Lords Sitting of 19 January 1977

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

LORD KEITH OF KINKEL
The right honourable Henry Shanks Keith (commonly called Lord Keith), one of the Senators of the College of Justice in Scotland, having been appointed a Lord of Appeal in Ordinary, and thereby created a Baron for life by the style and title of Baron Keith of Kinkel, of Strath Tummel in the District of Perth and Kinross—Was, in his robes, introduced between the Lord Ballantrae and the Lord Kilbrandon.

PAY RESEARCH UNIT: COMPARABILITY STUDIES
2.48 p.m.
Lord BEAUMONT of WHITLEY:: 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 percentage of the parties contributing material for the comparability studies of the Pay Research Unit has been asked to allow publication of their material in a generalised form.
The LORD PRIVY SEAL (Lord Peart): My Lords, as was explained to the noble Lord on 20th May 1976, and as I explained to him on 20th December 1976, the question of the need for confidentiality with regard to the comparability studies of the Pay Research Unit is under consideration. But the Civil Service pay research system is, of course, still suspended and its reactivation will have to be considered in the light of further developments in pay policy. It would therefore be premature at this time to ask the organisations participating in pay research whether they would agree to publication.
Lord BEAUMONT of WHITLEY: My Lords, is the noble Lord aware that more than a year ago his predecessor undertook to initiate a series of discussions, with those in the private sector who provide this information, to see under what conditions they would allow it to be provided? Is he further aware that we are not so much concerned as to the plans for the future, which we hope will be better based than those of the past, but as to the fact that it is the right of Parliament to know on what basis the past decisions were made? In view of the undertaking given by his predecessor, will the noble Lord and the Government now take steps to see what information can rightly be released to Parliament?
Lord PEART: My Lords, I repeat that I am very much aware of this question, and I myself undertook that this should be looked into. But I am not yet in a position to make a statement on it.
Lord CAMPBELL of CROY: My Lords, during the period of their consideration of the system before its reactivation, will the Government consider again the possible inclusion within the Pay Research Unit of someone from outside the Government service, because this would help to provide confidence among all concerned about genuine comparability?
Lord PEART: My Lords, I think that the record of the Unit is such that there is confidence that it will be impartial. But as regards opening it up, this is a matter which we have to consider. I note what has been said by the noble Lord.
Lord VAIZEY: My Lords, is my noble friend aware that, while we all admire the work of the Pay Research Unit, if the labour market is to work properly it is vital that negotiators have adequate information on which to base their negotiations? Therefore, I am sure my noble friend will agree that once the pay pause ends it is important that as much information about wages and salaries is published as is possible, consonant with confidentiality and so on.
Lord PEART: My Lords, I agree with that.

POST OFFICE: REVIEW OF SERVICES
2.51 p.m.
Lord BOSTON of FAVERSHAM: My Lords, I beg leave to ask the Question which stands in my name on the Order Paper.
The Question was as follows:
To ask Her Majesty's Government whether they will make a Statement about the current review of Post Office services.
Lord WINTERBOTTOM: My Lords, your Lordships will recall that when the Post Office announced the suspension from 2nd May 1976 of letter collections on Sundays, it promised to review the change after a year. That remains the present situation.
Lord BOSTON of FAVERSHAM: My Lords, while the absence of collections on Sundays has come as a welcome relief to some people—perhaps, not least, to some people in my own profession, the legal profession, because it provides a splendid excuse for not dealing with urgent week-end work in time for the Sunday mail—this is, nevertheless, a matter of very considerable concern and indeed inconvenience, to members of the public, because it is, after all, the members of the public who suffer when a service of this kind is suspended. While thanking my noble friend for his reply, may I ask him whether it should not be impressed upon the Post Office Corporation that there is this concern, there is this inconvenience, and it is very important indeed to ensure that the public are made aware of, hopefully, a favourable change as swiftly as possible? Also, could the Post Office Corporation be asked, with any influence that my noble friend has upon them, to reintroduce this service as speedily as possible?
Lord WINTERBOTTOM: My Lords, I will see that my right honourable friend is informed of the point of view of my noble friend. May I say that I welcome the fact that there are no Sunday collections because it means that I have to write no letters on Sunday but, as I say, I will see that my right honourable friend is informed of that point of view.
Lord DRUMALBYN: My Lords, is the question of Sunday collections the only matter that is the subject of the current review of the Post Office services?
Lord WINTERBOTTOM: No, my Lords, The full issues under concern are the cessation of Sunday collections, the withdrawal of second deliveries in rural areas, the withdrawal of late evening collections, and the closure of Post Office counters on Saturday afternoon. Perhaps the most important of these issues is Sunday collections, which make up £8 million of the £15 million savings achieved by these four measures.

HOUSING PROGRAMME: CAPITAL CUTS
2.54 p.m.
Lord HYLTON: 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 action they propose to take to mitigate the damaging effect of the proposed cut in capital programmes for 1977–78 and 1978–79 upon the Voluntary Housing Movement, its employees and sub-contractors and the consequences for those now homeless or badly housed.
The PARLIAMENTARY UNDERSECRETARY of STATE, DEPARTMENT of the ENVIRONMENT (Baroness Birk): My Lords, the Government regret the need to impose a substantial cut in the Housing Corporation programme, but the housing association movement unfortunately cannot be immune from the constraints which apply to all Government spending programmes. As my right honourable friend the Minister for Housing and Construction has today announced in another place, we are discussing with the Housing Corporation ways in which they might be able to raise private finance to mitigate the effect of the cuts and preserve their main priorities.
Lord HYLTON: My Lords, while thanking the noble Baroness for that slightly hopeful Answer, may I ask

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whether the Government accept that housing associations very often provide the only hope for people who are living in the worst conditions in the twilight areas of the big cities? Secondly, may I ask whether the Government are aware that if a very serious capital cut is imposed a great deal of the voluntary effort which is put into housing associations, and also voluntary funds, will simply become redundant? Finally, in view of the fact that it is not possible to cancel tenders which have been accepted, may I ask whether the Government agree that the savings will have to come out of purchases of land and houses for future programmes? If that is so—and I think it is—there will be a multiplier effect as a result of these cuts, not only in these two years but in the future programmes.
Baroness BIRK: My Lords, first may I say that I do not think that the noble Lord needs to qualify "hopeful" with the word "slightly". The situation is extremely hopeful. What the Government are now doing was found to be very acceptable at the meeting of the Housing Corporation Board which took place this week. If private loan finance can be made available, the reduction in the Housing Corporation's forward programme may be as little as 15 per cent. No cut has been made in that part of the housing association programme which is funded by local authorities. Therefore the noble Lord is correct in saying that if the cut were to stand as it does at the moment it would affect the new schemes, some of which would have to be cancelled. The cut nevertheless amounts to only about 17 per cent., which is similar to the proportion of cuts in the case of new towns; and it is certainly far less than the municipalisation cut of £50 million out of £110 million. The hopeful point is that negotiations are taking place at the moment and that the Treasury has agreed in principle that the Housing Corporation can guarantee £50 million of private finance, which is to be spread over two years in this way.
As to the point that the noble Lord raised about discouraging charitable donations, I do not believe that this will happen. If these negotiations over private loans are successful, as we hope they will be, although the programme will be modestly trimmed by about 15 per cent.
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there will be plenty of opportunities for charitable organisations to donate money for extra amenities, about which I know the noble Lord is very concerned. I am not sure whether there is a third limb to the noble Lord's supplementary question or whether I have covered everything.
Viscount GAGE: My Lords, I hope that the somewhat cheerful speech of the noble Baroness is borne out in practice. I can testify to the fact that a cold chill has gone through the whole of the Voluntary Housing Movement. They feel that they have been singled out for especially severe treatment. The noble Baroness has made a number of points which deserve careful study, and I hope that she is right in saying that the picture is a little better than we thought it was.
Baroness BIRK: My Lords, I do not think that I should say it all over again for a third time, but I believe I am right in saying that these negotiations are taking place and that the proof of the pudding is that the Board of the Housing Corporation, meeting this week, were very happy with the way matters were progressing.
Lord NORTHFIELD: My Lords, will my noble friend allow me to offer a very warm welcome to the announcement she has made this afternoon about the possibility of there being private money available to help the Housing Corporation through this difficulty? This might be a considerable breakthrough and a great help. Does my noble friend realise that this announcement may be very welcome to the new towns which have had to lose Housing Corporation activities but which might now find that they are to be restored, thus giving us variation in the tenure of houses which we greatly welcome and which we should like to be extended?
Baroness BIRK: My Lords, I thank my noble friend for making those points so succinctly. I am glad that at last somebody has welcomed some good news.
Lord AVEBURY: My Lords, does the noble Baroness agree that the voluntary housing associations are doing a magnificent job in renovating older properties at a cost which is substantially lower than that which is involved in providing new

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dwellings? Will the noble Baroness therefore use every influence to ensure that whatever funds are available they are applied for the renovation of older properties, and will she look in particular at the case of Lambeth where the voluntary housing association has offered to renovate some houses which are proposed to be demolished by the local authority?
Baroness BIRK: My Lords, so far as the rehabilitation of old property is concerned, the noble Lord does not need to persuade me of that because I am conscious of it and work hard on it in all fields. With regard to the particular case he mentioned, I should like to go into it and write to him.
The Earl of KINNOULL: My Lords, how is the noble Baroness able to modify her splendid socialist principles in order to welcome the advance of £50 million of private money for the housing scheme?
Baroness BIRK: My Lords, the noble Earl really must be joking! Is he really suggesting that in a mixed economy we should not work together in this way? I have the feeling that today bad news is uppermost in the minds of noble Lords.
Lord HAWKE: My Lords, are the Government aware that the whole housing programme will continue to be in the doldrums until the Government cease pre-empting the entire savings of the nation at usurers' rates and allow the price of money to fall?
Baroness BIRK: My Lords, I think we shall be discussing that next week.

CIVIL SERVANTS: INDUSTRIAL ACTION
3.1 p.m.
Lord CAMPBELL of CROY: 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 have been the effects so far of the withdrawal of services by certain civil servants, in the compiling of statistics
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and related matters, apparently as a protest against reductions in public expenditure.
Lord ORAM: My Lords, the Department of Employment has not been able to compile the normal published statistics on unemployment for November and December 1976 and on vacancies for these same months, as well as for January 1977. The Index of Retail Prices for November and December has had to be compiled from less than the normal amount of information and, in addition, there has been some delay in the compilation of other published statistics, in particular the monthly earnings and employment series. Operational statistics for the services concerned have also been affected. The Civil and Public Services Association has now suspended the industrial action with effect from 12th January.
Lord CAMPBELL of CROY: My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord for that statement in answer to the Question. I should like to ask him for just two points of information. Can he inform your Lordships' House when the missing figures will be available for the period from October to December, especially on unemployment? Secondly, following this unfortunate episode, have the Government made it completely clear that similar action in future will not be tolerated since it is alien to our system of Parliamentary government and entirely contrary to the principles of our public service?
Lord ORAM: My Lords, on the first point, it is hoped that statistics covering earnings and employment for the missing month will be produced quite shortly. The information was stockpiled during the period of difficulty. On the second point, my right honourable friend the Secretary of State made quite clear the serious view that the Government took of this action; that is, that it was unconstitutional. Indeed, he went so far as to make it clear that suspension of staff from duty was being considered. I think that was a firm message that was delivered and that notice will be taken of it.

AGRICULTURAL HOLDINGS (NOTICES TO QUIT) BILL [H.L.]
The LORD CHANCELLOR (Lord Elwyn-Jones): My Lords, I beg to

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introduce a Bill to consolidate Sections 23 to 33 of the Agricultural Holdings Act 1948 and certain other enactments relating to notices to quit agricultural holdings in England and Wales and related notices. I beg to move that this Bill be read a first time.
Moved, That the Bill be now read 1a—(The Lord Chancellor.)
On Question, Bill read 1a, and to be printed.

DIVORCE REFORM (NORTHERN IRELAND) BILL [H.L.]
Lord DUNLEATH: My Lords, I beg to introduce a Bill to amend the grounds for divorce and judicial separation in Northern Ireland; to facilitate reconciliation in matrimonial causes there; and for purposes connected with the matters aforesaid. I beg to move that this Bill be read a first time.
Moved, That the Bill be now read 1a,—(Lord Dunleath.)
On Question, Bill read 1a, and to be printed.

COMMITTEE OF SELECTION
The CHAIRMAN of COMMITTEES (Lord Aberdare): My Lords, I beg to move the Motion standing in my name on the Order Paper.
Moved, That the Second Report from the Select Committee be agreed to—(Lord Aberdare.)
On Question, Motion agreed to.

COMPUTER REPORT
Lord PEART: My Lords, I beg to move the Motion standing in my name on the Order Paper. The House was told on 13th May last year of the appointment of an informal Joint Committee on computer-based information retrieval systems. The Committee has now reported and my right honourable friend the Lord President of the Council and I think it right that its excellent report should have wide circulation. I hope the House will agree with me and I propose
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that the report shall be printed and placed in the Printed Paper Office. Similar steps are being taken in another place.
I should also like to take the opportunity of paying a warm tribute to the work of the Committee and to thank all its members, and in particular my noble friend Lord Darling who took the chair. I beg to move.
Moved, That the report of the informal Joint Committee on Computers presented to the Leaders of both Houses on 11th November, be printed.—(Lord Peart.)
On Question, Motion agreed to.

RURAL DEPOPULATION
3.6 p.m.
The Earl of CRANBROOK The Earl of CRANBROOK rose to draw attention to rural depopulation and the 34th Report of the Development Commission; and to move for Papers. The noble Earl said: My Lords, in moving the Motion which stands in my name it has been suggested to me that I should remind those of your Lordships who have put down their names and who are going to be good enough to support me that this is a short debate and therefore all of us must try to cut our coat according to our cloth, which is round about 10 minutes. Because I am unable to see the clock I have asked the noble Lord who sits in front of me to turn round and stare fixedly at me when he thinks it is about time I came to a close.
Rural depopulation is a very different problem from that of the falling population in the central areas of towns, because, living as they do in isolated communities, country-people have always had to rely very largely on their own resources—in the old days for almost all the necessities of life but at the present time for leisure-time activities. They have to produce their own substitutes for the theatres, cinemas, bingo halls and the museums which still continue to exist in a town if part of its population sinks away; but if those substitutes disappear in a small rural village the whole way of life of the people changes.
Inevitably this will be rather a "parish pump" debate and I shall speak largely from my own experience of (he rural county and the small village which have

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been my home for practically the whole of my life—certainly since my boyhood. Villages of our size—and ours used to be just under 300—used to be able to support one or two shops, a post office, pub, church, chapel and for leisure-time activities such things as a football club, a bowls club, scouts, guides, women's institute, flower show and the like. But, now in our village (now with under 200), though we still have our shop, our post office, our pub, our church and our chapel, all around us we see villages just a little smaller in which the number of children has declined until the school is closed. The number of customers declines until the post office goes first, then the shop, then the pub and finally the congregation becomes so small that the church is declared redundant and the chapel closes.
When that happens the bottom drops out of the lives of all the people who are left in that village. The village as a community is moribund; it can no longer provide the facilities which attract and encourage the young men—the key young men—on whom agriculture increasingly depends today. There is nowhere left where the pensioners and the parents of single-parent families can go to draw their allowances, buy their groceries or just have a good gossip.
What perhaps is more important, or just as important, in the villages which are just a little larger, is that as the population dies away it starts to fail to produce the secretaries and organisers on whom the leisure time activities to which I have just referred depend. Whether it is a football club, darts club, flower show, old people's club, all basically depend on the energies and enthusiasm of one man who organises it, and when that one man goes there is no replacement as the village gets smaller. So year by year I can see the village in which I live and villages of the same sort of size gradually sinking, until eventually, unless something is done, they too will become moribund, and in them, too, the whole way of life of people will be destroyed.
In lowland Britain that has not been due, as it has in much of the uplands, to isolated farmhouses being deserted because people will no longer live in them and take their children for miles across the fells to school, or to a slate quarry disappearing and the village in which the workers lived becoming
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derelict and the houses gradually falling down. In lowland Britain the fall in population has not meant that all the houses have become empty; in fact none of them are empty. The people who live in them, though, are very different from those who lived in them when there was much employment in agriculture. They are mostly, or largely, unproductive workers, the single-parent families to which I have just referred, and in particular the older people, all of whom the improved social services allow to go on living in their homes. A generation or so ago old people would probably have gone to live with a son or daughter—or, if the worst came to the worst, to the workhouse. And, of course, the situation is partly due to the greater age to which most people now live. The result of that has been not that houses become empty but that the size of the households living in those houses has become smaller. In my village, again, if I may give that as an example, the figure has fallen from about 4½ to 4¾ persons per household to about 2¾, and the result is that our population has fallen. If we are going to re-create viable communities in these declining villages we must increase the number of households, and, what is especially important, we have to try to increase the number of young men in full-time work living in the houses.
The increase in the standard of living that has allowed a great many people to continue to live in the houses in the way I have described provides the answer to building up the population again. Before the war, by and large only the reasonably well-to-do had a motor car. Now in rural areas virtually every man in full-time work has a motor car, and a very large number of the young people have a motorbike or a moped; the man in the village street is virtually as mobile as a stockbroker. As boys leave school they go on living at home, they find a job in a neighbouring town and if there is no train or bus they go to work by motorbike. But the crunch comes when they want to marry. No house is available to them in the village. If there is a vacant council house, by reason of the fact that they are young and just about to get married they are well down on the housing list, and that house is probably allocated by a distant district council to one more unproductive family. The young man who lives in the village, who urgently needs a

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house in order to go on living there and continue to work in the town, does not get it. That is sensible when one is looking at the general housing needs of the district. But times have changed. We are now faced with this real threat of rural depopulation, and the local districts must change their policy.
In addition, every review of rural depopulation points out how some immigration is necessary. That, though, must be spread among the villages such as I have described, which need new householders; and people must not be put in large estates in a few villages. That again means a change in the policy of the district councils. They have to face up to the fact that large estates are not needed, that small-scale developments in small villages are needed; they require a new planning system. The trouble is that the new district councils consist very largely of representatives of urban or semi-urban districts, and they tend to look upon their districts, as indeed do most people in towns in general, as being a series of independent towns with a rural hinterland. What we must learn is that that rural hinterland is made up of a large number of small isolated independent communities. It is those which are dying and creating the rural depopulation about which so many people shed, I am afraid, crocodile tears, because it gets no further than that.
It is only by those who live in small parishes like that, that the need for a change can be made clear. In my own part of the world there is a rather interesting development whereby the councillors representing small parishes have formed special rural interest groups, and they are hoping to make clear to people generally what the problem really is. The first problem is to increase our present population by providing new housing. At the moment, by and large enough work is available in the neighbouring towns. The next step, as our populations start to build up again, is to make quite certain that work is available. In my own county the county council has realised this, and for some little time has been trying to encourage development of industry in small groups in local towns. Experience has shown that that benefits not only the town but also the rural villages within a short distance.
I turn to the import of the Development Commission. In the future it sees itself providing more of that industrial development—not only in the towns, but continuing what it started to do many years ago, which is to encourage small-scale industrial development in villages which are in danger of falling away. Those of us who have seen what the Development Commission has done in the past know that it appreciates all the problems of small villages. We welcome unreservedly its proposals.
I should like to enter one last caveat which affects not only the Development Commission, but also everyone who thinks about this problem. In my county rather over 50 per cent. of the parishes are in the position I have described. However, it does not matter to those who live there whether the rest of the county in which they live is growing and growing. The population of an isolated village suffers in exactly the same way whether it is the only isolated and declining village in a county or whether half the county is in the same position. It is important that in considering this problem the Development Commission and others should bear that in mind and should not become too carried away by the thought of those counties in which the problem is very widespread.
My Lords, I have spoken parish pump politics but this is a parish problem. I hope that we shall hear from the noble Baroness in reply that the Government appreciate the problem, that they will advise district councils to look at it through the spectacles through which I have looked at it and through which all of us in rural districts look at it, and advise them of the cure which I have set out. I beg to move for Papers.
3.23 p.m.
Lord TANLAW: My Lords, I am sure that we are all extremely grateful to the noble Earl, Lord Cranbrook, for enabling us to debate this problem. Although I agree with almost every word that the noble Earl said in his opening remarks, I disagree with one point that he made. He prophesied—and he repeated it twice—that this would be a parish pump debate. To me, the problem of rural depopulation is not simply a parish problem, nor is it just a European problem.

