Where the dereliction—and this was one of the points raised by the noble Lord, Lord Sandys—is the result of industrial or other development, Government grants are available to local authorities for reclaiming such areas. This scheme includes sites such as disused spoil heaps, worked-out mineral excavations, abandoned industrial installations, land damaged by mining subsidence and disused railway land. But it does not cover land which may be regarded as derelict from natural causes such as marshland and moorland.
In the 1974–75 financial year about £4,600,000 was paid in Government grants for schemes of this kind. Much of the land reclaimed was used for open spaces, parks and playing fields, but I see no reason why parts of such reclaimed land should not be made available for allotments where the land is suitable for spade cultivation. Since 1964 local authorities have been carrying out regular surveys of derelict areas of the kinds which I have mentioned, and the last survey was in 1974. Derelict land is land so changed by industrial or other development that it is incapable of being used for other purposes. My Department pays a grant towards this, as I have already pointed out.
The noble Lord asked whether land could be further protected for use as allotments. Where land is vested in local authorities for allotments—that is to say, it is purchased or appropriated for that purpose—the consent of the Secretary of State is required if it is to be sold, used for another reason or disposed of for other purposes. The consent will not be given unless the Secretary of State is satisfied that adequate provision will be made for those plot holders who have been displaced or that such provision is unnecessary or no longer practical. With non-statutory land, consent is not required where allotments are provided by a local authority on land which is held for other purposes, and it is here that there is the competing demand to which I referred before. It is important that pressure should come from the

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grass roots to the local authorities. Demands should be made to the local authorities to see that some of the land free for other purposes, other than developments, should include allotments.
The point about legislation was raised by several noble Lords, and the noble Lord, Lord Sandys, read out various alternatives and options in the Thorpe Report. It is true that the problem here is a question, as always, of Parliamentary time. But I do not believe that we need be so depressed as to call it "a counsel of despair", as the noble Lord, Lord Sandys, did, because, as I have pointed out and as has been indicated by various speakers, a great deal can be done within the existing legislation. But when Parliamentary time permits—and I cannot say when that will be—we shall be introducing further legislation on allotments to rationalise the existing complicated legal code which is contained in the various Acts from 1908 to 1950. Whether or not that will be an entirely new Act will depend on how it is examined at the moment. I must point out to the noble Lord, Lord Sandys, that the question regarding Parliamentary time applies to every Government. The Party opposite evidently did not find time to do it between 1970 and 1974.
Lord SANDYS: My Lords, it was a Report commissioned by the Party of the noble Baroness.
Baroness BIRK: Yes, my Lords; but I am always ready to use a good idea produced by somebody else, and this is what we are discussing this afternoon. As we can tell from the debate, and in reading the Thorpe Report, this matter crosses Party lines completely. The Committee of Inquiry was set up by a Labour Government. It would have been a good idea to implement its findings, as has been shown by the good will and interest and all the things the noble Lord has said this afternoon. The Party opposite could have taken the credit for implementing it. What a lost opportunity!
When we consider what can be done, it comes down to pressing local authorities which are not as forward as they might be to do this, taking into account the varying amounts of land available, the whole question of voluntary bodies and the good will that is necessary. The Friends of the Earth and other bodies
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with similar objectives are pressing local authorities all the time to search out derelict areas and make them available. There are the voluntary organisations such as the National Society of Leisure Gardeners and the London Association of Recreational Gardeners. All these bodies have been and are working together. There are a great many other voluntary bodies which could also participate in this area without necessarily being basically horticultural or gardening organisations.
One of the important things my Department did was to indicate to the Manpower Services Commission, funded by the Government to mount a job creation programme in high unemployment areas, that within the environment field projects which conferred real social benefit should be given priority. This embraced the provision of recreational facilities including allotments. The Commission has already allocated over £106,000 to support projects in various areas to convert land into allotments and, in doing so, has created 85 new jobs. In addition, the Commission have financially supported a number of other projects for reclaiming derelict land which may be turned into allotments or used for food production at a later date. Two examples are in Middlesbrough and Liverpool.
We have had a great many suggestions and interesting points raised this afternoon in this debate. We are all much more aware of the possibilities that have been aired, and in listening to other people airing their opinions. Even without any further legislation, Orders in Council or regulations, a great deal can be done if there is the good will, participation, interest and the passion to do so.
4.58 p.m.
Lord WALLACE of COSLANY: My Lords, there is no doubt that we have had a really marvellous debate, which has been worthy of the House. It is unfortunate that we do not already have sound broadcasting, because this type of debate would be well received. We have had two excellent maiden speeches. The noble Baroness, Lady Dudley, made some pertinent points in a commendably brief maiden speech. The noble Lord, Lord Broadbridge, was very enthusiastic in an extensive and remarkably good maiden speech. I am not saying that in any

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patronising way. I said in my opening remarks that when one rose to speak in the House there was always an expert somewhere in the Chamber, but with due respect to the noble Lord, he showed the makings of an expert, particularly in this field. My noble friend Lord Davies of Leek livened up the proceedings, and I believe my "taste buds" remark brightened things up. We have had a debate which has brought forward a number of important social points.
We have had the reply from the Government. Naturally, we do not expect the moon when we get a reply from the Government, particularly when the noble Baroness has had things flung at her of which she has not been advised in advance. We have a great degree of satisfaction; we have even had the hint of legislation coming forward. We shall continue to press, and I have no doubt we shall press on very receptive ground indeed. We have sown the seed this afternoon; let us hope that it will not be long before Her Majesty's Government will let us see the harvest in the shape of some legislation and some prodding of local authorities.
I am very pleased indeed with the debate. I thank in particular the noble Lord, Lord Sandys, because he made a very useful contribution. I can forgive him for introducing a slight political note—that is fair enough—but the noble Baroness, Lady Birk, came back with a hefty punch to the jaw. So we shall have to see what happens later. We are a little ahead of time, but there is no point in continuing this excellent debate. Therefore, I beg leave to withdraw my Motion.
Motion for Papers, by leave, withdrawn.

SERVICES IN RURAL AREAS
5.0 p.m.
Lord DE CLIFFORD Lord DE CLIFFORD rose to call attention to the increasing difficulties being experienced by the population of rural areas caused by the diminishing services available to them and the hardships experienced as a result; and to move for Papers. The noble Lord said: My Lords, in introducing this short debate on rural areas I shall endeavour to keep my speech
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short because there are a number of other speakers to come and one does not want to run out of time. I am asking your Lordships this afternoon to consider people who, because of the smallness of their number, tend to be forgotten or ignored.
We hear a lot about commuter travel, London allowances and the shortage of buses in London, Manchester and elsewhere, but to someone who lives in the deep country it is surprising that it is possible to catch a bus within a few yards of one's home, or even to get a train. I should like your Lordships to remember that these are people who have rights. They are human beings who exist in situations which are not of their own choosing, but they have as many rights as anyone who lives in Dulwich or in the environs of Manchester or Sheffield. They do not have the advantages of town dwellers. They are people who may live up to two miles from the nearest shop, three to four miles from the nearest bus stop, and 15 miles or more from the nearest town where one can find anything approaching a supermarket.
If we look at what has happened over the last few years we see how the difficulties of these people have grown. The financial climate started to grow colder and money became shorter and, rather like a plant deprived of water, all the outside leaves have started to shrivel. Remote country areas were the first to feel the contraction. To my knowledge, the first to suffer was the maintenance of the small narrow roads which lead all over the country to people's homesteads and small villages. At one time these were maintained by local men who knew everybody, who kept the roads clean, cleared all the drains and the snowdrifts, and were generally full of knowledge about what went on in the local areas. Today what do we find? Someone from the local council drives around in a motor car and has a look at the roads. Then, having decided which of the minor roads needs something done to it, a collection of gentlemen, whom nobody knows, arrives and they proceed to do something which in many cases the local people consider unnecessary.
Next, the rail services vanished. There used to be little rural rail services running all over the country, but they

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vanished with the closures and the diminution of the money available to run them. Then matters became really difficult. The price of fuel rose and people were compelled to save energy, and the cry went out that private transport must be curtailed. That is comparatively painless to people who live within a few hundred yards of a bus stop, an underground or a commuter service, but what happens in the country? People still have to go two miles to the nearest shop, three to four miles to the nearest bus service and they have to use their own vehicles.
Many people in rural areas run smallholdings as a part-time occupation. What happened when the cost of fuel increased? Deliveries of foodstuffs instantly ceased. Some of these smallholdings run a few chickens, geese or sheep. Perhaps they fatten a few cattle during the summer and they all have to be fed. But when there is a minimum weight of delivery, it means that the food for these people must be fetched and they need their own private transport. The price of fuel rocketed up not only because of the increased cost but because of the imposition of additional taxation. People who live right away from the shops—some of them elderly—used to be served by mobile shops. They continue to be served by them, but such shops cannot be run at a loss. The man running a mobile shop has to pay for the fuel, the additional taxation, the vehicle tax and the additional insurance premiums, so what does he do? In the area which I know best, 2p is added to the price of a loaf of bread, 1p is added to the price of various tins of food, ½p is added to the price of tea and so on. This is especially hard on an ageing population living largely on a pension, which I shall talk about later.
On top of that, the economic climate gets colder and colder. Scattered around the country are small engineering workshops, perhaps employing no more than a dozen people. Orders became short for them and the men started to be laid off. But they still have to live in their houses away from all the facilities which townsmen have, and if they want to survive they must maintain their vehicles.
There were further threats as the climate became more chilly. In the area in which I live, one of the first threats which suddenly appeared was to our ambulance
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service. Sitting in our local town, Cleo-bury Mortimer, there is an ambulance which has two crews, both of them having lived there for many years. They know their area backwards. It was suggested that this ambulance service might be discontinued and moved to Kidderminster. The local people could not believe this. How is a man who lives in a carpet manufacturing town 17 to 25 miles away from the area he is to serve, to know how, on a dirty, dark, snowy night at two o'clock in the morning, to get to a small house, miles away from the main road, where there has been a severe accident? He may have to walk across a field. How is he to find that house? Similarly, if a lady's confinement is imminent at two o'clock in the morning it will be impossible for the Kidderminster ambulance service to find her. But the local service knows where she is. Those are the kind of threats which are causing country people great anxiety. Over one thousand signatures were collected from this area within 14 days, asking that this suggestion should not be proceeded with. We have not yet heard the result of that petition, but I hope that the local ambulance service will continue.
I turn to the postal service. This fascinated the area in which I live and no doubt it fascinated many other country areas. The introduction of the two-tier system made no impact on anybody, because the service we were getting by the former system was exactly the same as the one we were to get by the two-tier system of first and second class mail. I will admit that there was a slight upsurge in the delivery of first class mail; but it began to sag very quickly and the delivery of first class mail taking two or three days became quite normal. Then the Post Office announced that they were to do away with the second delivery. This was greeted with amazement in the deep rural areas. There never had been a second delivery! So how you do away with what is not there is one of those magician's tricks of which only Sir William Ryland could have thought.
The proposed withdrawal of the Sunday collection service will hit country people very hard. Due to the economies, at present the Saturday morning delivery in rural areas often collects the Saturday morning post. There is no Saturday afternoon collection. If, therefore, the

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Sunday collection is withdrawn, anybody who has received an important letter by first class post on Saturday morning has no hope of getting into the post an answer, or a request, until the following Monday. This is quite unacceptable. If you wish to put into the post a first class reply—which probably is not very often in deep rural areas, but it may well be necessary—you are deprived of the opportunity for it to reach its destination until the following Tuesday. I consider this a totally unacceptable situation.
Another matter has been drawn to my attention by a number of people, and I have seen it mentioned in the Press and elsewhere. In these deep rural areas many people run together a post office and village store. I am told by a number of people—no doubt the noble Baroness who is to reply will say whether or not I am wrong—that National Health Service contributions are deducted by the Post Office, and I am told also that the self-employed contributions are also deducted. Do these people get two beds in hospital when they are sick, and do they draw double benefits? I am sure that they do not, but I should be grateful if the noble Baroness could clear up this point because it affects a number of people and, in principle, I do not believe that it is right.
There are many more areas in which difficulties exist. I am pleased to see that the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Derby is to take part in this debate, because one of the areas of difficulty is the maintenance of the services of the Church. The grouping together of parishes has been carried out and is producing results. However, the difficulties under which the Church works are enormous and the people who require its services are those who are most devoted to it. I shall not, though, anticipate what the right reverend Prelate may have to say about that matter.
In this country the problem boils down to transport. In certain areas there may be one bus a week to take people to their local town. This bus may allow them to stay in that town for a couple of hours; then it will turn round and come back. There may be a workers' bus which runs in the early morning. People may have to walk a mile and a half in a snowstorm to a bus stop where there is no shelter
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in order to catch their bus, so they are soaked before they get to work. An elderly lady with an appointment to see her doctor or dentist in her local town who wants to do some shopping there as well, may have to walk three of four miles in a snowstorm, and then have to stand on the edge of the road waiting for the bus which has been delayed by the snow. And when she comes back she may then have to carry in her hands for the same distance, in these appalling conditions, anything between five and 10 lb. of goods.
Transport is a key factor in rural areas. I do not think that town and city people, who complain bitterly, realise how rural areas are suffering. I maintain that this country would not get by these days if it were not for the supreme community spirit which exists. People help each other and turn out at all hours of the day and night to assist those who are in trouble. It is not right that the Government should slap upon people increasing costs of transport such as to reduce their ability to give help over a wide area.
There is one other simple little matter. Many people live anything up to three-quarters of a mile away from the road, and in order to have their weekly or, more probably, fortnightly dustbin collection somebody has to take the bin down to the road. Nobody is objecting to the dustbin collection being only once a fortnight, but the fact that some elderly people may have to carry the bins down and cannot do that without the aid of their neighbours makes people sore. But the community spirit carries them over.
The deep rural communities are slowly getting older and older. The young people will not stay in the conditions which exist today. There is no entertainment for them, and even if there were, they could not get to it because of their numbers. My noble friend Lord Cranbrook, who unfortunately cannot be here today due to having had influenza, pointed out to me that in Suffolk the 1921 population of his village was 300; today, it is 200. Their schools are closed, their chapels are closed and their shop and their post office and their pub are all at risk of being closed because the population is diminishing.
In the past we have heard a number of remarks and suggestions that we might have post office bus services, and I

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believe experiments were carried out in that matter. The idea appears to have died. Perhaps the noble Baroness, Lady Stedman, can tell us whether or not it is being buried. Could we not find some method of running mini-buses? My noble friend Lord Cranbrook had probably an even better suggestion: he asked whether we could have cheap licences for taxis in rural areas. If I may add to his suggestion, perhaps we might have a relief on fuel tax for the running of these rural taxis, so that people might get together and organise one for their essential shopping. If we do not get rural bus services or some form of community transport there is no question but that the countryside will die.
I have spoken for well over the time I intended but, finally, I should like to pay a tribute to certain people. First, I pay a tribute to all the voluntary services that work in the deep countryside: the Meals-on-Wheels, the social car service and many others who are such a comfort to the elderly people and who ensure, for the benefit of the social services of the local authorities, that elderly people are kept in touch and their well-being is watched. I also wish to pay a tribute to the most valuable work which is done by the district nurses. Their help to the sick and convalescent in the countryside is unbelievable and their work is most valuable. I ask the noble Baroness, Lady Stedman, to ensure that, whatever is done to cut the finances for social services, the finances for these people should not be cut. My Lords, I beg to move for Papers.
5.25 p.m.
Viscount THURSO: My Lords, I am most grateful, as I am sure are all of us here this afternoon, to the noble Lord, Lord de Clifford, for initiating this debate in your Lordships' House. I have an interest in this in the sense that I live in a very sparsely populated rural part of the world and, in the terms and by the parameters used by the noble Lord, Lord de Clifford, I am unbelievably rural—truly rural, I might say. The area for which I mainly have responsibility and where I stay for the best part of my time is not two miles from the nearest shop, but 16 miles; it is not two miles from the nearest bus, but 16, and not five miles
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from the nearest town, but 25. Having got to the nearest town, the nearest large town with a supermarket is 135 miles away by road and 150 miles away by rail, which railway has been saved only by the furious activities of that famous Scotsman, Macpuff. So I feel that not only do I have an interest but also some knowledge of the subject.
At the same time as feeling for rural areas I feel that we have to make out a case for their preservation. I do not think that is difficult to do, but it should be done because I believe that rural communities are important to all of us. They are important to the country, and there are three main reasons for this. In the first place, they provide a large proportion of our food. Farming, which by its very nature takes place in rural areas, is down to its minimum in manpower. There is no area of endeavour in this country where productivity has more successfully pruned the manpower employed. Indeed, if we are going to increase the output from the countryside I believe there will have to be an effort to get people back on to the land, because we are so much down to the bone that only by getting more people on to the land shall we, in fact, get greater total production. In my view, in agriculture we have gone as far as can be gone along the road to productivity.
The second reason why the rural areas are important to us is because they provide our population with a large part of their recreation and holiday areas. Without life going on successfully in the countryside, it would be difficult to maintain a place where one could go to enjoy a holiday or to maintain a tourist area. There is no fun in going to stay in a pub in the country if there are no locals who come in after opening time and, over a pint of beer, a pint of scrumpy—or a nip of whisky, for that matter—discuss the doings of the city folk. Therefore, it is important to the full enjoyment of these areas, even by people who live in the towns, that they be kept alive as places where people live, and enjoy themselves and raise families. It is important, in order to provide the services to the tourist industry, to provide the people to work in the hotels and to look after the caravan sites and to mend the roads, and so on, and

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that in general there should be a thriving rural industry going on in the countryside.
The third reason why the countryside is important to us is because it provides a way of life that gives as much, if not more, happiness and fulfilment to the people who live there as does that provided by the urban reas. These rural areas nurture fine families and they give the sort of happy background to children and young people that enables them to go out into the world and become leaders in all spheres of endeavour within our society. There is no doubt that in the area of Scotland which I know and, indeed, all over Scotland, the figures will show that the proportion of children going to university from the rural areas is very much higher than the proportion going from the urban areas. This is due in great measure to the happy, solid background which country living and small town living is able to give them. This is a very valuable ingredient in our society, and one from which all of us benefit, because of the people raised in this way and brought out into the wider world to take their place in all spheres of endeavour.
My Lords, the rural areas provide a way of life where older people, retired people, widows and widowers can find happiness and meaning in the evening of their lives. So many of these people very sensibly do not retire in the middle of a busy city, but go to the quieter places, to places where they can make more ready contact with the life going on around them. In rural communities, everybody matters. Everybody is made to feel important to the community as a whole. I know as much from people who have retired in Thurso, who have chosen to retire in this remote part because they have found an attitude of caring in the country which they did not find to the same extent in the rushing hustle and bustle of the city from which they came.
If rural communities are as good as I have been saying, what am I worried about? I am worried about preserving them, because they are threatened from two directions. In the first place they are threatened by bureaucracy. They are anathema to the centraliser, anathema to the person who wants everything done in the most economical way in the big
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centre. Secondly, the sheer greed of materialism threatens these rural communities. You cannot possibly be as rich in the country, doing any job you like to think of, as you can be in a town. There are just not so many people to whom to sell things, so if you want to keep a shop, do not keep the little shop on the corner in the village; go and join in with Mr. Marks and Mr. Spencer, or someone of that sort, and work in a big centre where you have hypermarkets and supermarkets. If you want to go in for trade, or industry, or anything else, you will get more money in the bigger centres, but not necessarily more satisfaction, nor will you be any more good to the country, but you will line your pocket more quickly in the big centre than in the country. The gentle caring and static nature of the way of life in the rural areas is easily scorned and belittled. They fall easy prey to their richer urban neighbours and are easily outvoted or ignored. Yet I submit they are a vital ingredient in the totality of our way of life.
Town planning, above all, does not solve our problems. I was shocked and horrified to see on television just a few days ago a description of the vandalism and graffiti affecting one of our finest pieces of town planning, the New Town of Cumbernauld. There, one would have thought, one had the best planned town that anybody could wish for, in layout, in thought, for everything that a community could need. Yet because it lacked things very often provided in a small rural community, the younger people were feeling so little fulfilment in their lives that they were prepared to desecrate this fine new town, the pride of all town planners in Scotland and, indeed, in Britain.
So we might ask ourselves what are the physical features in rural communities that are of vital importance to those communities. The noble Lord, Lord de Clifford, pointed out many of these to us; and just as he did, I would say that the first important thing is transport. Human contact is what human communities are all about. If contact is lost within a community, or between one community and another, people will just drift away to somewhere else where contact with their fellow human beings can be maintained. No community should seek to be totally self-sufficient. No village,

