Lords Sitting of 28 June 1977

Preamble
The House met at half-past two of the clock: the CHAIRMAN OF COMMITTEES on the Woolsack.
Prayers—Read by the Lord Bishop of Norwich.
The Duke of Roxburghe—Sat first in Parliament after the death of his father.

OCEAN ISLAND
Lord BROCKWAY: My Lords, I beg leave to ask the Question which stands in my name on the Order Paper.
The Question was as follows:
To ask Her Majesty's Government what response they have received from representatives of the Banaban people to their offer of compensation for the devastation of Ocean Island.
The MINISTER of STATE, FOREIGN and COMMONWEALTH OFFICE (Lord Goronwy-Roberts): My Lords, the Statement by my right honourable friend in another place on 27th May envisaged an ex gratia payment of 10 million Australian dollars by the Governments of Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom to establish a fund for the benefit of the Banaban community. The response by the Banaban Council of Leaders accepted the payment provided that the administration of the fund was within their control and that Ocean Island was separated forthwith from the Gilbert Islands. As regards the division of phosphate revenues, which we regard as reasonable, the Banabans argued that these should all be paid to them, with none to the Gilbert Islands, from 1st April 1977.
Lord BROCKWAY: My Lords, in view of the statement of the Vice-Chancellor in court, and indeed by the noble Lord himself, that the Banabans have been very wrongly treated, is not this proposal of compensation very meagre indeed? Will the noble Lord consider the point that the Banabans have the right to self-determination; that they were not included in the Gilbert and
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Ellice Islands when they were annexed but were added later without consultation? Should not something be done to amend this unfortunate colonial experience?
Lord GORONWY-ROBERTS: My Lords, I could not agree that the proposed ex gratia payment is meagre. It is indeed very generous. I would once more express appreciation of the generous action of our Australian and New Zealand partners in the British Phosphate Commission in agreeing with us that a substantial ex gratia payment should be offered to the Banabans to enable them to protect their future.
As to the constitutional point, there are very deep feelings among the Banaban community in favour of separation from the Gilbert Islands, but there are equally strong feelings among the Gilbertese against the fragmentation of their territory, a feeling which is widely shared throughout the archipelagic Pacific communities. Whatever the original reasons, Ocean Island has been part of the Gilbert Islands for a very long time and the Gilbertese are strongly opposed to separation. It is for this reason that we have sought a compromise—to meet the Gilbertese feeling that the integrity of their country as they move to independence should not be fragmented further—and to meet, in some degree at least, the feelings of the Banaban community by fashioning a position of strong autonomy for Ocean Island within the independent Gilbertese State.
Lord KILBRACKEN: My Lords, would not the Minister agree that the compensation proposed represents an almost immeasurably small percentage of the vast profits that have been made out of these islanders over the years? Can the noble Lord give any indication of what percentage it does represent? Would he not agree that a far larger sum should be paid and that the British Government should do their best to see that such compensation is paid?
Lord GORONWY-ROBERTS: My Lords, I must respectfully disagree. I think this gesture is a very generous one. Originally the sum of 7 million Australian dollars was proposed. I am glad to say that I had some part in persuading our partners to increase that figure to 10 million

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Australian dollars so that a per capita income might be derived from that corpus for the future of the Banaban community which compares favourably with the prevailing rate in similar circumstances in the Pacific generally. But the availability to the Banabans does not stop there. They will continue to receive substantial sums from the revenues from mining until mining ends some time in 1979. The sum does not in fact take account of the fact that the Banabans have received more than 7½ million Australian dollars in revenues over the last three years. It is true that they have not, unfortunately, been able to utilise part of that to build up a fund themselves, and it is partly in recognition of that fact that this ex gratia payment of 10 million Australian dollars has been put together. Moreover, if we look at the pace and proportion of payments to both communities—and they really are one—over a number of years past, I think that proportionately the Banabans per capita have benefited considerably more than the Gilbertese.
As to arrangements for the future for the two communities to work together and live together within the Gilbert Islands, I am very hopeful that discussions may take place between them, at which I shall be very glad to assist, constantly trying to put together some workable compromise on this basis so that they can move together as a unified independent State looking to the future. It will then be for them, in the light of their experience of a devolved system, to decide whether to continue that or to adjust it further.
Lord BROCKWAY: My Lords, while I appreciate what the Minister has done in this matter to secure better terms, does his last reply mean that the matter is not now resolved and that there will be continuing discussions with the representatives of the Banaban people?
Lord GORONWY-ROBERTS: My Lords, as to the ex gratia payments, by definition, of course, they must be conclusive. We are well prepared to consider the Banaban suggestion as to the organisation of the fund. Indeed, we are willing to provide experts to organise the fund in a proper and fruitful way. As to the constitutional issue, my right honourable friend
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and I have always said that, although we see real difficulties in fragmenting this territory further, nevertheless we are prepared to listen to arguments for alternative arrangements. We think that the best hope for the future lies in the two communities working together within a devolved system, and we shall work for that. However, the final decision on the constitutional arrangements must, of course, lie with the pre-independence constitutional conference which in due course will be held and at which I have promised—and I repeat the promise today—that the Banabans will be fully represented and will once more be able to put their case.
Lord PARGITER: My Lords, I should like to ask the Minister whether or not the Banabans will be viable as a community when mining ceases on Ocean Island?
Lord GORONWY-ROBERTS: My Lords, it is at the least very doubtful, is it not? I do not want to prejudge the issue. There may be ways in which we can link the Banaban community—which for more than 30 years has lived on Rambi Island in Fiji—with the future of Ocean Island. I should welcome that, so that a viable future is possible on the island for the island in relation to the Banaban community and the Gilbertese. A great many options are possible once we can sit down and, with good will, talk these matters over. It has not been very easy to get that kind of discussion going.
Lord LEE of NEWTON: My Lords, having great sympathy both with the Banabans and the Gilbert islanders, I should like to know the terms and conditions under which the Gilbertese are now going to independence. My noble friend will know that many of the Gilbert Islands are purely coral atolls on which little in the way of food can be grown. If there is now to be a change in the conditions of independence, is there some other way in which revenue can be raised to sustain those on the Gilbert Islands themselves?
Lord GORONWY-ROBERTS: My Lords, my noble friend—who was himself Secretary of State for the Colonies and who speaks with authority on these matters—has put his finger on a very real problem. As with many other small

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dependencies moving to independence, the question of future viability arises no less with the Gilbertese as a whole as with the Banabans as a community. It is our duty to ensure the viable future not only of the Banabans but also of the Gilbertese community. We are working hard towards that end. As to the point my noble friend raised about the possibilities of economic development in the Gilberts, in the past few weeks we have had detailed discussions with the Chief Minister and his colleagues, and there are a number of projects and proposals which my right honourable friend the Minister for Overseas Development and my Department are actively considering with the Gilbertese Government at the moment.

JET PROGRAMME: EEC MINISTERS' MEETING
2.46 p.m.
The Earl of LAUDERDALE: My Lords, I beg leave to ask the Question which stands in my name on the Order Paper.
The Question was as follows:
To ask Her Majesty's Government whether they will make a statement on the last meeting of EEC Ministers about the future of the JET (Joint European Torus) Programme.
Lord STRABOLGI: My Lords, JET was not discussed substantively at the Foreign Affairs Council on 21st June but the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs informed his European colleagues that, in view of its high political content, the Prime Minister intended to raise JET at tomorrow's meeting of the European Council.
The Earl of LAUDERDALE: My Lords, in thanking the noble Lord for that helpful and informative reply, may I ask whether he is aware that there has been some criticism in Brussels, suggesting that we have rather overplayed our hand in this matter and have generated a good deal of irritation among the smaller countries, such as Belgium and Holland, through what they have been apt to call our rather crude tactics? Is the noble Lord aware of that criticism, and would he care to comment on it?
Lord STRABOLGI: My Lords, the position is that at the Research Council on 29th March it was agreed that the choice lay between Culham and Garching, but the view was held that the choice of site could not be made until the basis of the organisational structure had been decided. The organisational proposals put forward by the Commission and the Council Secretariat, which we supported, proved unacceptable to some Member States and were remitted to officials for further work.
Lord BRUCE of DONINGTON: My Lords, is my noble friend aware that many of our EEC colleagues have not the slightest hesitation in pursuing their quite legitimate national interests and that for Her Majesty's Government occasionally to dig in their heels must sometimes be a cause of considerable satisfaction?
Lord WYNNE-JONES: My Lords, can my noble friend say whether the Commission has reached any decision and put forward any proposal about the siting of JET? Further, can my noble friend say—if JET is to be sited at Culham—whether Her Majesty's Government are prepared to set up a European school at Culham?—which I believe was one of the original reasons why a long time ago the Commission proposed that Ispra rather than Culham should be the site.
Lord STRABOLGI: My Lords, with regard to my noble friend's first question about the Commission's choice of site, I can confirm that Commissioner Brunner said at a Press briefing on 21st June that the Commission supported Culham as the site for JET and that he hoped Chancellor Schmidt would agree. With regard to the second question about the European school, we are prepared to set up a European school at Culham. This would need the agreement of the Board of Governors of the European schools, but we shall make a formal proposal to them immediately there is a decision to site JET at Culham.
Baroness ELLES: My Lords, while considering the best ways of getting co-operation among the other Member States of the European Community, particularly where large sums of money are to be invested in the United Kingdom,

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may I ask whether the noble Lord would agree that the Minister responsible for these negotiations is a Minister who undoubtedly has shown considerable anti-European sentiments? If there is an indication that he would like the United Kingdom to come out of the European Community, is it not rather odd that that Minister should be trying to get JET sited at Culham?
Lord STRABOLGI: My Lords, the noble Baroness has her views on these matters and always, of course, tries to make Party political capital whenever she can. As I said in my original Answer, this matter is being raised by the Prime Minister himself at tomorrow's meeting.
Baroness ELLES: My Lords, would not the Minister agree that it is not a question of political capital but a question of the United Kingdom staying within the European Community in the future?
The Earl of LAUDERDALE: My Lords, could the noble Lord add to what he said? Are we to understand from what he said about the structural basis that there is now no longer any question of the team at Culham being disbanded at the end of this week, which appeared to threaten at one time? Could he also tell us whether, indeed, it is the case that we are still blocking the approval of research and development funds for Ispra pending a satisfactory solution to the JET issue?
Lord STRABOLGI: My Lords, if discussions on the site are still in progress we hope that the Commission will again extend the contracts of employment of the design team. Their basic salaries are paid, of course, by their parent laboratories. There is no evidence that they have been offered other contracts. With regard to the second point about Ispra, because the programme for the largest joint research centre at Ispra of course involves a substantial increase in its fusion role, we do not think it is sensible to decide on the Community fusion programme piecemeal, especially when there has been no decision on JET, which of course was intended to be its centrepiece. However, I should like to stress that there will be some fusion research at Ispra, even if JET is not sited there but at Culham.
Lord SEGAL: My Lords, would my noble friend bear in mind that an excellent teacher training college is now unfortunately being vacated at Culham and that this would form an admirable site for the proposed training college?
Lord STRABOLGI: My Lords, I am sure that that is a useful suggestion which I shall pass on to my right honourable friend. We have already earmarked a building. I am not sure whether it is the same one as that which my noble friend has in mind, but we certainly take note of what he says.
The Earl of LAUDERDALE: My Lords, is the noble Lord aware that his statement about the European school will be received with great pleasure by all those who want us to look at this matter as a European as well as a British interest?
Lord STRABOLGI: Yes, my Lords; and, of course, it is very relevant to the European personnel who will be working there and whose children need, when they go back to their own countries, to have taken the Baccalauréat if they wish to go to European universities.

BELGRADE CONFERENCE AND HUMAN RIGHTS
2.55 p.m.
Lord JANNER: My Lords, I beg leave to ask the Question which stands in my name on the Order Paper.
The Question was as follows:
To ask Her Majesty's Government what progress has been made at the Belgrade Conference on the question of the refusal by the USSR to comply with the Helsinki agreement by denying human rights, for example, refusing to permit applicants to emigrate, subjecting them to harassment and imprisonment, adopting Stalin-style methods by instituting false show trials against Jewish applicants and encouraging antisemitism.
Lord GORONWY-ROBERTS: My Lords, as I stated in the course of the debate in the House on 14th June, the CSCE preparatory meeting now being held in Belgrade is concerned only with

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preparing the organisational framework for the main review meeting in the autumn. Substantive issues related to the implementation of the Helsinki Final Act are not being discussed at the preparatory meeting.
Lord JANNER: My Lords, while appreciating what my noble friend has said, the Question, if I may say so in a humble way, is directed towards something which is extremely important and urgent. It is not a matter of waiting until the autumn. If you take such cases as the Scharansky trial, which is very urgent to some of us—
Several noble Lords: Question!
Lord JANNER: My Lords, I am asking whether my noble friend will take this into consideration. Will my noble friend take into consideration the fact that trials like the Scharansky trial are continuing, and that they are terribly distressing, and that vicious attacks are being made on people who the USSR know very well have not been in any way connected with the charge that is made against them? Would my noble friend say what possible steps can be taken before the autumn by him, by our Government, and by other Governments with which he is in contact, to see to it that these matters will be attended to without delay?
Lord GORON WY-ROBERTS: My Lords, may I, with equal humility, remind my noble friend of the terms of his Question. He asked, "what progress has been made at the Belgrade Conference on the question of", and so it went on. I tried to indicate that the Belgrade Conference, as such, has not yet convened. It will convene in September. What is happening in Belgrade at the moment is a preparatory practical meeting to arrange the agenda and other arrangements for the Conference itself. Therefore, substantive issues such as the ones my noble friend raised in his Question are not now being discussed in Belgrade. They will be. That is a point I made absolutely clear in the debate, and I do so again. The kind of case my noble friend quoted today, as with that quoted with great eloquence by the noble Duke, the Duke of Devonshire, during the debate, it is the intention of the Government to use in the proper
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prosecution of our views at the Conference itself in September and October, so long as it lasts. We shall seek a full examination of the progress made since the signing of the Helsinki Final Act by all the signatories. It is the intention not to confine ourselves to sterile polemics, but to look forward to see how everybody, ourselves and other signatories, East and West, can improve upon the progress made since the Final Act was signed. Matters which my noble friend has raised will most certainly figure in what we say in Belgrade.
Lord BYERS: My Lords, in view of the urgency, and the fact that the trials are now continuing, I wonder whether the preparatory conference could give consideration to advancing the date of the main Belgrade Conference? People could suffer very severely in the meantime unless something is done with some urgency.
Lord GORONWY-ROBERTS: My Lords, I entirely take the point. It is most responsible. I do not know that it would, on balance, be wise to advance the date of the Conference, but the point of the supplementary I think is well made. We are very much seized of the urgency of this particular case and of similar cases. As I have said more than once, we take every possible opportunity, without engaging in possibly counter-productive activity—and that is always a possibility in these cases—of informing those concerned of the very deep feelings in this country, and indeed throughout the West, about cases of this kind.
Lord AVEBURY: My Lords, is the Minister aware that Ludmilla Alexeyeva, the representative in the West of the Orlov Committee, has assured a number of us that, in making representations on behalf of those who are being tried for offences such as slander of the Soviet State (offences which are unknown in the Western criminal calendar), we are not jeopardising their position any further than it would otherwise have been? Will the Minister therefore make such representations, particularly on behalf of Scharansky and on behalf of Professor Yuri Orlov, and will he tell the Soviet authorities that if these trials are proceeded with, and they are convicted of offences which are unknown throughout

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the Free World, this will seriously jeopardise the prospects of making any progress not only on the Helsinki agreement but also on détente?
Lord GORONWY-ROBERTS: My Lords, I have no doubt that what the noble Lord says is true. It is, if I may say so, not in the interests of the Soviet or any other Government to engage in these practices. We have a duty to examine each case, however obnoxious or poignant, on its merits to see whether, in acting, we may not in that particular case or group of cases make it less possible for ordinary justice to be meted out to those people. It would be simple, even simplistic, to proceed on a basis of simple denunciation and protest. We do that on occasion, but I hope the House will join me in agreeing that we must examine each case on its merits, not as to its worthiness but as to the best way, in the interests of the person concerned, for us as a Government to proceed. Organisations and individuals in a free country like ours of course are free to speak out, and they do; indeed, I have no doubt that a number of embassies will by tomorrow morning have procured copies of the Official Report of today's proceedings in this noble House.
Baroness ELLES: My Lords, may I ask the Minister to assure the House that the European Community countries are co-operating together to get the draft agenda adopted? Are any East countries supporting the draft agenda which has been put forward by Her Majesty's Government in combination with other European Community countries?
Lord GORONWY-ROBERTS: My Lords, the answer to the first part is, definitely yes; and the answer to the second part is, hopefully yes.
Baroness HORNSBY-SMITH: My Lords, is the noble Lord aware that while we welcome his statement that these issues will be discussed at the September conference, many of us have grave misgivings that the USSR, who are adept at arranging an agenda to suit their own purpose, will, by the arrangement of the agenda which is now pending, create a situation by which the individual discussion of these cases—of people who are suffering so much at the present time—
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will be denied under the rules of order because the agenda will have been drawn too tightly? Is he aware that this is the concern of many people who want a real discussion on how Helsinki has worked in practice?
Lord GORON WY-ROBERTS: My Lords, the noble Baroness is quite right to draw attention to that possibility. We are making our attitude on the organisation of the agenda very clear in the current discussions, and I see no likelihood of an agenda arrangements being agreed which would have the bad effects which she rightly reminds us could be possible. In fact, it is not only the countries of the West but, as was suggested by the noble Baroness, Lady Elles, others—others not normally associated with the West—who agree with us as to the kind of agenda that could usefully be put together for a useful conference in September.
Lord JANNER: My Lords, while thanking my noble friend not only for what he has said today for what many of us know he has been saying at the conference—I call it a conference, but I suppose it is considered a preliminary meeting that is being held at present—may I ask him to realise that we appreciate the manner in which he has been endeavouring to get this particular problem attended to at the conference which is to be held? Is he aware that many of us are worried lest before that conference is actually held the position becomes too serious? We hope that it will give him an opportunity to discuss with his friends from other countries how to deal with the situation, remembering that when the USSR realise that other nations declare their view that the USSR are doing the wrong thing, they themselves sometimes react favourably?
Lord GORONWY-ROBERTS: My Lords, we are well aware of the urgency of these matters and lose no opportunity in pressing forward the points that have been made in this House today.

HOUSING POLICY REVIEW
3.4 p.m.
Baroness LLEWELYN-DAVIES of HASTOE: My Lords, with the leave of the House, at a convenient moment after

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3.30 p.m. my noble friend Lady Birk will repeat a Statement on housing policy review. That will be followed by my noble friend Lord Strabolgi repeating a Statement on housing policy review in Scotland.