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It is a world problem. It has been referred to by many noble Lords in other debates on the Third World and on other areas. It is an extremely serious problem. It is recognised as such not only by individual noble Lords here but by agencies, institutions and indeed Governments.
There are plenty of good intentions and good ideas to solve the problem of rural depopulation. However, as with most good intentions that concern Governments, there is a lack of funds available to solve this problem. In the places which we are discussing this afternoon there is also a lack of people and a lack of votes. In such areas this inevitably leads to a lack of funds. Funds are available through various agencies and through the Government. I hope in the very short time available to me in this debate to suggest that perhaps we make the best use we can of the funds that are available at present.
I should also like to put the British problem of rural depopulation in its European context. I draw the attention of noble Lords to the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe in Resolution No. 26 dated 13th April 1976. This was passed on the basis of:
"the steps which can be taken to reduce depopulation of rural regions."
A number of areas are mentioned in this resolution, but only one area in Britain; namely, Wigtownshire. I do not want to dwell on the problems of Wigtownshire, Dumfries or Galloway, which are areas I know. There are a number of other areas which are similar to Wigtownshire which, for one reason or another, may not have been included in this resolution.
However, we should remember that if the Council of Europe or the Committee of Ministers sought to choose this area as the worst affected in Britain, it is because it is a primary producer area. It obviously has a low population and poor communications. It contains industries of a very basic kind, mainly hill farming and forestry. As I am fortunate enough to speak at the beginning of this debate, perhaps I might make a distinction between rural areas and what I would define as semi-rural areas. I should like to think that the village, the hall, and the church of the noble Earl, Lord Cranbrook,
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fall into what I have defined as a semi-rural area because his village is not too far cut off in terms of mileage from areas of concentrations of people—a town or communications of one sort or another. There are many primary producing areas in Scotland, Wales, Northumberland and Cumbria, to name but a few. We must recognise the work of the Development Commission, not only in its Thirty-fourth Report but also because of what it has done to bring small-scale industries into these parts of Britain which desperately and sorely need them.
There is also the Scottish Development Agency which I know has been approached by Dumfries and Galloway and other regions about this particular problem. Additionally, there is the Council for Small Industries in Rural Areas. Indeed, there is central Government itself, and the Treasury has produced a report on depopulation in rural areas. Therefore, the agencies I have mentioned have funds available. It would be helpful in this debate for us to make suggestions, or give guidance to these various bodies, as to how these funds can best be utilised to solve the problem of rural depopulation.
One might, perhaps, break it down even further. There are two approaches to this. In rural areas of high unemployment the Government may be tempted—and it would be well-intentioned—to introduce just one big industrial unit, a capital intensive and labour intensive unit, which it might be thought would create spin-off industries. It would also soak up the unemployment and produce something different from the primary products of agriculture and forestry. I have heard the view expressed, "Why is it that those who live in rural areas must be designated forever as only hewers of wood and drawers of water? Why not introduce some big industry and let them have the same benefits as an urban dweller has from the industries on his doorstep?"
Lord DAVIES of LEEK: If I may interrupt, my Lords, on the denigration of "hewers of wood", am I wrong in pointing out to my noble friend that some hewers of wood are first-class craftsmen and produce beautiful carvings? I despair when I hear the phrase "hewers of wood" from a little old Anglo-Saxon proverb.
Lord TANLAW: My Lords, I was borrowing the phrase from Jim Sellers who used it at a meeting in Dumfries this month. I made the same point, that the hewers of wood or the forestry workers need to have far longer and greater training and expertise than an industrial employee, who has a period of days or weeks, and at the end of it has but to press a button on a conveyor belt. A number of representatives from the forest based industries and from the hill and upland farms pointed out that the skills required to live in the country, and to operate a primary producing industry such as forestry or agriculture, take a long time to learn, and it takes a special kind of man to persevere with them. Therefore, I am glad that the noble Earl has raised this point.
There is a temptation to solve the problems of unemployment and depopulation in the countryside by establishing one large industrial unit. I am strongly against this because in areas where it has occurred it acts as a huge magnet, and far from preventing rural depopulation it actually accelerates it. People leave the country districts and come to the town because of the theoretical attraction of large wage packets, and so on. This in its own way creates for the town a problem of inadequate housing, and it leaves empty houses in the countryside.
I am happy to say that the only regional report that I have seen on this problem is that of Dumfries and Galloway, and it has been approached on a small scale. Although the region has a very high unemployment rate, it is recognised that it occurs not all in one place; it is dissipated over approximately 2,000 square miles. Therefore, it will not be solved by one industrial unit, and the pockets of unemployment can be resolved only by introducing the right kind of industry, if such is available—and these are low capital industries—in the areas which need it most.
I want to take up the very little time left to me to mention one point, and this again concerns good intentions. The conservationists, who have done great work, certainly in rural areas that I know, have made some very progressive and helpful statements. I conclude by saying that 1976 was a very good year for
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conservationists. With the summer visitors they came in vast numbers to look over the hills and dales of upland Britain. But what worries me is that sometimes they put in reports which may restrict or restrain even small scale industrialists from coming to country areas. At a time when I believe that there should be no restrictions, they may also perhaps restrict the extension of forestry, which is the only industry that I know which is managing to create employment in areas where no other industry could possibly exist. Therefore I would say that the conservationists should be cautious concerning some of their remarks about the introduction of new industry in country areas, because they are taken extremely seriously and they can at times be detrimental to the local community, although the remarks are intended to be just the opposite.
Those who wish to restrict the spread of forestry in hill and upland areas of Britain should—and I apply this to conservationists as well—perhaps visit those areas in the months of January and February. In any area over 500 feet they will see a deep frost, or snow, and the only areas where the ground is not frozen is under the trees. The only place where man or beast has any chance of existing in the hard winter is in the forest areas. I speak of Eskdalemuir where we have had temperatures of below 20 degrees freezing, where diesel oil, as well as domestic heating oil, has frozen solid in its tanks.
It needs a special kind of people to live all the year round in these districts, and the forestry areas are the only harbour of wildlife, for stock and indeed for feeding stock. I hope that among the many other matters that we look at in this debate will be that of the increase of the integration of hill and forest farming which could make it possible for an economic unit I survive in the areas about which we are here concerned.
I could go on, but would make just one final point about the Treasury report on rural depopulation. I would hope that the Treasury look at this question in terms of forestry, because the stopping of the planting programmes at this moment will turn away a number of people who have been prepared to spend t their lives working in these rural areas. The Treasury

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—and let us be quite clear about this—are not at all keen on forestry or foresters, and I suggest that they look carefully at their own report and perhaps consider that they themselves for once can make a contribution towards helping those of us who live in rural areas rather than make life more difficult than it is already.
3.36 p.m.
Lord VAIZEY: My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Earl, Lord Cranbrook, for the opportunity he has given to the House to debate this subject. The Development Commission is one of those curious British institutions: it is a body of Royal Commissioners advising the Government on spending the Development Fund, voted annually by Parliament, on the rural areas. It has survived and adapted itself over nearly 70 years. Now, under the first-class chairmanship of my noble friend Lord Northfield, it is doing a better job than ever. As an economist, I am interested in the revival of our poor old economy, and I am certain that small enterprises that are the concern of the Development Commission have an enormous role to play.
The late Lord Keynes taught, I think correctly—though I am not sure that my noble friend Lord Robbins would agree with this—that an increase in output in areas of unemployment is not only not a cost; it is a benefit, through the multiplier, on the level of employment. It raises output, and it also raises the yield of taxes. Moreover, as a student of society, I am concerned about the survival of the social structure of the rural areas, which are being left to decay, as the noble Earl said, in county after county. The interesting point about the Development Commission is that it is concerned not only to foster small enterprises in the countryside, and to provide advance factories to tempt expansion and new businesses to set up, but also to support the rural community councils, the Women's Institutes, the rural work of the National Council of Social Service, and other causes and enterprises that contribute so much of value to our rural life.
My main concern for intervening in this short debate is to look to the future, and to ask my noble friend on the Front Bench some frank questions about the
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Government's intentions. The Development Commission's work in Scotland and Wales has been taken over by the two new Development Agencies. They were provided with initial budgets which together totalled some £300 million a year for both urban and rural development; and the Chancellor's December announcement has given them access to a further £5 million each for job creation.
Making every conceivable allowance one can for the amount of money spent in the urban areas, that means that the amount being spent in the rural areas of Wales and Scotland is much greater than the Development Commission will have for what remains of its work, which is in England. After all, it is doing most of its job creation and factory building on about £2 million a year, so in my view it is not surprising that an English backlash is beginning. I understand that there may well be moves afoot in another place to block clauses in the devolution Bill until there are assurances about rural England.
This brings me to the immediate period ahead. In the Development Commission's recent three-year report (it is the 34th Report), it was asked by the Government to expand in order to carry out the recommendations of an inter-departmental report on rural depopulation. It set out to create an extra 1,500 to 1,700 jobs a year as part of the report's suggested programme to help save the rural areas over the next ten years or so. I think the Commission has done this in a sensible way. It has asked the rural counties who are losing population to draw up their own action plans to show what can be done—and what they will do themselves by way of housing and infrastructure to which the noble Earl referred—and to add to a programme of advance factories (small factories of 1,500 to 10,000 square feet) provided by the Commission. This means that the Commission is in the business of creating confidence and acting as a catalyst to get development moving, to get output up, to increase tax yields, and so to cut the Government deficit—I think a very good investment for our nation. From inquiries I have made, it seems that this programme got off to a fairly late start and has now slipped, simply because the small pump-priming amount involved, less than £3 million a year, has not been found.

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The Commission is attached to that huge enterprise, the Department of the Environment, in those vile buildings just down the road, and some people perhaps think that the Commission is expendable; they do not see it, as they should see it, as part of the Government's job-creation and industrial revival strategy which is so essential to saving our nation. And now, having got a first year of factories under way, all as foreseen in the Government's own report, the programmes for years two, three, four, five and onwards are coming in from counties which are losing population. Once again, there is no assurance of pump-priming money for this investment.
This is a ridiculous situation when one considers the huge sums available for the urban areas through the National Enterprise Board, the advance factory programme, the really tremendous spending which the Department of Industry is doing and, let us face it, the sums which are being spent on the Scots. I do not grudge this to the Scots; I simply want the English to get "fair dos" at the present time. May we have an assurance from my noble friend on the Front Bench that the modest amount of money which the Commission needs and will invest—it is less than £5 million a year—will be found, and may we please be assured that this programme can go ahead for the five or ten years that are really necessary if the rural areas, North Norfolk and parts of the West country, Cumbria and so on, are to be saved.
I come finally to the question of the future of the Commission itself. In that rather unread "Green-edged" Paper on English Devolution there is mention in paragraphs 38 to 45 of the possible need for an English development agency to parallel those which are being set up in Scotland and Wales. But why set up a new body when we already have one which has lasted for 70 years and is doing a first-class job; namely, the Development Commission? In my view we should get it away from very close involvement with the Central Government Department, let it have the independence it needs, let it have its own budget, which probably needs to be about £20 million—this is not Government expenditure but Government investment which gives us a big return—so that it can go ahead, hold the population in the rural areas and stop
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them drifting to London, Birmingham and all the other big conurbations, revive the small towns, as it is starting to do (a good example of this is Okehampton in Devon), all in partnership with the local authorities, making the local authorities feel that they are doing a worthwhile job.
Against such a need, and with unemployment in the peripheral areas of England, like Cornwall, at such dreadful levels, it seems to me that £5 million as pump-priming is a very modest request. It will, in my judgment, if we get this £5 million, give the Treasury at least £15 million in savings in unemployment benefit and increases in tax yields. Frankly, I cannot think of any other investment which would give us that amount of return at this time.
3.44 p.m.
Viscount RIDLEY: My Lords, I am extremely grateful to my noble friend Lord Cranbrook for introducing this subject and I hope he will return the compliment by giving me a kick in the back if I go beyond my 10 minutes. I wish to speak about the report from the point of view of Northumberland, from where I come. I think we can qualify as having the lowest population per acre in England, if not in Scotland, although when I looked at the list of speakers it struck me that Cumbria seemed to have more Peers to the acre than anywhere else. I have been concerned very much with this problem for some time in Northumberland. It is of course not a new problem; it has been going on for a very long time, as has been said, but because it is such a gradual process and because it is so small scale it does not attract the attention which it deserves and which this debate will bring to it.
The Development Commission has already done a great deal to solve this problem by its policies and I welcome the chance today to pay tribute to its efforts to help Northumberland, in particular the dynamic and helpful chairmanship of the noble Lord, Lord Northfield. His energy in getting things done has been very impressive indeed, and successful, and I wish him every success for the future. He has been fortunate in having behind him the funds which the Development Commission needs to do its job and I mean no disrespect to him when I say

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that I have sometimes wondered whether, if the same funds could have been given to local authorities, the same results would have been achieved. That is rather beside the point, however, and we are indeed happy to co-operate with him and with the Development Commission and to pursue the policies put forward in the report.
It would be a pity if the state of the economy resulted in the drying up of these funds—as the noble Lord, Lord Vaizey, mentioned—in the same way that the money available to rural councils is being so seriously curtailed at the moment. That would be a great tragedy and I hope that when the Minister replies she will give an assurance that this programme will not be interfered with as a result of the cuts announced by the Chancellor of the Exchequer. In Northumberland the position regarding rural depopulation may be summarised by the minimum of statistics: between 1961 and 1971 the population of the rural part of our county fell by 8 per cent. and the available jobs in agriculture, fishing and forestry declined from 8,000 to 5,000, a dramatic decrease, and there is no reason to suppose that this trend has yet been reversed.
Indeed, there are many factors which have led to even greater speed of decline. One of them, for example, is the comprehensive reorganisation of education—I speak as one who is entirely in favour of comprehensive education—which has meant in rural areas that many children have to travel much greater distances to school, particularly as they get older, and they are not finding it so easy to return to their villages when they leave.
In this coming year the rural counties are suddenly faced with the need substantially to increase rates. This is because the Government in their wisdom have decided to switch resources from the taxpayer to the ratepayer and, as they have announced, to switch substantial resources to the inner cities. Nobody would deny the appalling depopulation problems of the inner cities. Indeed, that came forcibly to my attention when I was canvassing in the Newcastle Central by-election. I was sent down a road called Blenheim Street right in the centre of Newcastle and I was horrified to find that
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there were only five electors on the electoral roll; they were all Chinese and they were all out that evening. It is not right to rob Peter to pay Paul—it never has been or ever will be—and doing it on this scale will make it very hard for rural areas.
We in Northumberland calculate that we must put up the county rate by no less than 9p in the pound which is over 16 per cent., merely to replace the lost rate support grant, and of course there is inflation to add. Possibly the reason for this switch to inner city areas is not unconnected with the desire of the Labour Party to retain control of the metropolitan authorities in the forthcoming elections. That may be true or not; I doubt if they will, anyway. The point surely is that any system of local government finance which will allow such political manoeuvres, in either direction, towards urban or rural targets must be wrong. High rates in rural areas will do nothing whatever to help the new local industry which we are trying to attract, even if domestic ratepayers may be cushioned by rent and rate rebates. These new industries need help in the rating field as much as anybody else.
The Treasury report which has been referred to is a very useful document and I found it full of useful facts. It is, for example, extremely interesting to see how much more it costs the Exechequer to provide a job in State forestry than in either private forestry or light industry. The figures support the very good policy of the Development Commission in producing many small factories in many small towns and villages. What a good investment that is, as Lord Vaizey said. We should perhaps ask the Development Commission whether in the future it could give a little more attention—the report does not quite cover the subject as well as it might—to the provision of housing and assistance by the Development Commission to help district councils to produce more housing where it is required for young people. The Earl of Cranbrook mentioned this. I endorse his remarks and hope that this will in future become an important part of the attack on rural depopulation.
I have some doubts about tourism, which the Treasury report seems to think in some respects will solve many problems for us. In my part of the world, we regard tourists as the inhabitants of touring caravans,

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filled, as likely as not, with goods purchased in urban shops. They clutter up the road and tend to cluster along the coastline looking like fat white slugs and bringing in nothing to the countryside to compensate for the strain that they put on local services for short periods of the year. Tourism is very valuable in other parts of the world and has a big part to play, but I do not believe that it should in any sense be regarded as the answer to the depopulation problems of England.
To my mind, transport is one of the most important aspects of this problem. The cost is going up very fast indeed. In my part of the world, the National Bus Company can think of no solution other than raising the fares. It has done this no less than seven times in the last three years. This means that the villagers are becoming cut off from one another because they cannot afford to travel and, if they do not travel, the buses will lose even more money, with the cost again falling upon the rates. I hope that the Government will give more attention to the needs of local authorities in this respect when resources are available to do so. Of course we all realise the need for minimum public expenditure at this time. Nobody would deny that, but we see that the County of Northumberland is to get £2 million in transport grant for the whole of the forthcoming year and we cannot help comparing that with the £170 million for the underground railway for Tyneside and the £12 million motorway which has just been completed. We wonder whether we really enjoy the theory that even more resources will have to be transferred to inner city areas in the future. The dice are weighted against the rural areas.
One more point that should be made in the field of transport is that I hope that greater encouragement and, if necessary, subsidies will be given to the Post Office to continue experiments with the post bus system. I believe that this has proved to be an outstanding success in Scotland. The one service that we have has also proved successful and a little bit of "pump priming" here by the Development Commission would pay great dividends. Indeed, I believe that, in parts of the Hebrides, the post bus now provides the only known form of public transport and is highly successful and even profitable. So I hope that we can consider this as constructive help.
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As the noble Lord, Lord Vaizey, has said, the cost of doing something is not great. I have heard it said that the problems of the whole of the North of England could be solved by an expenditure of less than £1 million a year of public money for a period of less than 10 years. That is the scale of the operation that we are talking about. I hope that the Minister will today be able to give us some firm commitment on behalf of the Government to continue to help and to give serious consideration to the problems of rural depopulation.
3.54 p.m.
Lord DE CLIFFORD: My Lords, before addressing your Lordships, I should like to apologise to my noble friend Lord Cranbrook for not having been present when he opened this most important debate. I am one of those unfortunate people to whom the noble Lord, Lord Tan law, referred who live over 500 feet up. We have been having almost permanent frost recently and nightly we get about three inches of snow. When that is combined with a puncture such as I had this morning when I found the wheel frozen into the ground, my noble friend will perhaps forgive me for not having been here in time.
This question of the depopulation of rural England is one upon which I have addressed your Lordships before. I find that the position is not improving in any shape or form. The Development Commission is undoubtedly doing extremely good work, but I feel that it is acting a trifle too slowly. One factor that is occurring particularly in the deep rural areas is that the young people are leaving and are being replaced by pensioners and aged people who are seeking retirement. So, though the Development Commission may go ahead and lay out splendid plans for factories and other developments, when it comes to finding the young people to work in them, they will not be there. All the Commission will find are people who are on the verge of retirement or actually retiring. Alternatively—and this is even worse—the Commission will find that the houses have been acquired by people who merely want to use them as summer resorts.
When the small factories are put up—and there have been a number of them

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—they are nearly always centred on the perimeter of some small town. The people whom the Commission would wish to work in these factories may live anything from seven to 10 miles away down small by-roads in small villages. In some cases, I know of people who live anything up to a mile from a road at all and who have to walk down to the road. Therefore, may I ask the Government and the Development Commission whether they cannot turn their attention to seeing how they may assist the development of rural transport? The situation is really quite extraordinary at times. In my own part of the world there is what people call a market day in the local town, where there has been no market for years. However, the tradition remains that everybody goes there on that day. Down the road to collect perhaps 27 people a 46-seater bus is sent. We have arrived at a moment when, particularly in weather like this, if the bus goes down the road one way nobody goes up the road the other way. When it gets to the end there is a good deal of excitement as to how it is to turn round and then when it is going back up the road nobody can go the other way. The roads are reduced to one-way roads.
I believe that the Development Commission might turn its attention to seeing whether it cannot help some of the bus companies to produce the mini-buses which would not only very suitably carry out the shopping traffic requirement but could also be most usefully used in going from village to village, taking the two, three or four people who want to work in the local towns.
We are also losing and shall lose considerable population as a result of the closing down of the village schools. One cannot really expect, with the limitations laid down as to how far away a child must live before it can get a bus and with the weather we have been having, that a child should walk a mile and a half to the place where the school bus stops and then stand there for anything up to an hour because the bus has not been able to get there. This seems quite extraordinary to me and it happens not once but day after day in this weather. Similarly, they may be able to get back in the end but to expect children to walk anything up to a mile and a half in eight inches of snow after a day at school, where the snow ploughs have not passed
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and where drifts may be up to three feet deep, is asking a tremendous amount of a child who has to get to a school which may be seven, 10 or 15 miles away. I would ask the Development Commission, the Government and everybody concerned to see whether some better form of transport or better communications of any kind can be organised for these remote villages.
The noble Viscount, Lord Ridley, hit on one point which I consider to be absolutely imperative. That is the provision of houses for young people who are working in these areas. As I have already told your Lordships, the sale of houses at the moment goes from young to old, because the people who are retiring can produce the money at once probably, without any form of mortgages or things like that. But I feel that if local authorities could be helped to build better and far more up-to-date houses, which would be attractive to young people, they would be doing a great deal towards helping to stop the depopulation of the rural areas.
I still think that probably the key to the survival of all deep rural populations lies in proper transport facilities and a proper system of roads and access, as well of general communications such as those of the Post Office. One thing which has hit rural populations very hard has been the abandonment of the Sunday post. In my part of the world the last collection of post at the weekend is at 9 o'clock on Saturday morning, and the next one is at 9 o'clock on Monday morning. In these circumstances, how on earth can anyone reply to an important letter which might arrive at 11 o'clock on a Saturday? What usually happens is that the Post Office collect mail while delivering mail, and a person who has to make an urgent reply is completely hamstrung. No matter what stamp he puts on the letter, nobody will get it before Tuesday.
I should like to ask one more thing of the noble Baroness who is to reply to the debate—and this is my last request. Can she not use some influence with the Post Office to reinstitute the Sunday post in rural areas. I am not saying that this should necessarily be done in urban areas, for which for various reasons I hold no brief at all. But to do this in rural areas would be of enormous help to everyone