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no city, not even a country, can cut itself off from the outside and survive. Therefore, threats to the branch line railways, threats to rural bus services, to rural road development programmes, are all threats to rural communities.
The noble Lord, Lord de Clifford, also mentioned postal services. These are vital to rural communities. If you cannot take a bus to the nearest supermarket or department store, you have to write off for what you want, and have it sent out to you. In order to do this, you need a regular and reasonably priced postal service. So important has the postal service become to some of the more remote areas of Scotland that the Post Office—and all honour to it for the way in which it has done this—also operates the bus service in the same vehicle as it does the post round. Not the least valuable of the services rendered to a country community by the "postie" is the purveying of all local news and gossip. Any threat to the postal service must also constitute a threat to the community which it serves.
My Lords, there is one other important subject I should mention, and I know this positively from my own experience; that is, that education within the community is vital to its life. The community lives when the next generation is growing up within it. It is of paramount importance to try to keep elementary education within the community so far as possible. The policy of centralising education and of closing rural schools has already greatly damaged rural communities, especially in Scotland. Not only does it take the children out of the community in which they have been born, but it removes an important person from membership of the community; the village schoolmaster or mistress. This brings us naturally to the particular importance in rural communities of leadership. The school teacher and, like him, the clergyman, have always been important to the villages, because they are educated, trained people. They have been selected for their qualities of leadership. The decline in the power of the Church in our society and the centralisation of education have removed some natural leaders from rural areas. The centralisation and the professionalisation of local government has also removed the function of leadership from within the heart of these communities.
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Finally, as the noble Lord, Lord de Clifford, pointed out, economic pressures have removed many of the trades and services from the heart of our villages. The village trades have gone, and we will not get them back. We will buy our shoes from the multiples, we will buy our clothes from the multiples. We will no longer have the village tailor or the village bootmaker. I accept this. But must we also lose the village shop? The village shop, the village post office and the village police station are all important and worth protecting. There are villages nowadays served by a "Bobbie", who drives up in a car from somewhere else. This is a very unsatisfactory situation. It is not good police work. A good policeman lives on his beat and knows all the people on his beat. It is a bad situation when one starts to lose the post office, the police station and the village shop.
If we are willing to subsidise the small farmer and crofter in order to keep them in being, it may very well be necessary for us to subsidise the services which make worth while the life of the small farmer and crofter. If we want the farmer to be there, we must give him the life that he wants near to his work. The village shop is most important, not only for the goods and services which it provides for the farmer but particularly as the natural meeting place of the housewives and other shoppers of the village. It is a place where human converse takes place and the life of the village takes shape. Therefore, if we mean to do anything about the diminishing services—and by this we mean all services required for happy and fulfilled living—in our villages and in our rural communities, this must be a conscious effort on the part of all of us, on the part of Government and Administration alike. We should have plans for rebuilding our rural areas, plans for conserving our rural population, and thereby for preserving one of the sources of strength in our community and in our way of life.
5.42 p.m.
Lord MOWBRAY and STOURTON: My Lords, I should like to join with the noble Viscount, Lord Thurso, in thanking my noble friend Lord de Clifford for introducing this Motion and giving us

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the chance to have this debate. I am not going to waste your Lordships' time by arguing that rural communities are essential, because I think that is accepted by all of us. If it had not been, the speech of the noble Viscount, Lord Thurso, would have convinced anyone who did not know about things countrified. As has been said, transport which is a really important rural amenity, is under threat. Given easy transport, your communities in rural areas are happy, because they are able to communicate and get their life's blood by various means. So I make no apology because I am going to concentrate on transport.
In some areas where there is a good mixed population of all ages, some of the ill-effects, as my noble friend has said, are often mitigated by friends helping one another. This is a point which must not be underestimated. Especially where farming is profitable, most farm workers have transport and their wives usually drive. When the farmer is working, his wife has the use of a car and is able to help her neighbours who cannot drive. That is an important point which we must never overlook. But there are many areas where the population, regrettably, consists almost entirely of old folk, possibly without any transport of their own. Where, for example, do they go for honey?
It is now generally forgotten, I suspect, that the industrial troubles of the winter of 1973–74 led to the collapse of the then Government and also to the death of the Road Traffic Bill, which might, and probably would, have ameliorated the hardship of the rural transport scheme. Clauses 16 to 19 of that Bill suggested amending the existing law in a way which would have created a more flexible system of bus licensing, adapted to present-day circumstances, and designed in particular to improve transport in the rural communities. The Bill would have made it possible for lifts to be given in cars, against payment, without any risk of falling foul of bus licensing requirements. Minibuses with up to 12 seats, privately used, would have been free from these requirements. Mini-buses operating commercially would still have been subject to public service vehicle licensing—that is,
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to those provisions concerned with the fitness of both vehicle and operator to provide a service carrying passengers for hire or reward—but they would have been exempt from the need to have a road service licence where they neither carried passengers on journeys in urban areas or ran on an existing bus route in competition with a conventional service. That change would, I suggest, have opened way for more informal services by minibuses in country areas without conventional bus services or inadequately served by them.
I remember the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, the noble Viscount, Lord Colville, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Gardiner, the noble Lord, Lord Champion, and I myself all laboured long and spent many hours discussing all the various clauses. If we had passed it and got it into law it would have widened the scope for granting permits for other kinds of journey by mini-bus, and also made the criteria for granting road service licences more flexible, placing more emphasis on the interests of the public than existing legislation did or still does. I noticed that in another place yesterday an honourable friend of mine, Mr. Luce, introduced a Bill to amend licences of public service vehicles, and he paid tribute to that 1973 Bill of ours which, as I say, we laboured on before its sad death. I would endorse that I firmly believe that a Bill dealing with this problem is urgently needed, and I hope the Bill introduced yesterday in another place will survive and enable us to give our views when it reaches your Lordships' House.
My Lords, only yesterday the Daily Telegraph highlighted a situation existing in Oxfordshire, where two operating bus companies have told the county council there that they cannot continue operating services without a £330,000 subsidy. The operating area concerned had a local population of some 5,760 people, but it was found by the working party concerned that only 75 people were actually using the service, and in those circumstances it clearly was not on for the council to consider spending money of that kind. Nevertheless, those 75 people are probably going to be put out in their ordered existence by the consequent withdrawal of these services.

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My Lords, think of the many areas more rural than Oxfordshire which exist in the South-West, the North-West and the North-East of England, not to mention the distances, as the noble Viscount said, in Scotland, and also in Wales, where the population is much sparser and the area very much greater. I will not go into the problems of ferries, but of course to the Western Isles in Scotland this form of transport is life-blood, communicating one community with another—the very bread and milk of life indeed.
The Post Office has, so far as I know, since 1968 been experimenting with the carriage of passengers as well as of mail. I trust that Lord de Clifford's suggestion that it is not going on now is incorrect, and I look forward to hearing from the noble Baroness that it is not only going well but possibly going to be expanded. It is perhaps in the better utilisation of existing buses that we can hope to see real, quick improvement. There is no question of ample vehicles not being available. The key to improvement in the short term may well prove to lie in better integration of the school bus services with other services. School contracts, perhaps, should only be granted and, being profitable, eveyone wants them—where operators are willing to combine them with a public service. Even if a small subsidy was needed to implement this it would still be less than that needed to maintain a public service on its own.
My Lords, this is a short debate and I must not be selfish with time. I think none of us has more than 12 minutes, if the noble Baroness is to have time to reply. I should like to summarise briefly some conclusions on this subject, and again I make no apology for concentrating entirely on the transport side, because it is this which is the whole key to local communities' convenience. There should be greater use of all vehicles, particularly in the field of school transport: this, of course, may necessitate review of existing seating rules. Where school children use buses they can be put three to a seat; obviously if you were going to have a passenger service you would have to change this. There probably could be, I would say almost certainly could be, better co-ordination at county level on this, and possibly some action might be taken on the Thatcher Working Party recommendations. Better that this Government should do it than
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see it implemented later. Flexibility of licensing I have already emphasised. I would also suggest that there could be a more selective use of subsidies, perhaps using them to encourage the rearrangement of the existing services and new operators coming into the field. One thing above all is that we must all fight hard to preserve as many amenities as are practically possible in our rural areas.
There is a point I should like to make, and that is that often the lower key services make up for lack of quantity by greater personal enthusiasm and willingness to do more than the minimum required. I, too, should like to pay tribute, like my noble friend, to the excellence of the services that are provided both in the voluntary field and in the local council services. I have been lucky living in Yorkshire and in Scotland to find the services quite excellent, and the willingness of the men operating them of a very high standard. I have always been most impressed, and always realised that I must he particularly lucky when I hear some of the sad tales of people having to lug their bins three-quarters of a mile to be picked up. I must confess that in Angus and Yorkshire I have not had that experience in the rural areas, nor have the people around me. Before I sit down, may I say that I hope that the noble Baroness the Minister will be able to give us some form of reassurance that the diminishing trend will be stopped and, hopefully, reversed.
5.52 p.m.
Lord COLLISON: My Lords, I am sure that we are all most grateful to the noble Lord, Lord de Clifford, for introducing this debate. It is topical and so far has been very interesting. I should like to add to those credits which have been paid to social workers and other people, but we should not forget the staff of the Supplementary Benefits Commission and the staff of the Department of Health and Social Security, who sometimes have to travel many miles in the countryside in order to visit claimants and find out about their circumstances. They deserve great credit too.
A great deal has been said about the problems which exist in the countryside. I want to deal with just two major items, transport and communications, but particularly to call special attention to the

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position of the agricultural workers and also to those others on low incomes, the pensioners, the disabled, and the mothers who have to do the shopping and get into the villages. It is very difficult now to do the shopping for the family. I also want to mention the problem of children getting to school.
Agricultural workers are traditionallyȔand I think that everybody accepts thisȔvery low paid. If I may venture to disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Mowbray and Stourton, I cannot accept that agricultural workers have cars. Some do. Thank goodness more are now able to afford them! However, if you recognise that the minimum wage in agriculture is still only £36·50 a week and that a large number of agricultural workers are on the minimum wage, it is quite clear that they cannot afford cars. It goes without saying that the lower your income in an area where services have been reduced the more you suffer because you need the money, for example, to have a telephone in the house for communication purposes. If you want to get into a biggish town in order to go to the opera or hear some music, or even to go to the cinema, it costs a great deal of money these days, and if you have not got that money you are deprived of these things, whereas if you have the money and can spend it on these things you are not so badly handicapped.
Again the reduction in services has been applied more rigorously in rural areas where the population is low, as has been mentioned by the noble Viscount, than in the urban areas, the conurbations, where the population is clearly very much greater. I suppose that is natural, but the consequences of that are there. There is no doubt that in recent years there has been a marked deterioration in the services enjoyed by those living in rural and often in remote districts. Because of the nature of the job agricultural workers and their families are even more remote. They are living away from even the village; they live on farms which are often isolated, and sometimes where access is difficult.
I should like to deal specifically with the problems of transport and communication. So far as transport is concerned the National Union of Agricultural and
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Allied Workers has for many years called attention to the transport problem in rural areas. I received a letter on this subject as late as this morning. With the permission of your Lordships I shall quote a paragraph or two from that letter. It says:
"For many years the Union has pressed for improvement in the rural bus services, and as a result in part of our representations the Jack Committee of 1961 proposed that a very modest subsidy should be introduced. As you will recall this was not implemented until the Transport Act 1968 (Section 34) which gave local authorities enabling powers to subsidise the rural bus services on a 50–50 basis with central Government. Only relatively few local authorities took advantage of this measure, and our policy subsequent to 1968 has been to press the Government to make it mandatory on local authorities to take some action in the matter. In fact, as from April 1974 under a measure introduced by the last Tory Government, new arrangements were brought in through the introduction of a single Transport Supplementary Grant specifically for local transport."
The union—I am still reading the letter—
"protested about this new arrangement to the Ministry of Transport because under it there is no obligation on the part of local authorities to allocate any particular proportion to the rural bus services.
"Incidentally, in a letter to us dated 8th April of last year, the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State…pointed out that 93 per cent. of the £102 million revenue"—
allocated to this purpose—
"was going to the major conurbations in 1975–76.
"It is true that under the Local Government Act 1972 a positive duty is put on the County Councils to develop policies designed at ensuring the provision of an efficient passenger public transport service to meet the needs of their area. The fact is that the Government have not been able to help us at all in this connection, and the position is continuing to worsen irrespective of the many representations we have made on the matter."
So concerned were the union's executive that in 1974—and I assume that I suspect correctly that the situation has worsened since then—they circularised their district committees asking for information about the situation in their areas. All the replies referred to the deterioration in the services which had taken place, going right back to Beeching.
At that time I was a member of the Central Transport Consultative Committee, and I remember very well that while the members of that committee recognised the need to streamline the railway service we got an assurance from the

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railway authorities that if the services were to be removed and it affected more than a very few people a bus service would be provided instead. You do not need to guess what has happened to that assurance these days. Additionally many replies from our districts cited individual cases. They gave us examples of the acute hardship imposed on individual people they knew about. I have a whole sheaf of them. I am going to mention only two. In Lincolnshire, said the Report, there was
"…a very serious deterioration in the services around Louth and Grimsby…a woman from Donington on Bain having to walk six miles to the nearest bus stop to get into town for prescriptions and special foods for her diabetic husband "—
and, of course, for ordinary shopping. Then there was the case, mentioned in the Report, in Cheshire where
"the parishes of Siddington, Marton and Withington, with a total population of 700 people, are required, if they have no transport, to walk four to five miles to the nearest bus route. A few years ago there were three buses daily each way but now there is one bus each way, on a Friday only".
There is, then, the problem of school children, and here again a number of union county committees have written to the general secretary of the union protesting about the proposed new arrangements. As I understand it, the proposition is that whereas at present children under eight get free transport if they travel two or more miles to school and children over eight get this provision if they travel three or more miles to school, the basic idea now is for each local authority to introduce a flat rate charge irrespective of distance. Local authorities will then have discretionary powers to remit or reduce the charge where hardship can be established or if a child is handicapped.
The statutory walking distances after which free transport is provided is already, in my view and that of the union, too great. Our view is that the proposed distances should be reduced by one mile in each case; that is, for children under and over eight. We recognise that local authorities will have these discretionary powers to remit or reduce the charge where hardship can be established, but this will, in effect, represent the introduction of another means test. Your Lordships will be aware that, as in the case of school milk, this could lead to
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unthinking people—and of course children can, perhaps not deliberately, be very unkind—stigmatising children whose parents apply for remission.
I wish to deal briefly with the question of communications. The problem here is simply that people who are isolated need to make contact. The number of telephones in villages is being reduced and under new criteria being established there must be a revenue of £800 for a public telephone to exist. We have pointed out that difficulties will arise over this and we have said that a kiosk should be provided if a revenue of £200 can be established. We have pointed out that the postal authorities have power to establish kiosks where urgent need can be shown. Not enough notice is taken of the problems of rural people, My Lords, I have not considered this a political or Party debate. I have tried to put before your Lordships some of the facts as they are known to the people who should know about them—the Agricultural Workers' Union—and I thank noble Lords for listening to me.
6.4 p.m.
The Lord Bishop of DERBY: My Lords, I join with others in expressing gratitude to the noble Lord, Lord de Clifford, for proposing this Motion, and I have learned a great deal from what he and others have said. When I heard that Lord de Clifford intended to introduce this subject I began making inquiries to fill out the details of the general impressions that I had of the situation. I wrote to 12 clergymen in the diocese of Derby asking a number of questions, and all of them in different ways have given me precisely the same impression of the situation. I began with the consideration of transport and communications, but this led me on to wider concerns.
Often the country generally conceals this problem from itself by saying that nowadays so many people have cars. However, cars are an answer in the country only if the family owns at least two because, as likely as not, if there is only one, that has to take the man of the house to work, the wife being left to her own devices at home and she is restricted in all sorts of ways. If she wishes to work, this may be difficult and it is hard for her to share in life with others outside the local community. The car is also not available for the children

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and other young members of the family. In a parish which is intensively farmed there may be no recreation ground where children can play. In one instance of which I know, the nearest recreation ground is five miles away. In some of our towns we are erecting new swimming baths and sports centres, but children and young people can get to them only with difficulty until they are able to use transport of their own. Children are taken to school and brought home by bus, but they are unable to take part in out-of-school activities except in the middle of the day. And in their village communities, if indeed they live in a village, there are very few children of their own age with whom they can play and share interests. In a very true sense, children and young people in the country are being socially deprived in a variety of ways. This is an important part of the whole problem and it is due largely to the lack of suitable transport.
As we have heard, small shops are closing down and people must travel further for essential goods. The provision of these is tending to be confined to fewer and fewer key villages. Then there is the reduction in other services. Often today it is necessary to travel much further to hospital or to register a birth or death or to go to a coroner's inquest. Near to where I live a small maternity hospital is being closed. This is no doubt called for on medical and nursing grounds, but the hardship imposed on those who have to go to the hospital, either for treatment or visiting, will be very severe.
I had no intention of mentioning the particular problems of the Church, but Lord de Clifford mentioned pastoral reorganisation. We hone that even where there are groupings of parishes clergymen will visit faithfully, but there are occasions when people living in the parishes need to go and see them; and if there is no car available or no kind friend to take them, this again may be difficult. As a result of all this, village communities are becoming unbalanced; people are there in their needs—the old, the disabled, the mentally handicapped—but they are unable to go to the nearest town to take part in the day care facilities on which so much public money has been spent. Thus, we are left with the
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elderly, the retired and the week-enders—too many seeking such domestic help as there is or drawing on the services of such few workmen as there are.
Then there are the problems over housing. Young people leave the villages when they grow up, or at any rate when they get married, and their families also move nearer their work. They can never return; their houses are sold for large sums of money to retired people, to commuters or to holiday-makers. Village people have no necessary priority over council houses and sometimes, I am told, housing committees use villages for housing awkward people, thus taking away some of the provision for people who could give to villages a true continuing life. We need a new policy which will enable villagers to return to their native locality and will allow the young people to stay.
As for cars, the cost of running them is becoming greater and greater and is producing, at least for some families, poverty of a new kind. The car is essential to their life, but other things which they ought to have have to go. Such transport as there is at the moment is entirely insufficient. There is no bus except on market days and, if one goes, one must stay for the whole day. That is costly for everyone because meals have to be bought and there is a temptation to buy other things. It is also very tiring for the elderly. Buses often do not connect in a way which would make hospital visiting, attendance at the doctor's surgery or the collection of prescriptions or pensions possible. Fares, as they rise higher and higher, are a desperate problem. Wages are lower in the country and yet, because of the cost of travel, the cost of living is higher. The buses are carrying even smaller numbers of passengers and so the service is becoming less viable.
We have heard of a good deal that is being done voluntarily and through the provision of services, and I should like simply to underline that. This is a way in which the Church has suffered in that, as a result of some of the regulations about the driving of mini or larger buses, there are limitations on licensing which make it difficult to use these means to drive people to church. However, it is not only church-going which is affected in this way. People in different village