LOCAL AUTHORITIES (RESTORATION OF WORKS POWERS) BILL
Brought from the Commons; read 1a, and to be printed.
POST OFFICE BILL
Brought from the Commons; read 1a, and to be printed.
SHREWSBURY AND ATCHAM BOROUGH COUNCIL (FRANK WELL FOOTBRIDGE) BILL
Read 3a, with the Amendments, and passed, and returned to the Commons.

BUSINESS OF THE HOUSE
Baroness LLEWELYN-DAVIES of HASTOE: My Lords, on behalf of my noble friend the Leader of the House, I beg to move the Motion standing in his name on the Order Paper.
Moved, That Standing Order No. 43 be dispensed with for the purpose of taking the Restrictive Trade Practices Bill through all its remaining stages this day.—(Baroness Llewelyn-Davies of Hastoe.)
On Question, Motion agreed to.

TRANSPORT (FINANCIAL PROVISIONS) BILL
3.6 p.m.
Baroness STEDMAN: My Lords, I beg to move that this Bill be now read a second time. The purpose of the Bill is twofold; to provide specific statutory authority for the payment of temporary grants to the British Rail freight and parcels business and to the National
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Freight Corporation, and to raise the statutory limit on the amount which the British Waterways Board may borrow from £12 million to £20 million.
The White Paper on Transport, which was published yesterday and which I introduced to the House, discusses in some detail the Government's policy towards freight transport, into which I need not go further now. The Bill now before us is a more modest measure; it makes limited and transitional provisions for the three industries concerned without prejudging the future of any of them. Each industry is conveniently the subject of a separate clause of the Bill and I will therefore preface my remarks about the detailed provisions of each clause with some explanation of how the need for it comes about.
I should therefore speak first about the rail freight and parcels business. The House may remember that the Railways Act 1974 introduced new principles of support for the passenger railway which the then Minister for Transport described not as a lasting solution to the railway problem but at least a step forward. One of these principles was that the costs imposed on the railway by the rail freight and passenger businesses were separately identified in a new way. The expectation was that the rail freight business on this basis would be able to break even. Unfortunately, the delayed effects of price restraint, increases in costs and the recession in the economy so combined that in 1975 the rail freight business proved to be incurring a substantial deficit. There was no statutory provision for meeting this deficit, which was threatening to undermine the finances of the British Railways Board.
The Board took short-term measures. But it was clear that, in order to establish the rail freight business on a firm basis and to give it an assured future, careful examination of the whole underlying strategy was needed. The White Paper will give the House some idea of the tenor of this review. Meanwhile, the Government announced in July 1975 support not exceeding £70 million for that year, and, last February, a further grant of up to £60 million for 1976. At the same time, the Board was asked to make substantial progress towards phasing out the deficit during 1976 and 1977.

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The rail freight business is heavily dependent for traffic on the heavy industries such as coal and steel, which are the most severely affected by a recession. But, with the co-operation of the unions, the Board has been able significantly to reduce its costs while, by careful marketing, it has also increased its revenue substantially. It has also been able to win much larger carryings of coal and steel than they expected, and in fact the Board eventually succeeded in containing their requirement for grant in 1976 to within £40 million—the precise figure still being subject to audit.
I come thus to Clause 1 of the Bill. As I have said, the grants available under this Bill are intended to provide transitional support while short-term measures are implemented and decisions about longer-term strategy can be taken. All that Clause 1, therefore, provides is specific statutory authority for the grant in 1977. Authority for grant paid to date already exists in the Appropriation Acts. The clause therefore identifies the terms and conditions of the remaining payments and enables my right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Transport, with Treasury agreement, to provide a total amount not exceeding £30 million.
So far as the grant in respect of 1977 is concerned, this ceiling is consistent with the cash limit of £25 million for 1977 fixed in the White Paper on Cash Limits for 1977–78 published on Budget Day. Five million pounds of that sum has already been paid and will not therefore count against the £30 million limit in this Bill. The remaining £10 million authorised by Clause 1 is needed because of differences between the rate at which support accrues and the timing of actual payments to the Board. The precise amount due for 1975 and 1976 will emerge only when the grant audits now in progress have been completed. The sums which the Department has retained against possible adjustments will then be paid over and will fall within the scope of this Bill. So it will be clear that the provisions of Clause 1 do no more than reflect the decisions already taken on transitional support for rail freight.
I turn now to Clause 2, which provides authority for grants to the National Freight Corporation. The NFC have been receiving grant since January 1976, and
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Clause 2 fulfils the undertaking made last August by the then Minister for Transport to seek as soon as possible specific statutory authority for these grants. The NFC's financial problems stem largely from difficulties experienced by two of their subsidiaries, National Carriers Limited and Freightliners Limited. Both these companies were part of British Rail before the NFC was set up in 1968, and, like rail freight, both were badly hit by the combined effects of the recession in the economy and the effects of inflation.
The third problem area in 1976 was the Corporation's European subsidiaries. I know that this is a matter on which the Opposition expressed themselves very strongly in another place. I will however repeat the view of my right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Transport that the NFC properly took a risk in this instance. They have the statutory authority to acquire companies, and it is entirely right that they should have the same freedom as their private sector competitors to take commercial opportunities as they arise. The essence of the strategy was to bring together and rationalise existing companies. But the recession in Europe affected the whole operation, and the oil crisis in particular affected the two largest French companies which were in the tank haulage business. Early in 1976 the National Freight Corporation decided that the time, money and effort needed to carry through their European strategy could not be justified and that the right course was to close, or sell, their loss-making subsidiaries.
It is important to recognise that the need to make grants to the NFC arose from the particular problems in these three sectors of the business, which add up to about one-third of the total. The bulk of the business, the United Kingdom road haulage and associated companies, could have weathered the difficulties of 1974 and 1975. The overall position called clearly for vigorous management action to improve the immediate position, and a careful look at the structure and strategy of the Corporation.
The measures which NFC have already taken have brought about a considerable improvement. Here, again, they have been helped by the full co-operation which management have received from the unions. In the recently published 1976

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accounts the NFC as a whole record a trading profit of just over £4 million, as compared with a trading loss of £7 million for their United Kingdom companies in 1975. Nevertheless, when overheads and interest charges are taken into account, the NFC ended up with a total loss for 1976 of £15 million. Although this was half the corresponding loss for 1975, further cash flow support was needed, and Clause 2 therefore provides further transitional support within a limit of £30 million.
I must emphasise that this grant is a purely temporary measure. It will enable the Corporation to continue to meet its obligations while its future structure is under review. It is already clear that, because of the problems of National Carriers Limited, and to a lesser extent Freightliners, the Corporation cannot become viable on the basis of its present capital structure. A capital reconstruction will therefore be necessary, and the Government hope to introduce the necessary legislation in the next Session of Parliament. As the White Paper on Transport Policy says, a detailed Statement of the proposed changes will be published before legislation is introduced. Work is also proceeding on a business strategy designed to ensure that the Corporation will remain viable under its new capital structure, and the corporation will then be expected to pay its way without continuing help from the Government.
In the meantime the grant authorised by this Bill should be continued, and with care should be sufficient to meet the NFC's cash requirements until we can see these measures put into effect. My honourable friend has already announced in another place that the NFC have so far received a total of £42 million since January 1976—again under the authority of the Appropriation Acts—and that this further £30 million will, if required in full, bring the total level of support to some £72 million before the proposals for a reconstruction can take effect. But I would add that the payment of grant is monitored most carefully by the Department of Transport, and that not a penny has been, or will be, released without firm evidence of need on the part of the Corporation.
Neither Clause 1 nor Clause 2 offer open-ended subsidies; these are tran-
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sitional grants. As stated in the White Paper, the Government see no justification for long-term subsidies for any mode of freight transport. This policy has been constantly reiterated and has, I am sure, the support of the Boards of the two industries concerned, and the Bill is put forward strictly on these terms.
Clause 3 of the Bill deals with waterways. This Bill follows traditional practice in providing for the British Waterways Board within transport legislation, although the Government have now decided that it makes more sense to treat them as part of the water industry. Indeed, in the Green Paper on the review of the water industry, published in March 1976, the Government put forward the proposal that the Board should be merged with the proposed new National Water Authority. Response to that Green Paper is still under consideration, and the Government are expecting to publish a White Paper next month. In the meantime, Clause 3 is a technical provision needed to continue the present arrangements a little longer. Since the Board have a deficit on revenue account which is met by statutory grant, and since they obtain very little by way of depreciation on their heavily written-down assets, they need to borrow from the National Loans Fund for their capital expenditure. The limit on their borrowing was set in 1968 and has almost been reached. As an interim measure, therefore, we propose to raise that limit by £8 million. This should be sufficient to see them through until the review is complete, and any subsequent changes are implemented.
My Lords, this Bill is a modest measure to ensure that three public bodies are able to continue their important work while we reach and implement decisions about the way in which they should develop, particularly in the light of yesterday's White Paper. The Bill comes to us endorsed as a Money Bill, but that need not inhibit our discussion of it now. My Lords, I beg to move.
Moved, That the Bill be now read 2a.—(Baroness Stedman.)
3.20 p.m.
Lord MOWBRAY and STOURTON: Yes, my Lords, a modest measure indeed—but how seductively introduced by the

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noble Baroness! She makes all these things sound so attractive. Anyhow, we thank her for her introduction and explanation of the Bill. I should also like to thank the Government for the way in which her right honourable friend met many of the points we made during the Committee stage in another place; and, because of all that, I shall not be very long today.
Having said that, I go on to slightly rougher waters when I say (I do not think I shall be surprising many people) that the Government's performance in some matters, however, must be criticised as being somewhat dilatory because, as I regretted only yesterday, the rather glaring omission—to which the noble Baroness has referred again today—in the White Paper on the financial reconstruction of the National Freight Corporation and her reply yesterday are hardly reassuring, especially when we bear in mind the many years that this matter has been under discussion. However, today we have her promise that it will be introduced next Session. Who knows?—perhaps we may then be introducing it from her present Bench. Anyhow, if they are by any chance in the same place, we are grateful that it will be done then.
As the noble Baroness said, in this Bill we are asked to make available to the NFC grants of up to £30 million. While appreciating the reason behind this, we wonder whether the Corporation has really turned the corner and got on to that well-known but all too rarely seen road to profitability. The noble Baroness told us of some of the measures taken with regard to their ventures in Europe, and I quite agreed with her right honourable friend when he said in another place that it was right that they should take a business risk if it looked suitable. I think that is correct; and they took what appeared to be a reasonable business risk in Europe which evidently did not come off. The only thought that springs to my mind arises in the light of that rather good letter, I thought, in The Times a few days ago from Sir Christopher Soames, in which he drew attention to whether some of our British organisations are as competitive as are our foreign friends in Europe. I do not know whether or not that is the case, but, man for man, we do not seem to be able to match them at the moment in efficiency and, therefore,
1018
in profitability. It is slightly saddening that a calculated risk did not come off.
Having said that, again I would be unfair if I did not agree with the noble Baroness and welcome the profit shown in the 1976 accounts of £4 million compared with the loss in 1975. I think the noble Baroness said that that loss was £7 million. If I am right—and I have a copy of the accounts here by me—the loss was £9 million in 1975, so it is even slightly better than she said; it is from a loss of £9 million to a profit of £4 million. But, having said that the operating loss of £9 million changed to an operating profit of £4 million, we must admit that the overall loss in 1976 was still over £15 million. Bearing in mind what I have now had a chance to read, paragraph 181 of the White Paper, I should like to ask the noble Baroness this question. Are the Government confident that it will be possible to carry out the assurances given in that paragraph? This is the point with regard to their now having to exist on their own muscle.
With regard to Clause 3, if I can take things in a slightly different order, enabling the British Waterways Board to increase their borrowing powers from £12 million to £20 million, I was also very glad to see in the White Paper this morning, in paragraph 191, that the Government consider that,
"the waterways have an important part to play in commercial terms since water transport is so economical a user of energy".
Can the Government tell us in which direction the British Waterways Board will be utilising these funds? In another place the Minister concerned hedged and said that it was for his honourable friend in the sports Department to deal with that matter. In this House, we cannot fudge like that: all Ministers answer for the Government, and not just for their Department, so perhaps I can pin the noble Baroness down. Will the funds be used mostly for commercial or pleasure purposes? A few weeks ago I was told by Sir Frank Price, the chairman of that Board, and by other members of his Board, how much they would like to do if only the funds were available. I should like to see them in a position to put to the test the truth of their claims as to the viability of some of their schemes; or

1019
whether, as the Government, in refusing them funds, as in the case of the Sheffield and South Yorkshire Navigation Scheme the other day, seemed to indicate, those claims are thought to be false. We must remember that a relatively small investment with the Waterways Board can pay high dividends to the wellbeing of our waterways—an asset which, if I might say so, has in the past been somewhat neglected.
To turn to the railways section of the Bill in Clause 1, let me state straight away that we consider that we are being asked to take so much on trust about the railway needs because of the continuing dearth of information on their actual losses on their freight operations. In the latest accounts of 1976. we see a partial recognition of the need for more comprehensive and detailed accounts in the Railways Board report. Can Her Majesty's Government give us an assurance that they will use their best endeavours to encourage the Railways Board to have a more meaningful breakdown of costs? Because only then shall we be helped to identify more easily where the particular problems lie. Bearing in mind the statements in yesterday's White Paper, am I right in assuming that the Government intend this to be the last of these Bills providing extra finance for freight? Continuing to bear in mind the on-going need to economise in public expenditure, and the White Paper's denial, which I was glad to hear the noble Baroness repeat today, of any case for subsidising freight, let us wish this Bill God speed and hope it will have no future progeny.
3.28 p.m.
Lord POPPLEWELL: My Lords, I naturally give wholehearted support to this Bill because it is absolutely necessary that this money should be available. I would make just one or two suggestions to my noble friend for future consideration in the drawing up of the legislation that she has forecast will develop, probably next Session, and also arising from the White Paper that was issued yesterday. Now we accept the principle that transport is a public service, will the Government have a very close look at whether it is necessary to continue the National Freight Corporation and National Carriers Limited? When these bodies were established the objective was that there should
1020
be the utmost co-operation with the railways in the carrying of goods and parcels traffic. What has in fact happened is that there has been intense competition which has developed with the railways, particularly in the case of National Carriers Limited, and instead of there being cooperation we now find that this competition is extending even to long-distance traffic. This is something which I think should be carefully looked at.
We are very pleased indeed that the Freight Corporation has made an operating profit of some £4 million in the last financial year, but, of course, it shows a loss of £15 million overall. Of course, one of the reasons why this loss has taken place is because of the establishment of so many different National Carriers Limited depots and the difficulty of them dealing just with local traffic. Now they are going into competition on long-distance traffic, it is having an effect upon both the Freight Corporation and also the railways. Prior to the passing of the 1968 Act, these were all under the purview of the Railways Board, and this was a big contributory factor, even with the difficulty of that time, in keeping the loss as low as it was. Now is the time to see whether this experiment is on the right lines or whether we should consider the Corporation as a public service for the local authority and the new line of action suggested by the White Paper. One knows that in various parts of the country there is great difficulty in getting parcel traffic collected and delivered. In the past one could be sure that there would be a collection or delivery service within a reasonable time. Now it is often necessary to wait some days, particularly in rural areas and with the cutting down of so many collecting stations. To have the National Freight Corporation collecting loads through National Carriers does not make for the greatest efficiency in dealing with parcel traffic. While I agree with the terms of the Bill and welcome my noble friend's suggestion, I put these points forward for further consideration when the White Paper issued yesterday is clarified, and in the desire to achieve greater efficiency for all concerned.
3.32 p.m.
Baroness STEDMAN: My Lords, at least one thing is obvious, that when we come to have a discussion on the White

1021
Paper it will take a long time and range fairly wide, but this afternoon within the confines of this rather narrow Bill it has been a useful debate. I am delighted to know that noble Lords are starting to wade through the White Paper and to understand what it is all about. I appreciate the way in which the noble Lord, Lord Mowbray and Stourton, accepted the difficulties of the freight operations in Europe and accepted that the Corporation had in a sense taken a justifiable risk and had been unlucky. I am confident that we can carry out our scheme that there shall be no subsidies for freight. We have made it plain that after reorganisation this year there will be no subsidy for freight. Freight has to pay its way. I hope the noble Lord will accept my assurance that the Government are going to be firm about that.
So far as the British Waterways Board is concerned, my honourable friend Mr. Horam said in the House of Commons on 31st March that we were talking about borrowing money for warehouses, for land and for all commercial activities which needed vestment and which the Board undertake on a strictly commercial remit; that was why the additional powers of borrowing were being given to the British Waterways Board. It was not money with which they could start doing something for the Sheffield/South Yorkshire navigation however worthy some of us may think that would be.
I am also grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Popplewell, for his suggestion. As I said yesterday, no decision has yet been taken about the reorganisation or restructuring of the National Freight Corporation, Freightliners and National Carriers. Before any legislative procedures are put into being there will be a Statement in this House and I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Popplewell, will be in his normal place when that Statement is made and will be able to make a worthwhile contribution on our proposals on the restructuring of the National Freight Corporation, National Carriers and Freightliners.
This is a narrowly drawn Bill. It focuses on a cross-section of the problems which affect the public sector of the transport industry. It does not of itself solve any of the problems of parts of the
1022
industry, but it gives us the necessary breathing space while solutions are being developed, and as such I believe it is amply warranted. In the light of our discussion and the further explanation, I hope the House will be prepared to give the Bill a Second Reading.
On Question, Bill read 2a: Committee negatived.

HOUSING POLICY REVIEW
3.35 p.m.
The PARLIAMENTARY UNDER-SECRETARY of STATE, DEPARTMENT of the ENVIRONMENT (Baroness Birk): My Lords, with the leave of the House, I will now repeat a Statement being made in another place by my right honourable friend the Secretary of State for the Environment. The Statement is as follows:
"The Government are today publishing a Green Paper on housing policy in England and Wales, together with the first two parts of a supporting Technical Volume. Copies of these documents—the Green Paper in typescript form—are available in the Vote Office. The third and last part of the Technical Volume will be published next month. My right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Scotland is today making a similar statement about housing policy in Scotland.
"Although the House has had in the past many White Papers on housing this is the first time that any Government has sought to review their housing policy in a comprehensive and detailed way, and to publish the results as a basis for further consultation.
"The Green Paper enables us to take stock of the whole national housing situation: to record what has been achieved in the past as well as to judge what needs to be done in the future.
"The main conclusions the Government draw from the Review are these:—
"First, that housing conditions have been transformed in the last 25 years. Since 1951 we have completed 7½ million new houses, and renovated nearly 2½million more. In 1951 more than two out of every three households were living in physically unsatisfactory conditions or were sharing. Last year the figure had fallen to one in seven.