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concerned, and I know that the local Post Office authorities and the local postmen would be only too happy and too willing to do it. They have always said that they did not like giving it up in the first place.
4.3 p.m.
Lord WILSON of HIGH WRAY: My Lords, I am one who comes from Cumbria to partake in the debate today, which the noble Earl, Lord Cranbrook, has kindly given us the opportunity of holding. I am grateful to him for that; but I am less grateful to him for picking my speech to pieces, sentence by sentence, and your Lordships will be relieved to hear that therefore I have very little to say. I entirely agree with the points he raised, with just one or two exceptions. I do not know of any village where the pub has disappeared, and I think that he might possibly have mentioned people such as the doctor and the district nurse, who are of course of vital importance in the country and who are among the first to go. Loss of the post office means difficulty for old-age pensioners in collecting their pensions, cashing postal orders from their relatives, and so on.
The noble Earl has made these points, but I should like to summarise them very quickly because this is a comprehensive problem. Some noble Lords have dealt with particular aspects, but I think that the five problems are as follows. First, in the rural areas there must be work at a rate of pay commensurate with that obtainable in the cities. Secondly, there must be adequate housing. Thirdly, there must be adequate transport. That need has been touched upon time and again—it is of course vitally important—and in our part of the world the situation is becoming really desperate for those who cannot afford their own mechanical transport.
Then, more attention should be given to keeping the schools in being. The education departments are closing schools as hard as they can. Logistically they have every possible reason for doing so, but I think that every effort should be made to keep the village schools open. I am quite certain that in these village schools we can get the type of schoolmaster who probably, along with his wife, wants to live in the country and teach
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perhaps 15 children in a school in a remote village in Cumbria or Cornwall; and those children would get just as good an education as many of the children in our overcrowded primary schools in the cities. Finally, the necessary services must be made available.
One point which has been mentioned only barely calls, I believe, for a little observation. That is the problem of the second home. In the rural areas of Cumbria—and I think that the noble Lord, Lord Inglewood, will agree with me—approximately 10 per cent. of the houses are lived in by people whom we call off-comers. I emphasise that I speak here only in approximate figures. Some of your Lordships may have seen the article in the Sunday Times a week or two ago about the village of Finsthwaite where practically the whole of the indigenous population has disappeared and the second home owners have come in. One cannot blame a local man who has worked hard on his farm all his life—and was probably born there—for wanting to go into the local town where he has the amenities which he no longer gets in the village. Naturally he will sell his house to the highest bidder. If he can get £8,000 or £10,000 from a solicitor in Manchester, who wants to use the house only at weekends, one cannot blame him for doing that.
I think that this situation raises an ethical question; namely, those who own second homes in our villages should put themselves out of their way to feel that they have come to a new community, a community which they have chosen, a community which they enjoy, and should mix with the people and try to do a fair share in pulling their weight towards keeping village life going. For example, it might be much more worthy to take old Mr. and Mrs. Postlethwaite 10 miles into the town on a Saturday afternoon to do a bit of shopping, than to give a pound towards the village fete. One hopes that those who own second homes—many have not had them very long—will do their utmost to mix with the locals. It may not be easy, but nothing in life is easy nowadays and they should try to do the best that they can for the village.
In conclusion, my Lords, I must say that I am quite convinced that there are large numbers of young, active, intelligent

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people, young married couples, who would love to live in the country and who would do so if the proper opportunities were given to them. Therefore, I hope that all the questions that have been asked about rural development, and paying for it, will take that into account.
4.9 p.m.
Lord INGLEWOOD: My Lords, if not a new problem, rural depopulation is a very good subject for debate here, and not least because in every generation it takes on a somewhat different form. One factor which we must not forget at the moment, which makes the problem so different from what it was not so long ago, is that nearly every family has one motor car—even in the remote part of the world that we have been speaking of—and sometimes two. But I want to speak in particular about the district I know—again, Cumbria. I live in the North part, and for 19 years I represented the Southern part, Westmorland, in the House of Commons. The noble Lord, Lord Wilson of High Wray, was twice my opponent at Election time, and later my Lord Lieutenant, and I am very glad of the opportunity to follow him in the debate here this afternoon.
In reply to the noble Lord, Lord Vaizey, I would say that our county council has not been slow in preparing action plans. I have them here—116 pages dealing with the less-developed parts of the county. A great deal of it is written in the most beautiful planners' jargon, but none the less there is a lot of good stuff in it.
My Lords, I would submit that, however important this subject is, it is very easy to exaggerate. In every age there has been a tendency for the young to leave areas which are mainly agricultural or where the businesses are on a small scale. The young have gone to explore areas with bigger populations and hence bigger opportunities, and often they have come back with a wider experience than they would have had if they had stayed. I must confess that I did this myself and that I have two sons who are now both in London but who both intend to return; and I am sure that the same applies to a great many people with different backgrounds.
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Returning to Cumbria, to those who do not know it, it may look all the same on the map, but in fact the North and the South are very different. The Southern part has had a most interesting historical development. It may be thought to be remote and as rural as any corner of England, but until recently because of water power nearly every village had a workshop or a small mill working wool, timber or leather, which gave a greater variety of employment to the people in the county than was available in many similar areas. It is sad to say that many of those small industries have disappeared, just in the same way as small farms have disappeared. The Council for Small Industries in Rural Areas has done a great deal to help remedy this situation, and deserves all our support.
I would submit that small workshops are just as appropriate in villages inside the National Parks as outside them. We have been slow to accept this; but I can clearly remember the line I took in 1947 or 1948 during the Committee stages of the Bill setting up the National Parks, arguing and urging support for measures to ensure a greater variety of employment in those areas.
The tourist industry can do a lot—much more, I think, than the noble Viscount, Lord Ridley, submitted; but then, of course, Northumberland has not got the advantages of some other parts of England—but I admit that it cannot do everything. In this field there is a lot that we can learn from going to see what the Germans have done. They have always been more alive than we have been to the development of small industries—very small in many cases—not only in country towns but also in villages. In particular, since 1945, when they had a problem far bigger than anything we have known of settling the refugees from the East—and the numbers ran to several millions—they have put in hand the most extensive plans for setting up small factories and small businesses in the rural areas and in the villages, as well as in the larger towns. If well sited, there is very little conflict with the strict planning controls—and I think that in many areas the German planning controls over new buildings are stricter than we know them here.
My Lords, that is less likely to happen in Britain unless there are sufficient new

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houses built by local authorities and, further, unless such houses as are built are spread much more evenly over the whole area and are not concentrated on the edges of the small towns and in certain of the larger villages which are designated as appropriate for development. And in passing, may I say that the present trend of legislation does not encourage the owners of houses to let them to families living permanently in the district. Holiday lets, or even the sale of holiday homes, have an advantage which has already been described in the debate this afternoon, and much of that is thanks to recent legislation of the present Government.
I have one last point, my Lords, If the bureaucrats in any county education department want to break the heart of any village, all they need do is to press to close the village primary school. Some of these schools which are now in danger have up to 40 children and two teachers. That is no exaggeration, and I hope that the noble Baroness, when she comes to reply, will make it clear beyond all reasonable doubt that this must stop. Such schools, especially where the teachers live in the village, are valuable beyond all calculation. Many of them have long and honourable records and traditions and were endowed by the people who have lived in the villages, maybe over several centuries.
Not quite as important as the schools but also important in the sense that the same thing can be said about them, are the village Post Office or sub-Post Office and the district or village nurse. They must stay; and I would add the village policeman, too. Although nowadays he is rarely seen on his feet, he is none the less valuable and respected for that. Then there may be a village bus operator or a post bus. I claim to have done a lot of work in our area pressing for the setting up of the first post bus which still operates out of Penrith, and I am very proud of that. If there is no bus operator, an effort should be made to establish a post bus.
My Lords, one could go on with a long catalogue but in the end it all depends upon population, and that means housing. In our present mixed economy the responsibility for that is mainly, if not wholly, on the authority responsible for housing,
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and I have already referred to the doubtful policy in many counties where rural housing seems to be concentrated on the edges of the towns. My final plea is that I hope there will be a stop to the closure of these small village schools unless it is reasonable to all the people that they cannot continue, and that a much greater effort will be made to spread the building of houses over the whole of these areas.
4.17 p.m.
Lord HENLEY: My Lords, in initiating this debate the noble Earl drew for us a picture of the classic village, much of which has now gone; but what have not gone completely, perhaps, are the kind of social values which went with that village. We all know that that kind of village had less social delinquency; we know that it had fewer probation orders; we know that its schools had fewer calls on such special services as remedial teaching, and so on. But what also went with it and what is harder to quantify is the kind of neighbourliness and social integration which we all recognise when we see it though we find it very difficult to pin down and describe exactly. But it is, in effect, what the commuter and the seeker after the second home is looking for, is it not? My Lords, this quality can be seen in many of our towns, where there are aspects which we regard as rather village-like, as having a certain villageness. Is this not a quality which stays over from the old village, a picture of which the noble Earl painted, which may indeed have lost its function but the form of which survivies? And may it not be that these social values which we find very difficult to pin down, this kind of social cement which, as I say, we recognise even in our biggest towns, can be preserved and possibly superimposed upon our urban areas.
The noble Earl did not say so, but it seems to me possible that in trying to preserve these values we have made an error in the way we have looked at planning. We have tended to look at the planning of villages in terms of the key settlement—that is to say, the village which can be expanded, where it is worth spending money on sewerage, on schools and on transport—where the village becomes a bigger one. It may even become a small town. It may indeed lose those very qualities which I am suggesting, and which I believe the noble Earl implied, can be

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preserved. On the other hand, you have a village which misses out on this. It may even miss out—and I say this looking very closely at myself—because conservationists suggest that it should not be expanded because it has aspects that are beautiful and must be left as it is, as a museum piece. At any rate, there you have a very difficult question. On the one hand, you have the key settlement policy which is tending to destroy what we want to preserve; on the other hand, we are leaving those villages that we want to preserve not preserved but, in fact, almost ossified.
I do not put forward any ideas as to how this problem can be coped with. I merely put it forward as a most difficult question. My noble friend suggested that this was not only an English problem but a European problem, and, indeed, wider than that. It may interest your Lordships to know that the Russian planners describe this kind of village—the non-growth village, the kind of village that the Peak Park Planning Board aptly describe as in the spiral of decline—in the words "settlements without perspective". That phrase, "settlement without perspective", has some force. I think that it makes us realise how much this problem belongs not only to us but to the world in general—as is the case with many other of our problems, particularly those in this field embracing agriculture.
The difficulty I see is that the key settlement policy, on the face of it, is a perfectly sensible one; it makes sense economically. It is obviously cheaper to concentrate your dispersed services in this kind of way. But is this really the only way that we should look at these communities? Are we not beginning to understand that there are other kinds of accounting than accountants' accounting; that there is social accounting, too? Do we not recognise that the kind of social cement which this sort of community provides is something which is so valuable that we ought to consider paying a very high price indeed for it? If this kind of community feeling, this kind of neighbourliness, this kind of social cohesion, or whatever one may wish to call it, goes from our rural areas it will go from our urban areas. And if it goes from the urban areas we are indeed in trouble. This, I think, was the implication behind
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what the noble Earl said at the beginning of his speech; and the practical implication of that is that planners should begin to look very suspiciously at structure plans which deal in terms of key settlements; that they should loosen this up altogether and say, "Perhaps we were wrong".
My Lords, so much for that particular idea that passed through my mind while listening to the noble Earl. A number of other things were said in the course of the various speeches, and the first that I want to touch upon is the question of rural industry. One of the difficulties about rural industry has been the question of planning permission. If you give planning permission for a small industry—one, say, employing half a dozen people—then let us say that, as happens to some of those industries, it goes "bust", you are then left with the unfortunate state of affairs in which open-ended planning permission has been given, in which you are allowing in just those things that you want to prevent in these rural areas. Both the Dobry Report and the Development Commission have suggested—and it seems to me a very valuable suggestion—that there should be a special planning category for this kind of thing. I am quite sure that the noble Baroness is well aware of that and that she will have something to say about it. It is extremely important.
My Lords, running with that question of the small industry and planning permission for the very small industry, there is the question of change of emphasis (which, although I could be wrong, is being resisted by COSIRA) for giving money to very small industries in very small rural communities. COSIRA, most creditably, has built up a relationship in the smaller towns with the medium-size and smaller industries, over which they have done very well and which I should be loath to see diminished in any way. But I think that what it has meant is that COSIRA has not always been willing to look at the tiny industry in the village. I see the noble Lord shaking his head. I should be delighted to hear, in five minutes' time, that I am wrong. As I say, it was suggested to my mind that COSIRA is possibly not right here.
I turn now to tourism. The noble Viscount, Lord Ridley, said—and I follow him entirely—that he is not completely sure that tourism is the answer to these

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problems. The noble Lord, Lord Inglewood, disagreed with him. Well, my Lords, I am very doubtful about the benefits of tourism in the rural areas. I know that the tourist industry will tell me of the enormous sums of money in the balance of payments that are received in this country from tourism. That may be so; but the rural areas are not like London, Edinburgh and Stratford-upon-Avon. I wonder who gets the profits from tourism in the rural areas. It may be the tourist industry; it is certainly not the local farmers, who I am sure do not regard payment for the odd bed and breakfast and the odd tea as any proper substitute for the viability of their industry. I look at myself and I wonder whether I am not going to be rather like the poorer inhabitants of Spain and the Caribbean who see the rich tourists coming in and making use of their facilities. I sometimes think of myself as a supplier of raw materials from which the tourist industry is making profits; I see myself as the poor countryman of the Caribbean, and I am far from sure about the statistics of the immense wealth that comes to this country, even to Stratford-upon-Avon, London and Edinburgh, from the tourist industry. Here, I think I agree with the noble Lord from Northumberland.
My Lords, I think that those are the points I really wanted to touch upon. It has been a most useful and interesting debate. My difficulty in agreeing to the request from the noble Earl to join in the debate has been that I am aware of the appalling problems of the depopulation of rural England, of the extraordinary difficulty of what a village is, of whether it should be preserved, and if so how. I thought to myself that I can see no thread running through this on which I could hang anything useful to say to your Lordships. Indeed, I still feel that there is no thread, no answer, no solution to this appalling problem. I feel that all that we can do at the moment is to try to pose these questions: the question of where we are going, of what is worth saving, whether it can be saved and, if so, in such a way that what you are saving is not merely something to keep in a museum but something which we can graft on to our life in the rest of the urban world.
4.30 p.m.
Lord SANDFORD: My Lords, I feel that I must start by apologising to your
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Lordships for intruding a voice from the City of Westminster into this rural debate. But, like the three previous noble Lords who have just spoken, I can claim, too, to have my roots in Cumbria, though at rather humbler levels of Cumbrian society than have spoken so far. My forebears were farmers in Penruddoch, wheelwrights in Watermilloch and there are 400 years' worth of Edmondsons in the parish registers of Greystoke. So I can claim, though living in Westminster, still to have some understanding of these problems.
Therefore I should like to join with others in thanking my noble friend Lord Cranbrook for giving us an opportunity to discuss them. I disagree with him that they are matters of parish pump importance because the problems which we are discussing, which are of vital importance for the countrymen in their isolation, are just as important as the problems of the inner cities for the city dwellers living in their congestion. They are important also for the whole nation, so many of whom appreciate the countryside so much and spend so much of their time and money visiting it.
I should like to support my noble friend Lord Ridley in the strictures which he has for the Government in the sudden switch of resources from rural to city problems. This makes it extremely difficult for the rural authorities to plan their affairs properly. I should like to spend a little more time than has been spent so far in the debate on an assessment of this important document on rural depopulation which has been issued by the inter-departmental group under the chairmanship of the Treasury. The group's main conclusion at paragraph 1167—and this illustrates the difficulty of selecting the correct economists because they say such conflicting things—is that the economic case for attempting to remedy rural depopulation was a weak one and not as strong as the noble Lord, Lord Vaizey, would have us believe.
But they go on to agree with him that it could be treated by an application of the existing range of grants, subsidies, inducements, et cetera. If it is done, it is best done by the encouragement of hill farming, light industry—especially crafts, the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Leek, will be glad to hear—and despite what my

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noble friend says, by the promotion of tourism. Those are the things which in their view give the best value for public money. I personally agree with each of those propositions: that it can be done and that is the best way of doing it.
I should like to repeat the point that I made in the review of the national parks which I conducted two or three years ago, that there is absolutely no objection in principle to the introduction of light industry, even into the heart of the national parks, provided that it is done with all due control and firmness possible and planning conditions. But the Treasury group's further and very much firmer conclusion—and everybody who has spoken seems to have agreed with it (it is at paragraph 108)—is that the main and much stronger justification for remedial action in declining rural areas is to preserve rural life and culture for its own sake. That was the note on which my noble friend Lord Cranbrook began his speech, and I think it has continued throughout the debate.
I believe we should concentrate on this, not just in the interests of the villagers themselves, but in the interests of the large majority of people living in this kingdom who live and work in the towns and who obviously appreciate enormously their visits to the countryside. Of course one can add to that the considerable further number of foreign people who also obviously enjoy visiting this country and the countryside in particular. I am afraid that I part company with the noble Lord, Lord Henley, in regarding these people as just pests.
I agree even more with the final conclusions of the Treasury group. But the implication of that conclusion is that it is the conservation of the character—maybe that is the word for which the noble Lord, Lord Henley, was searching; I hope he will agree with me that it will suit—of these rural areas and their landscape, the character of their villages and communities, which is what really matters. I think we are all agreed about that; that is certainly the implication of the Treasury's economic report. At any rate, it matters more, it seems to me, than numerical changes in population or statistical trends in employment in themselves.
It is when those changes and those trends seem likely to impair the cherished
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character and natural quality of a place in the countryside that steps to check them are justified, not only in the local interest but also in the national interest, and therefore deserving of public funds. It seems to me that the steps that then have to be taken to modify those changes and check those trends that are judged to have these damaging effects, must be steps which themselves positively conduce to the conservation of that character and do not themselves add to the damage.
That is to say, public expenditure, for instance, on supporting traditional crafts, particularly building crafts and in particular keeping a village school going. I remember that in my short time in the Department of Education there was nothing that I had to fight harder for than the preservation of village schools. The economic and cost benefit arguments towards the larger schools are enormous; but, nevertheless, in my view they should not prevail in the balance. These matters, like keeping traditional crafts alive, keeping a village school running, keeping a country bus service going, are in principle more to be desired and more deserving of national funds than encouraging the establishment of substantial units of alien and unfamiliar industry. But, as I said, I am not against that in principle where it is appropriate. I think that the danger exposed by the noble Lord, Lord Tanlaw, about doing that on too large a scale deserves consideration.
The map both in the Treasury report and in the Development Commission's 34th report shows that every area in England suffering from depopulation also either embraces or is linked with a designated area, either designated as an area of outstanding natural beauty or as a national park. These are areas which already have character of exceptional attraction of national significance in the eyes of the rest of the kingdom's population.
When those attractions are carefully and tastefully cultivated, they can also become economic and social assets of great potential value to the local economy. Here I part company to some extent with my noble friend Lord Ridley because these are of great potential value not only to the local economy, but to the national economy as well.
I put it to you that no visitor is going to drive out, for instance, to North