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communities who want to share their activities are also affected.
The following are a few additional points. I should like to request adequate cheap or free car parking in market towns to reduce some of the very heavy costs. In addition, while it is almost impossibly difficult to make exceptions, perhaps there might be cheaper petrol or lower car taxation for those who live in the country and who must of necessity depend on cars. Also, of course, people who are dependent on the parcel service to obtain goods need a service for which they can pay. Here again, the situation is becoming more and more difficult.
As has been suggested, we need some co-ordination in the field of transport. For instance, if I may bring in a main line railway, the main rail artery connecting the North-West of Derbyshire with the South-East was cut in the middle. Just a few miles were taken away and what might have been a means of communication through the assistance of buses is no longer available, so that, if one wants to go from one extreme of the county to the other, one probably has to travel through Sheffield or even Manchester as well. That is simply one example of a lack of co-ordination in the cutting of services and the provision of others.
What I should like chiefly to stress is that we have a whole body of problems which are related. The situation has been allowed to worsen piecemeal and it needs a different kind of treatment if it is to be mended. Someone has said that at the present time villages are in a make or break situation. The future of farming is at stake if the farm staff is stranded in villages with almost no services or facilities, and there is general deprivation. What we need is some planning to help to create and keep mixed communities where people can share the kind of wholeness of life which they did in the past. But what we are presented with is the question of the kind of countryside and the kind of social communities we want to have. There is a very wide range of social need which shouts aloud for consideration and action, and I hope that this debate will do something to bring that range of need to the attention of the members of Her Majesty's Government and the country at large.
6.15 p.m.
Lord INGLEWOOD: My Lords, I, too, have lived in a village all my life and can claim to be familiar with the problems which we are discussing this evening. I should like to say how interested I was in the speech of the right reverend Prelate, which covered so many points. Not least was I interested in what he said about councils on occasion using villages as areas where an awkward tenant could be re-housed, for we have heard it said that certain Bishops have gained the reputation of doing the same with an awkward incumbent—that is, finding him a parish as remote as possible from the county town.
I make no apology for talking about rural transport and repeating what I have probably said more than once in earlier debates. This is a subject—and I hope that the Ministers on the Front Bench are listening—where Back-Benchers have to employ a tactic comparable to allowing water to drop on a stone. We have been doing it for years and perhaps some of us will live to see some substantial result; at least, I hope so.
After the war, transport in the rural areas of this country seemed to be generally good. In addition to the larger companies, some of the smaller bus companies were working well and we still had a network of rural railway services. However, we have been living through years when the tendency has been to form larger units and when the smaller country bus proprietors have, one by one, dropped out. The larger bus companies have never seemed to be particularly sympathetic to the needs of small communities, nor to be at all interested in co-operating with the small men whose giving up has been such a great loss to the countryside.
When speaking of this deterioration, my argument will be that it need not have been as steep and as sharp as it has proved, if only the larger bus companies and the local authorities—and, indeed, all concerned—had been readier to co-operate. It is remarkable, if one looks at the services in any district, to see how little effort has been made to link bus services together. In the town near were I live, there is a bus station which is three-quarters of a mile from the railway station. Some buses go to one and some to the other. There is no link

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between the two and if a passenger arrives from the South or North by the long distance express bus—which is not at all uncomfortable—he would be dropped, suitcase and all, in the main street of the town, halfway between the two stations. If he wanted to continue by train or by local bus service, he would have to carry his luggage quite a long way. How much more comfortable and practical travel would be if there were some co-ordination between these different local services.
I believe I am right in saying that the Transport Users' Consultative Committees, which are normally believed to be wholly concerned with the railways, may also be concerned, though to a lesser extent, with the co-ordination of all transport. I believe also that county councils have some duties in this field. I wish both those bodies would apply their minds not just to improving services but also to linking those which we now have.
Other fields of co-operation have already been mentioned. There are the school buses. I cannot see why they should not always be prepared to carry additional passengers, even if the number has sometimes to be limited. All too often, one sees buses carrying school children but with a number of empty scats and they set off at just about the time when people are leaving their work and want transport.
Further, there is the experiment of the postal buses. I was closely associated with the start of one such bus in the Lake District. It must have been the first or second of its type in this country. To the best of my knowledge it has proved to be a success, but I have not been able to understand why the Post Office have never advertised it widely. It seems very strange. I should have thought that it would be well advertised, and that the Post Office would claim to be a pioneer and was doing something which others were unable to do, to help people. Yet in the Northern part of the Lake District you rarely find timetables or notices about this service on hotel notice boards. I recall the last occasion I looked for such a notice in the main post office in Penrith. I drew attention to the fact that there was no notice displayed. A member of the Post
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Office staff went into the back, and returned saying that they were sorry, they could not put up a notice because they were out of print.
I wish to end on a lighter, happier note. Only the other day I discovered an example of what can be done by enterprise and with some co-operation. A small bus service is now operating in the Lake District, with the picturesque, gorgeous name of the "Mountain Goat". It was founded four years ago by a man of great enterprise, who now has nine small buses and three large ones. He had to battle his way to get the licences to start the service, even on the shortest stretches. Perhaps he was lucky, because when the Ribble bus company pulled out of the route over the Kirkstone Pass he took it on, and he has made a success of it with his mini buses.
Noble Lords will be interested to hear that now the National Bus Company, through Ribble, the local company, which had not held out the hand of co-operation very warmly to this enterprising man and his company, is now co-operating with him, to provide next year services from Windermere to Manchester Airport, and from Windermere to Hull. I cite that in detail merely to show that where people of good will get down and plan together something better can be done than what we have seen in most districts and heard about this evening. My Lords, I was determined not to sneak for long, less even than for the seven minutes for which I have spoken, and so I shall say no more. I commend my few words to the noble Baroness and I urge her to press forward with co-operation between the different people concerned in this field whenever she sees the chance of achieving some success.
6.22 p.m.
Lord NORTHFIELD: My Lords, I begin by declaring an interest as Chairman of Her Majesty's Development Commissioners who have a wide set of duties in helping the rural areas, at present mainly by building advance factories, setting up an advisory service to small industries, and subsidising and helping the rural community councils. In accordance with tradition, I will not speak about the precise details of a public board with which I am associated. But it is worth pointing out, and it is some compliment

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to Her Majesty's Government, that we, as a Commission, are not suffering a cut in expenditure this year. In fact we are being expanded. I hope that this is same comfort to those who have raised this debate today, bearing in mind that we are talking about the problems of rural areas. Our budget is going up quite substantially in order to help us do our best for the rural areas.
It was inevitable that much of the debate should be about transport, and I can speak freely about this because it is not the concern of the Development Commission. I hope that we shall realise that the day of the public bus service in the deep rural areas is drawing to an end. Figures were quoted by the noble Lord from the Front Bench opposite about the fact that in Oxfordshire it has been necessary to collapse a service which was costing £300,000 in subsidy to carry 75 people. One realises that this kind of thing cannot go on much longer. Had the noble Lord read the remainder of the article in yesterday's Daily Telegraph he would have seen that in Essex, for example, villages are to be cut off because it is no longer possible to provide £600,000 subsidy, and in Berkshire it is said that they simply cannot afford £1,000,000 to subsidise buses in the rural areas.
We must face the fact that this type of traditional bus service is coming to an end. Subsidies on this scale are no longer possible. That is why I should like to welcome the experiment announced by the Minister of Transport. He has said that in three or four special areas the Government will set up a scheme for experiments, and this will be run through a national steering committee with a local committee doing the work on the ground. I suppose that it will involve running mini-buses and operating voluntary service buses and so on; all the things we have heard about from time to time in the rural areas.
I say to my noble friend who is to reply that it is time to press for details of the scheme. When is this scheme to start? In what areas will it run? Will it, for example, be run in the really tough areas, such as Northumberland which has terrible problems relating to remoteness? Can we be given a date at which this scheme will start? The Minister said that a short Bill might be
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needed to relax some of the licensing laws. When is that Bill to see the light of day? Could we not start that Bill in this House if that would speed up the coming into operation of the scheme?
Merely talking about all this must come to an end, at least to some extent. As we face the demise of the conventional bus service we should be building up, more deliberately and more enthusiastically, a system involving mini-buses, post buses, local authority schemes and other projects which include relaxation of the licensing laws. Such action makes all the difference to rural areas.
This leads me to say that we should all try to tell people in rural areas what the National Council of Social Service is already doing about the problem. I point this out to the noble Lord, Lord de Clifford, who was good enough to introduce this debate. I have here two documents published by the National Council of Social Service, concerned with how various areas are running voluntary services of all kinds, and showing what examples are being set. There is enormous variation. I should love to read out the list, and there is a reference to what is happening in the noble Lord's own county of Herefordshire. It is very inspiring. What is needed is to spread the example of the good to the less good in the various counties, in the way of voluntary effort, dial-a-bus schemes, minibuses, buses run by youth clubs, post buses, and many other means of transport.
It is interesting to note that the conventional bus is not always excluded from the type of schemes I have mentioned. In Norfolk, for example, volunteers, trained by the National Bus Company, are driving buses. They are driving the buses in the rural areas and saving money. The scheme is being subsidised by the county council. What a good example that is to set. That is the type of imaginative approach we need. I ask my noble friend: please can we proceed a little faster before some of these areas die? If she can give a promise on this it would be the best news she could give us. Furthermore, will my noble friend make absolutely sure that when the Minister's own scheme is brought into operation the rural community councils are associated with it. This is the scheme involving the

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steering committee and the local committees, in the four areas which the Minister appears to be choosing. The rural community council ought to be on the working group in each area, helping to run and organise the service. They are doing so much to stimulate voluntary effort in this matter that it would be quite wrong to exclude them from the voluntary bodies which are to run these experiments.
I turn now from transport to the deeper issue, which was raised, in particular, by the noble Viscount, Lord Thurso, who talked about the need to revive rural areas. I suggest very strongly that what we should now think about is not patching up the problems of the rural areas but, more positively, starting their revival. This is the job, if I may say so, that we have in the Development Commission. In other words, no longer have we to say, "How can we get over that difficulty, solve that minor problem, ease that irritation?", and so on. We now have to say, "How are we going positively to regenerate some of the deeper rural areas?", which hold something like 2,500,000-plus of our population. This frankly boils down, as we have discovered, to making an imaginative approach: to creating jobs, to making sure that there is the housing and to making sure that amenities follow and that, in the end, we make the place attractive enough to ensure that young people stay.
This is not as hopeless a task as some noble Lords have hinted. What has happened is that in the last 12 or 18 months we have been able to stimulate action plans for rural revival covering all the really deep disadvantaged rural counties in this country. If I may say so to noble Lords, the pile of action plans on my desk is now over a foot high. They have been carefully thought out in terms of, first, injecting small-scale industry into their areas. That is something which was commended by Lord Sandford's Report on the National Parks as being necessary to keep an indigenous population in the National Parks, but, of course, it applies much more widely than the National Parks. So, first, there are these action plans. Then we asked that they be linked to an on-going housing programme in key growth areas, key villages,
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key towns, key settlements. We cannot prop up every village, but we can hold the population which would otherwise leave the rural areas in key settlements that counties and districts choose for themselves in their structure planning process. Then we are looking ahead, over periods of five and ten years, to the addition of amenities and to the building of offices in small rural towns—in effect, all the things that create a variety of opportunity for young people and encourage them to stay in the rural areas.
My Lords, this is a most hopeful thing. I do not think we should be as gloomy as some noble Lords have been today. All the evidence I have is that we are poised for a remarkable regeneration of many of our rural areas, which are being stimulated into saying, "How can we act to save ourselves, given a little Government help?"—help by way of building advance factories; by helping them, perhaps with the Housing Corporation, to add to their housing programme; by coming in with some offices, and perhaps later adding amenities such as community centres and things of that kind. Indeed, I am inspired by the way in which many rural counties are today facing their problems, determined to overcome them in the years ahead. If noble Lords want an example of this, I suggest they go and look at, say, the small town of Berwick, where this has happened after a very small injection of Government money in job provision. The whole town has lifted itself up. It has revived itself, cleaned itself up, built more houses, made more jobs; and it is now a thriving community. Welshpool, in the middle of Wales, is another example.
In other words, once communities begin to plan with enterprise, with enthusiasm and with confidence in their future, and given a little Government help from the Development Commission, it is absolutely remarkable what can be stimulated. If I may say so to noble Lords, this is the way ahead as we now see it. We must not, I suggest, be too gloomy. The expenditure of a few million pounds per annum—and it is a very few million pounds—is bringing about the start of a quite remarkable rural revival in this country. I am hoping that, given fair winds over the coming years, we shall

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be able to show extraordinary results, which will please noble Lords who have been fighting on this issue for many years.
6.34 p.m.
Viscount LONG: My Lords, I should like to congratulate my noble friend Lord de Clifford on introducing this debate this evening. I should like to thank him for what he said in his speech, taking us along the minor roads, round the rural areas, down the lanes and through the gates. At one moment, as my eyes closed, I felt that we were all there, with green gumboots on, wading through the mud. I should also like to thank him for what he said at the end of his speech concerning such associations as the Royal British Legion, the Women's Institute, the Meals-on-Wheels, all of whom play a most active part in our rural community life. It is vitally important that they be mentioned tonight. I ought to declare an interest because, my Lords, I live in the middle of Wiltshire, in a very rural area, and at the rate public transport from village to local town is being withdrawn at the moment—during these last two or three years, anyway—we poor souls who live in the rural areas might disappear, to be discovered some 200 years hence. So this debate must in itself draw attention to the plight of those in our rural areas who feel themselves becoming more and more isolated.
I noticed from my local papers some weeks ago that a local council had already begun an investigation into the hardships of the pensioners and the young people, and I quote what was said at a meeting of the Wiltshire Association for Local Councils:
"People in villages, and particularly pensioners, who used to go into town two or three times a week, just cannot afford more than once a week now."
In many ways we are going back to before the war, when I remember many of our locals going into town by pony and trap on market day.
I have noticed that in this debate very few of your Lordships have mentioned the cost of running public transport or the way in which the public use their transport services. I should therefore like to refer to those two points. Looking at the problems of transport—and they are becoming increasingly difficult day by day in these inflationary times—the first thing that comes to my mind is the cost
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of the vehicle, the cost of a 56-seater bus or the cost of a local train, and the cost of running that bus or train, the staff wages, the maintenance and so on. When I first drafted my speech I felt it would be a good idea to put the cost down on paper, but I could go on for ever with that and bore your Lordships. It must surely be a tremendous nightmare for any transport administrative staff to make ends meet during these inflationary times.
Having made that point, my Lords, I now look at the members of the public who use these services. Since the war, more and more of the public have been able to buy their own cars, and whenever I go into a town I notice that the first thing a factory has to build for itself is an enormous car park. The next thing I notice is that there is only one person to a car, which means that less and less people are using the public services. Therefore, can one wonder that the odd bus is being withdrawn from service? Yet the public demand that these services should continue regardless. I can quote an incident which occurred some three or four years ago when I was walking through my village. I am extremely lucky because, unlike some, I have a public transport service, though it is diminishing. Gradually they are taking more buses off.
As I went down through the village I was approached by a group of people with a petition. I was asked if I would sign this petition because they wanted a certain bus to be withdrawn. The bus service found that this bus was not making a profit. I looked up at that moment to see the bus coming in. Standing at the stop were six elderly ladies, one of whom was my old nanny. They got on to the empty bus, a 56-seater. Off the bus went and after a further five stops, about four and a half miles, it arrived at the local town with two or three more on board. The people who asked me to sign the petition had never ever used public transport; never were likely to use public transport and in any case had not a clue about how many people use public transport. I asked them to withdraw the petition from my eyes and to leave it well alone. However, the result was that that bus was withdrawn. The old ladies still continued to need it. An hour later there was still a bus. The public were not using that bus. The people on that

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list who were petitioning were not using that bus. No matter how good the service and how cheap the cost, they were not likely to use it. It is like the old story that you can take a horse to water but cannot make it drink.
The fact remains that we are experiencing a complete run-down of our transport system. The people who I believe—and I have heard it mentioned during the debate this afternoon—are going to be the sufferers in the long run (and are suffering now) are the old-age pensioners who can no longer drive a car and who through different ailments would not be allowed to drive a car, and the very young who have just left school who also would not be allowed to drive a car either because they have not taken the test or, if they have, because they cannot afford a car. Taking the case of the old pensioners, earlier I mentioned the association but mentioned that they would afford to be able to go into town only once a week. But we have also listened to speeches regarding the hope that the associations within the community will lend themselves and their cars to helping those old-age pensioners to go to the local market town to do their shopping more than once a week.
As to the younger generation they are not going to tolerate for long living in villages. I have a young daughter, aged 17. Her last bus back on Saturday night is at 9 o'clock. I do not feel like going out to collect her at 11 o'clock when she has gone to a disco, so I have a complaint. It is that if I go out I cannot go to the local disco. The young definitely suffer and are getting very irate—and the sooner they take their test the better!
My Lords, where are we now? I think we have heard a very good speech from the noble Lord, Lord Northfield. He mentioned the money that is to be spent on transport and new ideas in local towns. It sounded very lovely to me, but we are going through a difficult economic situation at the moment and I do not want that news to "leak" from this House, because the councils are winding down their finances. Obviously, on a long-term basis, we must try to find the money to improve the situation.
Lord NORTHFIELD: My Lords, the noble Viscount misunderstood me. I should not like to say that a lot of money is going to be spent on a lot of things; but that it is to be spent on job creation which is a key issue for the coming years and the proper one on which to expand spending.
Viscount LONG: My Lords, I agree that I probably misinterpreted the noble Lord. Nevertheless, we are looking at money which is not going to come forward too quickly at the moment or in the next four or five years. But I should like to congratulate him because of his imagination and the work he has put into this. I would say it is a good idea. I hope that with his association, and Government support, we shall see progress long this line. I apologise if I misinterpreted him.
My feeling is that, where the national bus companies can no longer carry on their routes economically, it is time that licences were granted to the smaller companies, the smaller people. I have experience of this. Some six miles away from me a small family has run a very good bus route every day and there has been no trouble with the interlocking of the National bus company. I think that could go on from village to village and area to area. I think that private enterprise must be given this boost.
There is a lot of talk of safety. I am not sure if the noble Baroness is going to bring it into one of the transport licensing grants or the commissioners' review of licensing, but I should be grateful if she would describe this word "safety". Is it safety from the driver's angle for from the machinery or the vehicle itself? I wonder what the word "safety" means when it is applied to licences.
Baroness STEDMAN: My Lords, it is both.
Viscount LONG: I thank the noble Baroness for the immediate answer, my Lords. I think this has been a great debate introduced by my noble friend. I hope the Government can give us some idea that they are thinking about us rather rural, old-fashioned people who find it difficult to get transport. We need an urgent review on the subject and I