1023
"Second, however, substantial needs remain, not least in respect of those one in seven—2·7 million—the bulk of whom live in unsatisfactory conditions, and new problems, particularly those of the elderly, the disabled, the single and the mobile are emerging.
"Third, it is no longer sensible to consider housing as a single national problem, but as a series of local ones requiring attention area by area.
"Fourth, now that the clearance of irredeemable slums is almost at an end, greater emphasis should be placed upon the renewal and modernisation of property wherever this is sensible. But a substantial level of new housebuilding will still be needed, not only to deal with the backlog of bad housing but also with the rising number of households over the next decade.
"Fifth, that there remains a demand and need for an adequate supply of rented accommodation which will be met overwhelmingly by the public sector. But equally there is a strong and growing desire for house ownership which should be met.
"Against these general conclusions we have looked at arrangements for housing finance. The present general subsidies to tenants and owner occupiers have been much criticised. Many proposals for change have been made. But the effect of most of the alternatives—when stripped to their essentials—would be significantly to increase the cost to the tenant and to the home owner of renting or buying his house. We reject this approach. First, because such increases would place an additional and unnecessary burden on millions of families, and second, because they would act to check the supply of decent homes.
"We therefore intend to maintain mortgage tax relief, and the general subsidy to the public sector. But we do believe that the present housing subsidy system—established on a temporary basis in 1974—should be recast and made more sensitive to the needs of those authorities with the most pressing housing requirements. On rents, we have in mind that increases should over a run of years keep broadly in line with money incomes.
1024
"In recent years there has been much comparison of assistance going to council tenants on the one hand and the house owners on the other. A great deal of analysis has been done on this aspect of housing finance in the course of the Review, and this is published in the Technical Volume. This shows that to arrive at an incontrovertible balance sheet is impossible because the systems are so different and the assumptions so debatable. But the analysis does explode the myth that there is a clear imbalance of benefit one way or the other. And the new subsidy system gives us the opportunity to introduce more formal measures which would be regarded by most as broadly fair between the two sectors. To do this we are suggesting that the minimum rate of general subsidy towards local authority housing interest payments should be related to the basic rate of tax relief on mortgage interest.
"At the heart of our approach to meeting the housing needs of the next decade lies a new role for local authorities—in developing effective local housing strategies which must embrace both public and private sectors, in partnership with all concerned—the building societies, housing associations and the housebuilding industry. These strategies will take into account the whole range of authorities' housing activities including those policies for the sale and acquisition of houses. At the core of an authority's direct contribution to its local housing strategy will be a four year rolling housing investment programme appraised annually with Government. To co-ordinate national and local policy I propose to establish a Housing Consultative Council for England with the local authorities and to maintain existing national machinery with the building societies and the house builders. My right honourable and learned friend will be developing existing relationships with the Council of the Principality.
"To help the programme of renewal, we propose that the emphasis should go on bringing more unsatisfactory houses up to a basic standard, rather than less houses to a higher standard. Repairs-only grants will be made more widely available, and we are considering increases in existing cost and rateable

1025
value limits for improvements grants. Grants will be made more readily available for houses in multiple occupation, and to private tenants.
"On empty houses we intend to speed up procedures for dealing with compulsory purchase orders. We shall also he urging local authorities to take more leases of empty privately owned houses, and to reduce vacancies in their own stock.
"As a Government, we welcome the clear desire of many to own their own homes, and we wish to facilitate this wherever we can. We intend to clear the path for home ownership for more people, more quickly by special Government assistance for first-time purchasers. We shall introduce legislation for a Government savings bonus, and for a matching Government savings loan of £500 interest free for the first five years. Building societies have a key role to play. We make proposals for them to lend more "down market" to people with modest incomes, and on older property. We also want to build on the steps we have already taken to secure a reasonably stable and adequate flow of mortgage funds. Partnerships between local authorities and building societies should be developed, with local authorities complementing the work of building societies, through "topping up" loans and other measures. The local authorities will be enabled to bring their home loans rate into line with the building societies' rate.
"Although it is unrealistic to think in terms of a reversal of the long secular decline of the private rented sector, it will remain important in London and other cities for some years to come. We are studying the problems of the sector in a special Review of the Rent Acts, but in advance of this we propose to take measures to encourage letting by resident private landlords and the letting of accommodation over shops and other businesses. We shall also enable private tenants to apply for improvement grants.
"So far, I have spoken of proposals designed to improve the supply of, and access to the right kind of housing. But we also propose a tenant's charter—a code of principles and practices designed to protect the rights of public sector tenants with legislation to give
1026
them security of tenure. Tenants will be encouraged to carry out improvements, and reimbursed for substantial improvements when their tenancy ends.
"We also want to see wider experimentation with newer forms of tenure, lying between home ownership and renting—equity sharing, co-operatives, co-ownership—and we wish to encourage the housing association movement to which the Government has given so much backing already.
"Last, but certainly not least, there are special groups of people who deserve separate attention—the elderly, the disabled and handicapped, the homeless, one-parent families. Proposals in respect of all of these are made in the Green Paper. Our policies will also help the single and the mobile.
"We intend to hold consultations on the Green Paper with all the major bodies concerned, and to allow until 1st November for comment. The proposals put forward have been conceived as a whole. It should enable us henceforth to conduct a far more informed debate on housing policy, and it should enable us to meet more sensitively and accurately the wishes and needs of our people for whom few things are more important than their home."
My Lords, that is the end of the Statement.
3.45 p.m.
Lord SANDYS: My Lords, the House will be grateful to the noble Baroness for reading out a long, important and detailed Statement, and we look forward to receiving the Green Paper on its publication. With this end in mind, the first question that I want to ask the noble Baroness is whether she believes that the date that she has given the House of up to 1st November for comment on the Green Paper allows a sufficiently long time in view of the fact that there are difficulties over publication? The cyclostyled version available from the Printed Paper Office, although satisfactory from our point of view, will never reach a wider public.
Secondly, there were references to the establishment of a Housing Consultative Council for England and the equivalent

1027
in the Principality of Wales. I wonder whether the noble Baroness can comment on when this will be established and say a little more about the aims of the body when it has been established. It is encouraging to hear that the Government have proposals for a review of the Rent Acts. We assume that this will follow upon the Green Paper which was published a short time ago. There was no specific reference in the Statement on homelessness, a subject to which your Lordships have devoted some time in recent months. I wonder whether the noble Baroness has any comment to make about this in view of its importance in the national scene.
My Lords, rather than comment at greater length, in view of the fact that there is to be a further Statement on housing policy in Scotland, I should like to leave my remarks at that for the moment.
3.47 p.m.
Lord AVEBURY: My Lords, we on these Benches are also very grateful to the noble Baroness for repeating the Statement which has been made in another place. Does she agree that, although there has been the substantial improvement that she mentioned from two out of every three households living in physically unsatisfactory conditions to one in seven doing so, that improvement is not reflected in terms of an equivalent in the ratios of people living in unsatisfactory accommodation? Generally speaking, there tend to be more people per household in unsatisfactory accommodation than in good housing. Therefore the improvement may not be quite as striking as the figures that were mentioned in the Statement appear to show.
The Statement indicated that no fundamental change was proposed in the system of housing finance, and it went on to remark that comparison between publicly-rented accommodation and owner-occupied accommodation was impossible because the systems were so different. Does the noble Baroness not agree that this is one of the fundamental criticisms that are being made of the system? The division of our society into council tenants on the one hand, and owner-occupiers on the other hand, perpetuates the class divisions of our society. Anything which
1028
Governments can do to assimilate them to some common system would be desirable.
Therefore, does the noble Baroness appreciate that some people will be disappointed that a way of assimilating the two systems on the lines of allowances which would be common to both owner-occupiers and council tenants cannot be found? Such a system might have been developed and would have maintained the total amount of the spending on the two systems.
With regard to the grants, is the noble Baroness aware that we would agree with the approach of spreading them as much as possible so as to bring as many houses as possible up to the basic standard? But is the noble Baroness aware that we should be disappointed if no particular emphasis is placed in the grants system on the need to improve insulation, a matter on which I have corresponded with her and one on which I know she agrees that more could be done. Something has been done in the way of improving insulation in dwellings occupied by the elderly and disabled; but we might have supposed, in view of the considerable interest taken in the subject in the Department, that something special could have been done there.
Is the noble Baroness aware that most people will support the idea of the special assistance for the first-time home buyers? This particularly imaginative proposal, to grant a matching Government loan of £500 interest-free, is one which I am sure all young people getting married will have cause to be grateful for.
Finally, on the question of private landlords, obviously one will have to wait to see what may be the outcome of this review of the Rent Acts; but in the meantime does not the noble Baroness agree that, if one is to avoid the private landlord disappearing altogether, at least the rents in the privately-rented sector should be permitted to increase in line with money incomes which, as the statement says, is to be permitted in the public sector. There is one further point. On the systems line between ownership and renting—equity sharing and so on—would the noble Baroness say whether there can he a transfer of properties from local authorities into these new forms of tenure as well as the use of those forms of tenure for houses newly constructed?
Baroness BIRK: My Lords, in reply to the points raised by the noble Lord, Lord Sandys, may I deal first with his query of whether up to 1st November will be enough? I can assure him that, if the delay on publication continues, the consultation period can be extended. His next point was on the housing consultative council. This will only be established after discussion and this will also take part of the consultation period. It is a new national forum on which there will be representatives of the local authorities and central Government bodies and possibly other housing agencies. The review of the Rent Acts will be completed, we hope, by the end of the year. That matter will be dealt with. This is why the question of the private-rented sector just threads in and out of the Green Paper for we are awaiting the Rent Acts review.
Homelessness is discussed in the Green Paper. It is certainly one of the factors which will have to be taken into account in the new housing strategy at both local and central level. Although it was a fairly long Statement, I am sure the noble Lord appreciates that the consultation paper is a very long document with three annexes; and I could not cover every point in the Statement. With regard to what the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, said about the figures not being so good, in the Green Paper we were careful not to exaggerate progress by making too much of the surplus of houses or by doing more than really making an assessment of how the figures will improve. He would agree that there has been an improvement over the years. When he has had an opportunity to read the document carefully—and I appreciate that with a paper of this size it is not possible for him yet to have done so—he will see there is in it very much more detail about the problems that concerned him.
On his point about the division into council tenants, on one side, and owner occupiers on the other creating a class division, I am sure that when he reads the Green Paper fully he will appreciate that the Government have done what people have asked for and have queried for some time; that is, they have made it entirely clear that they support home ownership and recognise this is what so many people aim at and want. But, at the same time, they are keeping this balance of rented
1030
houses both for people for whom it is the preferred option and for people for whom it is the only one.
He made reference to trying to even that out by means—so I imagine —of tax credit. I think that that is probably what he had in mind. We have looked at this carefully and he will find a long passage in the Green Paper which goes into the arguments and explanations of why the Government have rejected it. Brefly, it is that the universal housing allowance looks attractive as a concept; but when you get down to considering how to put it into effect it was found to be quite impracticable. The evidence does not support the case for such a radical scheme which would disrupt the lives of many householders. It would also affect the tax system and there would be no certain prospects of major advantages to come from it.
I am grateful to him for his warm support for the help to first-time buyers—which we think not only will be helpful to young married people but also will be a fillip to the construction industry which is extremely important. That is one of the factors behind a great deal of it. Some of the other points he raised were the same as those raised by Lord Sandys. He referred to the Rent Acts. I think it better to await the review. I would remind him that the Statement mentions the role of the private landlord and it shows we are cognisant of that fact. This is referred to also in the Green Paper, but it is closely tied up with the review of the Rent Acts.
Lord ROBERTHALL: My Lords, perhaps it is rash to comment on a Statement that I have not seen, but the Statement seems to be encouraging in a number of ways in a field which is so chaotic and in many respects so unfair. There is the great gulf between the people who own their houses, the people in council houses and people with protected tenancies, on the one hand, and the rest on the other hand. The encouragement of the sale of houses is a help. May I ask whether the Government will make it clear to the local authorities that the policy will be in this direction? I am sure that the great difficulty about letting houses at the moment is the extreme security of tenure which is now given to almost all tenants. I could hardly expect the Minister to make a statement on this. But will the Government bear in mind that there is this

1031
conflict, that the degree of security given to the average tenant presents an enormous hardship to all those people who have neither council houses nor protected tenancies—especially in places like London where there is still a severe housing shortage?
Baroness BIRK: My Lords, on the noble Lord's first point, the gulf between the council house tenant and the home owner, the local authority associations will certainly be seeing the Green Paper. In fact, they will have had copies by today or by this week. They will know exactly what is the Government thinking on this and the balance that the Government are trying to bring in this area. I think the noble Lord should remember that the local authorities have considerable, almost complete, autonomy in their own areas for how they work out their housing assessment. Under the new system, they will be helped in this way, because there will be a housing investment programme, a strategy plan; and, within the amount they get, they will be able, themselves, to adjust as to whether they wish to build new houses or to spend more on improvements and repairs, and so on. There will be in this an encouragement to them which, in the end, ought to reduce gradually the amount of subsidy.
So far as security of tenure is concerned, the Government, as I have already said, are awaiting the review of the Rent Acts; but I think it would be misleading to the noble Lord if I were to indicate that the Government want to ease to any degree the question of security of tenure.

HOUSING POLICY REVIEW (SCOTLAND)
4 p.m.
Lord STRABOLGI: My Lords, with the leave of the House, I will now repeat a Statement being made in another place by my right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Scotland. The Statement is as follows:
"I wish to make a Statement on the consultative document on Scottish Housing which is being made available today. This Green Paper is complementary to that which my right
1032
honourable friend the Secretary of State for the Environment has just announced for England and Wales. It is the outcome of a comprehensive review of housing in Scotland. It draws together the several developments on which we have been engaged over the past two years and further proposals which add up to a strategy appropriate to Scotland's housing needs.
"The Paper describes the great progress made in overcoming housing shortages in Scotland, particularly by the local housing authorities. But it also stresses the continued housing needs, with new problems arising as the old ones are solved. Too many people are still living in inadequate houses and depressing environments. We must take more account of people with special needs—the elderly and the disabled, for example, and single people of all ages. We must also give people better opportunities of obtaining the kind of house they want—whether they rent or buy.
"In consultation with the Scottish local authorities we have agreed arrangements for housing authorities to devise strategies based on local needs. Accordingly, all authorities will be submitting their first Housing Plans ' to me this summer to cover the five years beginning 1978–79. These plans take account of the whole range of housing needs, including the private sector. In parallel, we have been discussing a new single housing subsidy for local authorities. The Government will continue to give substantial financial support for authorities' housing expenditure. But I intend to distribute this support in a way which will reflect fairly the differing burdens in different areas. The new arrangements shall begin to operate in 1979. They will provide a better and fairer subsidy system. The level of assistance I have in mind will enable the local contribution to housing costs (rents and rate fund contributions) to keep broadly in line with changes in money incomes.
"As well as continuing support for the public sector, the Government want to ensure that the growing demand for home ownership can reasonably be met. To this end, the special measures to help first-time buyers announced by my right honourable friend—the

1033
Savings Bonus and Loans Scheme—will apply equally in Scotland. They will help many young people acquire their first homes. But for some people alternative forms of tenure are what they want—equity schemes, tenant cooperatives and so on. We will encourage more of these established to meet the demand for a wider choice of tenures.
"For the vast number of people for whom renting a public sector house is the most appropriate tenure, we shall be exploring with the local authorities the development of a model agreement for tenants so that the responsibilities of both tenant and the authority are clearly set out. Public sector tenants should be secure in their homes and they should not have to suffer outmoded and irritating restrictions. But they should also be able to take on more responsibility, if they wish, for the management and maintenance of their home.
"I hope that honourable Members and all interested housing organisations will now study the Paper closely and let us have constructive reactions. On the policy foundations we have already been laying, the outcome should be a coherent and responsive strategy to meet the housing needs of the people of Scotland. Our aim remains 'a decent house for every family at a price it can afford '."
My Lords, that concludes the Statement.
4.5 p.m.
Lord CAMPBELL of CROY: My Lords, I am sure the House is grateful to the noble Lord for having repeated the Statement being made in another place. It is welcome, certainly to these Benches, to hear that the Government are declaring that they now recognise the demand in Scotland for home ownership. In the past, Labour Ministers at the Scottish Office and some local authorities in Scotland have taken little account of that, though it has been recognised South of the Border; and there is considerably less home ownership in Scotland in proportion to the population than there is in England and Wales.
I should like to ask the noble Lord two questions. The first one, which I
1034
recognise may not be easy for him to answer on behalf of his Scottish Office colleagues, is this: In these circumstances, will the Secretary of State for Scotland relax his present restrictive attitude in granting permission to local authorities to sell council houses in appropriate conditions, where everyone is likely to benefit, including those on housing application lists? At present, the Government have made it clear that they frown on the sale of council houses in Scotland.
The second question is this. The noble Lord made no direct reference to housing associations, although I realise there may be something about them in the Paper. Do the Government visualise a larger role for housing associations in Scotland over the provision of new and better housing?
4.7 p.m.
Lord STRABOLGI: My Lords, I am grateful for what the noble Lord, Lord Campbell of Croy, has said about the Statement. He asked me two questions. One concerned the demand for home ownership. The conclusions in favour of supporting in various ways the development of home ownership in Scotland are not, of course, based on any dogma that this is the "right" or the "natural" form of tenure. It is based essentially on the recognition that this is what an increasing number of Scots people, especially the younger ones, want. We acknowledge the sense in providing for choice in housing to suit the wide variation in what people are prepared to pay at different stages of their lives.
The noble Lord also asked me about council house sales. The sale of council houses is not a free-standing issue. The decisions are to be made essentially against a local background. We are not encouraging wholesale selling, but we are not against sales. What we demand is that the scheme should be carefully worked out as part of each local authority's housing plan. It is still necessary to ensure an adequate supply of houses for rent, and that it is not all the better houses which are sold or those all of the same type or all in particular areas. It should be seen essentially as a means of meeting a part of the need for home ownership and should represent no more than a
"modest shift of part of the rented stock into home ownership".

1035
That would not have a distorting effect, we believe, on the provision of an adequate supply on rented housing, particularly in the Scottish situation where over half the houses are rented from public authorities, as against only one-third in England and Wales.
Thirdly, my Lords, the noble Lord asked about housing associations. These are discussed in the Green Paper and, of course, they will play an important continuing role. There are options put forward for revision of arrangements for housing association grants. I hope I have answered the various constructive questions asked by the noble Lord.