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Norfolk from London to visit the latest new piece of light industry, though there is no denying the benefit to the employees who may find jobs in it if such is being provided in that particular depopulating area. But some new and interesting attractions, say at Sandringham, Blickling Hall or King's Lynn—all within this area—may easily draw hundreds of visitors ready to spend their money there if features like these are attractively promoted and controlled, and supporting facilities and accommodation are provided to match them.
I agree with my noble friend Lord Ridley that it will be inappropriate to design all that solely with the idea of attracting caravanners. I hope that he will agree with me that tourists and caravanners are not synonymous. As the Departmental group points out, the French—and maybe the Germans, too—safeguard and promote their best countryside differently with a single agency pursuing one integrated set of policies in each of their designated areas and putting agricultural policy, development policy, recreational policy and conservation policy all into one set of hands, using management rather than control as their main tool. It may be that this is possible only when devolution is manifested by the presence of M. le Prefect in each locality.
Meanwhile, no doubt, in Britain the integration of our various countryside policies can then be achieved within local government by a body such as that created by my noble friend Lord Ridley, which is described in paragraph 153 of the Development Commission's report. I refer to the Northumberland Rural Development Committee, and I take it that it works in double harness with the Northumberland National Park Authority, the attractions of each being that they draw members from both the county and the districts concerned. Such a way of dealing with the problems in rural areas may not be as logical and tidy as Napoleon would have liked, but no doubt it can be made to work. It is sensitive to local feelings, and that is normally good enough for the British.
In the light of this, I myself greatly welcome the wider vision of their future role that the Development Commission describe in, I think, Part IV of their
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report. I particularly welcome the fact that their Chairman, the noble Lord, Lord Northfield, is here to join in this debate, because earlier in the week my advice was that he might not be able to be with us. I think it is greatly to our advantage that he is. They have certainly raised our sights, rightly I think, from factory building in the declining rural areas to much longer-term and wider aims of improving the economic, social and cultural base of the whole countryside. I very much welcome that, but must confess that I am a little worried—and I hope it is a worry that the noble Lord will be able to set at rest—when I read in paragraph 305 talk of a programme of "intensified development", attracting the encouragement and the support of the Development Commission.
"Intensified development" is not a phrase I would have dared to use in connection with any of the National Parks I was reviewing, and I think it is a phrase which is not perhaps most happily used when one is talking of some of the most fragile and cherished parts of the British countryside. I do not think it is the way to gain the support of the country landowner. I think it also strikes a chill into most villages in the countryside, because what must come first—and I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Northfield, will say that it always does come first—is a very careful analysis of the character of each rural scene and of the quality of rural life though out the areas with which the Commission is dealing. The quality of rural life, as my noble friend Lord Cranbrook said, must be cherished and fostered with particular care. When there is some clarity and agreement about just what that character and quality consists of, there is then some hope of finding and applying appropriate remedies to sustain them and to ameliorate any ill effects that may be caused by a declining population.
I certainly do not rule out new light industry, even in National Parks or areas of outstanding natural beauty as being among those remedies; but the continued encouragement of hill farming, the careful promotion (and I stress the word "careful") of tourism and of recreation, side by side with it—though not just caravans, of course—the restoration of traditional crafts and the patient redevelopment of

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dying communities—all those are likely to be nearer the mark than "intensified development".
The Development Commission, of course, is perfectly right in stressing over and over again in its report the sine qua non of every positive step of regeneration in the countryside beginning and ending within local government, where alone all those different policy strands can be held together. It is only inside local government that local decisions can be made properly and weighed in the balance with the feelings of the local electors, whose welfare is, I suggest, paramount and whose support is indispensable. But that is not to say that the Development Commission, with its experience of nearly 70 years of painstaking rural work, has not as vital a role to play today and in the future, as it had in 1909. I am glad that my noble friend Lord Cranbrook has afforded us this opportunity to pay our tribute to it.
4.45 p.m.
Lord NORTHFIELD: My Lords, I hope that a Yorkshireman who now lives in the most beautiful part of Cornwall may intrude on this Cumbrian "club" that has developed this afternoon and speak up for England and all the rest of it, if I may put it like that. I am in some difficulty in speaking at all, and perhaps I might explain to the noble Lord, Lord Sandford, that my reluctance to take part is because, quite properly, the conventions of your Lordships' House prevent my dealing with any aspects of the Development Commission's work. I have no intention of breaking those conventions and answering the many questions put during the debate. I should be delighted to do so after the debate for noble Lords who do not receive satisfaction from my noble friend, but as I am sure she is going to satisfy all of them I feel I shall be able to go home very happy after this debate.
However, I hope convention will not prevent my thanking the noble Earl, Lord Cranbrook, for raising this subject, and noble Lords who have taken part in the debate, and also, if I may say so, the hundreds of people outside this House (many of them in a totally voluntary capacity) who, unpaid, put in hours of work and are now contributing to what I think is a great enterprise of rural revival
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that we are getting under way. I think that today is a most propitious time to raise this subject.
If I cannot talk about the Development Commission, perhaps I may say three things arising from experience of rural areas and to reflect, in doing so, partly on the future. The first point is one which the noble Lord, Lord Sandford, himself has picked out as a significant part of our approach to this problem. I join with him absolutely and completely in saying that the whole of our approach to this problem must be based on a partnership between local government and whatever Government agency exists. Many people talk about the bad things, but, happily, one of the good things which came out of local government reform in the early 1970s was the creation of larger district councils. In many parts of the country that has enabled the problems of rural revival to be approached on the proper scale, by having big enough areas in which to evaluate and prepare action plans. The work of rural revival which is now going on would have been impossible without that reform of local government: it is a new cornerstone for the whole edifice.
I do not think the noble Lord, Lord Sandford, need worry about that perhaps unfortunate phrase in the report, "intensified development". That will be taken care of by local authorities. They know what they want. One of the most enlightening and heartening experiences of public life is to go round to local authorities, as is part of my job today, and say, "This is your rural area. Have you carefully thought out the various measures which must be taken together to form a total package of rural revival?" They will take care that it does not go off the rails, so I do not think the noble Lord need worry too much. I think it is worth saying that local authorities do not want everything paid for by central Government. Of course, they are very happy to have what money is going, but rural revival today is not concerned with handing out huge sums of money.
The problem is exactly that which we have in building new towns: it is in creating a new aura of confidence, leading to economic growth and social satisfaction. Just as a new town corporation builds factories, lays out roads and says: "This

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town is going places and will be successful, so why don't you all jump on the bandwagon?", with private enterprise coming in to play its part, so we have to do that in the villages and small towns throughout the whole of the rural areas, in order to re-create self-confidence on which all economic growth depends, and on which spiritual revival is also based for the coming years.
This is the first cardinal feature of our approach to these areas, and we must all latch on to it, as the noble Lord, Lord Sandford, said. The basis is local government. It must be challenged and helped, the pump must be primed and then things will begin to happen. If I may take one example—it has nothing to do with me, so I can safely say it in this debate—in the town of Berwick-upon-Tweed, for £1,500,000 of Government money, 1,000 jobs were created, the whole town took off and became prosperous, while the whole area surrounding it, helped in similar ways, has found its new confidence and almost does not need much more Government help. That is what rural revival is all about.
My second reflection is that we have to look ahead in the way that the noble Earl, Lord Cranbrook, and some members of the Town and Country Planning Association are now doing. Mr. Morris Ash, whom many of us in this Chamber respect enormously, has written an article about this in the Town and Country Planning Association's journal. What he says is that little industrial estates may be all very well: they help to get the process moving; they provide alternative jobs and hold young people, and the depopulation begins to decline. But should they be limited simply to key settlements.
What about the smaller villages? What about the deeper rural life that goes on and has to be sustained in smaller areas? What about the arts, the educational problems, the housing problems and all the other things that go to make up the fabric of social activity in the rural areas? They, too, need support. So that beyond what is being done now in this new, first period of revival, we must go with the noble Earl, with Mr. Morris Ash and with others into the whole question of how we extend into smaller areas, into smaller problems, into the more intimate detail of the needs of the rural areas. It will need a lot of work to
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isolate this, and to find out what can be done on a practical basis. I think that it will be the next stage of revival, once we complete this present job creation programme which is being fostered by the Government in the rural areas, in the small factories, so that we can move on to those broader aspects of rural revival.
I come thirdly and finally to my last reflection on what has been said in this debate, and I should like to look again at the future. The Government's White Paper on English devolution is a fainthearted document, a miserable little document in many of its parts. From paragraph 38 onwards, when it talks about the possibilities of an English development agency, it is running away from the whole problem. It stacks up a lot of disadvantages and there is hardly a good word to be said for the idea. I think that this is totally wrong. I am not thinking about an English development agency that takes over the Countryside Commission, the Tourist Board and all that. Those bodies have their role and are doing wonderful work, in total co-operation with each other, in the rural areas. What is important is that poor old rural England ought, in the coming years, to have a crack of the whip that has been given to the Scots and the Welsh in their new development agencies, and must be allowed to have something of that form helping rural England.
The report says at the end, in paragraph 41:
"Furthermore, it is doubtful whether a single English agency, having to co-ordinate a range of environmental and industrial functions in the differing circumstances of assisted areas which are spread from Cornwall to Northumbria, would be accepted as having the close familiarity with the problems of rural areas which are looked for."
When it says, in other words, that it is very doubtful whether an English body could carry the problems of the full range of all our rural counties, it is talking utter rubbish. These are problems which have great similarities, but great differences in local application, and provided we are sticking to this point of assisting local government and only of pump priming and never trying to do the whole job for local government, they are perfectly capable of being done by one English agency of some form, whatever agency is made out of the present pattern of agencies of that kind which exist to help the rural

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areas. So I hope that in the coming months noble Lords and others will join me and will fight hard for some greater vision in that White Paper, and for some action to give England some of the benefits that the Scots and the Welsh have been promised, and are indeed already having in the way of extra money.
I come, lastly, to one quotation from the rural depopulation study, chaired by the Treasury, to which the noble Lord, Lord Sandford, and others have referred, and I quote from paragraph 108. It is not very often that one finds a Government inter-departmental report which waxes eloquently, and indeed almost poetically, but there are a couple of sentences which are very well worth quoting. It states:
"In an overwhelmingly urban society, the existence of rural communities must have an effect out of all proportion to their numbers. It has a psychological value for townspeople, linking them to a life nearer nature and to their rural ancestry. It has a cultural value which cannot be measured, except perhaps by trying to imagine the effect on art, literature, music and culture generally of the disappearance of rural life."
Eloquence indeed, my Lords! I think this is a very good foundation for all of us in looking at the problems of perhaps 2 million, 3 million or 4 million people—a very minute proportion of our population—who live in these remoter areas, but without whom, without whose culture, without whose way of life affecting all the rest of us and without the backing it gives to our very existence all of us, and the whole of our society, would be poverty stricken by comparison with today. How much I support those sentences and the vision behind them. It is that kind of thing which guides noble Lords here and volunteers outside, in all walks of life, who are working hard for the rural areas; and, as I said, I now believe it is becoming a great enterprise with a great and receptive British audience. The move from the towns is on. The desire to live away from the urban rat-race overwhelms one as one tours England today. It is because I am so glad to be part of that, and to be helping in some small way, that I not only take great joy in my work, but thank the noble Earl for raising this debate today and look forward with anticipation to what my noble friend has to say in reply to the debate.
4.59 p.m.
Lord DAVIES of LEEK: My Lords, I apologise to the House for rising now,
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but I have sat through the debate and I promise to take no more than four minutes of your Lordships' time. May I say how grateful I am to the noble Earl for having raised this issue, and for some of the remarks from both sides of the House. I apologise to the noble Lord on the Liberal Benches for having interrupted him on a point with which he agreed. I want to pay tribute, too, to my noble friend for the dynamic lead that he has given. His influence can be seen.
I am grateful that from the Front Bench opposite reference has been made to Part IV, which says that:
"…the Development Commission has moved into a new era"
and, lower down:
"…is becoming increasingly sophisticated and more positive."
I should have left out the word "sophisticated" because its connotation does not quite fit in with rural life. Nevertheless, having looked at the map on pages 56 and 57 I am grateful for the magnificent work that the Development Commission has done in pushing forward factory projects all over England and Wales. I know about the co-operation that takes place in the councils in Wales. I notice, though, that in Gwent, South and West Glamorgan and Dyfed there is still room for local authorities to increase their contact with the Commission. I am not blaming the Development Commission because in this report an appeal is made to local authorities to co-operate with the Development Commission over what it wants.
Having spoken for two of my four minutes, I want to go on to make this point. We cannot hope to increase agricultural employment much more because—and now I use the word "sophistication"—of the sophistication of the mechanisation which has entered into modern agriculture. Consequently, increased rural occupation and employment does not lie in that direction.
I was delighted that when we looked into accountancy the appeal was made, "For God's sake! let's stop this materialistic accountancy, measuring life only in pounds, shillings and pence". Social accountancy, in terms of the juggernauts which are running through English and Welsh villages today and from one side of Europe to the other, is

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driving some people neurotic and is upsetting life. Because of the decline in rural life, vandalism is on the increase. The inner parts of our cities are blighted—for example, the Archway Road at Highgate. Anybody who lives in the Archway Road area today must be absolutely miserable because of the hundreds of thousands of tons of traffic that are incessantly moving along that road. Consequently, the reservoirs for our spiritual uplift and rebuilding lie in a constructive approach to rural England. In the case of our village schools, rather than that the children should be peripatetic and go to comprehensive schools, let the extra teachers needed in rural villages be peripatetic. I will not develop that point because this is the most intelligent audience in England to which I am speaking.
Lord STRABOLGI: My Lords, what does the noble Lord have to say about the Tribune Group?
Lord DAVIES of LEEK: My Lords, my noble friend on the Front Bench is muttering about the Tribune Group. Is he naïve? Is he not intelligent? One of the worst things that we did in Britain was to "Beechingise" it. The "Beechingisation" of Britain's railways means that in rural Britain we are paying the price in terms of empty valleys.
Finally, I come to my valleys in Wales, some of which are so narrow that the rivers are running sideways! New building can be taken into those valleys, because at the back of them there are beautiful mountains, hills and woods. The nut trees are still there. If anybody does not believe me they should listen to our Welsh comedian, Boyce, who speaks about new industries being brought to Wales. In one marvellous little song of his, he says: "The pithead bath is a supermarket now." In other words, in those valleys which were blighted by coal tips there are plenty of opportunities to make them more beautiful with modern buildings and by bringing jobs to those valleys.
At the end of my four minutes I come to the fact that the magnetism of the cities is beginning to disappear all over the world. Everybody in this Chamber knows that the magnetism of the city is disappearing. Man needs this social uplift. I want more strength to be given
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to the elbow of my noble friend so that he may push those authorities which are lackadaisical in co-operating with him and with all the other people in Britain who are trying to revive rural Britain.
5.3 p.m.
Lord CASTLE: My Lords, I will detain the House neither for four, nor for three minutes——
Lord HENLEY: My Lords, I hope that noble Lords who have not put down their names will remember that this is a short debate and that those of us who have spoken want to hear what the noble Baroness has to say.
Lord CASTLE: My Lords, I am prepared to forgo the right to address the House, but as I dropped in today from Europe and have been fascinated by the debate I am stimulated to make just one comment. In the reference made to the village pub, I understood the noble Earl who introduced the subject to deplore its passing, not its closing. The concern of all those of us who love the countryside is that so much of the village pub space is now being taken over by tourists.
I agree with some of the condemnations of the noble Lord, Lord Henley, whose work for the countryside has been remarkable, but in my own area I find that the tourist is driving the villager out of his own public bar. Although this may seem to be a small point to those noble Lords who do not have to use public houses for their social life, it is a matter of real concern to the villager that no longer does he have a place in which to hold his football and cricket club meetings. May I appeal to all those who have any influence with the Brewers' Society and other organisations to bear in mind that the preservation of the public bar inside the village pub is a real problem. I am sure that the noble Lord, Lord Henley, will support me on that point.
5.5 p.m.
Baroness STEDMAN: My Lords, may I assure the last speaker that I have no influence whatsoever with the Brewers' Society. I cannot claim to be able to do anything for him in that respect. Rural depopulation is neither a new nor a recent feature of our history, although

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I think it is probably new for your Lordships to discuss it specifically. Certainly it is the first time in my experience as a Member of your Lordships' House that it has been chosen for special debate. Movement of people from the country to the towns and cities has been a feature of our national development—as elsewhere in Europe—since before the Industrial Revolution. As the 1971 Census demonstrated, this migration continues from the large rural areas of Wales, the Scottish Highlands and South Uplands, the Pennine Uplands and the Welsh Marches. Smaller pockets of depopulation are to be found in other areas, including South West England, Lincolnshire and East Anglia.
Many noble Lords have referred to the various documents on the subject of depopulation that have appeared over the last few years. With other noble Lords I should like to pay tribute to the document from the Development Commission which we have been discussing at some length this afternoon, also to the one from the Inter-departmental Committee on Rural Depopulation and, not least of all, to the work done by the noble Lord opposite, Lord Sandford, in his National Park Review. These and other documents have provided a great deal of material for the Government to consider the causes of rural depopulation and what they ought to be doing about it.
The causes of depopulation are wide-ranging and complex. In particular, the reduction in employment in agriculture and other traditional country occupations, combined with the attractions—especially for the young—of better career prospects, higher earnings, and the more and varied social facilities of urban life are referred to in the Development Commission's report. Indeed, they were referred to in some detail by the noble Earl, Lord Cranbrook, as drawing people away from the countryside. As the Development Commissioners have graphically described in their report—as also did the noble Lord, Lord de Clifford—a vicious spiral can set in as communities begin to contract. As the population falls it becomes increasingly uneconomic to provide services in the smaller settlements. This results, as noble Lords know only too well, in long journeys to schools, to the shops, to doctors and hospitals, and a consequent
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decline in public transport, which means a lack of opportunity for further education and entertainment.
Noble Lords will recall discussing the problems of diminishing services in rural areas and the concomitant hardships on a Motion by the noble Lord, Lord de Clifford, almost a year ago. On the question of transport I think your Lordships were generally agreed when we discussed the matter last year that the key factor to the problem of the availability of services and facilities for people in rural areas is the one of transport. Many people are of course much better off in this respect as a result of increased car ownership; but about a third of the families in our rural areas do not have the use of a car and even in the car-owning families some members are denied the use of a car and the decline in public transport resulting from decreasing patronage and increasing cost, combined with the trend for centralisation of services, shopping and other facilities can cause serious problems of isolation for people in the more remote rural areas.
The noble Viscount, Lord Ridley, trailed his coat at me—I think perhaps deliberately—on the question of rate support grant and transport supplementary grant. I am not going to be drawn into details of justifying one or other of those: suffice to say that I sympathise with him. I come from Cambridgeshire and with his membership, and the membership of other people of the Association of County Councils, they will know what that reference means. But in many areas even the conventional bus services are uneconomic and are only able to continue because of local authority financial support. The Government meet a large part of this subsidy. This year for most of the Shire counties the Government are providing more transport supplementary grant than previously, to go towards their expenditure on a local bus service and in those areas where bus services have been withdrawn there is seldom any question of a stage service ever being introduced. Therefore we have to try much less orthodox methods of transport in those areas.
One of the reasons why the Development Commission cannot help the subsidised transport is because we have got central Government subsidising transport and if the Development Commission did

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it as well there would be a subsidy on a subsidy. But there are a number of different experiments going on in various parts of the country to find ways of providing a cheaper transport service. One example is the Norfolk village bus, which is a minibus driven by qualified volunteer drivers providing a fare service for half a dozen villages under direction of the county council. The whole operation is breaking even financially and similar schemes have recently been set up in East Sussex and in Clwyd. We have had the example of the postal buses described to us today; there is the idea of the voluntary car schemes; there are dial-a-bus schemes being tried out, one of them in an area adjacent to where I live. The Government have also commissioned an East Anglia University study into rural transport and accessibility and we are promoting a number of experimental projects in areas where there are rural transport problems. These will test on the ground what can be done to help the rural communities generally within the public service vehicle licensing code and through some modest relaxation of that code.
The noble Lord, Lord Wilson of High Wray, and the noble Lord, Lord de Clifford, and other noble Lords have referred to the question of the postal services. We had some questions earlier today on the postal service and I must remind the House that the Post Office is a corporation which is responsible for its own operating decisions. The Government cannot dictate to it, but I hope the attention of the Corporation will be drawn to our debate today so that they may know the feelings of the Members of your Lordships' House.
The vicious spiral which is started as depopulation begins is completed as more people leave because of the reduced services and the inability of the village to sustain community life. At the same time people from the urban areas may move in, buying houses for second homes or for retirement. The result is that we have a higher proportion of old people, fewer children and "ghost" villages like those in the Lake District about which we have heard this afternoon. Cumbria is indeed fortunate in the number of noble Lords that it has to speak for it in this House and in addition I am delighted to learn that the noble Lord, Lord Sandford,
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also has Cumbrian connections and one cannot help but wonder whether the Edmondsons at Seathwaite—in the wettest place in England—are also kinsmen of his. If they are, they provide extremely good refreshments for hungry climbers! The noble Lord, Lord Wilson of High Wray, referred to the problems of the "ghost" villages like Finsthwaite which are almost deserted in the winter months of the year and I would tell the noble Lord that I visited Finsthwaite only some 10 days ago and therefore I know to what he refers.
The Development Commissioners have drawn attention to the situation and they emphasised their concern in their previous report in 1965. They initiated what they described as "trigger area" schemes with investment in the construction of small factories with the aim of triggering off local and private investment in such areas. My noble friend Lord Northfield has described to us what has been happening in the Berwick area and the Commission's latest report records the success with which these schemes have met in Berwick and in the Eastern Border area of Scotland. But still the 1971 Census confirmed that rural depopulation was continuing—with total population losses in the decade 1961 to 1971 of between 10 per cent. and 15 per cent. in some districts. The losses were greatest among those of working age. So undeniably the rural depopulation is a continuing problem. What measure of our national resources we should be devoting to tackling the problem and why we should be concerned about the dying villages and the loss of jobs for the young people from our communities are questions which noble Lords have been pressing this afternoon.
Lord SANDFORD: My Lords, I wonder whether the noble Baroness would allow me to interrupt just for a moment. She is speaking in very general terms about these depopulation trends: is it not a fact that over the last five years the Highlands and Islands Development Board has done something to reverse, or at any rate to check, the trend?
Baroness STEDMAN: Yes, my Lords, and that is what we hope will continue from the additional work which we hope the Development Commission will be able to carry on with over the years to come.