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congratulate my noble friend on his debate this afternoon.
6.48 p.m.
Lord RANKEILLOUR: My Lords, there are considerable fears in the West Highlands that the Glasgow-Fort William Railway is to be closed within the foreseeable future, say five years or less. May I ask the noble Baroness if this is likely? I raised this point after the Unstarred Question by the noble Lord, Lord Campbell of Croy, the day before yesterday, but the noble Lord, Lord Kirkhill, was somewhat surprised by the question and did not have an answer at that time. Due to the uproar of Scottish nationalism racing through Scotland, many vital matters of everyday needs of existence have tended to be overlooked or ignored. The Highlands are still part of the United Kingdom, I am glad to say, and would like to be heard to its advantage, especially with regard to their lifelines.
Unlike the countryside of England, we in the West Highlands are not necessarily blessed with masses of criss-crossing highways and transport routes of rail and air. To reach a centre point like Fort William is a matter of road or single-track railway into the mountains. Both offer a rather low-grade service for modern needs. Some time ago I raised with Sir Richard Marsh the subject of the poor service that the farmers in the West Highlands, the hill farmers, had in the matter of moving cattle and sheep to lowland markets. I seem to remember that he regarded this as a matter of spasmodic loads and therefore unprofitable and thus not worth retaining. Such is the case now. We no longer have cattle and sheep trains, but have to reply on a handful of lorries, which are inevitably not necessarily available when we want them. I should add that my parish alone is over 500 square miles in itself.
That situation is not very good even in these troubled times. I should have thought an ailing business would try to attract every type of spasmodic income as well as its regular incomes for its own benefit and improvement, if not ours. By no stretch of the imagination can the rolling stock travelling from Glasgow to Fort William or Fort William to Glasgow be regarded as express, so would it not be better if the trains were made up of a combination of passenger cars, freight
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cars and cattle trucks? After all, British Rail is presumably in business to make a profit and not impress the watching public with only a nice neat string of passenger carriages. As the trains seem to halt at every station and whistle stop along the route, it would not be difficult to uncouple specific waggons at any one point for further distribution elsewhere. But, in the meantime, we are dependent upon lorries and they are subjected to B-rated, snaking, hill country roads and adverse weather conditions. My Lords, if we lose both forms of egress then we are trapped.
Viscount MASSEREENE and FERRARD: My Lords, before my noble friend sits down, may I give support to his suggestion? I hope the Glasgow-Fort William line is not going to be closed. The noble Baroness must remember that in the Highlands in winter the roads can be completely impassable for motor traffic. I cannot agree with my noble friend that there should be passenger freight trains, for, in that case, there would be very few passengers. The noble Baroness will know that the timber for the pulp mill at Fort William is gathered every day for the nightly train at Crianlarich. If that line was closed, I do not see how the timber could get to Fort William in winter. A great number of lorries would be required and in the winter the roads are often impassable, whereas this does not affect the railway which is a diesel line. I hope that the noble Baroness will forgive me interrupting, but I wanted to make that point.
6.53 p.m.
Baroness STEDMAN: My Lords, this has certainly been a wide ranging debate, although we seem to have come back at almost every point to transport. I am sure we are all grateful to the noble Lord, Lord de Clifford, for having given us the opportunity of airing our views in a way that they have been aired this afternoon. We all accept as undeniable that some of the services in the rural areas are diminishing and that many people are experiencing hardship and difficulties as a result. Indeed, most of the noble Lords who have spoken have given examples, many of them eloquently and movingly. But there is nothing new in this, it applies equally to private as to public services, the situation varies

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considerably from area to area and from service to service, and often there is little that Government can do to help; but that does not mean that the Government are unmindful of the problems.
We have to remember that years ago that villages and hamlets were formerly fairly self-contained. The majority of their inhabitants obtained their essential requirements, their living and social life within the confines of their own village and hamlet. They were satisfied with an occasional visit to the nearby market town. Then we had improvements in communications and transport—first the railways and then the motor car. Following that came a widespread decline in the marketing function of towns and villages. Rural settlements were no longer self-sufficient—shops and tradesmen (saddlers, shoe-repairers and blacksmiths, et cetera) have largely disappeared from many villages, and many country towns have lost their marketing and service functions because people seem to prefer to travel to the larger towns and cities where they have a wider choice of goods and services.
These trends towards centralisation are to be found in all sectors of the national and local economies. In the public sector many education, health and welfare services are increasingly provided from urban centres, where the larger population enables a wider range of facilities to be available. This tendency has been reinforced by the recent local government reform which has produced even larger and more remote areas and has combined rural with urban areas so that it is more administratively convenient for the authorities to provide services from a central point in the urban areas. Therefore we must recognise that there are real difficulties in providing services for people in rural areas, and the costs of doing so for a widely dispersed population are inevitably higher than if we provide services in a closely-knit, built up area. It may be necessary to accept centralising of services in the larger settlements if we are to provide efficiently the specialist services and facilities from which we all want rural people to benefit as well as those in urban areas. But I am well aware that improved facilities are of no benefit to the rural population without the means of getting to them. Therefore, it is of vital importance that transport
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should be available to people in rural areas, and the present problems—about which the Government in general and my Department in particular are very con cerned—are the result of decline in rural bus services. We announced in December that we were having the special project which was to look at the problems in the rural areas. Indeed, in his excellent and imaginative speech, my noble friend Lord Northfield referred to this and steps are being taken now in providing these experimental transport schemes. There are consultations going on with the interested parties. The only thing which has been confirmed is that there is little agreement about the extent to which alterations to the present licensing code would offer rural communities a real assurance of any improvement in their transport provision. The Department feel that what is needed is a careful assessment of what can be done to relieve the transport problems.
The experimental projects that my right honourable friend is promoting are to be in three or four selected areas in England, Scotland and Wales, where there are really serious rural transport problems. I am not in a position at this time to say exactly where they will be. The design of the projects and the form they will undertake will b the responsibility of Working Groups which will be under the chairmanship of officials from the appropriate Departments. They will include representatives from the local authorities, the bus operators, the trade unions and other bodies concerned. I will remind my right honourable friend of the need to include the voluntary organisations, the community service people, the WRVS and all these other bodies carrying the burden of providing services in the rural areas for us today. They will act under the general guidance of a Steering Committee.
These bodies were invited in January to nominate representatives to serve on the Steering Committee and the experiment areas will be selected through the machinery of this Steering Committee. Noble Lords will appreciate that when one starts talking about experimental transport schemes of one sort or another which may involve using voluntary labour, then we have to tread very carefully in so far as the unions are concerned, and we are anxious to have the widest possible consultations with them, so

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that we can allay any fears they may have that any extension of these experimental schemes, might result in loss of jobs for their members.
We have also taken steps on the question of the special bus services and the postal buses, which were referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Inglewood. I had made a note before he spoke to refer to the "Mountain Goat". I am familiar with the activities of the "Mountain Goat"; I remember it starting as one bus and I know what a tremendous success it is now. I wish I had put some money in it when it first started! I was surprised to know that the post bus in the Lake District is not advertised. This is something we might take up with the appropriate Department. I have used the post bus in the Ullswater area and I can assure noble Lords who were concerned that post buses are operating; there are now over 20 such services operating in England and over 50 services operating in Scotland.
In many areas these services have resulted in tremendous social benefits, and the availability of the new bus grant and fuel tax rebate has meant that the Post Office has been able to reduce the cost of remote deliveries.
Reference was made by one noble Lord to the delivery of letters and the reduction in services there, as well as to the fact that if we drop the second service it will not make any difference, because they have not had it anyway. As a matter of interest, I can tell him that it can cost up to 18p to deliver a letter to one of the more remote rural addresses, whether we have one delivery or two. The question of the Sunday service being withdrawn will also be reviewed after one year, and I hope that those areas which feel they have lost something over this will make their voices heard then.
Lord INGLEWOOD: My Lords, are we to understand that at the present time there are either Saturday or Sunday collections? Where there is no Saturday collection, and the Sunday collection is removed, will the Saturday collection be reinstated?—because it would be intolerable if there were two days without a collection.
Baroness STEDMAN: My Lords, my recollection is that it is only one day;
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but I am not absolutely certain and I will check on it and write to the noble Lord. On the question of the other forms of transport that might be used, school buses have been looked at and they are provided under contract by public transport operators. They are able to take fare-paying passengers, but again there are problems. School buses are always wanted at the peak hours. They are wanted in the morning and in the afternoon when there is a shortage of buses. When they are able to take fare-paying passengers they are allowed to do so, under the normal Section 30 permit system of the 1968 Transport Act. They make a useful contribution where they are able to be used, but there are disadvantages, because there is the difficulty of estimating what is to be the spare capacity at the different points en route. Also, of course, they are limited to the time of the school terms and are not available when the schools are not open.
I should also like to join in the tributes that have been paid to the WRVS and other organisations which are running the voluntary car schemes at the moment, where groups of volunteers use their own cars to provide the elderly with transport for medical purposes, for social services and for shopping trips. There is a mileage allowance for drivers and the schemes are provided by the local authority, and their expenditure is eligible for transport supplementary grant. None the less, it is a burden on those who do it, and I should certainly like to join with all other noble Lords in expressing my thanks and appreciation to them.
Then, of course, we have the Norfolk village bus scheme, which is a very ambitious voluntary scheme on trial at the moment, making use of a licensed service under the direction of the Eastern Counties Omnibus Company. Here there is a minibus, owned by the company, which serves a group of villages, with volunteer drivers under the control of a local committee. Fares are charged for this and the service operates under a permit which was granted by the Traffic Commissioners under Section 30 of the 1968 Transport Act, in lieu of having a road service licence. I understand that this is proving extremely useful and is doing a very good job of work, and that the idea might be able to be taken up in other places.

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The noble Lord, Lord Rankeillour, referred to the railways. I am not certain that the Glasgow-Fort William railway is one on which I am competent to speak for the Department. But I will certainly draw my right honourable friend's notice to what has been said by the noble Lord and by the noble Viscount, Lord Massereene and Ferrard, about the problems that would be created if this line were to close. I will make more inquiries and will write to both noble Lords if they are prepared to leave it at that. The rail rationalisation programmes created some havoc in the rural areas in the 1950s and 1960s, when some 900 miles of predominantly rural track were closed to passenger traffic. But there has been a hard core of wholly rural passenger services maintained in parts of Scotland, Wales, East Anglia and the South-West. I am advised that these services are extremely uneconomic, but they have been maintained at a steady level—indeed, only 75 miles of rural track have been closed in the last five years—because of their social value to the communities which they link together. I hope that this is something that we are always willing to keep in mind.
The noble Lord, Lord Collison, referred to the problems of county councils, transport grants and providing rural transport. The Transport Act introduced a rural bus grant, whereby local authorities give financial support to the local bus services and central Government contributes 50 per cent. Payments of this grant in 1974–75 amounted to £5·77 million, in addition to the direct Government support of the bus industry, through the new bus grant and the fuel duty rebate on stage services; and those two together account for something like 10 per cent. of the operating costs.
But since the introduction of the transport supplementary grant from April 1975, the payments by county councils in support of rural bus services have been eligible for that grant, and the Government said last year that in future allocations of the grant greater priority will be given to proposals to maintain minimum levels of services for rural areas. Indeed, in August last year the Minister invited the county councils to reconsider,
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in the light of this policy, the levels of support that they were proposing to give for 1976–77, and about half of the non-metropolitan counties revised their estimates upwards, and the Minister subsequently accepted for transport supplementary grant purposes for 1976–77 virtually the whole of the non-metropolitan counties' bus revenue support estimates, which amounted to over £32 million at November 1974 prices.
The noble Lord, Lord Mowbray and Stourton, asked whether I could give him an assurance that the diminishing trend will be stopped, and indeed reversed. I can give no assurance that goes as far as he would like. All I can say is that we are very conscious of the problems in the rural areas, and we are doing our best to maintain a satisfactory service and to improve it where we can.
The noble Lord, Lord Inglewood, referred to water dropping on a stone, which might eventually wear away the Front Bench and get something from it. Of course, the noble Lord comes from the part of the country where water-worn Westmorland stone survives a lot of drips on it, and I hope he will accept that the Government realise the problems and may be able to provide adequate answers before too long, or at least before all the Westmorland stone is water-worn away.
But even if transport is available in the rural areas, hardship can be involved for rural people, as many noble Lords have said today, if they have to travel long distances to get to the services. Mention has been made of the long and tiring journeys that children have to make to get to school. In my own county, we have children from the fen area who often have to walk one or two miles down a fen drove before they even get on to a road where a bus can pick them up. Of course, there are similar difficulties for elderly people who are visiting friends or relatives in hospitals or in neighbouring towns. I can only hope that all those involved in the provision of services for the rural population, whether they are local authorities, nationalised industries or Government Departments, will remember this and try to adapt their policies whenever possible to the situation of the rural areas. Transporting

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people to a central point where a full range of services is available may not always be the right answer. A better alternative may be to look at the provision of mobile services in the rural areas. We already have examples of these, including our travelling libraries and mobile clinics, and even in my own city and surrounding villages a mobile play-bus, which is tremendously popular in the more cut off villages.
Again, in the private sector, goods and services are increasingly being supplied from distant urban centres. The growth of the mail order business is an example of the way in which country people get the goods they require without shopping locally. Increased car ownership enables many people in country areas to go to the supermarkets to do their shopping, and refrigerators and deep freezes enable them to do their shopping weekly or even less frequently. The result is a fall in business for the village shops, many of which have closed. Travelling shops, where they are available, make up to some extent for the closure of the local shops, but as the noble Lord, Lord de Clifford, reminded us, recent rises in petrol costs have affected even the economics of the travelling shops.
The level of car ownership in rural areas tends to be high, as was demonstrated by the number of people in that part of Oxfordshire who are using public services. People with cars in country districts are often very helpful to their neighbours who are without them. But people do not like to be dependent upon friends and neighbours to offer them transport, and in terms of available services a minority of the rural population finds itself worse off. It is arguable whether the Government can, or indeed should, do anything to interfere with these trends in the private sector, which are largely the result of consumer choice. However, we share the concern at the position of the rural population without access to cars or public transport which finds itself in difficulties.
I have referred to the rural transport experiments which the Government are promoting. Alternative types of rural transport provision are being tried out: the postal bus, the use of the school bus and the voluntary car schemes, to ether with the project, just getting off the ground in Norfolk, of the village bus
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scheme. My Department are currently financing a research project into rural transport and accessibility at the University of East Anglia, and I know that many county councils, in the preparation of their structure plans and transport budgets, are paying considerable attention to these problems. In the meantime, considerable sums of Government money are going to maintain a minimum level of bus services in rural areas through the county council subsidies.
I mentioned earlier the wide variation in situation between the rural areas in different parts of the country. The provision of services in areas near our great cities and conurbations where the rural population has been increasing, largely as a result of the influx of commuters, presents very different problems from those of the more remote rural areas which are depopulating. An increasing population means strains on services; for example, new schools or school extensions may be needed in the villages. A declining population means rising costs per head of providing services for those remaining, or a risk of the withdrawal of some of the services altogether: perhaps the primary schools having to close, or the bus services no longer paying their pay.
The problems involve a complex interaction of factors which touch a wide range of central, regional and local authorities, and the complexity and variety of the problems means that there can be no universal panacea. It points to a need for the policies of the various authorities involved in providing services in rural areas to be co-ordinated and to have regard to their effects on the overall situation. Speaking for the Department of the Environment, I am also very conscious of the need for policies on the provision of services to be co-ordinated with policies for the conservation and preservation of the countryside and for recreation and tourism there. As I think some noble Lords are aware, with this in mind the Department of the Environment are currently reviewing policies for the rural areas generally.
Research into the problems of rural areas is also being carried out, as was mentioned in the recent Government response to the Report Strategic Choice of East Anglia. Noble Lords like myself who come from that part of England will

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know that the Report expressed concern at the increasing isolation of the rural areas and of the smaller towns in the region. It drew attention to the difficulties in providing services in these areas and made numerous recommendations regarding particular services, mainly in the direction of decentralisation. We said in reply that the Government recognise the special problems of rural areas which are not so located as to benefit from the spin-off from urban growth. In such areas—this is not only East Anglia—the combined effects of the cumulative reduction in agricultural employment and the progressive concentration of a wide range of public and private services in the larger centres are tending to weaken the economic and social fabric and ultimately will lead to losses in the economically active population. The primary need in such areas is to sustain and diversify the population base. The Development Commission, whose chairman, Lord Northfield, has spoken today, assists small manufacturing and servicing industries in rural areas with advice and finance and, where depopulation is occurring or threatened, they provide factory premises of various kinds. They assist also the work of voluntary bodies providing a wide variety of services designed to enrich the social or the intellectual life for the country people and their environment.
I am aware, both from what has been said this afternoon and generally, of the feeling in some rural areas that people living there are disadvantaged by reason of recent developments, such as the reorganised system of local government, water and health authorities—for example, the reorganisation by the noble Lord, Lord de Clifford, of his local ambulance service—which are all based on larger units and provide services that are being administered from distant urban areas, and also by changes in the Exchequer rate support grant. There are dangers inherent in larger units and centralisation and I hope that the local authorities and all those engaged in providing services will be alive to them. But we must not forget what I said earlier about the benefits to the rural population in having a wider range of services available to them and the need for concentration in the interests of efficiency and economy. I know that other factors,
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such as high food prices in rural areas which were confirmed by the findings of a recent Price Commission survey on food prices, and declining rural bus services, of which we have heard much this afternoon, have contributed to the feelings of neglect among the rural population.
Another source of resentment, which has not been stressed quite so much today but which is there, is the strain on services, to the disadvantage of residents, imposed by day visitors and tourists who are seeking recreation in the countryside. I can understand these feelings. I know also something of the difficulties in certain of our more populated areas created by people who have come in and bought second homes and made life so very difficult for the ones who live there. We can hope only that the fact that no longer can there be an improvement grant for a second home and a tax rebate on a mortgage for a second home may diminish the number of people who are buying these properties. We are aware of the difficulties that are created in a local situation when those who come in are able to outbid the people who want to live all the time in that area.
There are, however, compensations for living in an attractive rural environment. May I try to counter the prevailing note of gloom by pointing out the improvements which have taken place in the availability of services to people in rural areas. It is estimated that 97 per cent. of properties in rural areas are now connected to mains water and that 80 per cent. are sewered. This is a radical improvement from the position in 1939 when at least 1 million of those living in rural districts were without piped water and almost half the parishes in England and Wales were entirely without a sewerage system. Increasing car ownership in rural areas may have undesirable side effects, as we have heard this afternoon, through its contribution to the decline of public transport. But for many other people in rural areas it has greatly increased the range of services and facilities that are available to them. The telephone, the radio and television have done much to lessen the isolation of rural life, and local authorities everywhere are now looking at the plans they are making in order to present their structure plan. In the light of our present economic position, obviously they will have to pose

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their problems to themselves before they make their decisions. They must face up to decisions as to whether growth ought to be encouraged only where advantage can be taken of a favourable economic structure and good communications. They have to decide whether to plan for a more concentrated pattern of development to reduce the need for movement, with only a few villages, well related to public transport routes, selected for growth. They have to decide what attempts should be made to maintain their present services, thereby incurring higher subsidies. They must accept that there may have to be a withdrawal of services and increasing differences in the standards of access to work and services in different parts of the country.
This is, perhaps, one of the occasions when I do not regret being no longer a member of a county council, because these are very serious matters and they will have a far-reaching effect, but they are decisions which counties have to face up to before they prepare their structure plans. All noble Lords must be extremely grateful to the noble Lord, Lord de Clifford, for giving us the opportunity to take part in, or to listen to, this debate. My Department are as concerned as all the individual noble Lords who have spoken about the problem of rural deprivation, and I know my right honourable friend will read the report of this debate with interest.
There is a real opportunity for community self-help in many of the rural areas and, indeed, many of the rural areas are showing those of us who live in the urban areas how we ought to set about it; and it happens so much more frequently in the country than in the town. I do not think there can be any general guidelines laid down by my Department, since the problems of each area are quite different. However, I can assure noble Lords that we will look sympathetically at any schemes put to us which might benefit from more Government help or local authority help, although I am sure noble Lords will appreciate that in our present economic climate any financial help cannot be too generous. This debate has once again shown the value of these short debates and has given us all a great deal to consider. I am grateful to those noble Lords who have made it possible.
7.21 p.m.
Lord DE CLIFFORD: My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Stedman, for her reply, although in some measure it is rather frightening. I should also like to thank all noble Lords who have spoken in this short debate. I, personally, have learned a lot. I wish only to make two very short comments which apply to the noble Lord, Lord Northfield, and also to the noble Baroness, Lady Stedman. When you are dealing with people in rural populations will you, please, remember that they are very individualistic. The communities are very small, and when we hear that things are going to happen because everything is centralised, it means strangers. Now strangers are not very welcome in rural communities, particularly when they are trying to reorganise something about which the local community thinks it knows better than they do. On that note, my Lords, I again thank noble Lords for their contributions, and I beg leave to withdraw my Motion for Papers.
Motion for Papers, by leave, with drawn.