SALE OF LORDSHIPS OF MANORS BILL [H.L.]
(formerly Sale of Manors Bill [H.L.])
4.10 p.m.
Lord SANDYS: My Lords, on behalf of my noble friend Lord Kinnoull, I beg to move that this Bill be now read a third time.
Moved, That the Bill be now read 3a.—(Lord Sandys.)
Lord CLITHEROE: My Lords, before the Bill is read a third time, I should just like to thank my noble friend Lord Kinnoull and other noble Lords for the sensible Amendments which have been made to this Bill.
On Question, Bill read 3a.
Clause 6 [Powers of Councils consulted pursuant to section 4]:
Lord SANDYS Lord SANDYS moved the following Amendment:
Page 3, line 9, after ("acquire") insert ("the lordship of").
The noble Lord said: My Lords, this is very largely a drafting Amendment and, to some extent, is consequential upon the changes made at Report stage on 20th June. It seeks to clarify the purpose of Clause 6, and should be self-explanatory. My Lords, I beg to move.
On Question, Amendment agreed to.
Lord SANDYS: My Lords, I beg to move that this Bill do now pass.
Moved, That the Bill do now pass.—(Lord Sandys.)
On Question, Bill passed, and sent to the Commons.

CONSTRUCTION OF ROADS (TIME LIMIT) BILL [H.L.]
4.12 p.m.
Lord AVEBURY: My Lords, I beg to move that this Bill be now read a third time.
Moved, That the Bill be now read 3a.—(Lord Avebury.)
On Question, Bill read 3a an Amendment (privilege) made.
Lord AVEBURY: My Lords, I beg to move that this Bill do now pass.
Moved, That the Bill do now pass.—(Lord Avebury.)
Baroness STEDMAN: My Lords, I have listened on behalf of the Government throughout the stages of this Bill, and I must confess that nothing has been said which leads me to change the view which I expressed on behalf of the Government on Second Reading, that this is a Bill with good intentions but we believe that it would injure rather than help the very people whom the noble Lord wishes to assist. Of course, we want to reduce the period of uncertainty during which people may be unsure when a road will be built, or whether it will be built at all. But, on the other hand, my right honourable friend is frequently asked to expand and elaborate public consultation before firm proposals are made for a road scheme, and even after a line is chosen a great deal of further consultation with individuals is needed about the siting of junctions and the acquisition of land.
Sometimes, I am afraid, problems arise after an order has been made, so causing unexpected delays before construction can begin, but these seldom affect the need for the road. I do not see how allowing an order to lapse, or even bringing it up for renewal by Parliament, could do anything to remove the blight and the uncertainty. It would simply prolong them, because the need for the road is

1037
not determined by the existence or otherwise of the statutory order. We must bear in mind, too, the right of property owners to require my right honourable friend to buy blighted properties, which would cease if an order was allowed to lapse. I am afraid, therefore, that I must advise your Lordships that, notwithstanding our sympathy for the underlying aims of the noble Lord, the Government cannot give their support to this Bill, or promise time for it in the other place.
Lord AVEBURY: My Lords, the noble Baroness has made her attitude quite plain on previous occasions, and she has repeated the Government's view of the Bill which she herself submitted at the time of Second Reading. But I, also, have not changed my opinion that a Bill of this kind is urgently needed in the interests of people whose properties are blighted along the lint of motorways that are no longer required. If I may say so with great respect to the noble Baroness, I think that it is insufferable arrogance for the Department—not the noble Baroness, because I would never accuse her of such a quality—to pretend that once they have settled on the line of a road, their judgment is so infallible that no second thoughts can be had; they must have been right in that, as the noble Baroness put it, the need for the road is not removed by reason of the fact that after five years, under myproposal the order would lapse. That assumes that, wherever they make an order, it is simply a matter of time before the growth of traffic both private and commercial catches up with the demand. So that, if it is not in five years, it may be in 10 or 15 years that this motorway or that trunk road is ultimately required.
I have been given powerful support by the Government themselves in the White Paper which was presented by the noble Baroness yesterday, and which I have now had a chance of looking at. In every line of the chapter on roads I find that there are references to a greater degree of flexibility, which I am delighted to observe. The White Paper states that we now have over 1,400 miles of dual carriageway, trunk roads of two or three lanes, and 1,360 miles of motorways, making 2,760 miles in all, and the original intention was to continue expanding these to a network of 4,500 miles by the mid-1980s. But that concept has now been abandoned.
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The noble Baroness's Government are already revising downwards their "planning assumptions for roads"—that is the phrase used in paragraph 246—and the fixed targets of so many miles are not being replaced by any new figure which is to be achieved in some specified number of years. The White Paper states in paragraph 248:
"The strategic network concept will be modified. As a matter of national transport policy, the Government intends to adopt a more flexible approach and to deal as urgently as possible with the most pressing needs in the ways most sensible for meeting them. This is a matter not of building to lines superimposed on maps".
That is precisely what I am saying to the noble Baroness, that some lines have been drawn on maps.
I need not remind her that the genesis of this Bill was a line drawn continuing the M23, along which many people are still living with blighted properties and suffering hardships. It is as a result of the initiative which was taken by the M23 Action Group, in consultation with many others up and down the country, such as Transport 2000 and so on, that this Bill came forward before your Lordships' House. The opinion of those who are living in these areas is that a mistake has been made by the Government, or by the transport planners in the Department of the Environment, and this is a line superimposed on a map which should now be struck off the map. If the Department really mean what they say in this admirable White Paper, about a greater degree of flexibility, now is their chance to demonstrate that there will be, as it is put in the following paragraph, "a more selective approach". The fact that:
"… there will still be instances where an entirely new road remains much the best approach in both environmental and economic terms"
implies that there are other instances where a new road is not the best approach in environmental and economic terms. Otherwise, the statement does not mean anything at all.
I am glad to sec that we shall be more cautious about making growth assumptions in planning the road network, and that account is to be taken of an uncertain future in which energy and oil, in particular, are likely to become scarcer and dearer. The corollary of that statement, as the noble Baroness has probably heard

1039
me say before, is that if one looks forward to the end of the 1980s, when world oil production will have reached and passed its peak—and this is not my opinion; I am talking about the prognoses of experts, such as those at British Petroleum, who all say the same thing—it will not keep pace with an increasing demand if the rate of increase in demand is anything like so great as it has been in the past. Of course, this will not happen. Because of the way these matters develop, one would expect the price to continue to rise, as it has done since the so-called crisis of 1973, and that one would come into a new balance between demand and supply at a lower level of production than had been expected when the forecast was made a few years ago. This means that road transport in particular is likely to level off much earlier than the Transport and Road Research Laboratory had thought.
We are not in a position to go into this question in numerical detail because we have not yet received the review, which is promised, of the system of making these forecasts. All we can say in general terms is that it is very likely that the saturation point, which has been one of the main features of TRRL thinking since 1960 when these forecasts first began, is likely to be reached in the late 1980s and not in the year 2015, or whenever was the final point in the TRRL figures. Because we are planning motorways and trunk roads 20 years ahead, even now in 1977 we are at the point where we are thinking about roads which will be coming into use in 1997 when we shall all be some 10 years past this point of inflection in world oil production and consumption and when it is very likely that road transport fuel by means of hydrocarbon oils will have levelled off in this country and started to decline. That is the reason why I say that one cannot draw lines on the map. Therefore I am delighted to see from the transport White Paper that there is beginning to be some recognition by the Government that oil supplies are not inexhaustible and that the internal combustion engine may be starting to level off and decline as a method of powering transport in this country.
For the very same reason—I will not go into it now because it is not the occasion—that means greater emphasis on rail
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ways. The assurances that are given by the Government in another chapter of the White Paper mean no major cuts in the rail network. All this adds up, to me, to justification for a Bill of this kind. The Government need a way to withdraw these lines that are drawn on maps when they turn out no longer to be required. If one takes the hypothesis which the noble Baroness outlined in her speech, that minor changes will be needed to the approach roads after the Statutory Order has been made and that this process cannot be completed within five years, I have given a let-out to the Government. They could produce an Affirmative Resolution which they would have no difficulty in getting through both Houses of Parliament because, ex hypothesi, the need for the road in that case still exists; it is only a matter of confirming side road orders.
Therefore, I beg the Government to have second thoughts about the Bill. I am very sorry to hear the noble Baroness say that when the Bill leaves here and goes to another place no time can be found to debate it. Even if her arguments were correct and mine were wrong, the other place ought at least to have an opportunity to look at them. If the Government refuse to find time and merely put up some stooge to shout, "Object" when the Bill comes up on a Friday afternoon, they will be stifling public debate of a matter which is of very great concern—the Minister, I am sure, will agree with me here—to tens of thousands of people up and down the country. Therefore, I beg her to go back to her colleagues in the Department of the Environment, to report what has been said this afternoon and to see whether or not a niche can be found, at least in the Parliamentary timetable between now and the beginning of the Recess, for a Second Reading debate in another place which would allow the views of elected representatives to be heard.
Lord DRUMALBYN: My Lords, I do not know whether the noble Baroness intends to reply to what the noble Lord has said. If she does not, then I would say to the noble Lord that while it may well be that the House will not object to the Bill, I do not think that it will achieve very much if the Government do not intend to give it any assistance in another place.

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I would add—because, although I am not taking part in the discussion of the Bill I have listened to it—that I do not regard the Bill as having been fully debated in this place. I think that point should be placed firmly on the record before the Bill is passed so that nobody will think that this is the considered opinion of the House. If, however, the noble Lord wishes to go ahead with the Bill on those terms, then he is at liberty to do so.
Lord AVEBURY: My Lords, perhaps I may reply to the noble Lord's remarks. I think he will agree that every opportunity has been given to the House to debate the Bill. This is voluntary self-denial by noble Lords who have not taken part in the debate. However, it has had all the usual stages that any Bill goes through.
Lord DRUMALBYN: My Lords, I agree entirely with what the noble Lord has said. However, had it been a Bill about which, the Government having indicated its opposition in the first place, a large number of Members of this House held a contrary view, I feel certain that they would have attended the debate.
On Question, Bill passed and sent to the Commons.

REDUNDANCY REBATES BILL
4.26 p.m.
Report received.
Clause 2 [Power to vary rebates in Northern Ireland]:
Baroness ELLES Baroness ELLES moved the following Amendment:
Page 3, line 8, at end insert—
("( )No order shall be made under subsection (1) above unless the Department of Manpower Services for Northern Ireland thinks it expedient to do so with a view to adjusting the level at which the Northern Ireland Redundancy Fund stands for the time being and having regard to the sums which may be expected to be paid from that Fund in any future period").
The noble Baroness said: My Lords, as noble Lords will be aware, the Redundancy Rebates Bill is an enabling Bill. Under subsection (4) of Clause 1, the Secretary of State, while having powers to vary the rebates under the Bill, has to take into account certain considerations
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as to the size of the Fund and the possibility of future redundancies. The purpose of the Amendment is merely to give to the Department of Manpower Services for Northern Ireland the opportunity, under Clause 2, to take into account the same kind of considerations as those which have to be taken into account by the Secretary of State when making an order under the Bill. I beg to move.
Lord WALLACE of COSLANY: My Lords, I commend the noble Baroness for having moved this Amendment. As she has so rightly made very clear, it is consequential upon the Amendment to Clause 1 which was successfully moved in Committee of this House on 21st June. Since its sole purpose is to maintain parity between legislation governing redundancy payments in Great Britain and Northern Ireland, I do not propose to seek a Division. Having said this, I am bound to make it clear that the Government remain opposed to the principle underlying these Amendments, which are directly contrary to statements made about the intended first use of the enabling power to effect a reduction in rebate. It is therefore without prejudice to any future consideration of these Amendments, which may be necessary either here or in another place, that I am fully prepared on this occasion not to seek a Division.
On Question, Amendment agreed to.

RESTRICTIVE TRADE PRACTICES BILL
4.29 p.m.
Lord ORAM: My Lords, I beg to move that this Bill be now read a second time. The purpose of this Bill is to deal with a technical but none the less serious problem that has arisen in relation to the restrictive trade practices legislation which was extended last year to the supply and acquisition of commercial services.
May I begin by explaining how this problem has arisen. As your Lordships will know, the legislation provides for certain restrictive trading agreements to be registered with the Office of Fair Trading and for their subsequent investigation by the Restrictive Practices Court to determine their effect on the public interest. The features which make an

1043
agreement registrable under the legislation are that it is between two parties who carry on business in the United Kingdom in the supply of goods or of services and that certain restrictions are accepted by two or more parties to the agreement. By "restrictions" is meant that the parties accept some limitation on their freedom of action in relation to, for example, prices or charges, terms or conditions of supply, areas or persons to be supplied. The definition of "restrictions" is intentionally broad in its scope to cover the many sorts of anti-competitive arrangement that firms may enter into in agreement with each other.
The Restrictive Trade Practices (Services) Order which brought commercial services under the control of the legislation in March last year applied to, among others, banks and financial institutions. Thus any agreements between banks under which the sort of restrictions I have just described were accepted in relation to the lending of money had to be registered with the Office of Fair Trading. It was not the intention that normal loan financing operations should be made subject to registration. However, since the order was made, it has become increasingly clear that this has in fact happened. Many agreements for the provision of loan finance, credit facilities and so on are caught by the legislation because they contain restrictions on the freedom of action of borrowers, lenders or guarantors which are accepted by at least two parties to the agreement. This may arise, for example, where a consortium of banks provide loan finance for a project which is too large for any single bank to finance. Though these restrictions technically fall within the wide definition in the legislation which I have just mentioned, their purpose is not to restrict competition but to protect the security of the loan and the borrower's ability to repay. They may, for instance, prevent the borrower or guarantor pledging elsewhere assets which are directly or indirectly security for the loan, or limit the level of further borrowing.
It is clearly essential that banks and other financial institutions should be in a position to obtain adequate security for the loans they provide, without running the risk that in so doing they may be making a
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registrable agreement which may have to be defended before the Restrictive Practices Court. Quite apart from the administrative burden that would be imposed on the institutions concerned and on the Office of Fair Trading, the Government's view is that these are not matters which should be examined under the restrictive trade practices legislation. I have also in mind that many such agreements involve foreign borrowers who would be able to go to other financial markets for the funds they need and would no doubt do so if they had to face the hurdle of the restrictive trade practices legislation in this country. As your Lordships will appreciate, this could have very serious consequences for London as a financial centre and, in terms of lost invisible earnings, for the United Kingdom economy as a whole. The purpose of the Bill is therefore to remove loan financing and similar agreements from the scope of the restrictive trade practices legislation entirely, provided they do not contain restrictions which are harmful to competition.
I come now to the provisions of the Bill, which amends and supplements the Restrictive Trade Practices Act 1976 in a number of ways. I should point out that, as well as clarifying the position for the future, these changes have retrospective effect. This is necessary to remove doubts about the status of a large number of agreements which are already in existence. I hope your Lordships will agree that this is fully justified, since it was never intended that normal loan financing agreements should be subject to the legislation in the first place. The Bill is fairly technical in character, and I think it might be best if I explain broadly what the effect will be, rather than analyse in detail the legislative means that are used to achieve this.
The aim, as I have said, is to ensure that agreements for the provision of loan finance, credit facilities and so on, do not have to be registered with the Office of Fair Trading so long as they do not contain anti-competitive terms. The Bill does this by providing that if an agreement contains certain financing terms, there is no need to take account of any restrictions in it which are concerned solely with securing the loan or other financial liability, when considering whether it is registrable under the Restrictive Trade Practices Act. Thus, provided it meets these criteria, an

1045
agreement about loan finance et cetera in the United Kingdom will not be caught by the legislation; though, of course, if it contains other restrictions with an anticompetitive purpose it would still be subject to the legislation.
Clause 1 deals with the situation where restrictions in a loan financing agreement relate to the supply of services. It amends the relevant provisions in the Restrictive Trade Practices Act 1976 and the Services Order accordingly. Because, in agreements of this kind, there may also be restrictions relating to the supply of goods Clause 2 makes similar retrospective provision for exemption where the restrictions are concerned only with protecting the loan. Clause 3, in conjunction with Part II of the Schedule, deals similarly with provisions to exchange information about goods, so that these too will not be registrable under the legislation if their purpose is to secure the loan.
May I draw your Lordships' attention to two other aspects of the Bill's provisions. First, there is a broader exclusion from the Restrictive Trade Practices Act for agreements under which restrictions are accepted only by overseas parties and which relate to activities they are engaged in outside the United Kingdom. This has been included to ensure that foreign borrowers have easy access to the London financial market with less risk that the agreements they enter into here might be registrable. Secondly, the Bill extends, in the first three clauses, the order-making powers of the Secretary of State including, for the first time, a general power in relation to restrictions in goods agreements. This means that if experience showed in the future that agreements harmful to competition were being allowed to escape scrutiny as a result of the Bill, new orders would be made, subject of course to Parliamentary approval, to bring them back under the control of the legislation. The provisions could also be used to extend the exemption if this were found to be necessary.
My Lords, I hope that I have adequately explained the problem which has given rise to this Bill and the reasons why it is both necessary and urgent. The Bill has been given speedy consideration in another place. I hope that your Lordships will also agree that this unintentional effect of the restrictive trade practices
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legislation should be remedied as rapidly as possible and that this Bill should therefore be given a Second Reading. I beg to move that the Bill be now read a second time.
Moved, That the Bill be now read 2a.—(Lord Oram.)
Lord LYELL: My Lords, I think all of us on these Benches should be very grateful for the clear and speedy way in which the noble Lord, Lord Oram, has spelled out the complexities of the details contained in this Bill. As noble Lords will be aware, the subject matter is indeed complicated; I found it very difficult to understand until I obtained some information and the noble Lord, Lord Oram, spelled out all the implications of the difficulties in the Bill. I particularly enjoyed his reference to the various hurdles which had to be faced. Financial operations such as we have heard of being carried on in the City might have to jump over various hurdles. Looking down the margins of the Bill, I find the 1956 Restrictive Trade Practices Act and also one in 1976. There was one in 1968 and I understand that that has been replaced. There were various information orders, and, in 1973, the Fair Trading Bill. I concur with the noble Lord that there are a very large number of obstacles to a trade which is of great and paramount importance, as the noble Lord has explained.
We were pleased to hear that the restrictions which may be written into various agreements as far as financial considerations are concerned are there to protect the lenders' security in the types of loan which the noble Lord told us about. We were also encouraged to hear that the Restrictive Trade Practices Act 1976 inadvertently caught various of these loans, leases and large hire agreements. Clearly, it is in order to remedy some of the inadvertent errors with which the Bill presents us this afternoon. Of course it is right that various restrictions may be disregarded when deciding whether or not an agreement should or should not be registrable. It is all the more welcome that the Secretary of State may use the Affirmative Resolution mechanism in your Lordships' House and elsewhere to consider further disregard for some restrictions, especially when these might concern goods or information. We are interested also

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that the information agreements on goods are to be included in the Bill.
I take the noble Lord's point that the more swiftly we can deal with this Bill the greater the benefits. Finally, I would draw to the attention of the House and of the noble Lord the optimism of the Government in indicating in the Memorandum that no increase in central Government expenditure or, indeed, staff is expected. We are very encouraged by that, and we are encouraged by the Bill as it has been spelled out so clearly by the noble Lord, Lord Oram.
Lord DRUMALBYN: My Lords, I should like to join with my noble friend in welcoming this rather abstruse piece of legislation. It would have been very surprising indeed if the extension to services of the provisions with regard to goods had given rise to no difficulties whatsoever. We always recognised that it was going to be a very "dicey" operation. Therefore, we would not in any way criticise the Government for bringing forward this piece of legislation. We would certainly congratulate them on the attempt—and I think it will be successful—to avoid having to bring forward another piece of legislation; they are taking order-making powers in this case, and that, for my part, I welcome.
Lord ORAM: My Lords, I should like to thank the two noble Lords who have spoken for the spirit in which they did so in accepting this Bill. As the noble Lord, Lord Lyell, said, there are quite a lot of complications in the legislation upon which this particular Bill rests. He quoted the 1956 Act, which reminded me that that was the first piece of legislation on which I cut my teeth in another place, and I am sure the noble Lord, Lord Drumalbyn, was there doing that at the same time; we were both engaged in this sort of matter. As he said, with such a complicated subject it is not surprising that when changes do come about there are consequences from those changes which have subsequently to be caught up with. That, in essence, is what the Bill proposes to do.
On Question, Bill read 2a; Committee negatived.
Then, Standing Order No. 43 having been dispensed with (pursuant to Resolution), Bill read 3a, and passed.