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Noble Lords may be aware that following the 1971 Census the Government undertook a study of rural depopulation which included the cost-benefit analysis of the various ways of providing employment in rural areas to stem depopulation. The most practicable and cost-effective employment was found to be the small industry and, where it is appropriate, tourism—and I am not referring to just the caravan visitors to the area but to the tourist in general. The Government considered the study and decided that efforts to stem depopulation would have to be increased and as we have heard this afternoon the Development Commission was asked to play a leading role in stimulating action to this end. In Scotland and Wales that task has now been taken on by the new Development Agencies, who are continuing and intensifying the Development Commission's past work in their respective countries, work which is described in the report which covers the three year period up to March of last year when the Development Commissioners still financed the rural development in Scotland and Wales.
The noble Lord, Lord Vaizey, has referred to the English Development Agency and an idea was floated in the Development Commission's Report that the English Rural Development Agency should be set up on similar lines to the Scottish and the Welsh Development Agencies. They envisage an independent executive rural development agency which would bring together all the various development support now available from a number of separate organisations, operate within its own priorities and within the constraints of its own budget. It is certainly an interesting idea and noble Lords will recall—and indeed the noble Lord, Lord Northfield, referred to it—the Government's White Paper on Devolution which canvassed views on whether a single English agency or a number of regional development agencies should be established. The White Paper listed the main arguments for and against this and suggested that current opinion was tipped slightly against the proposal; but I will certainly pass on my noble friend's comments to my colleague the Lord President of the Council.
Noble Lords who have read the report and have listened to this afternoon's
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debate will, I am sure, fully appreciate and admire as I do the efforts of the Commissioners in the way that they have tackled the task and generated enthusiasm in the localities concerned. I, too, regret that even more resources cannot be made available immediately to deal with the wide range of needs and possibilities which are revealed in the action plans which local authorities are producing for the regeneration of their declining areas. But if the foundations are soundly laid, with careful planning by local authorities and integration of those plans with the county structure plans, then I am sure we shall find that the time and effort has not been wasted, and in fact that much has already been achieved.
Although I appreciate that the Development Commission's budget has not been increased as much as it would like, or would judge necessary to make speedy progress in tackling the problems, the figures given in Appendix II, Schedule II, to the report speak for themselves. Expenditure on factories increased from under £300,000 in 1973–74, in areas of rural depopulation in England, Wales and Scotland, to over £700,000 in 1975–76 for England and Wales only, a very sub-stantial increase even allowing for increased costs. Expenditure on factory construction in England in the current year is expected to be about £2 million. A further indication of progress is given by the figures for numbers of factories being built in areas of rural depopulation. Up to the end of 1974, when the extra efforts were initiated, the Development Commission had financed a total of 48 factory units. Since then a further 37 have been built and 118 are approved and under construction or in the planning stages.
Of the factories built before 1975, when the Commission was operating in the areas of rural depopulation in Scotland and Wales as well as England, the great majority, 30, were in Wales, 10 were in England and 8 in Scotland. Since then, as I have said, the Commission has shifted its emphasis and 96 factories have been built, are under construction, or are in planning stages in England.
Thus from a very modest start in England it has already been possible to build up a reasonable programme covering most of those areas identified in the Rural Depopulation Report. The employment

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provided in these factories will make a very valuable contribution, even if small by national standards, to solving our present unemployment problems. The Government have recognised this in including funds for the Commission for such factory building in some of the employment creation programmes.
I have paid tribute to the work of the Development Commission and its various agencies. I should like to say something about the local authorities. They have a key role through their responsibility for the provision of services and planning. We have discussed some of the more important services this afternoon, and we have heard how crucial to small communities decisions about these can be. The example of the closure of the village school was one that was raised.
It is not only through construction of factories that the Commission will assist in the maintenance and creation of employment. I should like, as several noble Lords have done, to pay tribute to the work of the Council for Small Industries in Rural Areas (COSIRA). It provides credit and advisory and instructional services for small firms in rural areas. An indication of the increase of the Council's activities generally is given by the performance of the Loan Fund. New advances have increased by two-thirds in the period covered by the Development Commission Report to a figure of £2½ million in 1975/76. By agreement with the Commission the Council have given increasing priority to areas of rural depopulation, thus supporting and reinforcing the effects of the investment in factory construction. The Council's services are available throughout rural areas and in smaller country towns (with a population in general of up to 10,000 people), while the Commission are concerned with the rural economy as a whole.
The Commissioners point out in their report that not all of the problems of rural areas stem from depopulation. In parts of the countryside, those nearest to the conurbations, difficulties arise as a result of expanding residential communities, and between the two extremes of growth and depopulation there are a multitude of local difficulties. As the Commissioners stress in their report, they must continue to concern themselves with all rural areas, with differing emphases in their work
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depending on the individual needs of particular areas.
There has been reference this afternoon to the value of rural communities to our society, and an important part of the Commission's work has always been to support social and community development in the rural areas. Their financial assistance to the rural community councils is important here. I should like to mention also the provision of village halls, which play so vital a role in village communities, and their help with financing the organisation of the Women's Institutes and their education services.
I would conclude by thanking the noble Earl for giving us this opportunity for discussing the Development Commission. I am sure the Commissioners will draw encouragement from the interest shown by noble Lords, the evidence we have had this afternoon that they are meeting a real need in our society and appreciation of the value of their work particularly in areas of depopulation. Noble Lords have expressed their concern about the need for additional resources for the Development Commission, and it is not necessary for me to remind Members of your Lordships' House that we are in times of considerable cutback in public spending. Even so, the Government have been able to allow the Commission to spend £1 million above that originally planned for next year to enable them to complete the factories started with this year's employment creation fund. My right honourable friend has arranged an early meeting with his colleagues and Treasury Ministers to decide what further resources may be available to the Development Commission. Noble Lords will not expect me to anticipate the results of this meeting, but I am sure the comments of noble Lords who have spoken today will be borne in mind by my right honourable friend.
I hope also that the noble Earl will be reassured that we are well aware of the problem of what he describes as the dying village. At the same time, I would not wish to leave the impression of a dying countryside. In general our countryside is more prosperous than ever before; the rural situation varies enormously. Only some communities are under economic threat. Many are thriving socially and economically, and

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much is in hand by the local authorities and the Development Commission to improve the situation where they are not. Finally, noble Lords may like to know that my Department hopes shortly to issue a discussion paper on the subject of rural communities. I have no doubt that your Lordships will return to this subject once again when you have considered that paper.
My Lords, many points have been raised this afternoon, many suggestions made, with very little repetition, and I am sure I have not dealt adequately with each one of them. I will check in Hansard and I will write to any noble Lord whom I have not answered fully. I will draw the attention of my right honourable friend the Secretary of State and other colleagues at the Department of the Environment to the very valuable expression of views in this debate.
5.29 p.m.
The Earl of CRANBROOK: My Lords, I should first like to thank all noble Lords who have taken part in the debate this afternoon. We have come from very different parts of England—although perhaps rather a larger number than was necessary or fair to the rest of us came from the North—all of us with different problems, depopulation in some areas, rural unemployment in others. I think one and all have stressed the importance which the noble Lord, Lord Sandford, stressed, of rural life and culture. I am not quite certain that we ought to stress rural culture quite so much, because what we have all been asking for this afternoon is the introduction of urban forms of works into rural areas; in fact getting back almost to the Middle Ages when every country village had to produce everything that its inhabitants needed. If we manage to revert to that we should not be killing the rural life, because we all want to preserve the life of a small community where people are friendly and know each other.
It is that which we are at great risk of losing if our villages disappear. That is not unique to the bucolic of us. It is not necessary to be a sort of Kiplingite peasant, immobile, cunning and rather inbred. There used to be the same sort of family relationship in parts of our larger towns, but that has been rather lost with
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the disappearance of town centres. However, it is that sort of spirit that we want to maintain in country districts. We are all at one on that, and I confess that I was greatly encouraged by what the noble Baroness said. If she does not mind me saying so, the proof of that pudding will be in the eating. My Lords, I beg leave to withdraw my Motion.
Motion for Papers, by leave, withdrawn.

ONE-PARENT FAMILIES
5.31 p.m.
Lord SIMON of GLAISDALE Lord SIMON of GLAISDALE rose to call attention to the report of the Committee of one-Parent Families (Cmnd. 5629); and to move for Papers. The noble and learned Lord said: My Lords, it is a very great privilege to introduce this debate, although it is necessarily a short one. All noble Lords who are due to speak today have far greater experience than I of the social problems involved in the one-parent family. In those social problems lies the real importance. My only qualification for opening this debate is that a quarter of a century ago I put forward to the Morton Royal Commission the proposal for a family court, which was part of the recommendations of the Finer Committee. As President of what is now the Family Division of the High Courts, I was made very much aware of the shortcomings in the law and the judicial structures, and of the demoralisation and dire poverty of those who went for matrimonial relief to magistrates' courts.
I was also privileged to be chairman of the Advisory Committee on the Bedford College Research Project. Professor MacGregor was one of the directors of research and he was a member of the Finer Committee. Mr. Finer himself was a member of our steering or advisory committee, as was the noble Baroness, Lady Summerskill. I should like to express my gratitude that she has come here today because I know that she has been unwell and that coming here has involved her in personal sacrifice. The Bedford College research project revealed a most appalling situation. I believe that it was the findings of that project which led to the setting up of the Finer Committee.
My Lords, I shall try to be brief. After 20 minutes your Lordships will be fully entitled to move that I be no longer heard. As so many of your Lordships have contributions to make this evening, it means that there is a time limit on speeches and I repeat the Government Whip's warning of only eight minutes each. In view of the greater knowledge of your Lordships, on the social side I shall deal mainly with the issue of family courts. As I said, that is not the central feature, although it is an important one, of the Finer report. In my view the central feature is the proposal for a new social security benefit. There are a number of other welfare proposals which are also very important.
I know that your Lordships would like me to start with a tribute to the late Mr. Justice Finer, who brought a remarkable and unusual equipment to the office of High Court Judge. His early death was a very great loss to the law and public life of this country. I should also like to pay tribute to the members of his Committee, who laboured prodigiously from November, 1969, to July, 1974—a period of four and a half years—in producing a great mass of most convincing evidence. I am sure your Lordships will agree that the handling of the evidence and the statistics was quite masterly, but it was animated throughout by an insight into the actual plight of the persons concerned. The plight and stresses of poverty added to emotional stresses that were inherent in their social situation. We can acknowledge those labours not by lip service but by implementing the recommendations—preferably by accepting them as they stand—but, if not, at least by finding a more efficient, sympathetic and generous way of relieving the needs of one-parent families.
As I said, the Finer Committee reported in July, 1974. Its report was not debated in either House until last October when, having read the debate, I feel bound to say that the response of the Secretary of State was most disappointing. Were it not for the courtesy that obtains between the Houses, I should be tempted to use a much stronger expression. In view of that it seems to me that I was justified, having failed in the last two Sessions to secure a full debate on the report, in continuing in the hope of being successful in the ballot. I am most grateful to noble Lords
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who are due to make contributions this evening.
My Lords, I said that I would deal with the institutional aspect of the report—the proposal for a family court. However, in approaching the subject, I hope that your Lordships will not think me to be oblivious of the human predicaments that are so vividly represented in the report. There are a quarter of a million fatherless families, well over 1 million children without an effective father; that is equivalent to the population of the City of Birmingham. Half of those families depend on supplementary benefit—in other words, they are on the poverty line. A horrifying number of 45,000 families—not children—are below the supplementary benefit level. They are far worse off than any other identifiable group in the population. Their very needs, their very position, calls out for the succour of society.
Society, in my respectful submission to your Lordships, has a supervening duty, because society has itself contributed to this problem. In fairly recent years it has been enacted that a husband can repudiate his wife after five years merely because she has ceased to find favour in his eyes—generally speaking, because some younger person has found greater favour. So we are actively creating more and more fatherless families. The noble Baroness, Lady Summerskill, with her great experience, and my noble and learned friend Lord Hodson, with his unexampled forensic experience, warned at the time what that meant; that there are only a handful of people in this country who can support two families, with the inevitable result that the first family would be pushed down to the poverty line and were lucky if they were caught there by the Supplementary Benefits Commission.
Into that Act there was written a provision that no woman could be cast aside, repudiated, if she could show exceptional hardship. Even where exceptional hardship has been shown, in not a single case has the discretion been exercised to withhold a repudiation There were reconciliation provisions written into that Act, as there always are into that kind of Act. It looks well in the Long Title. They are a complete dead letter. So I emphasise that society has a supervening duty towards these one-parent families over and above that they are an

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identifiable and identified group who are living in the most dire poverty. What that means is that this very night there will be tens of thousands of children who will be going to bed with inadequate blankets and threadbare blankets; who will not have had enough to eat, particularly because their mothers cannot shop around as the mother of a two-parent family can; who live in the worst areas of our cities, and pay disproportionately more than their neighbours; who have difficulties with landlords (both private landlords and local authorities); and, perhaps worst of all, who are living under continual stress—not only the emotional stress of having lost a parent or partner but, in addition, the supervening stress of living in constant, dire, nagging poverty. The children have stunted lives every bit as much as the children in the factories of the last century had stunted limbs.
The most important recommendation of the report was the guaranteed maintenance allowance. That was designed to take the one-parent family out of the supplementary benefit system altogether. That proved unacceptable. I thought, if I may say so, that the reasons given for its non-acceptance did not stand up to examination—indeed, they were trifling—and I would ask the noble Lord who is to reply to this debate to deal more adequately than was dealt with in another place with the question of why we should not have a guaranteed maintenance allowance.
If we cannot, what is proposed in its place? Is it going to be continued reliance on supplementary benefit? That is precisely what the Finer Committee said we should not have. Perhaps I can say that when a special allowance, a special social security benefit, was proposed at the Bedford College Research Project, I was not myself convinced that that was the best way of dealing with it. Our task on the Committee was merely advisory. But having read the Finer Report I have found myself completely convinced that the correct social solution, the primary social solution, is the guaranteed maintenance allowance.
May I deal with the family courts. At the moment, the separated wife, who forms the great bulk of this group of single parents, has to go initially to what
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are still called police courts, with all that that involves—that is spelt out in the Finer Report itself—if she wants an order from her husband. Wives have to prove a matrimonial offence, and a matrimonial offence on their part, generally speaking, precludes relief. Even if they get an order, the Finer Report shows that the great bulk are defaulted on, and then there arises the difficulty of getting the arrears paid. If the separated wife wants relief in respect of the matrimonial home she has to go to another court, the county court. If she wants a divorce, she has to go to a divorce court. When she finds that every single means of subsistence from her ex-husband has failed her, and sometimes even long before then, she has to go to the Supplementary Benefits Commission, with a right of appeal to a supplementary benefits appeal tribunal. Thus she is shuttled backwards and forwards.
It was for that reason that the Finer Committee recommended the establishment of a whole series of family courts over the country. That has been done perfectly satisfactorily in Scandinavia, and in many American jurisdictions. I am myself convinced that it is perfectly feasible, and Judge Graham Hall, who has unique experience in this field, has again endorsed that. It should have a judicial side exercising a strictly judicial function, presided over by a circuit judge assisted by lay magistrates. That would be a formal court deciding all judicial matters. But alongside one would have a welfare side with its welfare officer, as every divorce court and magistrates' court has at the moment. Their task would be to help with reconciliation, where that is possible and, where it is not possible to help with conciliation, particularly to remove the stress of contention over children, and give advice on various welfare matters, for example housing, supplementary benefit, taxation and child guidance.
As I said, that seems to me an entirely realistic project, and I thought the objections of the Secretary of State did not stand up to examination. The first one was the shortage of buildings. Surely we could use public buildings such as town halls. They are already used for a great many statutory tribunals, and although they would be only a stop-gap measure, we need urgent and stop-gap

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measures in this field. Many county courts are also perfectly suitable. What is not suitable is something that goes by the name and has the atmosphere of a police court. Then there was the objection about judicial manpower. That of course is real, if one proceeds on the basis that the whole of the existing matrimonial jurisdiction would be loaded on to the family court. But that was precisely what the Finer Committee sought to avoid by their proposals; their proposals, if implemented, would have removed the great bulk of cases from the courts.
The Law Commission set up a Working Party on Family Courts; that was consequent on the establishment of the Family Division by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Gardiner, whom I heartily supported in that regard. That Working Party was mysteriously dissolved in 1974 and I know that your Lordships will be anxious to hear from the noble Lord, Lord Wells-Pestell, why that was done. We are not today asking for money. I recognise fully that to do so at this time would be an idle request. What your Lordships will want to hear from Lord Wells-Pestell is the recognition that when the money is available this will be a priority and that, in the meantime, a Working Party is set up to plan for the needs of one-parent families on the lines of the Finer Report. There can also be, without any cost, the re-establishment of the Law Commission Working Party.
Lord Wells-Pestell brings an unexampled knowledge to this problem and a very warm understanding of the human needs. If he has been given the sort of brief that was spoken to in the other place, I beg him to put it aside and speak from his own knowledge and heart. We are, as I suggested earlier, in this respect in the situation of society about 140 years ago; Lord Shaftesbury had identified the plight of children being overworked in the mills and factories. His proposals for helping them, such as limiting their hours, were opposed even by people like John Bright, who was himself a self-proclaimed progressive, and, with their stunted limbs, those children grew up as a reproach to the whole of that society. If nothing is done for one-parent families we, too, will be standing reproached at the bar of history. If we do nothing—if this great monumental State Paper is allowed to accumulate dust—it will be
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an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual disgrace. My Lords, I beg to move for Papers.
5.55 p.m.
Baroness YOUNG: My Lords, I am sure that the whole House is grateful to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Simon of Glaisdale, for introducing this debate and for his perseverance in so doing. Not only is it three years since the publication of the Finer Report, but your Lordships' House has not had an opportunity to debate it until today. It is right that we should do so now, for it seems to me that the great value of the Finer Committee was in drawing attention to the plight of one-parent families, identifying them as a group and so making for a greater public understanding of and sympathy for their great problems.
For too many years the one-parent family was regarded as a social outcast. It may be thought that in the present straitened economic circumstances of our country, there is little point in having a debate such as this today, but I do not accept that view. First, the question of one-parent families will not simply go away; the numbers are far too great and I hope the noble Lord, Lord Wells-Pestell, who is to reply to the debate, will give us the latest figures. As Lord Simon pointed out, they are growing very rapidly. In 1971, the Finer Report said that there were 620,000 one-parent families with well over 1 million children. It is now thought that there are probably 700,000 families and there are 1,750,000 children. This is a rapid growth of a very real problem, and even if the figures are not precise the fact is that the problem is growing very rapidly indeed. To say, therefore, that there is no point in discussing the problem would be wrong and indefensible and the fact that there can be little or no extra money should force us all to be constructive and to ask what we can do.
It seems to me and my colleagues that our philosophy on this matter at the moment—I think it can be simply expressed—must be that the State must help all those families it can to help themselves. If we look at the conclusions reached by the National Children's Bureau study, Growing Up In A One-Parent Family, which was taken in 1970 we see that there were 750 children at the age of 11, out of

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the 12,000 sampled, who were children of one-parent families, and that research showed clearly that the children of one-parent families did less well at school, had worse housing and suffered greater economic hardship than their contemporaries. When all those factors were, however, taken into account, the differences in attainment and adjustment which could be associated with their parental background was very slight indeed. But of course society does not take all these factors into account when it makes its judgments, and in fact it is the children primarily who suffer more than anybody else.
I shall therefore confine myself to making a number of practical suggestions which I believe could be implemented now, given the administrative and political will to do so. Although I have great sympathy with all that Lord Simon said about family courts, I would not presume to add anything to the views he expressed so clearly and well on this aspect of the report. I would add only one point of a legal nature. It is to me very disappointing that, only a few months ago, legal aid in undefended divorce cases was withdrawn by the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor. This is a matter which has already been debated in your Lordships' House, but I believe that it is a decision that is very hard on women because, although they may not need legal aid, they frequently need legal advice. I believe that it has made a difficult situation worse for a great number of women.
I should like to make three general points. One of the difficulties of the Finer Report is that its recommendations cut across a great many Government Departments. The noble Lord who is to answer probably will not be able to answer all the points that will be raised today, but I hope that he will write to me on the points that are raised if they arise from Departments other than his own. I hope, however, that he will be able to say whether there have been inter-Departmental discussions on the report and, if so, how many, what Departments were represented and—most important of all—what conclusions were reached.
Secondly, of the one-parent families, five out of six are families where mothers are bringing up children on their own.
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All the weight of the evidence suggests that the difficulties that mothers have in getting jobs and then in keeping them are matters that, I should have thought, ought to concern the Equal Opportunities Commission. I wonder whether the Commission could be encouraged to make a special study of the subject, for what, in so many cases, is at stake is the status of women, and in this particular case it is the status of lone mothers.
Turning now to finance, it seems to me that there are practical ways in which help could be given to use the resources that we have better than we are using them at the moment. For example, the full child benefit scheme should be introduced as quickly as possible. Secondly there could also be a big increase in tax allowances or a reduction in tax rates so as to give one-parent families bigger take home pay and hence encourage them to depend on themselves rather than on the State. This could be financed by increasing indirect taxation—and I see that the Chancellor of the Exchequer has indicated that he may be moving in that direction. I hope that he will do so.
Thirdly, the introduction of the rest of the tax credit scheme would give single parents with taxable income below the tax threshold an extra cash income as of right. Again, this was part of the recommendations of the Finer Committee and it would be covered if all short-term benefits were taxed. We have an extraordinary situation in which retirement and widows' benefits are taxed but not unemployment and sickness benefits. It is very difficult to understand why this is so and why widows should have been singled out in this group. I believe that, if there were consistency, it would be possible to help these particular people.
The last suggestion is that maintenance income—not just a part of it, as at present—should be treated as earned rather than unearned income. In certain circumstances, once it rises above £1,000 it is treated as unearned income. Maintenance must surely be regarded as the same kind of income as housekeeping money given in a marriage. It seems to me extraordinary that it should be singled out and treated differently in this way. I should have thought that these were all constructive ways of giving financial help, of using the present resources more