USSR AND EXCHANGE OF PRISONERS
7.23 p.m.
Lord HANKEY Lord HANKEY rose to ask Her Majesty's Government whether they are aware of the one-sided accounts which have been given of the arrangements for the exchange of prisoners between the USSR and its allies at the end of the Second World War and whether they will ask the Official Historian to investigate the matter. The noble Lord said: My Lords, I have thought it desirable to ask the Question standing in my name on the Order Paper because it seems to me that the facts have been considerably misrepresented by the Press and other media during the past year, with little regard to the historical background.
First, let me explain why I know something of the facts from my own experience. I was at the Yalta Conference, and although I did not personally handle the agreements about the repatriation of civilians and liberated prisoners I knew a lot about the background. I was Counsellor at our Embassy in Poland

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from mid-July 1945 to March 1946. There were many British prisoners-of-war and others who had to be repatriated under the Yalta agreements. I personally witnessed the massive return of Soviet military and civilian personnel from Germany to Russia. The soldiers marched by, six and eight abreast, almost every day for two or three weeks, or perhaps longer, singing magnificently. The unfortunate civilians still looked half-starved but were obviously anxious to go home. From March 1946 until the end of 1949 I was head of the Northern Department of the Foreign Office, which dealt with the USSR and Poland and Czechoslovakia, and Scandinavia, and with this question of repatriation in co-operation with other Departments.
I should therefore like to give a brief documentary statement of the facts. In the total confusion which reigned in Europe as the allied victory was won, the enormous numbers of liberated prisoners-of-war and displaced persons were a great embarrassment. They had to be fed and looked after, but there was little food and the destruction of houses and communications was tremendous. They just had to be sent home to their own countries as soon as possible. The situation was much the same in the East as in the West, as the prisoners from the Western allies had largely been kept in camps in Poland and Eastern Germany. Thousands of liberated prisoners and displaced persons were evacuated from the United Kingdom and the United States of America to Russia, and from Russia to the West, even during 1944. It was clear that as soon as the allied armies entered Germany itself the problem would be on such a scale that formal and internationally co-ordinated arrangements would be found to be essential.
After much diplomatic preparation several agreements with the Soviet Government were accordingly signed at Yalta. One was signed by the British Foreign Secretary, Mr. Anthony Eden (now the noble Earl, Lord Avon) in the name of the United Kingdom as well as of Canada, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and India, all of whom were very much concerned. A similar agreement was signed by the Americans. These agreements provided for the care and speedy repatriation
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of all liberated persons of the nationalities concerned, and for the authorities on each side to be assisted by officers and doctors from the other side. The policy had, of course, been approved in advance by our own Cabinet and by the Governments of all the Commonwealth countries concerned. The British-Soviet agreement was published in full in the Daily Telegraph on 13th February 1945, and a full summary was published in The Times. The official text is in State Papers of 1947.
On the same day a second agreement was also signed by our Foreign Secretary, in order to settle detailed problems of legal jurisdiction and discipline over liberated Soviet citizens in the United Kingdom. They had to be fed, housed and looked after. They could not be left running free in a Britain heavily engaged in the desperate warfare of early 1945. Many of the people concerned had been captured in Germany, and even in SS uniform. They were of many different races, and almost none spoke English. So the second agreement provided for the application, under United Kingdom law, of Soviet military discipline to liberated Soviet citizens. These Soviet citizens could thus be treated as allies, as the Soviet Government strongly requested, and yet they could still be kept in good order. The arrangement was embodied in the Allied Forces (USSR) Order No. 166 of 22nd February 1945, issued, as others had been before, under the Allied Forces Act 1940. So there really was no concealment.
The second agreement itself, however, was not published at the time, as it was thought (perhaps, as it has turned out, over-cautiously) that some question might conceivably arise of its interpretation under United Kingdom law. The text was made publicly available with the Foreign Office archives concerned some years ago. However, the fact that it was previously withheld has given rise to some misunderstanding and misplaced Press criticism. But, as I have made clear, these arrangements were made and carried out publicly.
Of course, it is well known that difficulties arose in the execution of this policy. At least 32,000 Soviet citizens were repatriated from the United Kingdom even before the end of June 1945.

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Well over a million were repatriated from Germany, and over 50,000 from the British Zone in Austria. But a considerable number, especially those taken in German uniform, did not want to go, and some force had to be used. There were a number of suicides. The Americans had precisely similar difficulties, both in the United States and in their zone of Germany. In Austria there were some terrible scenes, notably among the Ukrainian or Vlasov troops and their families. These have been graphically described by the noble Lord, Lord Bethell, whose extensive personal research is contained in his book, The Last Secret. In parenthesis, your Lordships will see from what I have said that the title is rather a misnomer.
In the light of these difficulties, policy was carefully reviewed in August 1945 and confirmed by the new Secretary of State, Mr. Ernest Bevin. Some months later, first the Americans and then the British defined their policy more precisely so that only three classes of people would be repatriated, by force if necessary: first, Soviet citizens captured in German uniform, because prima facie they were traitors; secondly, former members of the Soviet armed forces, because prima facie by then they were deserters, and thirdly, Soviet citizens who had rendered aid and comfort to the enemy—each case to be proved individually. Your Lordships will observe that even under this formulation the Vlasovite Cossacks would have had to be repatriated.
The media and the Press have been inclined to attack the Foreign Office, and even the noble Earl, Lord Avon, personally, for inhumanity in adopting the policy they did. Just for a few minutes before I sit down, I think it is necessary, therefore, to look at these accusations in historical perspective, because this is really the nub of my Question to the Government. First, the Soviet Government and authorities were insisting that all their nationals should be repatriated. They were even making this a condition of our citizens being repatriated from Eastern Europe. There is good evidence that the Russians in fact delayed the repatriation of some of our prisoners until they were satisfied that they were getting theirs back. The Americans were in just the same position. Mr. Averell
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Harriman, the then United States Ambassador in Moscow, records in his book, Special Envoy, at page 416,
"Eisenhower and his staff were fearful that if they did not send back the Soviet prisoners, the Russians might seize upon one pretext or another to hold up the return of American prisoners from Eastern Europe".
My Lords, no Government and no Foreign Secretary could afford to fail or neglect to get our own men home as soon as possible. The Government would have been subjected to an irresistible storm of criticism, especially when it was known that many, if not most, of the really hard core of unrepatriated Russians, who were the cause of the dispute, had been captured in German or even in SS uniforms, whatever the circumstances in which they had been made to get into those uniforms. By comparison with this major British interest, I really do not think that humanitarian sympathy for those unfortunate people, who were clearly afraid of what would happen to them in Russia, could possibly have been given overriding priority at that time.
All the same, I must recall my very deep regret that in the heat and utter turmoil of the summer of 1945, with 7 million civilians of many nationalities, in addition to all the prisoners-of-war, being repatriated from Germany and Austria in only 20 months, it was impossible for the military authorities, British or American, to weed out all individual cases. The noble Lord, Lord Bethel, identifies some sad mistakes. But I must add that although his book is generally balanced, it is not quite fair to the Foreign Secretaries of that period, especially the noble Earl, Lord Avon, or to the Northern Department, of which I was the head from March 1946 on. I can personally certify that the members of that Department were then, and still are, most humane men, and in no way lacking in human sympathy. It is no fault of the noble Lord, Lord Bethell, that the media have gone further and distorted the Foreign Office attitude in a way which is quite unfair to the noble Earl, Lord Avon.
My Lords, in assessing these events, your Lordships must cast back your minds to the situation of 1945. A really desperate war of survival was only just being won, with the Russians as very essential allies not only in Europe to clear up the German problem, but elsewhere as well. In the first half of 1945,

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the war with Japan was still expected to go on for two years. Hardly anyone knew of the atom bomb project, and no one knew whether in fact that scientific curiosity would turn out to be effective. Where could one hope to send and to settle large numbers of Cossacks and other Russians? All Ministers were agreed that we could not do anything about them in Britain, where a recession like that of 1920 was expected to occur. We had our hands absolutely full as it was, with many Polish and other allied Servicemen who had also fought most gallantly against the Germans.
To sum up, I do not think that either of our Foreign Secretaries of Governments at that time had any real alternative to pursuing the policy which they did. All the Commonwealth Governments and the American Government did the same. They could not all have been wrong, or lacking in humanitarian sympathies, as the media have suggested. If mistakes were committed in applying the policy—as, indeed, some bad ones were—that was deeply regrettable, but perhaps understandable in the terrible circumstances of the time. If there is any serious doubt about this, then perhaps the Official Historian should be asked to examine the points at issue. I would be most grateful for the Government's considered judgment in the matter.
7.38 p.m.
Lord CAMPBELL of CROY: My Lords, I think your Lordships will agree that the noble Lord, Lord Hankey, is doing a service to your Lordships' House and to the interested members of the public in raising this matter this evening. The debate should enable more light to be thrown on the facts and upon the unenviable decisions with which the wartime Coalition Government were confronted. I watched the television programme on this subject. In the comparatively short time of such a programme, and given the theme running through it, I felt that full justice might not he being done to individual Ministers who had to take responsibility for exceedingly disagreeable and distressing decisions in wartime. The primary reason was that the first priority in wartime was given to winning the war. Further, there was an essential requirement which
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applied in this case, and to which the noble Lord, Lord Hankey, referred, to get our prisoners-of-war in Eastern Europe back as soon as possible after hostilities in Europe had ended.
I have also read the book by my noble friend Lord Bethell. I have it here beside me. The accounts there of what happened to groups of Russians who had been in German uniforms are properly placed, I believe, in the perilous context of a world war not yet won. He has gone to great trouble to get firsthand accounts, and the book is, if I may say so, well and movingly written. But as the noble Lord, Lord Hankey, has said, it is the short versions which have come out in the media, and the truncated reports, that may well give false impressions. Any reader of my noble friend's book who did not himself live through that period, as a member of the Armed Forces or in some other adult capacity, could be excused if he were to isolate the agreement made with the Russians about their nationals from other very difficult and unpleasant matters that had to be decided by the War Cabinet. Such a reader might also be excused if he were to magnify this into a post-war humanitarian problem. But it arose long before the war in Europe was over, and action was expected on it long before the war with Japan was over.
Decisions in a world war are governed by the overriding consideration, what is most likely to conduce to win it. Decisions had to be taken; they could not be put off, as sometimes in peace time it is possible to do. Sir Winston Churchill and the War Cabinet had to make other decisions of a similar kind. This was not an isolated case. There was no way of avoiding them. Their primary aim, totally supported by the British people, was to win the war and to help our own Forces.
For example, decisions to that end were taken which entailed the killing and maiming of thousands of non-combatants; for example, the bombing of cities and the killing of thousands of civilians. When this happened in Germany the casualties were mainly enemy civilians, but none the less a most distasteful decision had to be taken and was taken in order to win the war. When it came to bombing French towns this

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was an even more difficult one, but it was bound to be essential to bomb certain centres of communication, railway installations and other strategic targets. Leaflet warnings were dropped beforehand, but it was known it was impossible to avoid killing and wounding French civilians, allies in occupied territory. It was known that women and children would be maimed or blinded as a result, as the effects of decisions—wholly abhorrent effects of decisions which had to be taken. Would any of us at the time have taken different decisions from the War Cabinet? That is an example of the hideous kind of choice that had to be taken by those who were leading our country. They bore an almost intolerable burden in taking those decisions. I myself saw the bombing of one French town, the town of Caen in Normandy, from only two or three miles away. It was almost flattened in the summer of 1944.
That brings me to this point. It was in Normandy that we, the British Forces, were first aware that we were capturing Russians. Poles and Czechs in German uniform in some numbers. Your Lordships will understand why I shall have no hesitation in recalling my personal recollections of those days, from Normandy to the end of the war with Japan. It is necessary to remember what was happening, the world-shaking events, to put the Russian prisoner of war question into perspective. To me those recollections are as vivid as if they had happened last month, and I can only explain this by saying that I think when one is living through life or death incidents almost every day one's faculties are sharpened and no doubt one remembers these things clearly.
It is not as a former professional diplomat that I am seeking to make a contribution to this debate this evening. There are other speakers, including Lord Hankey, who will be doing that—and also as a former Minister in the Foreign Office. I did not join the Foreign Office until November 1946, after taking the exam on emerging from hospital, because I spent a year and a half in hospital after being wounded. I did then for three years deal with Eastern Europe, chiefly with Yugoslavia and Trieste, and that was long after the events of 1945 which are the subject of this debate. From
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Normandy to the Elbe, where I received a bullet through the middle in the assault crossing, I was in a Scottish Division fighting its way across Europe. So in June and July 1944 I was one who, being interested in foreign languages in those days, was aware that the prisoners we were taking in Normandy in German uniform were by no means all Germans and Austrians. It was clear that they were in the stationary ill-equipped units who had been manning the coastal defences; they were not in the Panzer Divisions and the other first-line German formations which arrived to try to repel our invasion once it had started. None the less, British and American Forces in the bridgehead were being shot at by roving bands in German uniforms. Of course, the rule that had to be followed was that someone in enemy uniform was an enemy. Once he became a prisoner he was treated correctly and humanely. Of course, that rule was carried out.
Again later in the war, in March and April 1945, when we were crossing Germany, I became aware of many nationalities and a mixture of categories. It was difficult to separate or define them. There were varying degrees of paramilitary services, or simply forced labour, but most of the people in them were not German. Besides a great many displaced persons, there was a shortage of food and many were already suffering from malnutrition; and there was, as the noble Lord, Lord Hankey, has described, great confusion. I did not leave the scene until the early hours of 29th April, which was the day before Hitler committed suicide, and the resistance in Europe ended only three or four days after that. But the war with Japan lasted until August, and, as the noble Lord said, most expected it to last much longer.
What was happening at the time of the British-Soviet repatriation agreement which was reported in the Press on 13th February? The Yalta Conference had been taking place in January and February. There had been a setback in the Ardennes offensive, by the Germans, in December and January. The British Army group made their assault on the Siegfried Line on 8th February, near Cleve—a date I am very unlikely to forget. So the Yalta Conference was taking place when we were still at the Siegfried Line and there was still the Rhine crossing

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to come late in March. The Russians had been advancing rapidly in the East and were over-running the prisoner of war camps in Poland and later in Eastern Germany, where our prisoners and the American prisoners were. My noble friend's book indicates that we and the Americans were at that time alerted to the possibility that the Russians would not quickly return the British and American prisoners of war; indeed they were dilatory in dealing with the first ones they found. They were very much left to fend for themselves. This was an overwhelmingly powerful reason for the British to reach an agreement. In any case, there were doubts, it seems, as to whether the British Government possessed legal rights to decide the future of allied citizens.
The alternative, if the Russians concerned had stated that they did not wish to return and we accepted this, was that in principle we would be ready to receive tens of thousands and grant them political asylum, presumably in the United Kingdom. Even if it had been practicable to absorb numbers on that scale, was it a policy which Britain could adopt towards the Soviet Union, a military ally, before we in the West had even broken through the Siegfried Line. Apart from other ways in which the Soviet Union might have ceased to co-operate, there was a threat to our prisoners of war, the threat that they would not be released and not able to return. I have no doubt that there would have been a public outcry in Britain if return of our prisoners had been delayed and it transpired that this was because our Government were declining to sign an agreement on the return of Soviet nationals.
I make no apology for returning to a personal note, because I think it helps to convey the climate of those times. My brother was thought to be a prisoner of war at that time. He was a Spitfire pilot and had been seen to land by parachute in Italy a year earlier. Nothing else was heard from him after that. He was missing. There were many British families in a similar position. They did not even know where their prisoner-of-war relations were. When hostilities in Europe were over they were not willingly going to accept delay. I should complete my own story, because the news was eventually bad. It was discovered in
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due course that my brother had been shot and killed while escaping.
Should there be any doubts in anyone's mind concerning the likelihood of the Russians carrying out their threat, or veiled threat, of delaying the return of British prisoners-of-war, let us look at what happened to their German prisoners-of-war. They kept them in the Soviet Union for several years. For example, the present German Ambassador in London was not released until about 1949, or later, and for a long time his wife and family had no idea whether or not he was even alive. This is the background against which this decision ought to be judged. Those who may be critical of Ministers and of the Foreign Secretary of that time—my noble friend Lord Avon—or of the agreement of February 1945, should ask themselves: would they, in those conditions and in his position, have taken a different decision? No one can be happy about some of the results of that decision; but was there an alternative? I hope that other speakers in this debate will, if they think they would have taken a different decision, tell us.
There has been criticism—and I think that this was justifiable—that the screening carried out in the summer of 1945 was, in many cases, rough and ready, and unsatisfactory. But, as the noble Lord, Lord Hankey, described there were several million displaced persons in different categories; and there was complete chaos. There was not enough food and shelter; and winter was coming. The speed with which the screening was done, unfortunately, gave rise to some errors. That many people had to be forcibly repatriated against their will—those who had been in German uniforms in the German Army and feared the consequences—was a distressing result of this agreement. The United Kingdom felt bound to carry out the commitment while doing their best to be fair in individual cases, and the Labour Government followed the previous Government in the same policy. My noble friend Lord Avon's personal concern about individual cases is illustrated on page 52 of Lord Bethel's book. Here he records the case of a Russian and his wife and child, who were not returned through a personal decision by Anthony Eden.