CONTROL OF FOOD PREMISES (SCOTLAND) BILL
4.45 p.m.
Lord LYELL: My Lords, I beg to move that this Bill be now read a third time.
Moved, That the Bill be now read 3a.—(Lord Lyell.)
On Question, Bill read 3a.
Clause 1 [Closure of food premises, stalls or vehicles dangerous to health]:
Lord LYELL Lord LYELL moved Amendment No. 1:
Page 1, line 13, leave out ("or vehicle") and insert ("vehicle or place").
The noble Lord said: My Lords, in the earlier discussions on the Bill we had some difficulty with the use of the phrase "places which are not premises", and the purpose of the Amendment is to clarify that phrase. With the leave of the House, I shall speak also to Amendments Nos. 3, 5, 6, 8, 10, 11, 12, 13, 16, 18, 19 and 20. Those are the Amendments which stand in my name on the Marshalled List. I hope it will be for the convenience of the House for me to speak at once to all these Amendments. When we were discussing the Bill at an earlier stage, we had some difficulty with places which were not premises, and the purpose of this Amendment and all the later series of Amendments is to sweep in any activities of a food business which are carried on other than at premises, vehicles or stalls. An example would be a pavement cafe. Since these activities are covered by the Food Hygiene regulations, we hope and believe that it is right that they should also be covered by the Bill. The Amendments will have the effect of bringing "places" specifically within the ambit of the closure provisions of Clauses 1 and 2. I beg to move.
Lord GRAY: My Lords, I did raise points concerning definitions and interpretations in the Bill during the Committee stage. The Amendments before the House today do not in fact touch on what I was talking about, but I think they can be commended to the House as a distinct improvement and clarification of the interpretation clause of the Bill.
Lord STRABOLGI: My Lords, I should like, on behalf of the Government, to be associated with what the noble Lord, Lord Gray, has said. We commend these Amendments to the House.
On Question, Amendment agreed to.
The DEPUTY SPEAKER (Baroness Wootton of Abinger): My Lords, I have to call your Lordships' attention to the fact that if Amendment No. 2 is agreed to I shall not be able to call Amendments Nos. 3 or 4.
4.50 p.m.
Lord GRAY Lord GRAY moved Amendment No. 2:
Page 1, line 17, leave out sub-paragraph (i) and insert—
("(i) food continues or is likely to continue to be exposed to the risk of contamination at those premises or on, at or from that stall, vehicle or place; and").
The noble Lord said: My Lords, it has been pointed out to the House that, if this Amendment is agreed to, Amendments Nos. 3 and 4 cannot be called. I should perhaps indicate that if No. 3 were to fall, this would not adversely affect Lord Lyell's series of Amendments, since the words he seeks to replace at line 19 would be similarly replaced by my Amendment No. 2. It may help t he House if I add that the seven Amendments standing in my name consist of two separate groups of linked Amendments which represent alternative courses by which my objective may be achieved. My objective is to put beyond doubt the fact that the closure order sanction which the Bill introduces can be used to stop a vehicle being used for the carriage or transport of food where such use represents a threat to public health.
The Amendment now before the House is linked with Amendments Nos. 7, 14 and 17. I believe that together they would achieve my objective. The alternative group of Amendments, to which I have just referred, comprises Nos. 4, 9 and 15. I believe that that group would also meet my point, albeit less attractively perhaps from a drafting point of view. It may be that a selective combination from the two groups would commend itself to the House and perhaps my noble friend Lord Lyell, who has indicated that he has some sympathy with my view that some sort of Amendment should be made,
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can indicate whether that would be a course to be preferred.
I hope that noble Lords will approve of my having explained the relationship of the Amendments. Perhaps I can now address myself in one speech to why I believe the Bill should be amended. Then, briefly, I shall demonstrate how the different groups of Amendments would achieve my purpose. If the House is agreeable, I shall then rest my decision on what course to follow until after the House has had the benefit of hearing from my noble friend Lord Lyell, then perhaps from the Front Bench opposite and maybe from any other noble Lord who may wish to intervene.
My Lords, in Committee it was established that the Bill should embrace all types and aspects of food business. As I have already said, the aspect on which my Amendment focuses attention is the transportation of food. Food businesses obviously can involve the carriage or transport of food in a variety of ways. Food can be moved by vehicle from one set of premises to another within a single business. The transport of food can be the sole activity of a food business; it can simply be the act of distributing by producers to retailers or the end-of-the-line delivery to the consumer. Perhaps I should advise noble Lords at this point that the activity of a common carrier is excluded by the terms of an exemption in Regulation 3 of the Food Hygiene (Scotland) Regulations 1959.
It is essential to the working of the Bill that each and all of these activities can be scrutinised at each stage of the procedure set out in the Bill, and that such scrutiny should take in not merely the premises associated with a vehicle but the vehicle itself, thus enabling prohibition of the use of that vehicle when appropriate. It is my contention that the Bill as drafted excludes from consideration a vehicle used to transport food, at a point in the sequence of provisions where it is a prerequisite that the vehicle is considered.
If I may, I should like to illustrate my point by examining the workings of Clause 1, and I invite noble Lords to examine each paragrah with me in order to determine whether transport is or is not catered for. For the purpose of this exercise let us say that a person has been convicted under the Food Hygiene Regula

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tions for having an insanitary vehicle. That conviction makes him a candidate for action by the Procurator Fiscal under the terms of Clause 1(1) if—and this is the point—the offence for which he was convicted included either one of the features set out in Clause 1(1)(a) or one that is caught under paragraph (b). The vehicle cannot be considered under paragraph (a) because that paragraph refers exclusively to premises which for the purpose of the Bill are a building or part thereof. So we must move to paragraph (b).
At the Committee stage I withdrew an Amendment which was designed specifically to introduce mention of transport at this stage. I argued that the context in which paragraph (b) refers to a vehicle suggests that the vehicle cited was of the mobile shop or fish and chip van type and questioned reliance of the draftsman on the word carrying a dual meaning. The case for the Bill as at present drafted is, I understand, that by employing the expression "food business", and specifically by employing it in paragraphs (a) and (b) of subsection (1), all varieties of food business and all aspects of food handling in the course of a business are brought within reach of the Bill's sanctions. That contention rests on the definition of "food business" set out in Regulation 3 of the Food Hygiene (Scotland) Regulations 1959—a definition which is imported into the Bill by Clause 6 and from which I quoted when the Bill was in Committee; and which cites the transport of food as constituting a food business. The tidying up of Clause 6through the series of Amendments that my noble friend Lord Lyell has tabled today does not alter that.
My Lords, I am prepared to accept this general premise as providing coverage of transport under the terms of Clause 1(1)(b) and submit that my noble friend and the Government are right if they ask us to read selectively from Clause 1(1)(b) as follows:
"the carrying on of a food business on …a … vehicle which is insanitary …".
So far so good. But at line 17 we come to the next stage in the sequence of controlling considerations. Here we must—as in his turn the sheriff must where a prosecution is involved—satisfy ourselves that the considerations spelt out in subparagraph (i), (ii) and (iii) can be used to catch the offending vehicle.
For the purposes of this exercise it is, first, best to look at sub-paragraphs (ii) and (iii) as these are quite simply disposed of, and it is sub-paragraph (i) that poses the problem. In the case of sub-paragraph (ii) I have already put the view that the reference to "vehicle" in the Bill covers a vehicle used for the carriage of food, so there is no difficulty there. In the case of sub-paragraph (iii), we have reference to a food business being carried on on a vehicle. In the light of what I have just said about subsection (I)(b), an offending vehicle falls to be considered here.
Now we come to the crunch. It is the wording of sub-paragraph (i) at line 17 that has prompted my Amendments. Under sub-paragraph (i) the sheriff is required to be satisfied,
"that food continues or is likely to continue to be prepared, stored or offered or exposed for sale at those premises or on, at or from that stall or vehicle".
If he is not satisfied, then the whole process grinds to a halt and the application for a closure order fails. I take the view that the sheriff cannot be satisfied that food continues, or is likely to continue, to be stored, sold or offered or exposed for sale on that vehicle when it is neither being stored, nor sold, nor offered, nor exposed for sale in a case where the food is merely being transported by that vehicle.
As I see it, it is the draftsman's selective use of the words describing the various types of activity which the regulations cite as constituting a food business which has created our difficulty. It has been suggested to me that the draftsman is looking to the word "stored" in subparagraph (i) to be construed as embracing "transported". Not only do I suggest to the House that this is stretching the possible interpretation of the word "stored" to take on a dual meaning beyond the reach of its elasticity, but in regulation 3 of the Food Hygiene Regulations (the interpretation of the expression "food business" upon which the Bill depends for its very lifeblood) the word "stored" and the word "transported" are adjacently and separately listed. Surely if, the two terms are quoted separately in the regulation and one patently therefore does not embrace the other, then one cannot embrace the other in the Bill.
I ask noble Lords to agree that we should today put beyond question the Bill's ability to catch with its sanctions the transportation aspects of food businesses. I appreciate that I have spoken at considerable length, but I was anxious to put my case in full, the better to explain my purpose and to try and show how transport is, and is not, in the Bill as it is drafted.
Before I resume my seat I must, as I promised at the beginning, briefly state how the two groups of Amendments achieve their purpose. One group simply introduces reference to transport in the key provision 1(1) and elsewhere where it is similarly appropriate. The other group, of which this is the first, follow in the draftsman's steps by using "food business" as he has done, and importing transport through that expression into those provisions in the Bill where I feel in consequence of my arguments it is required. I am told that either group, or some Amendments from one group or the other, might be used to achieve my end, and I will follow any such course should it be suggested. I beg to move.
5.3 p.m.
Lord STRABOLGI: My Lords, perhaps it might be helpful if I said something at this stage. The Amendments put down by the noble Lord, Lord Gray, have been put down to meet his point that it needs to be put beyond doubt that the Bill extends to the transportation of food as a part of a food business. He contends (and has explained why in his speech) that either of two groups of Amendments would meet his point—either, as the noble Lord said, a group consisting of Amendments Nos. 2, 7, 14 and 17, or an alternative group comprising Nos. 4, 9 and 15.
I have discussed this with the Department this afternoon and I am advised that we accept Lord Gray's point, but we believe that the best way to achieve it, and indeed to improve the Bill, would be to accept Amendments from both groups; that is, Amendments Nos. 4, 7, 14 and 17. I would he prepared to recommend to your Lordships that these particular Amendments should be accepted, and I suggest that they be passed when we come to them.
On Question, Amendment agreed to.
The DEPUTY SPEAKER: We then pass to Amendment No. 5. The Lord Lyell.
Lord LYELL Lord LYELL moved Amendment No. 5:
Page 1, line 20, leave out ("or vehicle") and insert (",vehicle or place").
The noble Lord said: My Lords, I think I spoke to Amendment No. 3 when speaking to Amendment No. 1. I beg to move.
On Question, Amendment agreed to.
The DEPUTY SPEAKER The DEPUTY SPEAKER: Amendment No. 6.
Lord STRABOLGI: My Lords, we have just been dealing with Amendment No. I, which has been passed. I think now the House should move to Amendment No. 2.
The DEPUTY SPEAKER: My Lords, I understood that the noble Lord, Lord Gray, had moved Amendment No. 2 and that we had accepted Amendment No. 2.
Lord LYELL: My Lords, I understood that the noble Lord, Lord Strabolgi, had suggested that, in order to achieve my noble friend's purpose, with which I am entirely at one, we should reject Amendment No. 2; we should not accept Amendment No. 2, but the other parts of the noble Lord's package of Amendments—I think that the noble Lord, Lord Strabolgi, spelled them out as Amendments Nos. 4, 7, 14 and 17—and that we could deal with them when we come to them. I understood that we were not content to accept Amendment No. 2.
The DEPUTY SPEAKER: My Lords, I understood that Amendment No. 2 was to be put and I put Amendment No. 2 and I think that it was agreed to. If this was a mistake let us go back and I will put Amendment No. 2 again.
Lord GRAY: My Lords, I beg leave to withdraw Amendment No. 2. I am grateful for what has been said in response to my speech. In view of the offer made to accept some of my Amendments, I feel that the case is met, and I beg leave to withdraw Amendment No. 2.
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
Lord LYELL Lord LYELL moved Amendment No. 3:
Page 1, line 19, leave out ("or vehicle") and insert (",vehicle or place").
The noble Lord said: My Lords, I beg to move.
The DEPUTY SPEAKER: We now pass to Amendment No. 4, which is an Amendment to Amendment No. 3.
Lord GRAY Lord GRAY moved, as an Amendment to Amendment No. 3, Amendment No. 4:
At end insert ("or transported on that vehicle").
The noble Lord said: My Lords, this is one of the Amendments which it has been indicated to the House would be acceptable to the Promotors and to the Government. I beg to move.
On Question, Amendment to the Amendment agreed to.
On Question, Amendment No. 3, as amended, agreed to.
Lord LYELL Lord LYELL moved Amendment No. 5:
Page 1, line 20, leave out ("or vehicle") and insert (",vehicle or place").
The noble Lord said: My Lords, I spoke to this Amendment earlier on when speaking to Amendment No. 1. I beg to move.
On Question, Amendment agreed to.
Lord LYELL Lord LYELL moved Amendment No. 6:
Page 2, line 2, leave out ("or vehicle") and insert (",vehicle or place").
On Question, Amendment agreed to.
The DEPUTY SPEAKER: My Lords, I have to inform the House that if Amendment No. 7 is agreed to I shall not be able to call Amendments Nos. 8 or 9.
5.10 p.m.
Lord GRAY Lord GRAY moved Amendment No. 7:
Page 2, line 6, leave out from ("the") to ("and") in line 8, and insert ("carrying on of a food business at those premises or on, at or from that stall, vehicle or place").
The noble Lord said: My Lords, this is another Amendment which, it has been
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indicated to the House, is acceptable to all concerned. I would reassure the House on the question of Amendment No. 8 falling that I have included in the wording of my Amendment the words which my noble friend Lord Lyell would include by his Amendment No. 8.
On Question, Amendment agreed to.
The DEPUTY SPEAKER: My Lords, I am informed by revised brief that r can call Amendment No. 8.
Lord LYELL Lord LYELL moved Amendment No. 8:
Page 2, line 8, leave out ("or vehicle") and insert (",vehicle or place").
On Question, Amendment agreed to.
Lord LYELL Lord LYELL moved Amendment No. 10:
Page 2, line 17, leave out ("or vehicle") and insert (",vehicle or place").
On Question, Amendment agreed to.
Lord LYELL Lord LYELL moved Amendment No. 11:
Page 2, line 24, leave out ("or vehicle") and insert (", vehicle or place").
On Question, Amendment agreed to.
Clause 2 [Interim order for closing food premises, stalls or vehicles where imminent risk of danger to health]:
Lord LYELL Lord LYELL moved Amendment No. 12:
Page 2, line 38, leave out ("or vehicle") and insert (",vehicle or place").
The noble Lord said: My Lords, would it be convenient to the House if at the same time I moved Amendment No. 13?
Several noble Lords: No.
Lord LYELL: In that case, my Lords, I beg to move Amendment No. 12.
On Question, Amendment agreed to.
Lord LYELL Lord LYELL moved Amendment No. 13:
Page 2, line 39, leave out ("or vehicle") and insert (",vehicle or place").
On Question, Amendment agreed to.
5.13 p.m.
Lord GRAY Lord GRAY moved Amendment No. 14:
Page 2, line 39, leave out from ("for") to ("involves") in line 40 and insert ("the carrying on of a food business").
The noble Lord said: My Lords, this is the third Amendment which, it has been indicated to the House, is acceptable both to the Government and to;my noble friend Lord Lyell. I beg to move.
On Question, Amendment agreed to.
Lord LYELL Lord LYELL moved Amendment No. 16:
Page 2, line 44, leave out ("or vehicle") and insert (", vehicle or place").
The noble Lord said: My Lords, I understand there has been an error and I think it is my fault. The noble Baroness the Deputy Speaker called Amendment No. 8; I understood that the House had accepted No. 7, which, inadvertently I believe, pre-empted No. 8. Is that the case?
The DEPUTY SPEAKER: My Lords, would the noble Lord kindly repeat that?
Earl ST. ALDWYN: Perhaps I can help, my Lords. It would appear that Amendment No. 8 was out of order and should not have been moved because No. 7 had been moved and carried. That is the advice I have received and I do not quite know how this matter can be put right. Would it be proper for the noble Baroness the Deputy Speaker to put Amendment No. 8 again so that we may say "Not-Content" and negative it? Would that be in order?
Lord GRAY: My Lords, the words in my Amendment No. 7 include those desired to be inserted by my noble friend Lord Lyell. Perhaps it is I who did not make that adequately clear to the noble Baroness the Deputy Speaker. If so, I apologise to the House and I hope that a simple remedy can be found.
Lord STRABOLGI: My Lords, the position is that we have recommended that Amendment No. 7 should be accepted, and No. 8, which is consequential, we have also recommended should be accepted; one does not pre-empt the other. I under-
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stood that the noble Baroness the Deputy Speaker put the Questions relating to those Amendments perfectly properly, but if the noble Earl, Lord St. Aldwyn, feels that she did not, then perhaps they could be put again, but both Amendments can be accepted.
The DEPUTY SPEAKER: My Lords, my original brief was that those Amendments were pre-empted. Subsequently I received a later brief which said that Amendment No. 8 was not pre-empted. Would it be convenient to the House if I were to put No. 8 again?
Lord LYELL: My Lords, may I remove the confusion by allowing the situation to stand as it is at the moment? We have accepted Amendment No. 7 and perhaps we may leave No. 8 as it is, it having also been accepted. May we now proceed with Amendment No. 16?
The DEPUTY SPEAKER: My Lords, if the House is satisfied with that, the decisions will stand and I can now put Amendment No. 16.
On Question, Amendment agreed to.
Lord GRAY Lord GRAY moved Amendment No. 17:
Page 2, line 44, leave out ("those purposes") and insert ("that purpose").
The noble Lord said: My Lords, I understand that this is the last of the Amendments which have found acceptance. I beg to move.
On Question, Amendment agreed to
Lord LYELL Lord LYELL moved Amendment No. 18:
Page 3, line 10, leave out ("or vehicle") and insert (", vehicle or place ").
On Question, Amendment agreed to.
Lord LYELL Lord LYELL moved Amendment No. 19:
Page 3, line 18, leave out ("or vehicle") and insert (",vehicle or place").
The noble Lord said: My Lords, I have already spoken to this; I beg to move.
On Question, Amendment, agreed to.
Clause 6 [Interpretation]:
5.19 p.m.
Lord LYELL Lord LYELL moved Amendment No. 20:
Leave out Clause 6 and insert the following new clause:
Interpretation
("6. Expressions used in this Act and in the regulations mentioned in section 1(1) of this Act shall, unless the context otherwise requires, have the same meaning in this Act as in those regulations.")
The noble Lord said: My Lords, this is simply an Amendment for clarification. I understand that, as drafted, Clause 6 could be unclear and might seem a little confusing. The purpose of the Amendment, along with the Amendments to Clauses 1 and 2 which the House has accepted, will correct any lack of clarity. I do not think I need explain the Amendment further: the new clause removes certain ambiguities and difficulties and makes for greater clarity.
Lord HUGHES: My Lords, I do not want to speak to this Amendment; I want to make matters more complicated than ever. It has taken a little time to understand what was going on regarding Amendments Nos. 7 and 8. The noble Earl, Lord St. Aldwyn, was perfectly correct; Amendment No. 8 could not possibly be in order because it purports to take out from line 8 words which had already been taken out by Amendment No. 7 and replaced by something else. So how can there be added to the Bill something to remove words which are no longer there? There must be some way of dealing with this matter. I should have thought that there should be some administrative way of dealing with such a palpable error.
On Question, Amendment agreed to.
Lord STRABOLGI Lord STRABOLGI moved Amendment No. 21:
Insert the following new clause:
"Effect of Order in Council under Section 52 of the Food and Drugs (Scotland) Act 1956
For the avoidance of doubt, the making of an Order in Council under section 52 of the Food and Drugs (Scotland) Act 1956, applying regulations made under section 13 of that Act to the Crown shall not have the effect of applying the provisions of this Act to the Crown."
The noble Lord said: I beg to move Amendment No. 21. This is a technical Amendment included to clarify that the provisions of the Bill will not apply to Crown properties. The Food and Drugs (Scotland) Act 1956, and the associated food hygiene regulations, do not apply to Crown properties either, although there is power in Section 52 of the 1956 Act whereby an Order in Council may be made so applying them. This is a longstanding power which has never been invoked, and there is no question now of it being used before the 1956 Act is updated and consolidated, as the Government intend. The provisions of this Bill would be included in that consolidation, and in the meantime it is appropriate to clarify that its provisions, like those of the 1956 Act, will not apply to the Crown. I beg to move.
On Question, Amendment agreed to.
The DEPUTY SPEAKER: My Lords, as there is some confusion about Amendment No. 8, with the permission of the House, I should like to call Amendment No. 8 again. The question is that Amendment No. 8 be agreed to. As many as are of that opinion will say, "Content"—
Lord STRABOLGI: My Lords, I should explain that I have just received advice that Amendment No. 8 is not necessary, and therefore it is not moved; it is withdrawn.
The DEPUTY SPEAKER: Amendment No. 8 is not moved.
5.25 p.m.
Lord LYELL: My Lords, I beg to move that this Bill do now pass.
Moved, That the Bill do now pass.—(Lord Lyell.)
Lord GRAY: My Lords, I am reluctant to detain the House any longer, but during our Committee stage I raised certain points: one general point, which at the time could not be answered, and one other, to which I was, inadvertently on the spur of the moment, given an answer which appears to be inaccurate. I expressed concern as to what would happen in a case where a person had his premises closed down and his food business put