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effectively, to those who need the help most.
Now for some administrative points. Most mothers who are bringing up their children would, I believe, like to do a job, not simply for the money though that is extremely important, but because it is good for morale to go out for a few hours a week. However, innumerable administrative difficulties are put in their way. There is, for example, the delay in reaching the right tax codes and, therefore, benefit payments. In going back to work, there can be a delay of up to three months in coding a lone mother in which she can lose as much as £10 or £20 a week. When someone is living at that level, it is really not possible to manage for three months on a drop in income because there are simply not the financial resources to tide such a person over. It ought surely to be possible to devise a system through the tax office of settling the code immediately so that the mother can go back to work.
Secondly, family income supplement is available to those who are in work but who do not earn more than a certain amount. But for some curious reason it is necessary under the regulations to work 30 hours a week before a person is eligible for Family Income Supplement. I understand that the definition of full-time work varies from Statute to Statute. Time is too short to quote them all but, under the Contracts of Employment Act 1972, it can be said that full-time work can be defined as work for less than 21 hours a week. This is to be amended by the Employment Protection Act 1975, when full-time work will be able to be reduced to 16 hours a week because that is the qualifying period under which the Employment Protection Act comes into force. In addition, for somebody who has been employed for more than five years, the number of hours reduces itself to eight.
I only quote these two figures—there are others as well—to illustrate that the definition of full employment seems to vary from Statute to Statute. As it is very difficult for many single mothers to work as much as 30 hours a week because the school hours do not make it possible, it seems to me that it would be worth looking at this point to see whether family income supplement could be extended to a person in full-time employment defined as meaning fewer than 30 hours a week.
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Day care is also needed for children. It is crucial to mothers going back to work. Up to a point, day care and earnings are a chicken and egg argument because, if a mother can go out to work and can earn she can pay for the day facilities but the day facilities cannot be provided until the mother can pay and can go back to work. Someone needs to break this cycle. This House has often debated the joint use of school facilities; that is, using them for a school and for day care. Is it too much to ask once again that local authorities should look at this matter and that the Government Departments themselves should use their influence to see whether it is not possible to reach some practical solution to enable children at school to stay longer until those mothers who have to work are free to collect them? Such a recommendation would be similar to Recommendation 210 of the report.
Finally, a word on housing. Housing is, in my opinion, in many respects a national tragedy. The result of much housing legislation has had the effect of giving least help to those who are the worst off. One of the uncomfortable effects of the 1974 Rent Act has been to further restrict the supply of private rented furnished accommodation in the one area in which private accommodation was in fact growing. The virtue of the private accommodation was not that it was particularly good but that it was available and that it provided a flexible means of housing for those who needed it. Now this area of housing is drying up and there is less furnished accommodation available for those who need it. It is the inflexibility of local authority housing which is such a real handicap for one-parent families. The fact that a lone mother who is separated from her husband cannot qualify in the area in which she grew up because she has left it and has perhaps been living in a council house in another area means that it is very difficult for her to return to the area where her parents and friends live and to get on a council waiting list. Perhaps the Department of the Environment might consider, among the many matters concerned with housing which it is at present investigating under its review of housing, a review of the points scheme which would take into account the need for flexibility in council housing particularly to help one-parent families. I believe that that is something

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that should be considered as a matter of urgency.
My Lords, I shall close. The importance of this subject is well illustrated by the number of speakers to whom I am sure we shall all listen with the closest attention and interest. I only hope that the Government will consider carefully the matters that have been raised and will, above all, act upon them.
6.10 p.m.
Lord BANKS: My Lords, I agree with the noble Baroness that the whole House will be grateful to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Simon of Glaisdale, for raising this important matter this evening and for speaking to us about it with the authority of his very considerable experience. After all, it is 2½ years since the Finer Committee reported and most of its major recommendations remain un-implemented. The Finer Committee carried out a very comprehensive research into the nature of the problem and set out very clearly the position of one-parent families. As a result, we know that one in 10 of all families are single-parent families. We know that over 1 million children are being cared for by single parents. We know that between 650,000 and 700,000 one-parent families exist, as the noble Baroness said. In one in six of these the single parent is a man; 15 per cent. are unmarried mothers; one in six are widows; and about half the number of single parents are divorced or separated women.
In these circumstances, it is not surprising that the Finer Report dealt fully with matrimonial law, its administration in the courts, and the interrelation of maintenance and supplementary benefit. As I understand the position, the Government have rejected the proposal that maintenance should be collected by the Supplementary Benefits Commission by means of administrative orders. If that is correct I should like very much to know why the Government have taken this decision. Possibly the noble Lord who is to reply could explain that later.
There are reforms in the law proposed by the Law Commission, but there is no indication of when they may be implemented, and unfortunately they retain the concept of the matrimonial offence so far
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as magistrates' courts are concerned. I am not clear what is the attitude of the Government to the principle of family courts. I understand that the Government say that they would cost too much to introduce at the present time, but I should very much like to know whether the Government approve of them in principle, because they would seem to me to be a very desirable development.
My Lords, I want to concentrate the remainder of my remarks on the need to provide adequate income. The average income of one-parent families is less than half that of two-parent families; 43 per cent. of single-parent families are on supplementary benefit, and 15 per cent. of them are actually below the supplementary benefit level—the families who rely on erratic maintenance and part-time earnings. A big factor which has been referred to by the noble Baroness, Lady Young, is the point that women's earnings are lower than men's, despite equal pay, because they tend to be employed in low wage occupations. The Finer Committee was quite clear about the matter. It said that the financial circumstances of one-parent families showed that they were in general much worse off than two-parent families. The Finer solution was, as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Simon of Glaisdale, pointed out, a guaranteed maintenance allowance for all single-parent families, and social security benefits of a long-term nature would be offset against it; and after allowing for the earnings disregard of £6 per week, 50p of every £1 of earnings over and above would be deducted from the guaranteed maintenance allowance, so that it would gradually taper off and be eliminated altogether around average national earnings.
The Finer Committee envisaged this being introduced in conjunction with the tax credit scheme proposed at that time by the Conservative Government of 1970/74. That scheme was somewhat restricted in the scope of the benefits which it would include, and also in the size of the benefits. It would have replaced income tax personal allowances, family allowances, and family income supplement. But the present Government have introduced the child benefit scheme, and we all know the unhappy history of that so far; but it is now being phased in. It is more limited than the previous Government's proposal.

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It provides a tax-free cash benefit to take the place of double taxed family allowances and children's income tax allowances. It is very small, being only £1 for the first child and £1·50 for subsequent children, although single-parent families get an additional 50p for the first child. But to take all single-parent families off supplementary benefit would mean that the bulk of the responsibility would fall on the guaranteed maintenance allowance, in view of the small nature, at the moment anyhow, of the child benefit.
In the light of that proposal by the Finer Committee, I should like to know what is the Government attitude to the concept of a special benefit for single-parent families, not specifically to that benefit. I know they say that the guaranteed maintenance allowance cannot be introduced now because it would cost £250 million to £400 million a year, and because they say it would mean the introduction of about 8,000 more civil servants. But I should like to repeat the question which was put by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Simon of Glaisdale, when he asked whether the Government agree in principle that there should be a special payment for single-parent families. The snag with the guaranteed maintenance allowance proposal is, of course, that it is means-tested. It has to allow for the tapering off which I described a minute ago; that adds to the administrative costs, and we all know how means-tested benefits have contributed towards the poverty trap.
But I believe that the long-term solution is to be found in a more thorough-going tax credit scheme than any yet proposed, one in which all personal income tax allowances would be changed to credits and all social security benefits and national insurance benefits would also be cash credits, and all income would be taxed and the cash credits set against that tax. Then we could have a special credit for one-parent families which would not be means-tested. Inevitably it would take time to introduce a system of that kind, even if the Government were committed to it. But in the meantime some help could be given by adopting the Finer recommendation—it would be a small measure of help, but it would help—for a special one-parent family addition to supplementary benefit scales. The Finer Committee suggested £1·50 at 1972 rates, which would now be £2·90, and would
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perhaps cost £36 million to £40 million, which, when one considers the figures which Chancellors of the Exchequer have to juggle two or three times a year these days, is a comparatively modest sum.
Then again, it would be possible to reduce the waiting time for moving from short-term supplementary benefit rates to long-term benefit rates. It could be reduced from two years to one year, or it could be eliminated altogether, and there is a case for saying that, like pensioners, single-parent families should go on to the long-term benefits immediately, since almost inevitably it is to be a long-term period of time during which they will be drawing supplementary benefit.
In conclusion, I should like to stress the need for one Minister to have overall responsibility for all aspects of the problem of one-parent families. The right honourable lady Mrs. Castle accepted this responsibility when she was Secretary of State for Social Services, but her successor has declined any overall responsibility of this kind. I find this most unsatisfactory. We are dealing with different aspects of one problem. It needs one Minister with the overall responsibility, however many others may also be involved. I think that this debate today will make clear that this House is anxious to see decisive and co-ordinated action.
6.20 p.m.
The Lord Bishop of LEICESTER: My Lords, the noble and learned Lord, to whom we are so grateful, made it very clear that it was no fault of his that such a long delay has occurred since the publication of this report, and still more, of course, since the committee began its work. But I think we shall all agree that it is at least regrettable, if not tragic, that so many years have elapsed, and that we now have to deal with it in this very rapid-fire way, whereby each of us has to think what is most worth saying in a period of eight minutes. It really is a totally unworthy way of having to deal with a document which is of such enormous importance but also of very great length and of great complexity, although I agree of admirable clarity. I ought to say a few words in this debate because among those who gave evidence to the Finer Committee was the Board for Social Responsibility of the Church of

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England, which acted as convener of almost all the social agencies of the great Christian Churches in this country—that is, all those agencies concerned with this kind of problem—and in the evidence which was submitted no fewer than 8,000 individual cases of the family conditions of lone-parent families were in fact under consideration.
The Finer Report very naturally accepts and works from what is now called the non-judgmental approach to this matter. I want to say that I am absolutely in agreement with that in the sense that the community as a whole must put first the welfare of the children, and that in planning its legislation it cannot take into account the individual circumstances whereby the oneness of the parenthood arises. But I feel that no word should go out, certainly from these Benches, or perhaps from the whole House, to suggest that there is no responsibility anywhere along the line for the creation of these one-parent families. Of course, in the case of widowed families there is no responsibility on either spouse (at least, we hope there is not) for that situation; and in the case of the single-parent families I am personally ready to guess that in very many cases the greater responsibility lies with the aggressive male, who is usually missing when it comes to supporting the family that is coming into existence as a result of what has happened.
In the case of the divorced and separated families, the whole pattern is so tangled that it is quite impossible to work out responsibility in any detailed way, but I shall always remember the words of the noble Baroness, Lady Summerskill, when we were discussing the financial side of the divorce reform Bill, and I am glad to see the realistic note in the Finer Report which says quite plainly that whatever may be the intentions of a man (taking the man as usually the figure chiefly responsible in these matters) in practice he just cannot support two families in the way that they ought to be supported, and we must not disguise from him or from ourselves the fact that he is in fact handing over to the community as a whole a burden which once rested honourably, and probably happily, upon his own shoulders.
We all know that an economic blizzard has swept over our country, and we are
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making various suggestions to Her Majesty's Government as to how to combine a real and adequate response to the Finer proposals with the economic necessities of the day. The only suggestion I feel able to make in that way is that we must regard these debates as at the least an important process in self-education. We at least, as representing one phase of Government, can face up to the facts that have been put before us with such stark clarity in the Finer Report, and it may be that in any rearrangement of social benefits we may have to change our priorities. We know how very hard it is ever to withdraw any benefit that has been given in the past, but I think that we may be coming to something of a watershed.
Even when the Finer Committee was set up I think most of us thought that every decade would see the articulation of some new area of deprivation which could easily be dealt with given the will. That is something which has been going on certainly ever since the first decade of this century. Nowadays, questions are being asked as to whether we are getting near the end of what the wealth-producing part of the nation, the working population, can sustain; and if that should be the case we then shall have to look very carefully at our priorities. I myself was disappointed that there was such a blank refusal to consider the guaranteed maintenance allowance. I thought that looked as though it was something definite that could be put alongside the widow's pension as something that would be a right of the lone parent, whether it were a man or a woman.
I welcome the action of the Government (and the poor Government have not had a single little flower thrown at their feet today, I think) in having, I think I am right in saying, brought in the child benefit scheme, under the terms of the interim benefit scheme, one year earlier for the sake of lone parents. If that is so, that may be something of a breakthrough, because I think it is the first time in our social history, so far as I know, that this particular class has stood alone in the social legislation of our country.
As time is so very short I shall have to leave out all those other remarks I intended to make, but I agree with many of the remarks that have been made. I

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was going to speak particularly about the question of the 30-hour rule, because it is clear that if that requirement of a 30-hour week in order to qualify for family income supplement were reduced to one of 24 hours it would make it just possible for a parent to take her child or children to or from school at the beginning and end of the morning and at the beginning and end of the afternoon if required, and still fit in a 24-hour week, whereas you just cannot do that with a 30-hour week. At least, I tried to work it out myself and found that I could not do it.
My Lords, I will end on a perhaps slightly more sombre note. We are told that these figures of lone-parent families, and, hence, of children in lone-parent families, are increasing. I saw one effort to extrapolate these figures to the year 2000. Of course, this is full of uncertainties; but if the rate goes on increasing as it is at the moment it is estimated that by the year 2000 there will be 3 million children in this category. I agree with the noble and learned Lord, Lord Simon of Glaisdale, that we largely have ourselves to blame. We in this House and in another place too have gone along with the nation in making divorce easier and easier. We have sown the wind and we shall probably reap the whirlwind; but we must remember that one marriage saved is better than a great deal of ambulance work after the breakdown. Among the other things for which we may perhaps hope and pray is the revival of those qualities of responsibility—and, I will add, chastity—without which we shall never get ourselves out of this morass.
6.41 p.m.
Baroness SUMMERSKILL: My Lords, I should like to thank the noble and learned Lord, Lord Simon of Glaisdale, for initiating this debate. I learned from him in another place many years ago that when problems concerning women and children faced the House we could always rely upon him making a contribution which revealed his compassion and his expert knowledge of this subject. He told the House that I came here despite the fact that I was ill. Since then, I have had a number of notes. I want to assure the House that it is nothing terminal. It is simply the incurable English disease of rheumatism with which, in view of the average age in this House, I feel that many noble Lords are familiar.
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I cannot forbear from commenting on the inordinate length of this report and on the time which it took to produce it. I do so for a purely practical reason. I know of many women's organisations, influential organisations of active women, in many parts of the country, who are unable to afford £8 for a report. The large size of the report deters women from buying it, because they have two jobs, most of them, one inside the home and one outside the home. They cannot spare the time to digest a report of this size. I do ask—and there was a majority of men responsible for the report—that perhaps they will consider having a smaller report produced which will be available for the poorer people in the community.
The immediate reaction of Mrs. Castle at the Ministry of Social Services, I think was expected in view of the precarious nature of our financial position. It was recommended that there should be a guaranteed maintenance allowance of £9·50 a week at current values for single-handed parents. Although the Government have not found it possible to accept it immediately, this does not lessen the powerful case for putting the 600,000 single-handed parents and their 1 million children in the very forefront of the queue for consideration. I hope that that is what we are doing today. This category of human beings is not only the poorest in the country but, moreover, they have little chance of helping themselves. The £72 million which the guaranteed maintenance allowance will cost the State should be regarded by the taxpayer not only as a form of financial support for the poorest but as an insurance against having to maintain the children in care or, later, as delinquents guilty of anti-social behaviour.
I regret that the Committee did not regard it as feasible or desirable to undertake an inquiry into the relationship between delinquent behaviour and family circumstances. I should think that in these days this would have provided a powerful argument for focussing the attention of the community on the urgent need to succour the child denied a normal family life. The very isolation of the lone parent who has to take on jobs in the home which are normally shared is, in some measure, responsible for the children of one-parent families showing signs of stress. The effect on the child was summed up very well by the Committee. They

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said that a family in which a mother or father, single handed, has to bring up children will think of itself and be treated by others as a little cluster of deviants from the marital norm. I should like to know what proportion of the football hooligans guilty of vandalism and physical assault every week are "deviants from the marital norm" who are determined to get their own back on society. One must remember that a child does not forget its early upbringing and—I hate to use the phrase—revenge is sweet. The effect on the child of being regarded as outside the norm of the two-parent family is, in my opinion, so crippling psychologically as to warrant these children being numbered among the disabled in our society and consequently qualified to receive a special benefit.
The report rightly says that the old assessment of blame, which pitied widows and which attached varying degrees of moral delinquency to divorced or separated women and to unmarried mothers, should now be irrelevant. But it is still very relevant wherever we look. It still has a major effect on those in authority. For example, women still have to prove a matrimonial offence to get a maintenance order in the magistrates' court and they will not be successful if an offence is proved against them. Surely, that is totally illogical when the sole ground of divorce is irretrievable breakdown of the marriage irrespective of the guilt of either party.
Most families today, soon after the second child is born, enjoy at least two wages; but the fatherless family must depend on a single wage or on supplementary benefit. It is useless to expect greater enforcement of maintenance orders to lift these families out of poverty. The evidence in this report shows that in almost no case is the maintenance order going to be higher than the supplementary benefit that the family can claim. Undoubtedly, for these unfortunate women, part-time work is the answer for most of the one-parent families, supplemented by part-time day care facilities for the children. But, too often, part-time work and, indeed, whole-time work involves the exploitation of women's labour and very low wages. As the right reverend Prelate has said, the men against whom maintenance orders are made have
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insufficient money to maintain both themselves and their families in separate households. I remember clearly the debate on that subject. I recall the speech of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hodson. I supported him when he said that the only woman who will get paid is the one who is there on Friday nights when the man receives his wages—and so it has proved to be.
The right reverend Prelate is right. What has happened is that the divorce Act has simply passed the responsibility of bringing up the children to the taxpayer. Those who agitated over the years for easier divorce failed to consider the side effects on the children which, in my opinion, involves more misery and heartbreak than that experienced by adults who find that a marriage has proved unsatisfactory. Where did we have the children's voice speaking in this House? Nowhere, of course. That cruel, ugly, hateful divorce Bill was pushed through by all kinds of adults outside who thought that they were being progressive. It was completely heartless about the effect on children, and now we find what is happening to the children in this report on one-parent families.
Of course, housing problems closely rival money problems between husband and wife, particularly over the ownership of the house; and the difficulties in finding a home for one-parent families are aggravated because of the discrimination exercised by local authorities who regard them as being less deserving. The unmarried mother is often regarded as suitable only for inferior accommodation.
My Lords, I am two minutes over my time; I am sorry, I am trying to finish. The report confirmed what organisations such as the National Council for One-Parent Families, Gingerbread and the Child Poverty Action Group are agreed about; namely, that one-parent families suffer severe poverty, are the last in the queue for housing, suffer social isolation and, in consequence, the children grow up maladjusted. This is the point which the country should appreciate. While the Government find it impossible to introduce the guaranteed maintenance allowance, there is a large administrative area where discrimination can be removed and replaced by a more compassionate attitude and a greater measure of justice hitherto denied to one-parent families.
6.43 p.m.
Baroness SHARPLES: My Lords, I too am very grateful to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Simon of Glaisdale, for providing the opportunity of this afternoon's debate, on a situation which worries many people who work in this field. My main concern is for the much neglected minority group of prisoners' families within the framework of one-parent families. Their situation is seen as temporary, and hopefully the man will return to his home, his absence usually being due to his committing a socially unacceptable act. So, besides suffering the deprivations which all one-parent families experience, the prisoner's family has to cope with the hostility of neighbours and the need to make a new relationship with the man inside gaol. Understandably, available resources are geared to the man and his aftercare; but it is the wife who has to take him back into the family. She may think that life will change miraculously for the better on his discharge; but, sadly, experience shows that this is rarely the case, and now, when she really needs help, it is not available.
Exceptionally hard pressed are the groups with special problems: the wives of other nationalities. These women often have no relations or friends; they may speak no English; and, indeed, some have never even handled money, being completely and utterly dependent on their husbands for literally all the day-to-day decisions. Lacking means of communication, they are indeed very isolated. Letters have to be translated before being censored, and this can cause long delays; and if the wife cannot read or write, she will have considerable difficulty in finding someone to help her. Children of school age may be of some assistance but they have their own problems. I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Summerskill, that children suffer very much in this area. I believe that this is particularly true for some Asian families, especially those from Uganda, and for Turkish Cypriots, again because of the language difficulties. I wonder—and I feel this very strongly—whether embassies could give more practical help in these cases.
All prisoners' families need continuous support from the time the man is arrested, is imprisoned, and then in the very difficult period when he is free and, hopefully,
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returned to his family. Their problems may be mainly financial, but stress and strain will also be evident. Constructive advice and understanding can do much to help the family (especially the wives) so that we may hope that they can take up their lives together again as a family.
6.46 p.m.
Lord GARDINER: My Lords, I too am very grateful to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Simon of Glaisdale, for giving us an opportunity to consider this important report tonight. I will not repeat any of the points which have been made because we are limited for time and must be highly selective. Therefore I want to mention two points, both matters on which I opened a debate in this House in July 1974; namely, the cohabitation rule and the defects of the Supplementary Benefits Appeal Tribunal.
So far as the cohabitation rule is concerned, as your Lordships know, often the Commission's officials can say to, perhaps, a widow, "Now you have a spare room in your house you must help yourself. You can create some income for yourself by letting your room". As soon as the widow lets it, she is liable to be charged with cohabitation. Of course the official has complete power to take away her book or books. If she is a widow she may have a widow's pension, which is not enough to take her above poverty level but which has been topped up by supplementary benefits. From the moment her book is taken away, she is destitute and has no money coming into the house.
She has to appeal then to two tribunals: in respect of her pension, to the National Insurance tribunal; in respect of supplementary benefit, to the Supplementary Benefits Appeal tribunal. The Finer Committee made two recommendations about this. They considered whether these payments ought not to continue pending the hearing of the appeal because, after all, supplementary benefits are the last refuge against destitution. They thought there were difficulties about that, but they said that at least where she disputed the facts on which the official had found cohabitation, the payments should go on until the hearing of the appeal. The average time for appeal is about five weeks. I should like to ask