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My Lords, in the summer of 1944, Russians in German uniform were shooting at us at Normandy. Some of the different ways in which they had arrived in that situation remind us of the ruthless cruelty of Hitler's régime. Deprived of food, and with a few shot as examples, it is clear that some were propelled under great duress into a German uniform. But it was the overriding aim of the British and United States Governments to overcome that régime, to defeat Hitler's tyranny. In order to achieve that aim, very unpalatable decisions had to be taken. Without doubt this was one of those unpalatable decisions.
7.54 p.m.
Lord ALLAN of KILMAHEW: My Lords, I am glad that my noble friend Lord Campbell of Croy has taken the line that he has, because it seems to me that just to put this very emotional issue in its right perspective goes far to answer many of the criticisms against this action in general and against the noble Earl, Lord Avon, in particular. It is on that rather narrow point, while respecting the deeply held feelings on this subject, that I wish to talk tonight. Some of your Lordships know that I was Lord Avon's Parliamentary Private Secretary for some years, and I have enjoyed his close friendship for 20 years. During this time we have discussed this and other matters. Also, of course, your Lordships know that the noble Earl, Lord Avon, is the last man in the world who would want, or ask, anyone else to fight his battles for him or to defend his position. Had he been in this country, I have not the slightest doubt that he would have defied all possible advice and been in his place in your Lordships' Chamber tonight. As it happens, however, he is in America convalescing from a serious illness, and even then he considered making a special effort to get back for this debate, but was dissuaded from doing so.
It is quite inappropriate for me to seek to debate any points in Lord Bethell's book, or indeed in the particular TV programmes or newspaper articles which it inspired. The noble Lord, Lord Bethell, some of whose books I am happy to say my publishing concern has been proud to publish, has always been most courteous to me, and indeed I believe it was through me that he first
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approached the noble Earl, Lord Avon, on the subject of this repatriation of prisoners. That the noble Earl, Lord Avon, decided not to discuss or correspond over this issue was, in the first instance, because of ill health, but it was also because of a conviction that he really had nothing to add to what he had already written on the subject in his book. The same considerations apply to approaches made to him on behalf of the media.
As your Lordships will understand, it is impossible for him, in terms of energy and time, to comment on every book, TV programme, or article which covers events in which he himself was personally involved. This especially applies, as in this case, when he is sure that his course, however disagreeable it was, was the right one, and for the reasons which he has already publicly explained. I make this point because it is being said by some who ought to know better—although not of course by the noble Lord, Lord Bethell, himself—that Lord Avon's silence indicates an acceptance of the episode as it has been presented by the media. This is far from the case.
In the introduction to Lord Bethell's book, Hugh Trevor-Roper, in the first paragraph, writes two sentences which I should like to quote. The first is:
"In war one great aim obviously overrides others, and gives for the time an absolute validity to the lesser decisions which it entails."
And then a sentence or so further on:
"The comfortable after-wisdom of the historian "—
and, he might have added, the TV producer—
"is a luxury. He has no responsibilities. He can afford to be wrong."
That brings me back to the context in which this decision on the repatriation of prisoners was taken. It was taken, as my noble friend has just indicated, before the fighting had ended. It was implemented, at least in its first stage, long before the dust of war had settled, or begun to settle. For years before that, for 10 years or more, the Germans—certainly the Nazis—had been recognised as the enemies of civilisation. For six years before that, the German people, with their European and Eastern allies, had been waging war against us with the utmost ferocity and had committed many

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fearful atrocities from Rotterdam to Singapore. One does not, of course, want to fan embers that are now nearly dead, but the Germans and their allies, and all who fought and supported their cause in the war, were, by the time it ended, held in complete contempt and loathing by those who had won the war. This hatred of all that Hitler's Germany stood for was part of the inspiration and strength of the Western Allies, and it seems to me to be totally unreasonable to expect that this would evaporate overnight with the ending of the war, or that it could fail to embrace all those who had fought for or supported our enemy. A highly sensitive and much respected man who is very much in the public eye now told me that when, in his prisoner of war camp, some Russians who had been fighting for the Germans were discovered hiding, he had neither hesitation nor compunction in arranging for them to be turned over to the Russians; this man, a man of great culture and sensitivity, was influenced by the conditions and atmosphere of the time.
There was then, as many of us in this Chamber of course remember, no inclination at all to take a charitable view of the Germans or those who helped them. In fact, had such an inclination existed or been expressed, I think it would have caused a far greater outcry then than has been raised today from a feeling that, looking back from 30 years on, we may have been insensitive or indeed inhuman in this issue. So many of those who protest today seem to forget that, villainous though Stalin may now appear, even with that hindsight he was never so totally evil as Hitler and, anyway, at that particular time he was an ally, an ally to whose support and those of his very brave armies we almost certainly owed our survival. Whatever may have happened later, at the time of the repatriation of these prisoners, Stalin was not an enemy; he was still an ally. It was not only the general climate of opinion which had to be considered by the Government of the day; there were many other realities of the political and social situation which had to be faced.
Both the noble Lord, Lord Hankey, and the noble Lord, Lord Campbell of Croy, referred to the question of the
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refugees and the economic chaos. Lord Campbell also mentioned the clearly expressed determination of Stalin that those who had fought for the Germans, thereby betraying the millions of Russians who had died in the defence of their country, should not escape the, albeit brutal fate which he felt they deserved. I would remind your Lordships that even in this country we sought retribution from those of our citizens who had given comfort to the enemy. Stalin of course in this, as has been mentioned, had strong cards to play in the shape of the allied prisoners of war in areas liberated by his armies, and he was not afraid to play those cards. I have spoken to one prisoner of war at whose camp there arrived a convoy of American armoured vehicles to take them back across the Elbe into the American zone. The Russians immediately surrounded the convoy with armed men announcing that anybody who attempted to board it would be shot. It was explained later that the Russians were taking this action because they wished to have the repatriation of their prisoners settled satisfactorily, from their point of view, before they would release the British and allied prisoners there.
This intransigence, of which this particular example is an illustration, was, as has already been said, well known by the Americans and all the Commonwealth Governments and I have seen the strength of the pressure that was put upon the United Kingdom Government, and on the Foreign Secretary particularly, from those sources to reach a settlement over the question of the repatriation of prisoners. It was at this time that Lord Avon put a note on a document to the effect that we could not afford to be sentimental about these people. This has been, not by the noble Lord, taken out of its context of time and really made to give the impression that Eden was a man of no feelings at all. But anybody who knows the noble Earl will realise how he agonised over this decision. Nevertheless, he has said that then, and for that matter now, he believed and believes that no other option was open to him.
The fact is that in war or even in the immediate aftermath of war one cannot afford to be sentimental about anything. Indeed, there is a requirement to be unsentimental. The admiral, general or air marshal who sends his forces into action cannot afford to be sentimental, even

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though he knows the risks they are running; he cannot afford to be sentimental any more than can a statesman who is dealing with things on a much bigger canvas, but with lives equally at stake on both sides.
I will end by reading two short paragraphs from a letter written to me by my noble friend Lord Barber, who was involved in this matter and who would have spoken tonight had it not been necessary for him to be out of London. He wrote:
"I myself was one of those aircrew who were held by the Russians after the end of the war in Europe. We realised at the time that we were being kept as hostages until the return of Russians who had been liberated by the British. If the Government had refused to return the Russians, I do not doubt that most of us would have accepted our unhappy lot as being a necessary consequence of the aftermath of war. In the event, a different decision was taken. The point I want to make is that it is all too easy for armchair critics who themselves have never had to take major decisions involving life and death, not to mention the wider international considerations; to moralise, generations later, about what should or should not have been done. I well remember at Dunkirk how we looked in vain for cover from the RAF. Many were killed on those beaches as a result of the decision not to risk our aircraft, yet that decision was undoubtedly the right one".
He ended:
"The winning of a war and the issues of peace were not quite as easy as the critics now pretend."
8.8 p.m.
Lord GORE-BOOTH: My Lords, I put my name down to speak in this debate on the supposition, which I believe to be correct, that what we in this House are trying to do is to put on record a proper perspective of this tragic matter. We have heard highly rational explanations from noble Lords who have spoken, of why what was decided had to be decided, and I think that they are explanations with which nobody can disagree. I will try to take the discussion in one respect on to an even deeper emotional level than has been reached hitherto. I do this partly because, unlike noble Lords who have spoken so far, I was at the time when all this was happening totally unconscious that it was happening. Thus, I have no particular interest or point of view to defend. I speak partly for that reason, partly because I have come across this story—the story of the Ukrainian
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Cossacks—at first hand, in Austria, and partly because I saw the BBC film. In Austria one encountered the story which I fear still tends to be related there as the normally chivalrous British entertaining their guests and then sending them off to their death. It is good to know the completeness of how this came about even if it is of little consolation.
I would not blame the BBC for putting on that particular film. I think it was a courageous thing to have done. But of course where the film went wrong was in its subordination to present-day tastes and techniques; things happen, and that must be because somebody blundered or made a mistake or there was a wrong recommendation. What was wrong with the film was the evident effort to convey the impression that not only the noble Earl, Lord Avon, but also certainly one colleague of mine had made an inhuman, illogical and basically erroneous recommendation. That was entirely wrong and has been partly responsible for the necessity for this debate. One wishes that people could realise that real tragedy like this is not a sort of cops and robbers business, where the cop happens to be wounded or the robber killed. The real tragedy here was that it was what I would venture to call a tragedy of inevitability. It was not a thriller; it was a tragedy of the nature of Oedipus, or Hamlet. There was nothing in the circumstances of the time which could have prevented it.
Noble Lords who have spoken have given many reasons of policy and of the waging of war as to why these cruel things must happen. I am surprised that nobody has yet mentioned Hiroshima. There is one aspect of our discussion which no speaker has mentioned, however, though the noble Lord, Lord Allan of Kilmahew, came near to it. I came home in February/March 1945, somewhat ironically, to prepare for the Charter of the United Nations, and my memory is as vivid as that of other noble Lords as regards contemporary matters. I refer to the state of public opinion in Britain. All public opinion knew about our Soviet allies was that the Communist Russians had done to Hitler what the Czarist Russians had done to Napoleon. That seemed an absolute miracle. If one knew nothing of the difficulties of dealing with our allies, one's attitude was bound to be completely uncritical, and so it was.

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The thought that the British publio—quite apart from the question of British Ministers—could have understood or stood for a decision by which we accepted Russian anti-Soviet Government refugees at this time shows how politically inconceivable it was to take any decision other than that which was taken. That is what I call a tragedy of inevitability. There was in fact no choice. Going past Lienz, where the Cossack tragedy happened, as I have done since, all I could feel about the situation was that, if I had been there, I hope I should have allowed one or two people to escape in order personally to salve my conscience. Apart from that, I do not see what any British Government could have done.
I have only one more thing to say. It is a perhaps slightly unorthodox contemporary warning about this episode. One noble Lord after another has described—and has done so absolutely correctly—what would have happened to British prisoners if they had been held as hostages. I know a German and an Austrian both of whom were held in the Caucasus for four years. That may be attributed by some to the excesses of Stalinism; but, if anybody thinks that, may I remind him that, after the departure of Mr. Khrushchev from the political scene in the Soviet Union, the whole political and ideological effort inside the Soviet Union for the subsequent decade has been directed towards the rehabilitation of Stalin. So I leave your Lordships with the warning that, while what happened was inevitable, there will be the danger of recurrence of comparable incidents so long as there survive systems of Government which are without compassion.
8.15 p.m.
Lord SAINT OSWALD: Here comes controversy, my Lords! However, by way of opening this speech on a harmonious note, I should like to begin as I shall end, by expressing complete support for what I take to be the purpose of the noble Lord, Lord Hankey, in asking this Question—that is, that the Official Historian should investigate this horrendous matter. It has become clear that this whole issue would never have been brought to debate were it not for the book written by my noble friend Lord
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Bethell entitled The Last Secret and for the television film based on that book, which between them performed the most valuable task of bringing the matter to the public notice. These, together with consequent correspondence in the Press, are explicitly the "accounts" to which the Question refers; but the form of the Question invites me to quote the closing sentence of the measured and penetrating introduction to that book by Professor Hugh Trevor-Roper. He said:
"This is not a book which calls for judgment: it calls, as good books do, for reflection."
It is therefore the noble Lord, Lord Hankey, who is instigating or inciting judgment by using that somewhat trigger-happy term one-sided "in reference to my noble friend's book and its consequences. It is he who has fanned the embers, to pick up a phrase already used this evening. If anything, I was impressed by my noble friend's restraint. In deploying the case, after careful research, he leans over backwards at quite an angle to excuse the diplomats, if possible, by remarking that they were out of their depth. He said:
"Accustomed to handling matters of State and regarding it as their duty to bring nations together by negotiation, they were confused by the problems which involved life or death of actual human beings and they were aghast at the idea of breaking a solemn treaty in order to protect individuals."
At various points of the book, my noble friend seeks to exonerate those who were carrying out orders repugnant to them, though he does not conceal the fact that the orders emanated from Mr. Anthony Eden, as he then was, towards whom the noble Lord and my noble friend Lord Allan of Kilmahew have shown touching and very proper solicitude. Solicitude is all very praiseworthy but would have been better deserved, in my esteem at least, if Mr. Anthony Eden had applied an ounce of such solicitude on behalf of those—particularly women and children—whom he was sending to their death. We know that approximately 2½ million men, women and children—by no means all Russians—in the hands of the Western Allies towards the end of the war were forcibly and in justified terror despatched to Soviet Russia, some by the British and some by the Americans. Of those 2½ million, it is estimated that between 10

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and 15 per cent. only were permitted to live in a highly restricted and punitive form of freedom, which we should not call freedom. The overwhelming majority were shot or sent to a living death in the camps so graphically described by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Solzhenitsyn has referred to,
"this action of the Western Governments. This massive handing-over of ordinary Russians to retribution and death".
Even in this telling indictment, I wonder whether the translator has done justice to the facts. The normal reading of "retribution" is "a recompense for, or requital of, evil done". Scarcely any of those condemned had committed any evil at all, unless we accept the Soviet indictment of simply being abroad, whether willingly or not, as a category of evil.
I now come to a passage in my speech for which, I confess, I have little stomach. But I hope that the source and strength of my compulsion will be accepted. Some of the best, bravest and most far-sighted compatriots I have known in the course of a fairly well-travelled life have given their careers to the Foreign Service of this country and have made a greater contribution than most of us can to the influence of our country. It is therefore all the stranger, sadder and more dispiriting to find on many occasions that the attitude and operation of the Foreign Office as a whole, functioning as an institution, fills me with something close to a sense of despair. That is when that body sets out, skilfully, deliberately and, to my mind, deplorably, to conceal and even obliterate the truth and to continue to do so when the acceptable purpose of such concealment has long since passed. When concealment is impossible, there is often an effort to obscure and confuse the options presented. This is such an instance. The noble Lord, Lord Hankey, claimed that there was no concealment because the whole thing was announced in some obscure Army order, but who reads Army orders except staff officers? The noble Lord, Lord Gore-Booth, on his own witness, did not read this one.
We have heard this evening some of the trumpets of the apologia. I wish that I could have been more impressed. I do not consider that a counter-case has been made to the array of facts
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provided by my noble friend in his book. I have heard no note of evidence, not even a piccolo among the trumpets, convincing me that my noble friend's account was "one-sided".
The apologia has rested upon three unequal bars; that is, that the consequences have been exaggerated, or, as some kind of alternative, could not be foreseen at the first. The noble Lord, Lord Hankey, is unquestionably sincere in the defence he presents. Over the years I have had every reason to regard him as considerate, engaging and indeed, benevolent in personal interchanges. His benevolence was never more evident than during an encounter yesterday when we met in the Library, where he was studying a volume which I was seeking, and he courteously passed it to me for my own contradictory purposes within a minute or two. That particular document was the Agreement between the United Kingdom, together with the other Commonwealth Powers on the one hand, and the Soviet Union on the other hand, relating to prisoners-of-war and civilians liberated by the Forces operating under Soviet Command and Forces operating under British Command, signed at Yalta on 11th February, 1945.
The key article is Article 1, which refers to all Soviet citizens liberated by the Forces operating under British Command. There is only one faintly ominous provision in that article, and that is ominous only if interpreted in the most callous and inhuman manner. It provides that such liberated persons,
"will, without delay after their liberation, be separated from enemy prisoners-of-war and will be maintained separately from them in camps or points of concentration until "—
here we come to the casuistical opening—
"they have been handed over to the Soviet or British authorities, as the case may be, at places agreed upon between those authorities."
That is, inevitably, the compulsion which the noble Lord, Lord Hankey, has invoked. Yet there is nothing which I, as a reasonably observant, careful and humane layman, can read which prescribes that the period of technical "liberation" shall be circumscribed, or that one form of cruel bondage shall be exchanged forcibly for another equally cruel, or for execution. There is nothing to say that these liberated citizens must be handed over against their will and in

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terror of death by the British authorities to the Soviet authorities. The phrase, "as the case may be", is meaningless, because it does not compare like with like. In the inconceivable event of British prisoners not wishing to return to Britain, was there a question of Her Majesty's Government insisting on the implementation of a non-existent undertaking? Of course there was not.
The second bar of the apologia is the fear that British prisoners-of-war in Soviet hands would never have been returned unless we had forced the Russians to return as a sacrifice. This is where I am perplexed by the phrasing of the noble Lord's Question. Exchange of prisoners is, as I understand, a specific and recognised term in international law, incorporated into the Geneva Convention, the Hague Convention; in particular the Regulations annexed to that Convention concerning the Laws and Customs of War on Land, and the exchange of prisoners captured by the enemy. In every document I have been able to find, the law and obligation regarding the exchange of prisoners is related to an exchange between enemies, and is nowhere concerned with Allies. It appears to me, especially in the light of the only relevant wording in the iniquitous Yalta Agreement, that the onus of proving that the freeing of British prisoners-of-war was ever endangered or used as a lever by the Russians, lies upon those who made the pitiless decision to surrender the "hostages", as they have to be considered, hostages by the million, including civilians, women and children.
The noble Lord, Lord Hankey, said, and I listened with respect, that there was evidence that this was so. Well, I have searched—others have searched more diligently—and have not been able to discover such evidence. My noble friend behind me gave an instance, and I am certain that he believes in that instance. I invite him to show me evidence of it, and to show me, if he can, that it was anything more than isolated if, in fact, his information was correct—
Lord HANKEY: My Lords, will the noble Lord give way for a moment? The noble Lord, Lord Bethel], quoted two case in which the Russians threatened
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to do this, one by General Ratov at New-land's Corner, and another at a diplomatic level.
Lord SAINT OSWALD: My Lords, nothing produced by my noble friend, by the noble Lord asking the Question, or by my noble friend Lord Allan of Kilmahew, suggests that this was a general order, or a general likelihood of an order, from the Russian High Command, or the Russian rulers.
The third bar of extenuation is the claim that we could not know what the consequences would be. Alas! this does not survive scrutiny. For instance, as only one instance, in November 1945, Sir Isiah Berlin, serving in the Moscow Embassy since 1942, spoke to a Soviet general who informed him frankly that all those being forcibly or voluntarily returned were being placed in the hands of the NKVD. There were cases where the accompanying British officers, after crossing into Soviet territory with batches of victims, saw them being marched off under armed guard. There were even cases where the executions took place within earshot, if not in sight, of the British officers.
Mr. Anthony Eden himself made reference in a Cabinet Paper dated 3rd September 1944, to the,
"…probability that if we do what the Soviet Government want and return all these prisoners…whether they are willing to return or no, we shall be sending them to their death."
The whole policy was governed by that other phrase of Mr. Eden's, "We don't want them here."
The number of enemies of Britain we disposed of by this method of proxy execution must have been minimal. The non-Communist Russians had no wish to fight against us. There were numberless cases where a batch of Russian prisoners, soldiers, or civilians, was lined up and ordered to put on German uniform. If one man refused, he was shot where he stood. If a second refused, he was shot. If a third refused, he was shot; all on the spot. After such examples, reluctantly they gave in to save their lives. In this way countless Russians caught by Allied troops in German uniforms were wearing those uniforms only to save their lives.