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out of action, even where he had done nothing wrong himself and it was merely a case of the situation, or juxtaposition, of his premises in relation to other premises belonging to a third party. It was suggested at the time that the third party could he dealt with under the Bill.
In fact, the provision drawn to my attention on that occasion does not, I understand, touch it, and I would ask the Government if they would be good enough to bear in mind that it would be extremely unfair in certain circumstances that a man put in this position, who had done nothing wrong, and who had done his best to prevent something wrong happening on his premises, should be left with as his only recourse the bringing of a civil suit against the person who offended him. When I raised other points, I understand that the Government said that they might be looking at the 1956 Act, and it may be that when they do that, or when they look at the regulations being I understand, 'currently redrafted, they can deal with this point. The other point which I raised at the time, and which could not be fully answered then, was a general question as to whether the Bill's provisions as written covered aircraft, trains, and oil rigs, and I should be grateful to know whether or not any view on this has been reached.
Lord STRABOLGI: My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Gray, has raised three interesting points, and I should like to take this opportunity of thanking him for all the great trouble he has taken over the Bill, and for the various Amendments that he has suggested, some of which we have felt it useful to accept. The noble Lord asks about the question of the closure of premises resulting from the acts or default of a third party. I am advised that, for the purposes of civil law where a person whose food business is affected as a result of the fault or negligence of a third party, the ordinary civil remedies for nuisance or negligence on the part of that third party will be available to him, depending upon the circumstances.
For the purposes of criminal proceedings, Clause 4(2) of the Bill provides that Section 45(2) of the 1956 Act shall apply in relation to proceedings under this Bill as it applies in relation to proceedings under
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the 1956 Act. Section 45 of the Food and Drugs (Scotland) Act 1956 provides for the acquittal of a person, who, charged with a contravention, is able to satisfy the court that he has used all due diligence to secure compliance with the requirements, and that the contravention was attributable to someone else's fault. A defence is therefore available to the operator of a food business charged with a contravention of the regulations under the criminal law, where he can show that he used his best endeavours to comply with the standards imposed, and that a third party was responsible for the breach.
The noble Lord also raised the question of aircraft. So far as aircraft are concerned, legal advice is that they are not one of the subjects within the scope of the Food and Drugs (Scotland) Act 1956 or the associated food hygiene regulations, and that the Bill will therefore not apply to them in any case. The need for control of food hygiene on aircraft is not pressing, since catering arrangements are based on pre-packed food supplied from establishments which are covered by statutory control, and further, the crockery and utensils are usually of the throw-away variety, but we take the point that the noble Lord has raised.
With regard to oil rigs, the Food and Drugs (Scotland) Act and associated food hygiene regulations would appear to apply by virtue of Section 3(1) of the Continental Shelf Act 1964, and contraventions in the Scottish area will be governed by the law in force in Scotland under Article 2 of the Continental Shelf Jurisdiction Order 1968. While it can be said, therefore, that the Bill also extends to oil rigs, again the mechanism for enforcement may present difficulties, but, as for trains, it is a separate question.
Lord ALPORT: My Lords, before the Bill passes I wonder whether I might put a point. The difficulties which have arisen, and which arose over a different Bill on a previous occasion—last week, in fact—where the instructions to the Lord Chairman or Speaker do not actually direct him or her as to the procedure to he followed, places the Speaker in a very difficult position indeed. I wonder, having listened to this part of the debate, whether it is in fact right for us to pass this Bill, in case there may be some misunderstanding still extant in the Amendments which have

1063
been made which, if the Bill is passed, we shall not have another opportunity to correct in this House. I did not follow this in any detail, but I know very well the difficulties which the noble Baroness had to face in putting the various Amendments to the House. It seems to me not only that there would be arguments for preparing the procedures rather more accurately, perhaps, than appears to have happened on this and on previous occasions, but also there may be misunderstanding with regard to the final form the Bill takes now, at Third Reading. Therefore, I wonder whether the formality of the Third Reading and of the Motion that the Bill do now pass should not he delayed, at any rate until another occasion, when it would not occupy any of the time of the House and would give an opportunity for any changes to be made which are necessary as a result of any misunderstandings.
Baroness LLEWELYN-DAVIES of HASTOE: My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, particularly for his kind words about the difficulties of the Deputy Speaker. I think everybody in this House recognises perfectly clearly that the difficulties we got into this afternoon were in no way the fault of the Deputy Speaker. Indeed, contradictory briefs have been raining down on her during the afternoon, and I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Alport, for raising that point.
As to his further point, on the best advice I have I think the Bill is now clear and correct, and that when we read it in Hansard tomorrow we shall find that it would be quite correct to go on now. And if indeed we are finished with this part of it, perhaps the Question, That this Bill do now pass, can be put.
Earl ST. ALDWYN: My Lords, I had in any case intended to say a word on the Motion, That this Bill do now pass, but what has happened this afternoon has to my mind made it even more important that I should say it. Yesterday we had the Report stage, on which there were no Amendments. I appreciate that this was done for the convenience of various Members of your Lordships' House, but I think I am right in saying that, although it is not strictly set out in the Companion,the Procedure Committee has deprecated the moving of Amendments on Third
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Reading other than for the purpose of tidying up matters which were not entirely clear at preceding stages, particularly the Report stage. If these Amendments had been put down on Report, then, although an error had inadvertently taken place, it could have been put right on Third Reading. I hope that the House will take careful note that it is highly undesirable that Amendments should be moved on Third Reading except, and only except, for the purpose of tidying up something which is found to be wrong after Report.
Baroness LLEWELYN-DAVIES of HASTOE: My Lords, with the leave of the House perhaps I may entirely endorse what the noble Earl has said. When we were discussing these matters in the Select Committee of your Lordships' House on Practice and Procedure, it was agreed by everybody that business could be expedited, could be made more efficient, if only noble Lords would stick to our own rules and customs—and customs are just as important as rules. This is a perfect example: that at Third Reading we should have only corrections. If we had done all this on Report, today's business would have been very much easier for the whole House, and I am indeed grateful to the noble Earl for raising this matter. I endorse what he says. Of course I agree that the business managers always consult the convenience of your Lordships, but what is to the convenience of some noble Lords is not always to the convenience of others. On that note, I think perhaps the Question might be put, That this Bill do now pass.
On Question, Bill passed, and returned to the Commons.

EEC ENVIRONMENT POLICY: ECC REPORTS
5.35 p.m.
Lord ASHBY Lord ASHBY rose to move, That this House takes note of the following Reports of the European Communities Committee on EEC Environment Policy:—

Sixteenth Report (HL 87) on organochlorine compounds—R/1628/76.

Thirty-first Report (HL 139) on plant protection products—R/2027/76.

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Twenty-second Report (HL 93) on water standards for freshwater fish—R/2005/76.

Thirty-second Report (HL 140) on water standards for shellfish—R/2641/76.

The noble Lord said: My Lords, I beg to move the Motion standing in my name on the Order Paper. Your Lordships' Select Committee on the European Communities is charged with reporting on matters which come from the Commission which raise issues of policy or principle. The four reports which are before your Lordships this afternoon have been before the Sub-Committee presided over by the noble Baroness, Lady White, and we decided that they raised matters of principle which should be debated in your Lordships' House. I am very grateful to the noble Baroness for giving me the privilege of opening this debate.
The questions are important because they confront Her Majesty's Government with a dilemma. On the one hand, if the Government were to comply with the proposals in one of these Directives before your Lordships today we would be obliged to incur what the noble Lord, Lord Nugent, described as "astronomical" expenditures, and, as I shall explain in a moment, expenditures which are totally unnecessary for the purpose of the Directive. If we comply with another one of these Directives, we shall be committed to a prodigious and almost useless programme of monitoring, using scarce manpower and resources. On the other hand, if the Government do not comply with the Directives on environmental issues, without giving compelling reasons for their dissent, then we create the impression—the false impression—that Britain is querulously unto-operative in environmental matters, that we are dragging our feet in this campaign and that we are encouraging pollution havens where people can dump waste on the cheap. It is a dilemma between totally unnecessary expenditure and totally unjustifiable tarnish of our public image in Europe, and your Sub-Committee hopes that this debate may help to clarify these issues.
Two of these four Directives are about pesticides; and, fortunately, the noble Lord, Lord Skelmersdale, is here, and will
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speak upon these with far more authority than I can. All I should like to say is that there is in the United Kingdom a surveillance of the use of pesticides and fungicides under the Pesticide Safety Precautions Scheme. It operates a voluntary phasing out of dangerous, persistent pesticides. How successful is it? The simplest way to find out how successful it is, is to find out how much of these pesticides accumulates in the bodies of human beings. This has been done for organo-chlorine compounds, which are the most notorious of them, since 1963. Over these last 14 years there has been a steady decline in the levels of these in the fatty tissues of human beings in Britain. They never were a threat to health, and today we are almost at the bottom of the league table for concentrations of pesticide residues in human beings—and, for that matter, in many animals, which are monitored, too. So the only real point of contention in these two reports is whether to substitute some legal ban for the voluntary process which is being operated at present; and there is in any case provision for doing this under the Control of Pollution Act 1974.
The other two Directives I shall have to say a little more about. One is on the quality of freshwater for fish, and the other is on the quality of salt water for shellfish. I would remind your Lordships of what is in these two Directives, and why the proposals cause such disquiet. Then I should like to put the facts very briefly into a perspective which I hope will persuade Her Majesty's Government to make strong representations, not only against these two Directives but against the general philosophy which lies behind them.
I begin with the Directive on water standards for freshwater fish. Its purpose is unambiguous. It is to impose quality objectives which—and this is a quotation from the Directive,
"aim at allowing fish…to live in favourable conditions".
It applies only to waters already capable of supporting fish. Its intention is clear: it is for the sake of the fish, not for the sake of the fishermen or for the sake of those who eat the fish. This policy—to protect nature for its own sake not just for the convenience of man—was in the declaration made by the Heads of State of the

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Community when they met in 1972, and it is one wholeheartedly supported in the United Kingdom. But from the beginning Her Majesty's Government made that attitude clear. They prepared a memorandum about the draft declaration to come from the Heads of State of the Community, and they said this:
"…the important thing is to agree on objectives. When it comes to implementation, the most effective and acceptable means of making progress should be employed".
This is the gist of the matter. It is not over ends that Britain finds herself in disagreement with the environmental policies of the Commission; it is over means.
The objective of the proposals for freshwater fish is to allow the fish to live in favourable conditions. It would seem to me that a reasonable way to reach this objective would be to ask the fish—in other words, to monitor fish populations. But this is not the way the Commission is tackling the problem. The Commission's Directive prescribes 16 parameters—levels of temperature, oxygen content, acidity and concentrations of a number of chemicals—all of which have to be monitored regularly. If these levels were proposed merely as guidelines, or for information, they would be quite interesting and ueful, but ten out of these 16 levels are mandatory. If they are adopted by the Council and we do not comply with them we shall be breaking Community law; if we comply with them, we shall be committed to a monstrous expenditure.
May I pass on to your Lordships what the National Water Council stated in evidence: they said that if all rivers and streams which presently support fish life need to be designated under Article 4, which specifies which rivers are capable of supporting fish, then:
"…water authorities collectively might have to spend thousands of millions of pounds on sewers and sewage treatment works to comply".
If expenditure on this vast scale were essential in order to keep fish in our rivers, the case would at least be arguable. But the plain fact is that many of our rivers carry flourishing populations of fish and yet do not comply with the mandatory standards prescribed in this Directive. Let me put on record one or two facts. Eighty-nine per cent. of the rivers in
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England and Wales carry fish. But just over one-third of these fish-carrying rivers (36 per cent.) do not comply with all the mandatory standards prescribed by the Commission. Here are a couple of examples supplied to your Sub-Committee by the Severn-Trent Water Authority. The Afon Garno is a salmon nursery and trout fishery. It carries no contaminants, except those from natural sources and yet it fails to comply with two mandatory and four guideline standards imposed by the Directive. The Severn at Trimpley is a coarse fishery used extensively by match anglers. This river fails to comply with seven of the quality standards proposed in the Directive. Indeed, the Severn-Trent Authority told us that no fishery in a river in their region would wholly comply with the conditions of the Directive.
If the Directive becomes law, one of the common disqualifications in English rivers would be too high a temperature. The mandatory maximum in the Directive is 20 degrees. We were told that this is a misprint for 25 degrees, but I notice that it reappears as 20 degrees in the First Report on the State of the Environment published only two or three weeks ago. However, 20 degrees (or perhaps 25 degrees) is the maximum for summer and in winter 10 degrees. If this standard were to be applied to the Trent, the power stations there, which generate 25 per cent. of the Central Electricity Generating Board's total capacity, would either have to close down or spend millions of pounds a year to cool the water below the present level which is just under 30 degrees; and yet the Trent—our Sub-Committee was assured—is used by hundreds of thousands of anglers every year.
In England and Wales there are some 12,000 kilometres of river which carry fish, but which do not comply with the standards prescribed in this Directive as being favourable to fish. The fish are unaware of this disqualification and I suggest that it would be unreasonable to ask Her Majesty's Government to ban them from these rivers. I would ask instead another question: as we can afford only limited resources for the improvement of rivers, would it not be better to employ these resources on rivers which at present are too polluted to carry fish? May I now direct your Lordships'