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my noble friend Lord Wells-Pestell whether after 2½ years the Government have accepted this recommendation, or have rejected it. If they have rejected it, why.
Secondly, the Finer Committee said that it was very hard on the children when all money was withdrawn because the Supplementary Benefits Commission, even in the case of the children, went on paying the money for only four weeks and not until the appeal had been heard. They said that had given them particular concern. The report continues:
"'The purpose of these payments is to cushion the family against the abrupt reduction in their income, give the couple time to claim any family income supplement to which they may be entitled, and time to adapt to a situation in which the whole family must in most cases rely upon the man's income for their support' We regard this period of four weeks as insufficient. Proper as the decision to withdraw the benefit may be, its sudden loss creates in many of the cohabitation cases a crisis within the household of the first order…the loss of income from the benefit may result in the total disruption of what may already be a parlous household economy; rent may fall into arrears, other debts may accumulate and gas and electricity meters become tempting targets. As the Fisher Committee observed, 'The Commission…recognise that the rarity of payments to meet urgent need in cohabitation cases may well conceal a fair amount of genuine need that is not being met. We recommend that the four-week period to which we have made reference should be extended to three months.'"
I should like to ask my noble friend Lord Wells-Pestell whether, after 2½ years, the Government have accepted or rejected that recommendation and, if they have rejected it, why.
In the debate of July 1974 I adumbrated the many defects of the Supplementary Benefits Appeal Tribunal. In the case I have put where a woman has to go to two different tribunals, I have known cases where, on exactly the same evidence, the Supplementary Benefits Commission have found there was cohabitation and the National Insurance Appeal Tribunal have found there was not: never the other way round. I know of no complaint against the National Insurance tribunal. There is an appeal from that tribunal. There is a Commissioner with the status of a High Court judge. His decisions are public and they are binding on the tribunals, who have to follow the ordinary doctrines of precedent. In the case of the Supplementary Benefit Tribunals, they are the lowest rung of the tribunal ladder.
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The chairman is supposed to be a lawyer—that is why the Lord Chancellor has to appoint him—but in fact only 6 per cent. of them are lawyers. They have great difficulties in finding enough people to sit; and they say there is no law; it is all discretion. I think I told your Lordships last time that I had just met a solicitor friend of mine who had just come back from one of these tribunals. The chairman had told him that they had a letter which proved cohabitation. My friend asked to see the letter but was not allowed to. He asked whether he could be told what was in it, but the chairman said they would not tell him. They say themselves they apply no law of evidence. They act on anonymous telephone calls and things of that kind.
In September 1975 Professor Bell, who had been asked by the Department to make an extensive report on these tribunals, published her report and it fully substantiated all the complaints which I and other Members of your Lordships' House had made about these tribunals; for example, the fact that very often only two turned up instead of three; the fact that so few of them were lawyers or really understood the jurisdiction they were supposed to entertain; the fact that there was no appeal from them and so forth. After 18 months, what do the Government say about that? The Government spoke last night in a Written Answer to a Question put in another place. The Government have known for some little time that your Lordships were going to debate this subject tonight. This Question came so late in the day that although I got Hansard as soon as I could it ends:
"Continued at column so and so"—
which means we shall not get that until tomorrow morning. My noble friend Lord Wells-Pestell, with his usual courtesy, was kind enough to give me a copy of what most of your Lordships will not be able to see until tomorrow. The Government have accepted one or two recommendations of the Bill Committee on training, and so on. Then there is a whole group of them, and they say:
"A number of improvements have been made or are being considered, in particular stressing the independence of the tribunals, making them as accessible as possible, and generally simplifying the appeal procedure."
Then they go on to deal with a few small points made by the Professor. They include

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better tribunal premises, clearer and more complete documentation of appeals, improved forms of explanatory leaflets, reconsideration of the role of the tribunal clerk and the officer who represents the Supplementary Benefits Commission at appeal hearings, measures to overcome the difficulties in attending hearings of elderly or handicapped appellants and those who live in areas badly served by public transport, and efforts to reduce the time between making an appeal and the hearing. All those are prefaced by the words I first quoted, as being a number of improvements which have been made or are being considered.
I do not think your Lordships will need me to tell you that when a bureaucracy uses the phrase about an improvement that "has been made or is being considered", it means absolutely nothing at all. As to each of these, I would ask my noble friend Lord Wells-Pestell to tell us which they are. First, as to clearer and more complete documentation of appeals, has that been made or is it being considered? Improved forms and explanatory leaflets: has that reform been made or is it being considered? Reconsideration of the role of the tribunal clerk and the officer who represents the Supplementary Benefits Commission at appeal hearings—has that been done or is it being considered? It is rather like a cosy family party. The Minister appoints the other two members of the tribunal and, I believe, in practice most of the chairmen as well, because the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor is not familiar with those who might be appointed from non-legal sources. The clerk comes from the Ministry and of course the man who presents the case on behalf of the Commission. As regards measures to overcome difficulties and so on, are they still being considered or have they been taken?
Finally, I should like to ask what the answer is to the other very sensible recommendations made by Professor Bell. For instance, with regard to training, she says:
"Stage 1: these are the intermediate and simple things which could be done at once: improve and strengthen the quality of the existing tribunals and their work by taking a number of steps as quickly as possible, appoint a legally-qualified chairman for each region or a national SBAT chairman with particular responsibility for training and improving the consistency and quality of decision making."
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Out of the hundreds of chairmen, 6 per cent. (18) are lawyers, I understand. If there are 18 legal chairmen, why can they not be appointed as senior chairmen for the regions, and why should that proposal not be implemented.
Finally, there ought really to be a proper system of appeals as in the case of the National Insurance Tribunal, as I gather all the Government propose to do is to give the appellant a right to appeal in law to the High Court. With great respect, I think that is most unsatisfactory. The National Insurance Commissioners who have the status of a High Court judge are very familiar with the cases which come before National Insurance Tribunals and the cases are so allied that they would not have any difficulty with appeals from the Supplementary Benefits Appeals Tribunal. High Court judges, of course, are unfamiliar with those cases. There are many other cases put by Professor Bell, but time does not permit me to mention them. I should like to ask my noble friend Lord Wells-Pestell whether he could say at least a word about the other reforms of which at the moment all that is said is that they must await a long-term review. Since I first raised this matter in July of the year before last, how long is long.
6.58 p.m.
Baroness FAITHFULL: My Lords, I should like to take this opportunity of paying a tribute to all those who served on the Finer Committee and in particular to the late Morris Finer and the late Professor Titmuss. The report, is a significant social document, not likely to be put aside by any Government. Therefore I am grateful to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Simon of Glaisdale, for introducing this debate.
I could have wished that the terms of reference of this report covered children of one-parent families, not because the content would be any different, not because the parents obviously are very crucial to the whole debate, but because the Department of Health and Social Security or the Department of Education might have had a sense of responsibility for taking action on this report, whereas, as it is, the recommendations cover a wide spectrum of the social services and therefore the ultimate responsibility appears to lie with no Department.

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The noble and learned Lord, Lord Simon, asked me to include the welfare aspect, and here I tread on the same ground as the noble Baroness, Lady Summerskill. A child inevitably experiences certain deprivations with only one parent caring for it, be it mother or father, and there are many fathers caring for children on their own. There are the two aspects—outward and visible difficulties, such as housing, finance and legal problems, and the inner emotional needs and conflicts of lack of identity, lack of status and split loyalties. Let it be said, however, that children are resilient and one loving, caring, competent parent with a sense of purpose can, and does, redeem the situation. I speak with feeling and with gratitude as the daughter of a mother widowed when her two children were two and four, and with a minimal war pension, but the war pension came regularly and was not means tested.
However competent a lone parent, there must be steady and consistent supportive services. Many of these have been, or will be, touched upon. I will confine myself to one area, that of the legal and social position when the maintenance allowance does not come through regularly and on time. Seen through a child's eyes, the lack of basic needs spells rejection. When the mother has to pursue her husband through court proceedings or has to spend endless time at the supplementary benefits office, when the Giro from the Supplementary Benefits Commission does not arrive or a maintenance cheque from the court does not come, for the child this spells deprivation, lack of security and a sense of rejection. I must, however, pay tribute and say that it must be recognised that, in the last few years, there has been a closer tie between the court and the Supplementary Benefits Commission. There is now an arrangement by which the maintenance allowance can be registered with the magistrates' court, and the magistrates' court can pursue the parent for maintenance. But I should say here that there are very real difficulties, from the legal point of view, in getting an affidavit, et cetera.
I should just like to make some recommendations which are very simple, not costly and at grass roots level. When
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parents have been widowed, separated or have had a child outside marriage they are bemused, bewildered and life is difficult. At that stage, I believe they should be given a simple pamphlet by the court, or, in the case of widows, by the registrar of births, marriages and deaths, laying out simply and clearly where they can go for help, what they can get and what they are entitled to. I believe that another difficulty lies in the complex social situation that we have at the moment, in that there is no one person who really knows and who can give advice to a single parent. So I should like to see named in the pamphlet somebody from the court to whom parents know they can go if they want to discuss taking the father to court for non-payment of maintenance. I should also like to see in the supplementary benefit office a responsible named person to whom a parent can go, who is conversant with the wide complexity of grants; and I should like to see both these names on this pamphlet supplied to parents.
On a long-term basis, I would support the noble Baroness, Lady Young, in regard to an inter-Departmental committee perhaps producing a Bill. I recognise that it might not be able to be introduced now, or for some time to come, but at least thought would be given and perhaps some sections of it could be implemented without extra cost. May I say—this is slightly way out—that if this Bill is produced there will obviously be discussions with the EEC countries. But may I just mention the difficulties of parents married to men who leave them and go to a country such as Switzerland, where there is no reciprocal arrangement for taking a man to court for a maintenance allowance. I hope that at some point in time we may have reciprocal arrangements with other countries. With those few remarks—I have taken seven minutes—I would say that these simple recommendations could be implemented at no cost and with great benefit at the grass roots to the lone parent.
7.6 p.m.
Lady KINLOSS: My Lords, when I spoke last June in the most reverend Primate's debate on the family, I complained that we had not yet found time to debate the Finer Report. So it is an especial pleasure to me to congratulate

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the noble and learned Lord, Lord Simon of Glaisdale, on having been lucky in the ballot.
The first thing that struck me, when I began to study the problems of one-parent families, was the enormous complexity of the subject. It is an absolute jungle. The Finer Report has 519 pages of report and 391 pages of appendices; it makes 230 recommendations and of these I am happy to note that some have already been accepted and implemented by the Government. At the same time, thinking of the fathers or the mothers who are left to bring up the child or children in a one-parent family, they must feel overwhelmed by an absolute jungle of options, possibilities, form-filling and regulations with which their situation faces them.
The Finer Joint Action Committee did a fine job in producing a guide to the report and this is, of course, most helpful to us. I wonder whether the noble Baroness, Lady Summerskill, has seen it, priced 50p? Could not, I venture to wonder, the Government produce a guide for the use of one-parent families, or even, perhaps, a series of guides for the different categories of one-parent families—the widows and widowers, the divorced or separated, and the deserted of both sexes, or the single mother. I fully recognise the complexity and difficulty of the task, but over a number of years successive Governments have produced a Highway Code that the young can understand. I should like to see available in every Post Office a simple guide for one-parent families, and a poster to advertise it. I am sure that this would be very helpful to those who want to know, and are entitled to know, how they are placed. I think it is of extreme importance that we should make the regulations as simple and as explicit as possible. People in distress are in no state to understand the complexities of law.
The composition of one-parent families is varied, and the idea of an unmarried mother bringing up a child alone as the normal one-parent family is not accurate. There is an ever increasing number of fatherless families and motherless ones. The motherless ones, I think, face additional hardships, or at least the father does. Not only is he unaccustomed to dealing with the washing and ironing and cleaning of the house, but there are all
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the little things in the every-day life of a child, from a cut finger or a bruised knee to a broken toy. The lone father also suffers from comments from neighbours who, no doubt through ignorance of the situation, castigate him for not working but living at the expense of the State, not realising that he is doing a hard but honest job of trying to bring up his children in a happy family atmosphere and to keep the family united.
I am disappointed that so far the Government have not yet seen their way to introducing family courts, as first recommended by the eminent woman judge, Jean Graham Hall. We do not have many women judges, and therefore I think we should listen to them, especially when they speak upon family matters. I was very disappointed by the Attorney General's statement on 26th October last on family courts, because I can see no justification for two parallel systems of jurisdiction in family matters. It seems to me to be illogical to have anything other than a wholly unified system of matrimonial law. We speak of rifts in the matrimonial lute, but no one in their senses would try to make marriage like playing on a two-manual church organ. But of course it is not sufficient merely to deal with the formal law; one must also have regard to administering it in a suitable place. I can think of many nervous women—and, indeed, men, too—who are frightened by the formal atmosphere of a court. Could not the rooms at present used informally for juvenile courts be used for family courts? Indeed, it would seem to be quite logical to use for family courts the somewhat less awe-inspiring atmosphere provided for the juvenile courts.
Many others who have already spoken in this debate have made, and no doubt others who are to follow, will make, many valuable points. I shall therefore confine myself to one other matter only. The one I have in mind is day care. The reduction of the rate support grant means that very many local authorities are cutting back on day nurseries. In the most deprived urban area of the United Kingdom, Strathclyde, the total closure of all day nursery provision is under consideration. Nothing apparently is being done to expand comprehensive nursery centres, day fostering, employers' day nurseries and all-day play groups. In one area in

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which services of this kind are a most obvious need, nothing is apparently being done. I refer to after-school play groups. Would it not be possible to use the schools for this purpose and so make use of buildings which otherwise would not be in use? Not only are there difficulties with the child in primary school, but there is the problem of the comprehensive school child, especially in rural areas, who arrives home before mother or father. There is also the problem of school holidays which preclude the lone parent from working, or certainly from working full-time.
For lone parents, the possibility of working is often the only way of participating in adult society. The disappearance of the facilities that enable them to go out to work can only be a psychological disaster for many of them. A psychological disaster for a lone parent is a disaster that can only be worked off on the children. In the case of motherless one-parent families I think that day care, in whatever form, is of special importance because it may well provide the only contact with women that the children may have. I have in mind a little boy of my acquaintance whose mother deserted his father and her family. At first he went round saying to different women whom he knew, "May I call you Mummy for today?".
I beg the Government to give urgent thought to this matter. With the exception of Ireland, EEC figures show the United Kingdom provision of day care to be the lowest in Europe. I realise that this is not the time to discuss economies in expenditure, but surely we could save in areas such as excessive lighting and heating in public buildings. There is plenty of scope for economy and we must avoid extravagance. Perhaps what was thus saved could be used to help towards day care for children who need it.
Lord STRABOLGI: My Lords, may I remind your Lordships that this debate must finish at eight o'clock, and in order to give my noble friend Lord Wells-Pestell adequate time in which to reply I should be grateful if noble Lords who are about to speak would limit their speeches to five minutes.
7.15 p.m.
Baroness GAITSKELL: My Lords, we should be very grateful to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Simon of Glaisdale, for introducing this urgent debate. In any debate on either one-parent families or divorce I must confess that I find myself wondering whether there is not some merit in polygamy, because at least the discarded wife and the children are often kept in the common home. But, seriously, the solutions are so difficult in terms of human relations.
Despite the fact that I agree with the contributions of my noble friend Lady Summerskill and the right reverend Prelate, that the Divorce Reform Act may, for the time being, have increased the difficulties for children in one-parent families, I do not believe that the children are any better off in countries where divorce is not allowed, and I should like statistics. I find much more comfort in the practical suggestions of the noble Baroness, Lady Young, and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Simon of Glaisdale. I must also confess that I am very ignorant about the problem that is dealt with in the Finer Report. I have tried to read a certain amount but I find that my knowledge is still quite inadequate. However, I have learned a certain amount during the course of the debate this evening.
In Britain over many years we have given very low priority to families and children. There was a distinct bias in taxation policies throughout the 1960s against the family with children. However severe are the consequences of taxation on low paid, two-parent families, the consequences of taxation on a one-parent family are far more severe. To maintain older children in a one-parent family obviously means that conditions are most inadequate. I agree with my noble friend Lady Summer-skill that this may be one of the reasons for the increasing number of drop-outs in education and for general discontent among young people.
There are many reasons for the poor results of our welfare services for one-parent families. One of them is that the basis of entitlement to welfare benefits is too complicated to be understood and taken up by those in greatest need of these benefits. It has been estimated, as the right reverend Prelate has said, that

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by the year 2,000 over 3 million children will have had experience of a one-parent family. Whatever hardships are endured in our society by the low income groups in two-parent families, we can be sure that they are very much worse in the one-parent family. Taking this into account, it seems ludicrous that single parents have to wait two years before obtaining any benefit entitlement.
A remnant of old-fashioned social disapproval still haunts the one-parent families and I suppose that this is reflected in the social policies which we adopt. Otherwise how can we justify our tax systems, which show that the proportion of tax taken from the average affluent worker—which of course has also increased over the last 10 years—has not increased so much as the proportion taken from the low paid? We find among the low paid most of the one-parent families. It is a sad comment on the times we live in when we remember that in 1965 a low paid worker, defined as one earning two-thirds of the average national wage, paid no income tax whatever. This shift during the last 10 years in the burden of taxation towards the low paid must be reversed. Although I am not an economist, and I have no doubt that I shall be shot down in flames by the Minister, it seems to me that this tendency to shift the burden of taxation on to the low paid must be reversed. I am not thinking of the wealth tax. I do not believe that it would cost so much as day care and nursery schools and all the other things which we have suggested. It seems to me that here is an area where a change in taxation policy can help the one-parent family and that we should stop discrimination in taxation in favour of single and childless couples.
In areas of deprivation we all know that personal taxation should be based on the needs of families with children of different ages. Assessments for one-parent and two-parent families must be different in order to be fair. Many of the Western democratic countries in Europe are better than we are at dealing with these welfare problems. Norway is particularly good and has an outstanding record, with tax-free child allowances and graded grants up to 16 years of age for pupils, and up to the age of 27 for students and the disabled. I must leave out the other countries which also do rather better
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than we do. Unlike in Britain, in five European countries none makes full-time work a bar against social insurance benefits. What causes the poverty trap is the means-tested benefit; and most experts today ask not for means-tested, but for universal benefits, and other things which, unfortunately, there is not time to go into.
I believe the in-built inequalities of our tax system and our social security system must be ironed out if we are to achieve better results from our social policies. The choice for a civilised society to achieve progress in this field is, as has been said, not whether to have a family policy but what kind of family policy we should have to make up a system of family income support in need, wherever that need may be. I believe that the selective systems have proved to be imperfect and a strong case has now been made out for universal benefits.
7.22 p.m.
Baroness ELLIOT of HARWOOD: My Lords, we have had a remarkable debate. I thought the speech made by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Simon of Glaisdale, was not only moving but very dramatic. What would Charles Dickens have made of this situation if he had been alive today? Oliver Twist would have been nothing compared to what he could have written about the conditions that have been described.
I believe that local authorities should be made to understand the real problems with which one-parent families are faced. I was horrified to hear the noble Lady, Lady Kinloss, say that Strathclyde, one of the most unsuccessful reorganisations in local government in Scotland, has now decided to cut down on all the services to help mothers in the way of day care for children. We ought to make it as easy as possible for the one parent to go to work, and I entirely agree that we must alter the hour rule so that people can get benefit and assistance if they are working, say, only 20 hours or even less. That is absolutely vital.
Also I think the simplification of applications for rent and other allowances should be tackled at once. These delays, complications and form-fillings could certainly be done in a far simpler way if