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It was clear that many of them deserted to the Allies at their first opportunity. No distinction whatever was made for them. I wonder how many noble Lords are aware that many thousands of these Russians deserters, after escaping, fought with great bravery with the Allied Forces against the Germans. They were packed off to their deaths with the rest. There were many who had never been Soviet citizens, never lived within the Soviet borders, let alone owed allegiance to that Government. They included the elderly General Krasnov, who bore a British Military Cross, and who was hanged in Russia in 1947, after forcible deportation by ourselves into Soviet hands.
Much is made, and has been made today, of the cruelty of the Cossacks. Mr. Anthony Eden used this pretext, as recorded in my noble friend's book, by classing all Russians taken in uniform as serving in German formations, whose behaviour "has often been revolting". That was to generalise so sweepingly as to equate the behaviour of anyone who bore arms against us, willingly or unwillingly, with the repellant SS. This was at best rough justice. Any soldier accused of offences against civilians is permitted a court-martial. These were condemned without trial of any kind and, most grotesque of all, their wives and children were condemned with them.
What kind of military regulation, or penalty, can cover that? The onus of proof rests on those who condemned and sentenced by expulsion to Russia. Some proof is not hard to find, but it shows that only a fraction of the Cossacks themselves were guilty of such behaviour, and they were explicitly obeying the orders of the Nazis, whose characteristic and ferocious purpose it was to convince their own subjects that this was typical Russian behaviour, and thereby stiffen, or inculcate, the spirit of resistance against the advancing Soviet armies. No Cossacks ever bore arms against the Western Allies, and this is a point worth recollecting. The pretext must be specious in any case, since all Russians, those who were suspected of behaving savagely, those who were never accused of this, those who fought, and those who did not fight at any moment, were all treated equally. They were handled wholesale.
None of us who have joined, or who will join, in this debate are likely, I
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think, to be classed with that Gilbertian figure:
"The idiot who praises, with enthusiastic tone.
All centuries but this and every country but his own."
That is a description borrowed, I think, from Canning many years earlier. We are more likely to be teased as somewhat old-fashioned patriots, and I do not shy from that definition as explaining why I do not wish the blemishes of our past to be artificially concealed. There is no lack of magnaminous example to compensate.
We are as one in the central purpose of this question, as I understand it; namely, that the Government should ask the Official Historian to investigate this whole matter. I am all for that. I had already supposed, although the noble Lord, Lord Hankey, did not confirm it, that by "the Official Historian" he referred to Sir Llewellyn Woodward, the fourth volume of whose Documents on British Foreign Policy, Second World War was brought out by the Stationery Office last week, bringing that history up to 1943. It is no secret that there are three large files in the archives dealing specifically with what I regard as this ugly matter, and he will have bountiful material upon which there could be a temptation to draw sparingly. I hope that temptation will be resisted.
It is also the case that before the end of this year another book will be published by Hodder and Stoughton, a great deal longer and still more comprehensive than that of my noble friend, discovering and describing greater horrors and closer connivance between our own Foreign Office and the Soviet authorities—a connivance in cold-blooded, massive-scale slaughter. My Lords, I realise that these are strong words. The term "connivance", in particular, is not casually employed. The unhappy fact is that, whatever extenuating factors may be invoked for what was done, it cannot be denied that it was done knowingly; that decisions were made forcibly to repatriate these millions of men, women and children in the full, unquestionable awareness that they were being sent to death or inhuman forms of imprisonment.
There are many noble and honourable countrymen who will not see the justification for this harking back to past horrors.

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It was the same with Katyn. They will say, as they have often said, "It is done with; it is behind us". In this instance they will further claim that necessity demanded such action in the national interest; indeed, as has been so claimed this evening. Yet a great English statesman who was well versed in matters of national interest in peace and war had this to say on the subject. Speaking in another place on 18th November 1793, reported in Hansard, Vol. 23, col. 1209, Mr. William Pitt, demanded:
"Was not necessity the plea for every exertion of power, or exercise of oppression? Was not necessity the pretence of every usurpation? Necessity was the plea for every infringement of human freedom; it was the argument of tyrants; it was the creed of slaves".
In the matter we are debating, an infringement of human freedom on a tragic plane was effected, and decisions made by a Government of this country were responsible. It behoves us, I believe, to examine ourselves.
My Lords, before closing I feel compelled to refer briefly to a matter analogous to this. The Minister cannot be expected to make reference, since it is disconnected from the Question itself, but it makes credible by example what I have described as the stubborn determination, on occasion, of the Foreign Office, for reasons which I am certain they consider patriotic and a matter of compelling professional duty, to obscure certain distasteful events, whether or not they may have the faintest responsibility. In 1940, 15,000 Polish officer prisoners were assassinated and buried in a mass grave by the Soviet authorities. In a debate in this House in June of 1971 the then Conservative Government were persuaded by the Foreign Office to put up a pretence that the facts were in doubt because it might make life diplomatically difficult with the Russians if they did otherwise. I will not go into the deceptions of that debate, in which my noble friend Lord Aberdare was an innocent spokesman.
Since then, a committee has been striving to set up a monument to those otherwise unrecorded allied officers. I have the honour to be a member of that committee. The Foreign Office has used every scrap of influence it possesses to exclude us from any site in central
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London. Despite its efforts, and with the gallant support and patronage of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, a site has been found and the monument will be erected. Now, my Lords, at this stage, the Soviet Embassy is having the effrontery to write bullying, almost threatening letters to the officers of the royal borough. Here is interference by a foreign Power in the affairs of local government of this country, of this capital. With the British Foreign Office and the Soviet Foreign Ministry against us, it will be something of a triumph over odds when the memorial is erected in Gunnersbury Park in September of this year.
My Lords, if we who feel worried by this are asked, as we may be, why we are so persistent over issues which cannot conceivably be corrected, I think we would answer as my noble and much missed friend the late Lord Conesford once said on this matter: that truth for its own sake has an intrinsic and essential value. I have in mind the Essay written by Ralph Waldo Emerson on "Intellect"—a theme which he combined inseparably with the theme and substance of Truth:
"God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose. Take which you please—you can never have both. Between these, as a pendulum, man oscillates. He in whom the love of repose predominates will accept the first creed, the first philosophy, the first political party he meets…He gets rest, commodity and reputation; he shuts the door of truth. He in whom the love of truth predominates will keep himself aloof from all moorings, and afloat…He submits to the inconvenience of suspense and imperfect opinion, but he is a candidate for truth, as the other is not, and respects the highest law of his being".
My Lords, in this very real sense, in calling upon the Official Historian to investigate, the noble Lord, Lord Hankey, has declared himself a candidate for truth. I hope that, with me, he calls for the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, however ugly, however sinister, even to the point of shame, that truth may reveal itself to be.
8.35 p.m.
Lord REAY: My Lords, for good or ill, I shall not attempt to scale the heights of passion, eloquence and pugnacity which were reached by the noble Lord

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who has just sat down. I listened in awe to his accusations and the moving recital which he gave of terrible events. I would not agree with all of what he said, and one of the aspects of this will come out later in my speech. The two points to which I should like to address myself are, first, the accusation of one-sidedness in so far as it is directed against the book written by my noble friend Lord Bethell, The Last Secret; and, secondly, the idea which seems to run through this Question that any defects which that account may have, or which any other account based on it may have, should be corrected by action taken at an official level.
I know that the noble Lord, Lord Hankey, in his introduction, concentrated his attack mainly on the television broadcast which he had seen, rather than on the book written by my noble friend. I did not see that broadcast. Knowing the medium, it would not surprise me if it left out subtleties or qualifications which appear in the book. Nevertheless, it was based on the book; and if the noble Lord, Lord Hankey, did not mean the book to be a target of his Question, then I think this could have been made plainer in the Question itself. To me it does not seem right to call the book one-sided. Certainly my noble friend Lord Bethell makes judgments, but they are not facile judgments, as our most distinguished contemporary historian, Professor Hugh Trevor-Roper, in his foreword, to which other noble Lords have referred, makes plain. In his view, these are not facile judgments. My noble friend Lord Bethell gives facts, he gives all the facts, he gives terrible facts; and I do not think the noble Lord, Lord Hankey, was inclined to attempt to refute the facts given in that book—and certainly my noble friend Lord Campbell of Croy did not do so. Indeed I have seen no really successful attempt to refute them.
Also, I think that in that book my noble friend gives the background to the decisions of those times; and he also gives the arguments and a description of the political necessities of that time, which can be used and which have been used to defend the policy which the British Government followed then. My noble friend himself remains critical of that policy—at least, that is my interpretation of his position, and he is here to correct me if I am misrepresenting
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him. Others may feel that the awful necessities of that period make criticism inappropriate. That, surely, is a matter for personal judgment; it is not a justification for calling the book one-sided. But even if it had been one-sided, and even if the televsion programme was one-sided (which I tend to doubt, particularly following the intervention of the noble Lord, Lord Gore-Booth, although the broadcast may very well have given a much harsher and more simple judgment than given in the book), what role can there possibly be, I wonder, for official action?
Freedom of expression is one of our basic values, and is it not the right course for anyone who disapproves of these accounts to provide their own account without calling on official assistance; in the case of the television programme, to make their own public protest without calling on official assistance? Without wishing to cast aspertions on the Official Historian, whatever or whoever he or she or they may be, I am mystified by the supposition that the correct account of historical events is best provided by official sources. I should be most eager to hear philosophical justification for this attitude from the noble Lord, Lord Coleraine, if he takes the line that I think he is going to take, for he himself is a very distinguished Parliamentarian and the son of a Prime Minister.
My Lords, we are dealing with events in the twilight between history and current affairs. The link that binds them to current controversy is the survival of some of the participants, even some of the principal participants. Were that not the case, I doubt whether the Question would have been tabled; but somewhere in the privacy where this resolution derived its motivation I think I see the shadows of another anxiety. It seems to me that this resolution may draw part of its inspiration from a dislike felt in some quarters for the new rules which have made available to historians for publication attributable comments and advice given earlier in their career by public servants who are still alive and even, in some cases, still in office.
If that is the case, then the author of the Question was not selective enough in his target. I myself have considerable misgivings about the new rules. I think they have been adopted with far too little

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thought for some of their implications. If the noble Lord, Lord Hankey, were at some future moment to choose to fight a battle on that ground he would receive a broader basis of support than he has achieved today. I think that in such a situation he would also get something that his Question today can hardly get for him, and this is a constructive result.
Lord GORE-BOOTH: My Lords, before the noble Lords sits down, may I ask one question since he was good enough to refer to me? Would he not agree that in looking at the balance of the film—and I am not referring to Lord Bethell's book at all—the overwhelming visual presentation of one side of the tragedy did overwhelm, in the nature of the medium itself, the rather perfunctory explanations of the decision of the Government and its somewhat personal allusions to individual people?
Lord REAY: My Lords, with respect, I am at a disadvantage for, as I said at the beginning. I was not myself able to see the programme. Notwithstanding that, I think that the right course for anyone is certainly to make a protest with respect to that; but I do not think that constitutes, even if it is true, sufficient grounds for calling for official action.
8.43 p.m.
Lord BETHELL: My Lords, I feel embarrassed to talk about this subject and I will not go into the arguments in my book or in the television programme in very great detail but will speak briefly and try to mention one or two matters which were raised by one or two speakers in the interests, I hope, of truth and the avoidance of one-sidedness. In one respect, I think that this debate is bound to be one-sided in that this House contains a considerable number of people who took part in the decisions made on the British side in 1944–45, particularly former members of the Foreign Service and also one or two former Ministers of those years. This House, however, does not contain any representatives of the victims of the policy which was decided by the British Cabinet in September 1944 on the recommendation of the Foreign Office of that time. I probably have some advantages over other noble Lords in that I have over the past two or three
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years spoken to between 100 and 200 of these victims and I feel that their case should be put, however briefly, and that judgments should be made on the basis of what they decided, what they did and what happened to them after the decision was taken.
The first point that I want to make clear, because it was raised by several speakers, particularly by the noble Lord, Lord Hankey, and the noble Lord, Lord Campbell of Croy, was the equation of people who were forcibly repatriated with people who were captured in German uniform. My researches seem to me to indicate that such is not justified; that these two categories of persons cannot be equated. It follows, of course, that those Russians or Ukranians or Cossacks who were captured in German uniform were less likely to want to return to the Soviet Union than others, to put it mildly. But those who were so captured form a small minority of the 2 million or 3 million people whom we are discussing who were sent back irrespective of their own wishes, and by force if necessary.
Here I think the noble Lord, Lord Hankey, made an error when he said, if I quote him correctly, that many or even most of those sent back by force were captured in German uniform. I do not believe that this is the case, The majority of those repatriated were either prisoners of war from the Red Army who had fallen into Nazi German hands or forced labourers who had been taken by Nazi Germany from Russia to Germany, to France or to Austria to work. These people, many of them, resisted the threats and blandishments offered to them—which for many of them were the only way they could save their lives. It has been decribed how such threats were made which would perhaps make all but the strongest of us turn to some resource that might save one's life rather than carry on in the inhuman conditions of Nazi German camps. But many resisted and many stayed in the conditions of the service of Nazi Germany at that time or in the camps for Russians which I need hardly remind your Lordships, although I must, bore very little resemblance to the prisoner-of-war camps in which British and American prisoners found themselves. The survival rate was not very high among Russian prisoners in those camps. Let us make it clear that the vast majority

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of those who were forcibly repatriated as a result of the British decision, which was subsequently confirmed by a decision of the US Government, were people who remained loyal to the Soviet Government and who were not guilty of treason, even by the harsh Stalinist code.
Another point raised by the noble Lord, Lord Hankey, which I want to mention briefly is the suggestion that The Last Secret, the title of the work that I wrote, was a misnomer. It is a quotation from Solzhenitsyn. I should like to make it clear that while it is true that the agreement about the exchange of prisoners was printed in the Daily Telegraph in 1945, no mention was made in that Daily Telegraph report of the fact that all Soviet citizens were to be repatriated, irrespective of their own wishes and by force if necessary. Here I think is the case for saying that a mistake was made.
Before I go into that, I want to make it absolutely clear that I do not think the decision was easy. I do not think that Anthony Eden or the Foreign Office or other Ministers or the Prime Minister—Mr. Winston Churchill at that time—who reached that decision had an easy task, by any means. I am sure that they thought about it carefully; although I have not been able to speak to any Member of the Cabinet at that time. With one exception they are all dead. The unfairness, if there is unfairness, must be relative and we must try to judge it as best we can after 30 years. The BBC programme has been criticised by many speakers. I saw it and contributed to it. It inevitably put a slightly different emphasis than other people who have written about this subject because it is much harder to encapsulate in 90 minutes of screening what someone else may write in 200 or 300 pages of a book. Perhaps it was a subjective account as are almost all good television programmes.
It is an emotional subject. The death of 1 million people by a decision of our Government must surely be an emotional subject. Let there be no doubt about it, of the 3 million or 4 million which were sent back as a result of our decision, at a very conservative estimate 1 million of them perished, either immediately executed or through cold and hunger in Stalin's labour camps. One can understand how various people who approach this subject do so with emotion; whether
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their emotion is one-sided is perhaps a contradiction in terms because emotion has no side. Whether the BBC was right to put it out is something which under our constitution we must leave to the BBC to decide. Personally, I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Gore-Booth, that it was a courageous decision to put it out. I thought that the film was in the highest traditions of the BBC and this opinion is borne out by the reactions of the audience research department whose remarks about that film have been, on balance, extremely positive. Since a number of noble Lords criticised that programme and thought it was one-sided, perhaps I ought now, in the interest of fairness, to read a letter which was sent a few days ago to the Director General of the BBC by Mr. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who some of us saw on television two or three weeks ago. He writes to Sir Charles Curren:
"Dear Sir,
During my stay in London, I had the opportunity of seeing your BBC television film 'The Last Secret' (producer Robert Vas). Even though with great delay, this film recreates in some degree the sharp pain of our Russian suffering—the suffering of millions of people betrayed and handed over to a certain death by the British administration of the time (some of these people perished in front of my eyes).
Far from being exaggerated, the terrible dimensions of the actual events, and the involvement of those who were responsible for them—both the British statesmen and the military personnel who carried out their decisions—are considerably toned down in the film: those who took such decisions bear the responsibility for them to the end of of their life and before posterity those who carried them out, when faced by film cameras, have no other justification to offer than, 'I acted on orders'. Let us remember that this was the argument used by all the Nazi war criminals, and that it was never accepted as a mitigating circumstance.
I would go even further: what happened then was a dire miscalculation of British foreign policy, a miscalculation whose terrible consequences for Britain are only now becoming manifest. This is precisely why the showing of this film to the British public is extremely important and may yet serve as an object lesson.
I remain, Sir,
Yours faithfully,
Alexander Solzhenitsyn."
I am not saying I agree with everything contained in that letter; it must be considered in the light of a debate on a matter on which it is very difficult to say anything which is not one-sided, such painful and tragic issues does it raise.

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One must appreciate the reactions of other speakers such as the noble Lords, Lord Hankcy, Lord Gore-Booth and Lord Allan of Kilmahew, who are well acquainted with the noble Earl, Lord Avon, and no doubt the reaction of the noble Lord, Lord Coleraine (who will speak when I sit down). They are understandable; and while I understand, I hope, why it was Mr. Anthony Eden (as he then was) felt obliged to take this decision and put certain considerations before others at that time, I hope we also agree the reaction of Alexander Solzhenitsyn is also understandable, and the reaction of the Russians—many of whom I have seen in the past couple of years—is also understandable, and that reaction is one of horror.
Let us not delude ourselves, this is not a dead issue by any means. This may be the last secret in the United Kingdom, but among Russians, whether in emigration or among the former population of Stalin's labour camps, a population which in the 'forties—the time we are discussing—ranged from between 10 million and 20 million, this is not a dead issue. There are many millions of people still alive throughout the world who remember with horror the decision that was made and the result it had on themselves, if they survived, or on their relatives, friends and dear ones.
One extremely valuable result of this debate has been that for the first time I have been able to obtain a reaction about this matter, albeit indirectly, from the noble Earl, Lord Avon. I did, as the noble Lord, Lord Allan of Kilmahew, mentioned, attempt not once but three times to contact the noble Earl in order to discuss the matter with him. It would have been in the interests of history and a greater understanding of this problem if the noble Earl had agreed to see me. I addressed him courteously, and had he agreed to see me I would have discussed the matter courteously with him. Likewise, the BBC approached the noble Earl with a long, detailed and courteous letter asking him to participate. If the film is one-sided, this is mainly because no member of the Foreign Office agreed to participate in it. The noble Earl, Lord Avon, and several others, were invited to do so and they all refused.
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This may well answer the point raised by the noble Lord, Lord Gore-Booth, that this is why perhaps only one side of the picture was emphasised, although I think the producer of the programme made a credible effort to put what he understood to be Lord Avon's point of view. But of course he had to guess at it, he did not have the benefit of being able to discuss it with the noble Earl or any Foreign Office officials who served with the noble Earl in the Foreign Office at that time. The producer, Robert Vas, did his best to put himself in the position of the noble Earl. This must have been difficult for Mr. Vas since he is a British subject of Hungarian origin who had to leave his own country in October 1956.
In conclusion, my Lords, I want to do something which I have not had the opportunity of doing before—something which I wish other speakers had done a little more often during this debate—that is, to express my deep compassion and sympathy, and not shame but responsibility, for what happened. There can be no doubt that, as a result of a decision taken by a British Government, terrible things happened and great injustices were done. I do not, of course, include in those injustices the punishment that was meted out to Russian, Cossack or Ukrainian war criminals who committed bestial acts against their own people, or against Yugoslavs, Poles or Russians—people who voluntarily took up sides with Nazi Germany out of opportunistic motives, in order to gain power or reward of some kind or another. My sympathy is not with them, and in most cases I feel that by being repatriated, if necessary by force, to the places where they committed their crimes they got their just deserts.
But my sympathies are with those who were forced by starvation—and I mean real starvation—and by duress, by which I mean a pistol pointed at the head in the knowledge that the man holding it will pull the trigger if he gets the wrong answer, to do such things as dig a German anti-tank ditch or, as many women did, wash clothes for a Nazi German officer, or some such service, but who, of course, were immediately convicted of collaboration as soon as they returned to the Soviet Union. My sympathies are also with those who committed no collaboration of any