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attention to another of these Directives, one which sets water standards for shellfish. This Directive too is explicitly stated to be for the sake of the shellfish, not for the sake of those who sell or eat shellfish. Like the Directive for freshwater fish, this Directive too prescribes quality requirements for the water rather than evidence that the fish are living happily in the environment where you find them. In this case, if you include a list of nine metals which have to be monitored, the total number of parameters to be kept under surveillance is 19. Among the quality objectives are some which are astonishingly unrealistic. Thus, there is one that the temperature variation within six hours must not exceed five degrees. To achieve this standard, it would be necessary to control the rain, and the water and the sunshine; feats which are at present beyond the capacity not only of Her Majesty's Government but of any Member State in the Community. Another quality objective is to keep the bacterial coliform count below 300 per 100 millilitres for 90 per cent. of the samples and below 500 for the remaining 10 per cent. This objective has nothing to do with the welfare of the shellfish which will flourish in colicounts thousands of times higher than this. It would be relevant only if the shellfish were to be eaten without any further treatment. This could be achieved by chlorinating the water, but that would lead to other harmful effects. That shellfish should be safe to eat is obviously essential; but that is not what this Directive is about and the efficient way to ensure that shellfish are safe to eat is to do as we do already, to insist on treatment between harvesting and marketing.
This confusion between the desire to promote the wellbeing of shellfish and the desire to protect public health has been criticised also by another Member State of the Community. On May 6th 1977 the German Bundesrat had a number of adverse comments to make about the Directive and declared that it needed amendment. But apart from this confusion, the main objection to the Directive at present is its reliance on the monitoring of 19 parameters as the means to ensure the health of shellfish. To do this would put an intolerable burden upon the scientific services which are employed to protect the environment.
The Lancashire and Western Sea Fisheries Joint Committee reckon that it would need some 400 manhours of field and laboratory work per annum to monitor one average-size shellfish bed; and the Shellfish Association of Great Britain reckon that some 10,000 sampling stations would be needed if this Directive were to be complied with. At a rough guess, therefore, compliance with this Directive might commit well over a million man-hours, perhaps up to 4 million manhours per annum for monitoring shellfish beds.
My Lords, it would be a pity to put these criticisms before your Lordships it' there were no remedy—and I speak as a committed pro-European. Britain is as anxious as are any of her partners to provide favourable conditions for the growth and flourishing of freshwater fish and shellfish. The simple way to work towards this objective is not to prescribe long lists of parameters in the water—some of them, as you see, quite demonstrably unrealistic—which have to be complied with: it is to monitor the fish. So I hope that one outcome of this debate may be that Her Majesty's Government will bring pressure to bear on the Commission to give up this cumbersome and misguided method of trying to protect the environment and to put in its place three very simple principles. The first is to let the fish and shellfish decide whether the waters are favourable for them; the second is to monitor very carefully their health and growth and—very important—to publish the results of that monitoring and to ask the other Member States in the Community to publish their results, too. The third is to act promptly to treat the environment at the first sign that the fish or the shellfish are under strain.
This brings me to the last point I want to make to your Lordships. How did these misconceived Directives come to be composed? And what steps can be taken to prevent in future the embarrassment—to the Commission, I am sure, as well as to the Government—which follows the criticisms which have to be made of these Directives and not only these; but similar criticisms have had to be made on two other Directives, one on effluents from wood pulp mills and the other on the waste from titanium dioxide plants.
Before issuing a Directive, the Environment and Consumer Protection Service in Brussels invites a panel of experts, drawn from Member States, to give advice. For freshwater fish there is a wealth of sound advice available, because the Food and Agriculture Organisation has a body called the European Inland Fisheries Advisory Commission (EIFAC) which is a body of experts who have published an impressive series of reports on the conditions favourable for fish. The convenor of EIFAC is one of our own authorities on fish, Mr. J. S. Alabaster, who is at the Water Research Station at Stevenage. The Commission's panel drew heavily on the report of EIFAC. They gave good advice to the Commission. But when the Directive appeared, it was quite inconsistent with the experts' advice on several very important points including the levels of oxygen which are tolerated by fish; and no reason for this was given.
There is a similar inconsistency between the advice given to the Commission by its panel of experts on shellfish and the terms of the Directive which purported to be based on the experts' advice. So I hope that a second outcome of this debate may be that Her Majesty's Government can persuade the Commission's Environment and Consumer Protection Service to set out clearly the scientific evidence upon which they base their Directives and, in particular, to state their reasons when their Directives differ from the advice that their own experts have given to them.
My Lords, those of us who have been to Brussels to discuss these problems with members of the Commission have the impression that part of the difficulty is that the Environment and Consumer Protection Service has much too small a staff and not a sufficient spread of expertise to deal with the demands made upon it. There is a mismatch between the heavy obligations to fulfil an ambitious programme which was set out by the Council's Declaration of 1973 and the resources given to this part of the Commission's staff to do that job.
I wonder whether Her Majesty's Government, during this period when Britain's influence can be most easily exerted in Brussels, could encourage the Commission to strengthen the staff who have to draft these difficult and highly technical Directives; because misguided
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Directives of the kind before your Lordships this afternoon and of the kind that have been before you before, are going to make, if they are approved, a waste of millions of units of account in Member States; not to mention the awkward controversies they cause which strain good relations between Britain and the Commission.
But the most important expression of opinion which, I hope, may arise out of this debate concerns what one might call the "philosophy" of policies to protect the environment. The foundation of these policies is, again, in the Declaration of the Council in 1973. The Commission's present policy of harmonisation is not consistent with this Declaration of their own Council. There are two passages in it which have been over-looked in most of the environmental Directives with which your Lordships' Sub-Committee has had to deal. One is the statement that concern for the environment should be—and I quote—"at the lowest cost to the Community". To spend huge sums of money to make water favourable to fish when it is already so favourable that people pay to fish in it, does not seem to me to be doing something "at the lowest cost to the Community". The other phrase is that in setting objectives—and, again, I quote from the Declaration—allowance should be made for "the specific regional conditions". To spend huge sums so that you get exactly the same water quality standards in Italy and Scotland does not take account of "specific regional conditions". I should hope, therefore, that Her Majesty's Government could persistently press this point when they are negotiating Directives with the Commission.
So, my Lords, I come back to what I said at the beginning. Over ends, there is no fundamental conflict between Britain and the rest of the Community. Over means, Britain has great experience to offer her partners because we were in the business of protecting the environment long before any other European country; for 114 years ago the noble Earl, Lord Derby, made a speech in this House which initiated the first really effective means of controlling one of the kinds of pollutions of the air, the acids coming from alkali works. Ever since then, this House has played an important part in legislation on the protection of the environment. There is still much to be put right; but our

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pragmatic approach has been a proven success over more than a century. I believe, therefore, that we have much to offer our European partners towards a genuine harmonisation of laws to protect the environment; but, my Lords, we still have to persuade the Commission that there is a difference between harmonisation and homogenisation. I beg to move.
Moved, That this House takes note of the following Reports of the European Communities Committee on EEC Environment Policy:—

Sixteenth Report (HL 87) on organochlorine compounds—R/1628/76.

Thirty-first Report (HL 139) on plant protection products—R/2027/76.

Twenty-second Report (HI, 93) on water standards for freshwater fish—R/2005/76.

Thirty-second Report (HL 140) on water standards for shellfishR/2641/76.—(Lord Ashby)

5.59 p.m.
Lord SKELMERSDALE: My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Ashby, has given us several valuable pointers as to the way we might well conduct ourselves and the points that we might well follow throughout the course of this debate. He has made particular reference to his two reports on fish: the quality of water for shellfish and the quality of water for freshwater fish. I am a little unsure of my ground on these two; and I should like to draw your Lordships' attention to the two papers on pesticides as reported in the EEC Sub-Committee G's 16th and 31st Reports concerning organo-chlorine compounds and plant protection products respectively.
I have been especially interested in these linked subjects from the time they first appeared as Consultative Documents last summer, not only because they refer to chemicals that I use in my work as a horticulturalist—and here I must declare a pecuniary interest—but also because the chemicals affect the air we breathe and the food we eat to such a marked degree that anyone who takes the slightest interest in the quality of life on this planet cannot fail to be interested and, moreover, concerned that very dangerous chemicals are used in agriculture and horticulture, and indeed in such unlikely industries as carpet making I will refer to this briefly later.
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Although we are debating the two Papers together—and in fact they arrived in Westminster almost simultaneously—they arise from two different directorates in Brussels. The Report R/1628/76 is an interim one to the council on some persistent organo-chlorine compounds and is a Health Directorate document, whereas the draft Directive emanates from the Agricultural Directorate. For convenience, I will be referring to them as the Report and Directive respectively throughout my remarks.
Let us take the Report first. Although this suggests that legislation will be needed in the future, it does not deal with any of the Directives currently under consideration. As it is a Report and not a draft Directive, it is probably not a proper subject for debate at all, but the Sub-Committee, on which I serve in a minor capacity under the very strict though fair chairmanship of the noble Baroness, Lady White, thought that it was so important that our own Report (No. 16) needed verbal underlining.
It sometimes seems to me, as a comparative newcomer to your Lordships' House, that some subjects do not get the treatment in Parliament that they deserve, that the Official Report loses something by not being able to use capital letters, red ink or quotation marks, making it very difficult to stress points that really are important. I know that this is quite impossible, that there are both technical and visual difficulties and that there are Parliamentary techniques for emphasising particular points; but, my Lords, this Report deals with poisons and here you can imagine that the word is in the biggest capital letters that it is possible to print—or, in this case, not to print.
At the risk of being contradicted by noble Lords who are much more scientifically-orientated than I am, I would define a persistent organo-chlorine as a chemical based on the chlorine atom, which is so constructed as to enter the sap of a plant, making the whole plant toxic to animals—including man—for a certain period. This period may be anything from a few days to several weeks. One can take for example Dicofol as an acaricide for the control of mites on apples and strawberries where the minimum interval to be observed between the last application and harvesting of the crop is seven

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days. DDT, as we are all well aware, is still used on a whole range of pests on agricultural and horticultural crops, and here the minimum interval to be observed between the last application and the harvesting of edible crops is two weeks.
There are of course many other examples, but I hope that I have made my point that these chemicals are highly dangerous for some considerable time after application. In many cases they are also dangerous while they are actually being applied and, as an employer, I have often had to insist on the wearing of face masks and gloves while they are being handled. It is even more alarming to know that organo-chlorines can persist in air, water and soil as well as in foodstuffs.
I meant to paint a frightening picture—and this goes some way to explaining why the use of these chemicals is, it would appear from evidence that we have received, on the decrease and not, as may be deduced from the Commission's Report, on the increase. Indeed as we say in our conclusion under paragraph 13(a), on page 5, we know of no organochlorine pesticides currently used in the Community which are likely to be used increasingly in the future. It is our view that these chemicals are so dangerous, both to the user and to the end consumer of the product, that it is next door to impossible that either manufacturers will wish to increase their production or farmers to increase their use.
It is in everyone's interest to phase them out completely; but—and this is most important—food must be produced economically and this means that pests must be adequately and cheaply controlled. This cannot be achieved while there is no alternative chemical on the market that works as well as, or better than, the persistant organo-chlorine. Therefore the "considerable amount of research" to which the Commission refers would be far more justified in developing alternative chemicals than, as they propose, that:
"this should be directed towards those organochlorine compounds which are likely to be increasingly used in the future".
I do not think that it would serve any useful purpose to emphasise the rest of our Committee's conclusions and opinions on the Report, which are what one might
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term the theoretical side of the argument. The practical side then would be the Commission's Draft Directive on Plant Protection Products. These include all inorganic mercurial and many organochlorine pesticides, and the points I have made already on the Report refer equally well to the Directive. However, theory and practice do not always go together, and practical considerations very often outweigh the theoretical ones to such an extent that the theory has to be re-thought and re-written.
I was fortunate enough to be able to go to Brussels earlier this year with the noble Baroness, Lady White, and the noble Lord, Lord Ashby, who briefly referred to this excursion to the EEC capital. I was able to meet M. Bartholemy, the Director for Agricultural Legislation, and his colleagues. As the Sub-Committee had already decided that the key to the whole problem was the legislation that may be required to implement the Directive, one of the first points raised was the suitability of the Pesticides Safety Precaution Scheme (the PSPS for short, to which the noble Lord also referred). In all other EEC countries it is necessary to introduce legislation to control or ban the use of plant protection chemicals. In the United Kingdom, however, we have an anomalous situation where the use of pesticides is controlled by the non-statutory PSPS. This controls the pesticide products which are put on the United Kingdom market and the precautions to be observed in their use.
Under the Scheme the manufacturers concerned agree not to market a product containing any new chemical for use in agricultural or food storage plants or to introduce a new formulation which could show an increased hazard until recommendations for safe use have been agreed with Government departments concerned.
It would appear to be part and parcel of the Agricultural Chemical Approval Scheme, under which proprietary brands of horticultural chemicals can be approved; and if not, it must be very closely allied to them. It is, I understand, the only voluntary scheme there is and, although it is backed up by sections of various Acts of Parliament, for example, the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974, the Pharmacy and Poisons Act 1933 and, most important, the Health and Safety (Agriculture) (Poisonous Substances) Regulations 1975,

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the Commission, it appeared, are extremely unhappy about its being able to enforce the Directive in question. This is a point on which I am slightly at variance with some of my colleagues on the Committee, who believe that no harm would be done to have a mandatory scheme, and that the United Kingdom should in this matter operate consistently with the rest of the Community.
One of the main problems as explained by M. Bartholemy is that it does not cover third party imports and retail sales outlets. However, there is a suggestion by the newly-formed Trade Association covering the distributors of agricultural chemicals that there should be a parallel scheme for them. So far as imports go, there seems to be no reason why a section of one of the Customs and Excise Acts should not be used for this purpose.
I am very afraid, though, that a recent Government decision may well put the seal on the argument or, indeed, completely invalidate it. The operators of the Agricultural Chemicals Approval Scheme—that is, the Ministry of Agriculture—have published a booklet called Approved Products for Farmers and Growers annually since the very beginning of the scheme. This contains a list of approved products and gives guidance on the efficient and safe use of agricultural chemicals. Every year it has been free to farmers and growers and, indeed, everyone directly concerned with the working of the scheme. This year, however, the Government have decided that the charge shall be£2 per copy.
I fully realise that this is in line with current thinking that users of the Ministry of Agriculture's services should pay an economic charge. To a certain extent I feel this is the right attitude, and it is right to charge for such things as growing season inspections and soil tests. These are going to be used in any event especially by certain seed producers and exporters who will not be able to carry out their normal business otherwise. The situation however, is even worse than I thought, because when I went to Quantock House —our new prestige agricultural office in Taunton—yesterday, I discovered at the door not only a huge orange notice advertising the booklet, but also the information that it was available only from Government bookshops—in other words,
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by post at£2·17 a copy. Furthermore, I was told that the staff were not allowed to sell it at all.
My question, therefore, is this: by charging£2 for this booklet, which lists such plant protection products as are available and approved in this country, many of them being included in the annex to the draft Directive, have the Government considered that many small-scale and perhaps not so small-scale producers will, at worst, not now bother to get it or, at best, have out-of-date copies and therefore will not be acquainted either with the new or better products or, more seriously, will continue to use chemicals for purposes which are not now recommended or are indeed illegal? If I am right in my assumption—and I hope I am not—do the Government agree that the whole scheme will break down so far as the users are concerned and could ultimately become a danger to the health of the whole community? I believe there are still free individual leaflets on particular chemicals, and I hope those will remain and will remain uncharged for.
However, I am straying slightly from the Directive. As I have said, I agree with witnesses from the Ministry and therefore hold slightly differing ideas from some of my colleagues on the Sub-Committee as regards the operation of the draft Directive; but I do not differ at all from their other findings. I agree entirely that so far as possible one must minimise the risk of using any chemical, but I am among the first to say that, in order to ban a chemical totally, an efficient substitute must not only be found but must be tested and approved for general use. For example, Dieldrin is still recommended in this country as a dip to control cabbage root fly simply because, although there are other products, they are not as efficient. Even so, in the annex to the Directive, it is listed as a product which should be banned for this purpose and used only for certain purposes, mainly in non-edible plants, from 1979. That is only two years away, and I doubt whether it would be possible to perfect an alternative and have it tested and approved in that time. Incidentally, Dieldrin is also used in the carpet industry to control carpet beetle and will continue, presumably, to be so used since the draft Directive covers only plant protection products and not the uses of what I term

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to myself toxic, mainly agricultural, chemicals which perhaps would be more appropriate.
Again, it is recommended that inorganic mercury compounds, with the exception of mercuric oxide, which has a partial derogation, should be banned immediately. One such is mercurous chloride, perhaps better known as calomel. This is a widely used chemical, both commercially and by amateur vegetable growers, as a dip for seedlings to control diseases of brassica crops, particularly club root. That is an extremely important pest which could destroy a cabbage crop completely. It is also used as a seed dressing to control white rot on onions. So far as I know, it has not yet been effectively superseded. My Lords, I could continue giving examples, but I hope I have shown that many of the proposed banned and partially banned products have uses which it would be a mistake to withdraw. So long as they are carefully used, following correctly the directions on the labels and in the PSPS booklet, they are perfectly safe. I hope, therefore, that derogations from the list will be applied for and given.
Lastly, my Lords, Sub-Committee G has a general comment which has come up before in these debates. This is the subject of a bibliography which we feel should be appended to any Directive or report. It is the old "niggle" on which the noble Lord, Lord Ashby, has very outspoken views, although he did not comment on it this afternoon. I could hardly, then, refrain from discussing it very briefly with M. Bartholemy. We feel that it is not only desirable but requisite for those concerned with the detailed surveillance of the reports to be able to read the background and, especially in the case of your Lordships' Scrutiny Committee, to be able to check this with facts as they appear in the United Kingdom.
I got a very interesting reaction to this proposal; I learned that it was not the practice of the Commission at any level to question experts who have been asked for their opinions. Indeed, I had the impression that it was a practice to be avoided at all costs—and, my Lords, I still fail to understand it, despite the earlier remarks of the noble Lord, Lord
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Ashby, and in spite of the possible lack of expertise among the Commission staff. Surely, in order to report fully on a particular matter, it is absolutely necessary to get all the facts. One is that any piece of scientific data can frequently be interpreted in more than one way. Is it not possible for a committee of your Lordships' House to form a valid judgment when different views are expressed? I think it is, especially when several members of the committee have the scientific expertise required to judge between differing views. Even if this was not the case, it would be much easier to find and approach the appropriate witnesses after one had read the background information and decided which points needed to be followed up. I also feel that it would be a great help to the civil servants who are concerned in each particular case. Often they have their own channels of communication and know the background, but I am assured that that is not always the case, or indeed adequate.
My Lords, I have spoken for far too long and I must apologise for taking up the time of your Lordships' House to quite such an extent; but I hope your Lordships will realise that this is a subject dear to my heart and one about which I am pleased to be able to say that I am a tiny cog in a gigantic machine. If any of my remarks today have fallen on even slightly fertile ground—I hope not completely sterile—I shall be amply recompensed.
6.16 p.m.
Baroness WHITE: My Lords, I am sure that all Members of your Lordships' House will join with me in congratulating, first, the noble Lord, Lord Ashby, for a masterly presentation of these reports which are before us today and, secondly, the noble Lord, Lord Skelmersdale, who indeed showed a considerable knowledge as well as a very deep concern with the two reports on which he spoke. We were very glad indeed to have his company in Brussels and to feel that we had someone with us who, in his own practical life, had direct experience of these matters and therefore could speak with knowledge as well as conviction.
As the reports have been dealt with so competently and so comprehensively, I do not wish to retrace the ground, but I