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somebody were to look at the matter straightforwardly and make it as easy as possible for the one parent to get the necessary allowances. We all know what complications there are when wages are altered and codes have to be changed. That is all right if you are in work and earning good wages, but it is not if you are left, as these women are, with responsibility for a family and not knowing which way to turn and how to tackle these complicated things. I would tackle the administration of these benefit schemes immediately.
I agree that the housing situation is a vital matter. Again, I would go to the local authorities and I would press for these emergencies to be treated just as one would treat an emergency when a person is knocked down by a motor car and has to be taken by ambulance to a hospital. The hospital would not turn the patient away because it was an emergency case; they would take that patient in at once. I believe the local authority should be told that these emergencies for housing are of the greatest importance in this terrible problem.
There are many other things I should like to say, but I would merely add my voice to those we have heard today and say to the Government that they should do something now—not in a few years' time and not, as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Gardiner, pointed out, in the phrase of the civil servant, waiting to see what is going to happen. We know what is going to happen if we do nothing: the situation will get worse and worse and worse. Now is the time to do something. Much can be done without spending money, simply by reorganisation and an intelligent use of what is available. I am quite sure that we could do something today which would be of vital importance in this desperate situation.
7.26 p.m.
Viscount HANWORTH: My Lords, speaking late in a debate of this nature one necessarily merely emphasises what other people have said, but as my speech was going to last only five minutes, in order to save time I will roughly follow what I intended to say. The magnitude of the problem has already been stressed. Many one-parent families are the result
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of easier divorce. Quite apart from the moral obligation to help those in our community who are in need or in difficulty, we have a social responsibility to do so, arising from the divorce legislation which Parliament has enacted. It is hard to understand why, after three years, so few of the recommendations of the outstandingly excellent Finer Report have been implemented.
I intended to deal with only two matters of great concern to one-parent families, but if time permits I may add a third. Our present system of income supplements and benefits is a jungle. It is not so much that more money is required, but that it is wastefully employed and the system so complicated that no Administration, however efficient, could make it work effectively. Not only is there in many cases a positive disincentive to work, but those who are really in need fare worst. There is probably no section of the community which suffers more from these shortcomings than one-parent families. When a lone parent tries to return to work, he or she faces delays of up to three months or more before benefits and tax are fixed correctly. During this time a family can lose even as much as £20 a week and be worse off than on supplementary benefit. Furthermore, a lone parent working more than 30 hours a week can receive a family income supplement if the gross income is below a specified amount, but two months' pay slips have to be submitted before a claim is made and the total delay before any benefit is received is usually about three months. Even longer delays may arise before the penal emergency tax code can be adjusted. How does the Treasury expect the family to live during that period of three months or more.
My third point, briefly, is that there should be more opportunities for part-time working. Originally, it was said that part-time working was impossible for teachers. But when there was a shortage of teachers it was found that this was an excellent and easily arranged matter. It was also said that one could not have part-time workers in the hospitals, but it was found to be necessary and quite efficient. It has been argued that part-time working in research is impossible. My reply to that is that most of those working in universities, professors and lecturers, are part-time researchers, and if it is true that it is impossible, why do

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they carry on? No, part-time working is in most cases perfectly possible if one is prepared to make some alterations in the way affairs are managed.
The other matter which I should like to mention concerns the courts. The Finer Report stresses that at the moment there are three systems of family law in operation. One stems from the High Court, another the magistrates' courts, and a third is administered in camera by the Supplementary Benefits Commission. As Finer said, nothing could exceed the confusion created by three modes of assessment of a liability, all different from each other, and two of them employed in courts of law acting in ignorance of the third mode which the Supplementary Benefits Commission use in making decisions which affect the very same group of people. What is needed is a family court. It is absurd to contend that new buildings must be provided for such a court to operate, or that new legal expertise needs to be generated. In all this I am reminded of the cynic's prayer for use in Government Departments:
"Grant that this day we come to no decisions, neither run into any kind of responsibility, but let all our doings be ordered to establish new and quite unwarranted departments, for ever and for ever."
7.32 p.m.
Lord HYLTON: My Lords, I should like to turn to the housing aspect of the very urgent and serious problems facing one-parent families. All the authorities are in absolute agreement, from the Francis Committee to the National Child Development Study, to the Catholic Housing Aid Society Study of 1973 and the Shelter Housing Aid Centre Study of 1975. These concur completely with the Finer Committee on the seriousness and the urgency and the lack of suitable accommodation.
I should like to suggest two preventive measures that would help things. The first concerns the co-ownership of the matrimonial home, and here we are awaiting eagerly the report due from the Law Commission. We very much hope that it will fully take into account the Finer Report and that it will produce recommendations that will help, both during the currency of a marriage and after its dissolution.
The second preventive measure concerns joint tenancies for local authority houses
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in the names of both husband and wife. The best authorities—for example, Leeds, Birmingham and a number of others, and more recently the GLC—have always done this, but last year only eight out of the 33 London boroughs made a regular practice of offering joint tenancies. The corollary of the joint tenancy is that it should be transferred by the authority to the parent, who has actual care of the children, in all cases of marital dispute. So much for prevention.
I come to aftercare measures, after a family has broken up. The noble Baroness, Lady Summerskill, rightly pointed out that discrimination against the one-parent family as such should be unthinkable but in fact does happen. It should also never be the case that one-parent families are rehoused in a concentration, in a ghetto, in one particular estate or street. There is need secondly, for revision of points schemes which at present discriminate severely against the one-parent family (Finer Committee, paragraph 673). My noble friend Lady Young mentioned residential qualifications. The trend is to place less emphasis on these, and I am very glad to see that the London Borough of Hammersmith has given a striking lead in this. The Finer Committee Report, paragraph 678, laid down the two criteria which should be predominant when it comes to rehousing.
I have already mentioned the question of transferring tenancies from husband to wife, or vice versa, and this needs to be done conditionally when a family dispute first shows itself. That can be done administratively. There is also a need for changing the law under Section 7 of the Matrimonial Homes Act 1967, to give power to the court to transfer local authority and housing association tenancies in the same way that it can already transfer private tenancies. I understand that the Government are having discussions with the Building Societies Association and with the local authority associations on what happens when a mortgage is current and you have a family breakdown. These discussions have been going on for a long time. I hope they will soon be brought to a positive conclusion and that we shall have some effective action.
Finally, on these aftercare measures, may I say how very badly we need a

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circular on the whole question of the housing needs of the one-parent family. The reason for asking for a circular is that one-parent families are almost totally unrepresented on local authority housing committees. We were promised, or at least it was officially stated in October 1975, that a circular would come out very soon. I should like to ask why the delay and when will we get that circular? So much for housing.
If I may touch on the question of self-help and mutual help in and among one-parent families, this is something absolutely essential and necessary to their morale. It is relatively cheap to provide, and there is a considerable range of voluntary bodies existing to do just that. To name a few, Gingerbread, Mothers in Action, the National Association of Widows and the National Federation of Women's Aid. I hope the Government will give them all possible encouragement and help. One or two have already received EEC funds, and I hope that this will be possible in many more cases.
7.37 p.m.
Baroness SEEAR: My Lords, your Lordships want to hear Lord Wells-Pestell's reply and not listen to me speak; I will be as brief as I possibly can. I want to focus on the position of single parents who want to go out to work, because I believe it is exceedingly important that it should be made as easy as possible for them to do so. Will the noble Lord tell us—not necessarily tonight—what steps will be taken, even in the present economic situation, to ease the position of the single parent who wants to work? It must be not only an economic but also a considerable psychological relief to be able to do so.
One of the points already mentioned is the ridiculous restriction of family income supplement to those working less than 30 hours a week. One can see why it was introduced originally, but surely it would be possible at very little expense to vary this requirement. As the noble Baroness, Lady Gaitskell, pointed out, there is the further quite ridiculous handicap arising from our tax system. This is perhaps not the moment to mention it, but it is quite crazy that we start to tax at what is effectively a 40 per cent. marginal rate,
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35 per cent. plus the social security contribution. To charge 40 per cent. when one first starts paying tax is quite absurd. I have said this on a number of previous occasions, and it is high time this matter was looked at again.
I want especially to refer to child care services. In times of economic stringency child care services, which are not popular in the community as a whole, however much they are demanded by the women particularly concerned, are obviously up for attack from a number of quarters, but they are absolutely vital to the single parent who wants to go to work. I speak as a non-parent, but surely it must afford the most enormous relief to be able to put your child into care for a few hours while you are working and having adult society rather than the society of small children.
Day nurseries of course have the reputation of being very expensive, and so they are. However, can we not somehow get together those most expert in this area, to see what in the present situation can be done to make child care services—day nurseries—available without any great additional cost to the community? I could expand on this, but in the time available to me I shall not do so.
While I am on the subject of day nurseries, I should like to put in a special plug for a care which is all too little developed in this country but which is very widely developed in other European countries and which in many ways is even more important than the day nursery. It is the provision of care facilities during school holidays. The single parent with a child of seven or eight years, with no one at home for the holidays and with nowhere for the child to go, is in an impossibly difficult situation. If I had to choose where to allocate the expenditure I would spend it on holiday care rather than day nurseries, but that is another matter.
These are matters of the greatest urgency. I am sure that with ingenuity and imagination we could find ways of making far more child care facilities available. This would be of prime importance for the single parent, but it would also be very important for many other women. I am sure that if we do not make this a central issue it will be a casualty of our economic plight.
7.42 p.m.
Lord WELLS-PESTELL: My Lords, I am sure the noble and learned Lord, Lord Simon of Glaisdale, will not misunderstand me when I say that I cannot join with all the other noble Lords in thanking him for introducing this particular debate. I cannot do so because I share the view of the noble Baroness, Lady Faithful. I think that we have attempted, through no fault of the noble and learned Lord because he was limited to a short debate, to cover far too much ground of great significance and considerable importance in a short space of time. That is certainly not the Government's fault. A certain amount of business must be got through. There are a large number of No Day Named debates and they must be fitted in. However, perhaps with all its limitations it is desirable that we had this debate today because I for one believe that the issues are not only of great significance to the community, but are of considerable importance to individuals. If a Government cannot move from time to time in directions in which people want them to move, it is a good thing to remind those people occasionally that there are still hurdles to be taken. Generally speaking, I do not think that there is a great deal of difference between the view of the Government on a number of matters, although there is on some, and some of the views that have been expressed today.
The noble and learned Lord asked me not to speak from a brief and that would be no new thing for me—but rather to say what I think. Of course, that is what I cannot do. As the noble Baroness, Lady Young, knows only too well, Ministers speak for the Government, they do not speak for themselves. All my experience—and I am getting on now—has been in the field of professional social work and voluntary social work in the selection and training of social workers. However, I am sure that some of your Lordships are sick and tired of hearing that. Therefore, I understand the problem; I understand what noble Lords and Baronesses have said with regard to this matter. I should, perhaps, have preferred to take one or two of the areas covered by the Finer Report and to discuss them in depth. Nevertheless, we have spread what we had to say over a very wide area instead of putting our roots down deeply in defined areas.
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Under the Rules of your Lordships' House I must sit down by eight o'clock, so I cannot deal in detail or ever adequately with the vast number of questions which I have been asked. I shall try to deal with one or two of them. I shall read, as one normally does, Hansard, and if I think that a matter should be dealt with by post, I shall reply in that way. However, I am bound to say that pressure is such that the replies may not come within a matter of a few days. As the noble Baroness, Lady Faithful, knows, I dealt with some over the Christmas Recess. However, I undertake to do that. I am sure that the noble Baroness, Lady Elliot, did not mean what I think she implied; namely, that conditions today in some respects are as bad as they were during the days of Oliver Twist. I shall not let her get away with that because it is just not accurate, and she knows it.
The Government have been criticised because they have not implemented all the recommendations of the Finer Report. It was asserted—and perhaps if it were not explicit, it was implicit in what certain noble Lords said—that there was a lack of sympathy and understanding by the Government. That just is not true. If any noble Lord believes that there is a lack of sympathy as regards the matters raised today by Members of your Lordships' House—and I know that I shall be accused silently of making a political point here—since this Government were returned to power in March 1974, in spite of a severe economic difficulty can noble Lords honestly say, bearing in mind the benefits and the increase of benefits which we have made fairly substantially over a very wide area, that this shows a lack of concern on the part of the Government? I do not think that anyone would say that.
The real truth of the matter is that we are not indifferent to the hardship which is being felt and experienced by one-parent families—we accept that—and we are not indifferent to the difficulties which are being experienced by other groups. In the last analysis a Government must show that they understand the needs of the various groups and must parcel out what they can give over a wide range of groups and not make unfair provision for perhaps one particular group.
I do not believe that we have done too badly when it comes to one-parent

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families. However, what so many of your Lordships tend to forget is that the recommendations of the Finer Committee include a drastic restructuring of financial support for one-parent families, wholesale reform of the matrimonial law in magistrates' courts, which I agree is long overdue, and a completely new system of courts for family matters which, when I was in that particular field, I too advocated following the advocacy of people far better informed on these matters than myself.
However, the noble Viscount, Lord Hanworth, is quite wrong in saying that there is no problem about buildings. Anyone who has the least understanding of the problem would not make that claim. People wait for months in custody and on bail to come to trial because we do not have enough facilities to deal with them. We are building Crown Courts. When I first entered the Probation Service there was one quarter sessions for London which had three courts, which surprised the rest of the country. I do not know how many Crown Courts there are in London at the present moment but there are certainly more than 20 of them, with more than one court meeting in them simultaneously.
It is not easy to find buildings. Investigations have been made into the use of town halls for a variety of purposes, but they are now using them. Although we have amalgamated boroughs in London—twos and threes into a new borough—and there are two or three town halls, they are in use. You cannot take a room in the town hall and make it into a family court and then move it all out the next day. I think the noble and learned Lord would agree with me that there has to be a special kind of environment. There has to be a special kind of setting if one is to have a family court. It is not a question of shoving in a few tables and chairs and then moving them out next day, or stacking them up in the corner.
Viscount HANWORTH: My Lords, would the noble Lord allow me to intervene?
Lord WELLS-PESTELL: My Lords, I do not want to, if the noble Lord does not mind. I have only 9 minutes to go. There is so much one could say on this.
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This is going to be very unsatisfactory, much more unsatisfactory for me than it is for your Lordships, because I cannot deal with so many of the essential matters. There would be major and far-reaching propositions whatever the prevailing economic circumstances, and today we have to face the unpleasant fact that we are up against the lack of money and the inability to have the manpower to do all the things that we want to do.
Of course we could make payments much earlier than we do, although FIS (family income supplement) does not take at the most more than four weeks to deal with in the initial stages. But so much more could be done if we could increase the number of civil servants. On one side we are told that we have to do this, and on the other we are told that we have to cut down. This is the situation we are facing at the present time. It is all the more essential that we should take a close look at the background against which any responsible consideration of the Finer Report must take place. That is one of the reasons why I welcome today's debate, because I think this has to be a continuing debate. The noble and learned Lord quite rightly made a comment about the Law Commission's Working Party on Family Courts and wanted to know why, I think the noble and learned Lord said, the Government terminated it. I may be wrong about this.
Lord SIMON of GLAISDALE: My Lords, that is right, and I asked that it should be set up again.
Lord WELLS-PESTELL: My Lords, I am looking at the Law Commission's Ninth Annual Report for 1973–74, and I see that they say:
"The report of the Committee on one-parent families contains detailed recommendations for the establishment of a family court. No useful purpose would be served by our own Working Party going over the ground already traversed in the Finer Report. We"—
that is, the Law Commission—
"have therefore decided not to dissolve the Working Party but to suspend its operation indefinitely."
I take the noble and learned Lord's point of view, because I think that this matter has to be looked at very carefully. I can remember juvenile courts being set up, and they left a lot to be desired. I

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think we have to go into this very carefully. But it is a matter for the Law Commission to look at again to see why it cannot be resuscitated, because I am sure—notwithstanding the fact that the Finer Committee went into it very carefully—there are perhaps other considerations which the Working Party could look at. However, with respect I suggest that this is a matter for the Law Commission.
The Finer Committee report involved six different Government Departments, and in my own Department no fewer than six separate divisions. Governments never work fast at the best of times, as we all know, and when you have six Government Departments all inquiring into their own sphere of responsibility you have endless discussions. It is part of our way of life. It takes a long time to get round to decisions, and perhaps in view of the complexity of the whole business it is a good thing.
I hope that my noble and learned friend Lord Gardiner will not feel that I am trying to duck his question. The matter he raised of a supplementary benefit appeal tribunal is of considerable importance. A large number of people feel concerned about this. A large number of people in your Lordships' House are concerned about it, and it would take me a long time to deal with this matter in the way that the noble and learned Lord wants me to deal with it. With the greatest respect, could I persuade him to put down a Question either for oral Answer, if he feels that there is sufficient time at Question Time, or a Question for Written Answer? I will undertake, if it is for written reply, to try to see that it is as long as possible. If it is in Hansard, a far greater number of people would be present if it was an oral Question, or a far greater number of Members of your Lordships' House would read it if it was for written reply.
I have not time to deal with a great deal, but perhaps I ought to say something about the guaranteed maintenance allowance. The Government have not felt able to accept this proposal. First we feel that it is very expensive. Even with the limitations Finer proposed it would cost something like £250 million to introduce, as the noble Lord, Lord Banks, said. There is not the money available for such a benefit. Secondly, it would require the establishment of several thousand extra
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civil servants to administer the allowance and the related system of administrative orders for the recovery of maintenance from liable relatives, usually the man. Thirdly, all the guaranteed maintenance allowance would do for about 300,000 one-parent families is to transfer them from one form of means tested benefit—namely, supplementary benefit—to another. We do not feel that there is really anything to be gained by it.
I wish the noble Baroness, Lady Faithful, had developed it more when she reminded your Lordships that it is possible for the Supplementary Benefits Commission to come to an arrangement with a husband to pay, and so we pay the wife and we recover the money from him. If he is in default then the Supplementary Benefits Commission could take him to the court and get an order, and if he defaults then they can apply under certain powers for an attachment of earnings.
I asked for this information because I thought it might be interesting: we recovered a considerable amount of money last year, something like £40 million, from husbands. We have taken several hundred of them to court when they have defaulted, and we have got a large number of orders. In fact, the number of cases in which the Commission took criminal proceedings because the liable relative failed to maintain was 624, and the number of cases in which the Commission took civil proceedings to obtain orders was 305. There were attachment orders but, as I say, the total amount recovered from persons liable for maintenance amounted to something like £40 million.
I did not want to deal with the matter of tax credits which the noble Baroness, Lady Young, raised, but I think I am right in saying that the Conservative Party estimate that it would cost about £5,000 million. I would ask her to look at their literature because it is an enormous sum and, if that were the case, one can understand why we regard it as being unrealistic at the present time. The fact that short-term benefits, such as sickness and unemployment benefits, are not taxed—again, as I think Baroness Young knows—is due to administrative difficulties, though we are still looking at the subject because there are many people on all sides who know only too well that there is a very strong argument here.

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As to reducing the 30 hours a week to something like 20, which I think Finer recommended—
The Lord Bishop of LEICESTER: I think it was 24, my Lords.
Lord WELLS-PESTELL: Perhaps it was 24, my Lords—the Government have said that while they sympathise with the objective, this proposal must be considered in the context of the limited resources available and the need for critical examination of any demands for additional expenditure. However, we have not shut our minds against it.
I am sorry about the inadequacy of my replies, but this is a very big subject and in the time given to me I have not been able adequately to cover it. Perhaps we may return to it one of these days and deal with certain factors and situations which demand more careful discussion.
8.2 p.m.
Lord SIMON of GLAISDALE: My Lords, it only remains for me at this hour to express my gratitude to all noble Lords, from whom I do not exclude even the noble Lord, Lord Wells-Pestell, for the contributions they have made today. Considering the short time we have had, noble Lords have covered an amazingly wide area of ground. The debate has shown that there is a large body of opinion which has been aroused, a great deal of thought concentrated and many consciences are sensitive to the issues we have been discussing. My Lords, I beg leave to withdraw the Motion.
Motion for Papers, by leave, withdrawn.