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kind with Nazi Germany even on that petty level, those who sat it out in the camps, who starved almost to death but who managed to survive and went home, hoping that they would be greeted as loyal citizens, as of course our prisoners were when they returned to this country, and as American prisoners of war were when they returned from Nazi Germany to their country; hoping and expecting, as was their due, that they would be greeted with a turn-out, with a celebration, because they were coming home. But then, instead, they were leapt upon by the terrible men of Stalin's NKVD and shipped in trains to the Far East of Russia, where the vast majority spent 10 years of horrible imprisonment and where the survival rate was low—certainly less than 50 per cent.
I hope that these remarks do not fall into the category of what the noble Lord, Lord Barber, called, in his letter to my noble friend Lord Allan, armchair criticism. I repeat again that I do not feel that the decisions made at that time were easy, and I am extremely glad to hear from my noble friend that they were agonised over by the noble Earl, Lord Avon. However, I feel it is right, years after such a tragedy has happened, that people should study such questions and reflect.
This is not the only one, of course, on which there has been similar criticism. I recall that a number of studies have been made of, for instance, the bombing of Dresden by the RAF, and a number of people have felt that that was wrong on humanitarian grounds, even granted the military necessity and other considerations. This question has been discussed and some people feel one way, while others feel another way, but I think it is right that the question should be discussed. Likewise, the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima is another question. Some justify it; others feel that it was something which should not have been done. This, I feel, is the trade of the historian—not to judge, not to make accusations, not to sit back in an armchair and attack people who lived in difficult times and who were hard-pressed, and could hardly have the time to give every matter the consideration which it deserved. The historian should not judge, but he should give people pause for reflection.
9.5 p.m.
Lord COLERAINE: My Lords, I think for the first time in my life I have really understood the meaning of that term "the generation gap", and it is almost impossible to bridge it in this case, and for those who were living through these experiences to make those who were not living through them understand in the very least what they were. I do not say that in criticism of my two noble friends, if I may so call them, for what they have said. I say it just as a statement of what I believe to be the fact. I do not think any of us, whatever our age, whatever our responsibility in these matters may have been, can look at the picture without a feeling of infinite sadness and horror. But I must say that I agreed with the noble Lord, Lord Gore-Booth, when he said that we were caught up in a tragedy of inevitability; and that, after all, is the characteristic of tragedy. George Meredith wrote:
"In tragic life, God wot,
No villain need be!
Passions spin the plot";
and I have a very strong feeling, which I think the noble Lord, Lord Gore-Booth, shares with me, that we were caught up in a situation in which what we did, and the decisions which we had to come to, were inevitable.
I do not want now to enter into any criticism of my noble friend's book, The Last Secret. There are many criticisms that I could make of it and perhaps I shall have the opportunity of making them to him personally, but I do not want now to go into that. I prefer to go back to the question put by my noble friend Lord Campbell of Croy, who asked what those who criticised the decisions that were taken then would have done if the decisions had been theirs to take. Neither my noble friend Lord Saint Oswald, nor the noble Lord, Lord Bethell, nor the noble Lord, Lord Reay, has answered that question.
It seems to me that there are two separate issues. The first question is whether or not the agreement that was reached at Yalta and published the day after it was signed should have been made. The second question is: it having been made, were we or were we not bound to observe it? First, let me say a brief word on the first and the crucial

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question: should that agreement on the repatriation of prisoners-of-war and civilians, because that is what the agreement covered, have been made? The agreement was signed on 11th or 12th February 1945. In reply to a Question in another place the Secretary of State for War, Sir James Grigg, on 13th February, said that he calculated that there were 60,000 British and Commonwealth prisoners-of-war either in camps which had already been overrun by the Soviets or in the direct path of their advance, although he qualified what he said by adding that the Germans had been at great pains to evacuate as many as they could before the Russians got there. And he qualified that again by saying,
"But in spite of that, it is almost certain that they will be overtaken by the Russians".
It was the view of the Government of the day that those men were in mortal danger. The danger did not stem so much from fear of what the Soviet military authorities would do. Although they would probably have behaved with harshness and severity, the chances are that they would have behaved with correctitude, by their standards of correctitude. The real danger to our prisoners-of-war came from what would happen in the wake of the battle. As the Russian troops advanced further into Germany and as all the ragtag and bobtail followed the victorious armies, they would find these prisoners, who evidently were not Russian, who spoke a language which sounded like German, and who looked like Germans; and there was a very real danger that they might have been massacred. The only way of guarding against that danger was to come to an agreement with the Russians that there should be repatriation of those prisoners as speedily as could possibly be arranged.
That agreement was arrived at. In one sense it was an equal agreement because it covered both sides equally. In another sense it was unequal because, as noble Lords have indicated, there were so many different categories of Russian prisoners-of-war and displaced persons. But if the Foreign Secretary had refused to try to reach that agreement he would have been gambling with the lives of between 40,000 and 60,000
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prisoners-of-war from Britain and Commonwealth countries. I cannot conceive that any Foreign Secretary in that position could have taken that gamble. I think he had to consider, first, the interests of his own fellow countrymen in Eastern Europe.
Lord BETHELL: My Lords, if my noble friend will allow me to interrupt him, I wonder whether he has any evidence which I do not know about which would suggest that the Foreign Secretary or the Foreign Office in 1944–45 would have been seriously gambling with the lives, or with the long-term liberty, of British subjects if we had refused the request to repatriate by force all Soviet citizens—men, women and children—because I am obliged to say that after a lot of research I have not found any such evidence.
Lord COLERAINE: My Lords, I know my noble friend takes that view. I do not know what evidence he looked for; I do not know whether he expected to find a letter from Marshal Stalin saying: "Unless you do this, I shall murder your prisoners", or: "Unless you do this, I shall turn them loose and they will be overrun by those who follow". As a Member of that Government it seemed to me that the only argument the Foreign Secretary could use was the argument of probability, and there was a very strong probability that unless an agreement was come to there would have been disastrous consequences for our prisoners-of-war. It was a gamble. The Foreign Secretary may have been wrong, but it seems to me that he had to play safe in this respect and assume the worst, and not light-heartedly say: "Oh well, perhaps the risk is not so great after all. We will take a chance. Perhaps nothing will happen." I do not think that would have been right.
But apart from the question of prisoners-of-war there were operational considerations of very great importance at the time. As the allied forces were advancing the whole of Central Europe was a seething whirlpool of displaced persons of every nationality, some of them armed, some of them undisciplined, some of them highly dangerous to security and to the advance of the allied forces. It seems to me that from that point of view

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also it was essential for those responsible—the War Cabinet in this country and the President of the United States in the United States of America—to arrive at a solution as quickly as they could.
Now we come to the question as to whether, if, as I believe, the agreement was the right agreement to reach, we would have been justified in breaking that agreement. I do not think we would have been. There has been a lot of talk about Soviet propaganda and its effect upon public opinion here, but the plain fact of the matter is that if the Soviets had not stood at Stalingrad, if they had not reversed the tide of Hitler's invasion, the war would have been lost; and as my noble friend admits in his book, even at that time it was by no means clear that the war had been won. If we had then involved ourselves in a kind of private war with our allies, in addition to the war against the common enemy our difficulties might have been very severe indeed.
In this context, I think we might remember just one thing, that from the Continent London was still under bombardment by the V2 missiles. The sites had not then been cleared. But not only was the question whether or not we should win the war still a live one; there was the further question of the Japanese war, as the noble Lord, Lord Hankey, so clearly pointed out. It was necessary, in the thinking of the United States of America particularly, and in our thinking, too, that the Russians should continue in the war until the defeat of the Japanese.
There was yet another consideration, and perhaps this was unduly idealistic. I confess the consideration was very much in my mind that if we were to make a tolerable world after the war, we had to have Russian co-operation in world reconstruction. We did not get it, but I think we were bound to act in the belief, or in the hope, that we would get it. We could not again take a gamble on the whole thing, and say: "Oh well, reconstruction does not matter. Probably the Russians will not help anyway, and we will just have to fight the thing out now". That is quite apart from the old-fashioned prejudice which we have in this country, of keeping an agreement when we have come to it even if it works out in a way that we do not particularly like.
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I was not only a Member of the Government of that day, and therefore in my small way taking some share of the responsibility for this dread decision, but, like my noble friend Lord Allan of Kilmahew, I have been a very close friend and associate of the noble Earl, Lord Avon, for a period of nearly 40 years—in the dark, harsh days before the outbreak of war; during the war, first as his Under-Secretary and then as his colleague in the Churchill Government; and in particular in the last 20 years, when he has had to battle endlessly with illness and physical disability. I am certain of two things about him. One is that he is a man of extreme sensitivity. What happened in Europe—matters with which my noble friend Lord Bethell deals—I am quite sure filled the noble Earl, Lord Avon, with as much horror as my noble friend himself would feel. But he is also a man of quite extraordinary courage. He was prepared then to take decisions which he believed to be necessary in the interests of his own people, in the interests of the alliance, and in the interests of a new and reconstructed world. He was prepared to take these agonising decisions. If he had not been so prepared, I am not clear in my mind that we would have won the war, that we would have been sitting here arguing out these things in peace and quiet. If we had got involved in an internal war with our Soviet allies as well as in the war we were fighting against Germany and Japan, as I have said, no one could say what might have been the consequences.
9.24 p.m.
Lord GORONWY-ROBERTS: My Lords, I shall be very brief. We have had a debate in which all the speeches have been temperate and tolerant in relation to one of the most emotive issues to be raised in this House in recent years. The debate has certainly illustrated the daunting hazards of decision that beset Ministers and public administrators. As the years pass' and the records are revealed, the historian, the polemicist and the producer examine them, select from them, pass judgment on their success or failure, and even on their morality or otherwise. In doing so, of course, they are bound to miss all but a faint echo of the anguished doubts which attend so many Governmental decisions, particularly in war. Nevertheless, in a free

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and democratic society this is how it must be. If we denied to historians and others freedom of access to the record and the right to comment on it and to interpret it, then indeed we should have no right to call ourselves free.
A quite different matter, however, is raised in the Question put to Her Majesty's Government by the noble Lord, Lord Hankey, who asks that the Government should instruct the Official Historian to investigate the arrangements for the exchange of prisoners between the USSR and its allies at the end of the Second World War. My Lords, I would ask: what is the function of the Historical Adviser to the Foreign Office, in a free and democratic country? Is it to record or is it to judge? To ask the question in a democratic assembly is to receive the answer. There surely can be no serious doubt that in a free society like ours the function of an Historical Adviser is to record, not to judge; to ensure that the record is true and complete, and available to whoever wants to come along and accuse or defend. It may be otherwise in other countries, where totalitarian Governments arrogate to themselves the exclusive privilege of writing their own histories and pronouncing finally both on the facts and on the moral merits of a question. But that is not, and cannot be, the function of an Official Historian in a democratic society. His duty, I repeat, is to see that the record is complete and available to those who think the record will bear one interpretation or another.
The records are available in this case, as they are in cognate cases, after a lapse of 30 years. The papers are public. In fact they are held in accessible form in the Public Record Office, and have obviously been accessible and have been studied and interpreted already in book form or in broadcast programmes. There may be other books interpreting the same record, which is available to all, and perhaps completely controverting the interpretation which the noble Lord, Lord Bethell, has presented in his own book. I am sure that he would be the last to complain. It is certainly not the function of Government to lay down an official interpretation. It is their duty to preserve records, and to preserve them in their entirety, and then, within reasonable rules,
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to make them equally accessible to all who wish to consult them and to interpret them. It is no function of the Government of 1975 to pronounce portentously on the decisions of the Government of 1945, any more than it is the function of the Government of 1976 to pronounce officially on the morality of the actions in 1776 of George III and his advisers in North America.
So, my Lords, not entirely to the surprise of my noble friend Lord Hankey, whose opening speech I admired very much for its temperate balance as well as its cogent nature, I am unable to accept his request. But there is nothing to prevent any individual, and indeed groups of individuals, from positively invading the Public Record Office and producing their own version and their own interpretation of what is made freely available in a democratic society, and what never was made freely available—if I may venture to criticise for a time other countries and other systems in this atmosphere of somewhat vehement criticism of this country for what it has done—to the citizens of any totalitarian States, whether Communist or Nazi. We should feel proud that it is possible for a citizen of this country, or indeed from any other country, to come here with a confidence that the full, true record, even of our mistakes, is fully available to them, and that we only ask—we do not even demand—that the record should be consulted meticulously and quoted unselectively so that an objective account is given sustaining whatever interpretation is chosen.
Having answered the question contained in my noble friend's Motion, I have only one or two observations to make. I respond gladly to what, among others, the noble Lord, Lord Coleraine, has said about those involved in this harrowing decision in 1944–45. My association with the Foreign Office, latterly the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and with those who serve there, is now fairly considerable. I have found them to be, individually and collectively, men and women of the highest principle, of the utmost dedication and of deep humanity. Moreover, as a political opponent of his over many years, I feel it right to say from this Box, and from this side of the House, that I wholly agree that all who know, and have known,

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the noble Earl, Lord Avon, know him as a man and statesman of courage and humanity in peace and in war.
All decisions, certainly in war, are a matter of choice. Many of the decisions of peace involve the impossible task of achieving irreconcilable objectives. This was the case in regard to the exchange of prisoners of war. If there were not a book today about the inhumanity of handing over, by inadvertence or in the climate or turmoil of the time, innocent people to the Russians—if the decision had gone the other way—there might have been a book and a programme about the inhumanity of having consigned thousands of British and allied prisoners of war to harm, hurt and even death.
The decision in this kind of context is always a choice. It is like that of the surgeon who has to make up his mind whether to save the mother or the child. It is no good saying that he must save both; he has to make his choice. If he saves one, those who disagree with him can accuse him of inhumanity or even malpractice. Equally, if he saves the other, those who disagree with him on that score might accuse him for an equal but equally partial and partisan reason. Thus, while in a democracy it is utterly right that the records should be made available and that interpretations should freely be made, we really must bear in mind always that no interpretation is fair unless it bears within it a realisation that all decisions in contexts such as these are choices and, almost always, agonising choices.
It is true that those who make decisions cannot escape the consequences of them. None of us can, either in public or in private life. But when the criticism is made, those who are criticised have the right to demand that the record is punctiliously used and that the conclusions are drawn with scrupulous scholarly precision. I am not totally confident that that could be said of the productions, the form of programme, dealing with this incident. There is also a right of those who are criticised, the right of refutation. It is easy to refute a book or an article; the weapon of print is available to everybody. But it is not so easy—here I take the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Gore-Booth—to ensure that there is an answer by television; that is, another
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programme setting the other interpretation. Who is to do it? Where is the producer to be found? In this case a producer was found who had an understanding of Eastern Europe and who therefore produced this programme with efficiency, but there are certain difficulties about answering a programme on television.
Lord BETHELL: My Lords, the noble Lord has been so fair up till now that I hesitate to interrupt him, but does he accept the point which I made in my speech that people who took part in the decision-making on the Foreign Office side in 1944 and 1945 were given the chance to state their point of view in the BBC film which he mentioned and decided not to take it?
Lord GORONWY-ROBERTS: My Lords, the noble Lord tells me that they were. I must accept what he says.
Lord COLERAINE: My Lords, is it really an obligation on members of the Foreign Service to attempt to build up a sensational television programme? It would seem not.
Lord GORONWY-ROBERTS: My Lords, we are hack in the field of interpretation and I am almost inclined to appeal to the noble Lord, Lord Reay, who, in a notable speech, put his finger on the main truths of the matter. I agree with so much of what he said that I wish I had more time to deal with it and to enlarge on many of the points which he raised.
Here again, we are in the field of interpretation. What I am anxious should come out of this debate is not a judgment but a modus. How do we comport ourselves, whether in this House, in print, on television or on radio, in regard to questions of this kind? Some of the principles on which publicists and parliamentarians operating in a democratic society might operate have been eloquently described in this debate. I subscribe to them and I hope that, on a reading of the record of the debate, further help may be available to those who feel bound to investigate the record and to interpret history to posterity.
I have only one more observation to make. There is of course no Member of this House or anybody outside who

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does not recoil in horror from the enormity of the consequences of many of these inevitable decisions. I do hope that we shall leave this debate reminding ourselves that the fundamental enormity is the enormity of war itself.

WIMBLEDON AND PUTNEY COMMONS BILL [H.L.]
Recommitted to an Unopposed Bill Committee.
FATAL ACCIDENTS BILL [H.L.]
Reported from the Joint Committee on Consolidation Bills without Amendment, and recommitted to a Committee of the Whole House.
LEGITIMACY BILL [H.L.]
Reported from the Joint Committee on Consolidation Bills without Amendment, and recommitted to a Committee of the Whole House.

HOUSES OF PARLIAMENT STAFF
Lord O'HAGAN Lord O'HAGAN asked Her Majesty's Government:
The number of

(i) clerks in both Houses of Parliament; and

(ii) civil servants

in each of the last 125 years or at other convenient intervals which clearly indicate significant trends over that period.
Lord SHEPHERD: (i) Civil Servants. Records of non-industrial Civil Service staff from 1902 and total Civil Service staff numbers (i.e. non-industrial and industrial) from 1939 are given in Table 1 of the publication Civil Service Statistics 1970 to which I would refer the noble Lord. Similar information is not available before these dates. The following figures bring up to date those in the Table:

Year(1st April)

Non-Industrial

Industrial

(Thousands) Total

1971

498

202

700

1972

496

194

690

1973

511

189

700

1974

512

180

692

1975

524

177

701

1976 (1st January)

565

180

745

(ii) Clerks in both Houses of Parliament
The figures given below, which cover the same period as that for which Civil
356
Service figures are available, do not include supporting staff. The figures for the Lords include the Clerks in the Record Office, serving both Houses of Parliament.

CLERKS IN THE HOUSE OF LORDS

1902

19

1939

14

1944

13

1949

14

1954

15

1959

15

1960

15

1961

15

1962

15

1963

15

1964

14

1965

15

1966

15

1967

15

1968

14

1969

15

1970

16

1971

15

1972

16

1973

17

1974

18

1975

20

1976

20

(plus 1 temporary)

CLERKS IN THE HOUSE OF LORDS

1902

19

1939

14

1944

13

1949

14

1954

15

1959

15

1960

15

1961

15

1962

15

1963

15

1964

14

1965

15

1966

15

1967

15

1968

14

1969

15

1970

16

1971

15

1972

16

1973

17

1974

18

1975

20

1976

20

(plus 1 temporary)

CLERKS IN THE HOUSE OF COMMONS

1902

37

1939

26

1944

23

(plus 5 temporaries)

1949

29

(plus 3 temporaries)

1954

33

1959

34

1960

34

1961

35

1962

35

1963

36

1964

36

(plus 2 temporaries)

1965

36

1966

36

1967

37

(plus 2 temporaries)

1968

38

(plus 1 temporary)

1969

42

(plus 3 temporaries)

1970

41

(plus 4 temporaries)

1971

43

(plus 4 temporaries)

1972

45

(plus 4 temporaries)

1973

39

(plus 6 temporaries)

1974

38

(plus 6 temporaries)

1975

41

(plus 7 temporaries)

1976

43

(plus 9 temporaries)

House adjourned at seventeen minutes before ten o'clock.