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think it is of some interest that this very week the United Kingdom ceases to hold the presidency of the Commission and it is perhaps of some significance that the six months during which for the first time we have occupied that role have not been entirely happy ones either for us or for the Commission. I am not now speaking of some of the major matters of difference between ourselves and our European partners, because I doubt whether any different presidency could have influenced some of the really deep divisions of interest which persist, but I had frankly hoped that during this period we might perhaps have been a little more successful than I think we have been in persuading our European colleagues at the official level, in the European Parliament and in the Economic and Social Committee which examines some of the matters which come to our Select Committee, that our United Kingdom difficulties were well-founded and not, as I am afraid they sometimes consider, due simply either to some antipathy towards the Community as such or to some peculiar insular obstinacy on our part.
It is therefore distressing to those of us who are certainly not antipathetic to the Community as such and, I hope, not unduly obstinate, that we have not made as much progress as we would have wished in increasing mutual understanding on these matters, in spite of the best endeavours on our part and, I am sure, on the part of the Commission in Brussels—and also, I should like to stress, the quite excellent personal relationships between ourselves and the staff of the Commission. But I think that the matter must be taken a little further if our debate today is to be of any real value, and I propose to do so with regard to the two reports on freshwater fish and on shellfish.
However, before I do so, I am under an obligation to draw to the attention of your Lordships some remarks in the Sixteenth Report on organo-chlorine compounds, on behalf of my noble friend Lord Shackleton. He had very much wished to be here when we discussed the two reports on organo-chlorine compounds and pesticides, but he is abroad and is not able to be here. But he wrote to me, because, as a dedicated ornithologist and naturalist himself, he felt that we had not given due weight to the concern which had been felt when some of the substances
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referred to in the report, and in the draft Directive, were used to a far greater degree than they are at present, particularly during the 1960s.
He said that our reference in the Sixteenth Report to the effect of pesticides on birds, in which we said that this had been the cause of some concern, was entirely inadequate. He said that these particular substances had,
"…a very serious effect indeed on several species of wild life and not just on falcons",
to which we had particularly referred.
"If it had not been for a great deal of agitation…the effects would almost certainly have been much more serious…These paragraphs are very misleading since it looks as if it was simply a matter of ornithological interests against those of gardeners".
I can very well understand the feelings of my noble friend Lord Shackleton in the matter; I promised that I would refer to it in this debate.
We took the matter up with the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food and they, of course, entirely concurred that the changes in the practice in this country were due to the concern felt from about 1956 onwards, when large numbers of seed-eating birds were found dead in cereal growing areas in the spring, and that it was certainly true that the activities of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and the British Trust for Ornithology, in particular, were to influence Her Majesty's Government and the advisory organisation of the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, with the effect that we have, as the report makes perfectly clear, very considerably diminished the use of a number of these products. The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, has complained that it took the Government quite a while to reach this conclusion. Public interest was aroused by the American book Silent Spring, but I think we owe it to the organisations concerned, as well as to my noble friend Lord Shackleton personally, to admit that perhaps we might have been a little more emphatic in our reference to this point. I do not propose to say any more about those two reports, because the noble Lord, Lord Skelmersdale, has dealt with the details most adequately.
However, I should like to say just one or two words about the fish reports,

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partly because I must confess that it was very gratifying to find that one of them was the subject of a feature article by David Wood in The Times newspaper of 30th May, which I am sure a number of your Lordships saw, headed, "Cockles and mussels, alive, alive-o!" My noble friend Lord Ashby has made plain why it is that we are so much concerned with these two reports. Nevertheless, I wonder whether perhaps some of the misunderstanding which has undoubtedly existed between ourselves and Brussels has been due to the United Kingdom's attitude to the way in which these draft Directives are really intended to be carried out; that we take them much too literally.
This had not occurred to me, because they seem to be specific enough. But I have been looking at the report of the very brief debate which took place in the European Parliament last February on the draft Directive on freshwater fish. I am sorry to say that, in spite of all our feelings about shellfish, this Directive was simply passed "on the nod", although there were absolutely glaring difficulties about it. But it simply went through with no debate whatsoever on 6th June, so far as the European Parliament was concerned. Of course, fortunately, that does not mean that it is legislatively enacted.
But in that very revealing debate in the European Parliament on 7th February, when the rapporteur, Mrs. Kruchow, presented her report, she was aware, because of a brief amendment which was subsequently withdrawn, which had been put forward by a Conservative Member from another place who is a member of the European Parliament, that there were some reservations about this draft Directive. So she said, rather tartly, that she could not commend the proposed amendment—innocent and insignificant as I felt it to be—because it was based on a misunderstanding:
"The directive we are discussing today does not deal with the existence of fish in fresh-water areas capable of supporting them, but with the fresh-water areas in which the individual governments have decided fish should be able to survive".
This is an attitude of mind to which we, I am afraid, as my noble friend Lord Ashby, has already indicated, find it extraordinarily hard to adapt ourselves. I raised both eyebrows when I read that.
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But then I read further the contribution of M. Noè, who spoke in that brief debate. He took the same line as the rapporteur and was urging Mr. Spicer to withdraw his modest amendment, which he also felt was based on a misunderstanding. He said that Mr. Spicer's anxieties can,
"…have no real foundation if one considers the criteria on the basis of which the water-quality classifications have been and will be applied—namely, according to the particular stretch of the river concerned".
He went on to explain that the parameters, which worried all of us so much, would be expected to be applied, in effect, only in the,
"…upper reaches of rivers, that is the section near to the source, for which conditions permitting fish to thrive are laid down. But bit by bit as one descends towards the river mouth these criteria are retained only where possible. A high level of industrialization, of course, makes retention scarcely possible".
He then went on in further detail.
But it appears to me that what is intended by these Directives, if one takes the stance of the members of the European Parliament, is not that they should be absolutely binding upon Governments of the Member States, and all one has to do is to indicate: "Here we have a reach of the river which does not cause us many problems. We will designate this and for the rest, so far as the draft Directives are concerned, we will quietly ignore their existence." Similarly, applying the same principle to the shellfish, which were not debated, it appeared to us, when we were considering this in the Sub-Committee, that there was at least a possibility that one need designate nothing at all. Therefore, if one designated no areas the Directive would not be operative.
My noble friend Lord Ashby very properly raised the moral dilemma in which one would be placed when one knew quite well that one was marketing shellfish from a certain area, or, mutatis mutandis, that in certain rivers fish were living, but decided that it would be much more convenient not to designate rivers unless they were already up to standard, or not to designate shellfish beds unless there was no doubt at all that they met all possible water-quality parameters, and that therefore, in effect, the Directive would be inoperative.

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If this is really true—I find it hard to believe, but the indications in this debate and in the European Parliament are that it may be—why are we all wasting our time? While we are doing all this work, why are our officials going to and fro between here and Brussels? If all that is intended is to devise a set of standards which in some few, almost ideal situations may be attained but for the rest one just shrugs one's shoulders and says, "All right, we will get along as best we can and we won't worry too much about it", then obviously we have been under a complete misapprehension. I believe that I gave the House a wrong date. The freshwater fish debate was on 14th January.
In perusing the brief debate, I turn next to the intervention of Mr. Tugendhat, who is a member of the Commission and who, therefore, was speaking officially for the Commission. The first point which worries me about his intervention is that he suggested that our objections to the scientific basis of this and various other draft Directives is misplaced, in the sense that the scientific data in any absolute form is not, as yet, available. Mr. Tugendhat proceeded to suggest that the data so far available upon which the Commission is working are based on studies conducted in artificial conditions. This is quite absurd. Through the water authorities and others, we in this country can provide the Commission with reams of data based not upon laboratory, artificial and simulated conditions but upon the actual conditions in the rivers.
It seems to me that Mr. Tugendhat was under some misapprehension as to why it is that we object constantly and urge constantly that the data upon which the propositions are made should be public and manifest, with all the various authorities properly quoted. He seems to regard the fact that the Commission are proceeding to make draft Directives on inadequate scientific evidence as an unfortunate fact which cannot be helped. However, I am sure that in particular those noble Lords who have been working in the Sub-Committee will agree that this is just not the case. Ample evidence is available, most particularly in the case of freshwater fish, from which proper scientific conclusions can be drawn.
Mr. Tugendhat then proceeded to say that,
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"…what the Commission is trying to do is to set a quality objective, but it will be up to the Member States themselves, each individual Member State, to decide how it should be achieved: it will be up to the Member State to say whether it should he one stretch of river or another, whether it should be the total river or just a part".
This is not what we in the Sub-Committee had understood to be the position. Had this been simply a question of quality objectives and not standards, and had these standards to be applied only to particular stretches of water which could be designated at will, then I repeat that we should not be worrying ourselves too much. The quality objectives would be something to aim at, but we should not be unduly harassed by the feeling that we were in breach of some international Community obligation.
At the end of that paragraph from which I have just quoted Mr. Tugendhat goes on to say that,
"…the overall objective standards will be imposed by the Community".
What does he mean? I do not know whether my noble friend Lady Birk, who is to reply to the debate, can clear up what appears to be quite plainly a confusion of thought, one which I must admit has not been made plain to us even after more than one visit to Brussels and the most interesting conversations we have had with members of the appropriate Directorate in London. It appears to me that since we feel that this is entirely unjust we are being put in the doghouse, because members of the European Parliament, which is only an advisory body but which nevertheless has to be listened to, certainly take a quite different view of the obligations which would be imposed upon us by these draft Directives.
It is worth drawing the attention of your Lordships' House to what seems to me to be a situation which we must indeed endeavour to clear up. I do not wish to stress unduly something which is referred to incidentally in our reports to the House but to which we find no satisfactory answer; that is, the economics of these proposed draft Directives. My noble friend Lord Ashby referred to the astronomic costs involved if we took the draft Directives literally and carried them out in every detail. It is not a matter only of the economic costs of the particular proposals in the draft Directive. As the noble Lord, Lord Nugent, made plain in his evidence to

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us, the fact is that if you are concerned with the total management of a freshwater system you have to balance one interest against another. One of the gaps in the Brussels administration seems to be that they put forward individual Directives. Even if they were more satisfactory than we normally find them to be, there is still no obligation upon the administration to consider these Directives in their totality as affecting the management of our water systems.
Finally, I could not help being struck by reading a brief report of the recent United Nations Water Conference held in Mar del Plata, Argentina, in March of this year, where the United Nations pointed out that they were considering, "Water for better quality of life and life itself". I quote from the United Nations pamphlet:
"Only a fortunate few (one-fifth of the world population) can get water simply by turning a tap. For the remaining four-fifths securing water is part of the daily struggle to exist. When contaminated, which happens all too often, water can be a source of disease and death".
Do we really have to spend all the money suggested in these draft Directives if we carry them out in the sense in which we supposed at least that they were to be carried out, when resources of both money, effort and skilled manpower should surely be diverted to the far more pressing water problems of other parts of the world?
6.37 p.m.
Lord ZUCKERMAN: My Lords, first I should like to congratulate my noble friend Lord Ashby for his brilliant review of the considerations which have led to the opinions expressed in these reports, and then I should like to focus on that part of his address in which he expressed the view that the expert advice which had been given to the bodies in Brussels who are responsible for producing these draft Directives had not been completely taken into account. From there may I turn to the real problem, as it seems to me: the difference between mandatory and voluntary standards and regulations.
I suspect that the main reason why the Commission has gone further than the expert evidence warranted, and why it has shown so much zeal in trying to do good, is to be found in the gulf which separates the body of scientifically established fact from the advice and
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opinions which different scientists can be expected to tender. We all know that scientific fact has to be accepted until it is proved to be false. Scientific advice, however, particularly when it is based upon very slender evidence, varies according to the judgment of the individual scientist. We must never forget that fact. The amount of scientific knowledge in the spheres of toxicology or ecology which underlies these draft Directives is extremely limited. In toxicology, where there are real facts, decisions can be taken.
I was the chairman of a Government Committee in 1951 and, although it was set up by the Government, I was an independent. That committee dealt with organo-phosphorus compounds. It did not take us more than four weeks or so to get the facts, and it took the Government of the day no longer than about two months to have legislation forbidding the use of organo-phosphorus compounds except under the most rigid controls.
On the other hand, in the vast area which we were then looking at we were dealing with "grey" facts. We did not know whether we were dealing with real risks, or possible risks, and out of the recommendations of a further committee which followed the first and which I also chaired, the present Pesticide Safety Precautions Scheme came into being. In my view it has had a brilliant record of success.
On the ecological side the situation is far more a case of "we do not know". Those people who suppose that they can exactly predict the ecological consequences of doing this or that are mainly fooling the public. It is usually a matter of intuition. In one of these reports one reads, for example, that the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds wants to see DDT banned—and I quote—"as a major step forward". That may be right, but I do not know what the evidence is on which it is based. Usually when people talk about preserving an ecological balance they are speaking intuitively, and not on the basis of scientifically established fact.
In saying this I want to make it quite clear that I believe warnings about the possible dangers of agrochemicals are necessary. Obviously they have had an effect. The spring which Rachel Carson warned us—was it 10 years ago?—would

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soon become silent is still filled with the melody of birds. This may be partly because of the warnings that have been given about the possible dangers of agrochemicals. It is true that the use of agrochemicals on the farm has affected some species of birds in the wild. But overall it cannot be said that the general scene has changed over the post-war years as a result of the use of agrochemicals as much as it has from the drainage of land, the removal of hedges and climatic changes. This also is referred to in the report on persistent organo-chlorines.
It was inclement weather, not the use of agrochemicals, which decimated the wren population in this country in 1963. Today the wren is one of the commonest birds in the country. I do not know what the true facts are about the peregrine falcon. I am prepared to accept that that bird and the sparrow-hawk have declined in numbers, possibly because of the build-up of chemical residues and consequently of changes in the food chain of which they are part. On the other hand, hen harriers, bearded tits and many other species have spread. I was talking to a farm labourer only this week and he told me that in the part of the county in which I live the lark is more common this year than the locals had ever known it to be. Nobody knows why.
What I found significant when I was reading the current literature is that in recent years the gains have far out-numbered the losses, which through the exercise of a vigilant monitoring service have clearly been kept down. I was also surprised to read in a work which gave the chronology of the extinction of birds, namely the New Dictionary of Birds—which was edited by Sir Landsborough Thomson, a conservationist and ornithologist if ever there was one, who has only recently died—that many more species disappeared in the first half of the century when modern agrochemicals were not being used than have disappeared since. I read, too, that no bird has become extinct since 1945. Clearly the fact is that we do not have sufficient background information about the natural secular changes which are taking place in the fauna and flora of the world—not only of our own island—to judge of the significance of such changes as may be due to the use of agrochemicals or of any of the substances about which we are warned in these Papers.
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Nor do we know enough about toxicology or risk-benefit equations to impose statutory or mandatory controls to the extent suggested by the draft Directives. We need to remember that the world must have more food; it cannot get it without the wise use of more agrochemicals. Starvation and poverty can damage the fauna and flora of the world and the quality of life every bit as much as can the misuse of agrochemicals. We must remember that what the tourist finds picturesque in some underdeveloped country where the balance of nature has presumably not been disturbed, is often paid for by the misery of people who are still deprived of the benefits of modern farming practice.
I now turn to the Pesticides Safety Precautions Scheme, which was described by the noble Lord, Lord Ashby, and which has operated now for some 20 years. It has remained essentially a non-statutory scheme although, as I have said, certain supporting provisions—for example, the organo-phosphorus compounds—notably in relation to workers, have now got a statutory basis and in fact have had it since 1951. The scheme itself however remains a non-statutory but formally agreed and utterly binding concordat between industry and Government. It lives and prospers without legal basis because both sides benefit. The industry, in getting a PSPS clearance, has a seal of safety second to none, and from my own experience and observations I can assure your Lordships that the quality of work that is done in the major industrial laboratories in this country which are concerned in producing new and effective pesticides and herbicides, is second to none. I have not seen work as good in university laboratories. This is not surprising in view of the amount of money that is available to some of the industrial laboratories in comparison with what appears now to be the lot of the universities.
I must confess to a fear of statutory schemes. They presuppose a depth of knowledge about toxicological and environmental matters which seems almost like a scientific conceit. Where is the knowledge whereby the absolute standards which statutory schemes would demand could be set? I do not want to suggest that some earlier speakers in this debate have, as it were, made fun of some of the mandatory conditions which have been

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laid down for fish. As the noble Lord, Lord Ashby, has said, it would be necessary for us to clear the fish from our rivers because they are living where they should not be living. We do not have the knowledge to make these statutory demands.
Think of the nonsense which has flowed from the Delaney amendment to the Pure Food and Drugs Act on the American Statute Book, as a result of which industry and scientists who serve industry and Government have to prove negatives; they cannot prove that if you drink 100 gallons of water a day you are not going to die, even though the water is pure. Common sense ceases to be a basis for prediction. The fact that our fish are able to survive in rivers which do not abide by the standards in these draft Directives means of course that we have to shut our eyes to the real facts.
I remember when the Council of Environmental Quality was established in the United States of America, I was told that within five years every river in the United States was going to carry fish. I asked what would happen if, on the day before the five years was up, there were not fish in every river. I asked: "Are you going to call out the National Guard and are they going to carry their tin hats and a bowl of water with tiddlers in and pour the tiddlers into the streams to make quite certain that what has been stated as an objective is met?" This is the kind of nonsense into which we are led by absolute mandatory demands.
We must remember that legislation and mandatory controls can drive judgment out of the window. Ill-considered regulations can destroy initiative and make the whole process of innovation too costly and too risky. I am not speaking here about trying to see how shellfish or other creatures conform in their behaviour with the controls which are now suggested in these draft Directives. If too many regulations are made statutory on the basis of presumed scientific evidence, it inevitably turns out that there are not enough scientists to help in their enforcement, a point that the noble Lord, Lord Ashby, has already made. As the record of the Environmental Protection Agency of the States shows only too well, lawyers and writers of draft Directives are always
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ready to step in where real scientists fear to tread.
It is disturbing that we in this country are always under pressure to make statutory what can be dealt with rationally and voluntarily. We have to try to spread our view, our way of doing things, in the Council of Brussels. It is the only sensible way. Statutory controls will not prevent mistakes and absolute toxicological standards are not going to prevent the occasional death. I wish it were possible to approach this whole problem in a scientific and rational way; that is, to compare our records, based upon a voluntary scheme of approval, and on full cooperation of Government and industry and the user, with what happens in those countries where statutory controls are demanded. If it turned out that life was safer and cheaper and better in those countries with statutory controls, we might re-consider, but until then it seems to me that the Government would be well advised to try to press our way of doing things on Brussels, and, if they fail, to persuade Brussels—given that these Directives do become final Directives—that our way of doing things conforms with what Brussels wants.
6.52 p.m.
Lord SANDFORD: My Lords, as a fellow member of this Sub-Committee which has formulated these reports, I should like to express my admiration to the noble Lord, Lord Ashby, for the way in which he has presented them to your Lordships and to confirm that I very much support all that he had to say. I also associate myself with the noble Baroness, Lady White, as regards the difficulties and doubts that we feel over the question of balance and priorities and interpretation. But I would prefer to dwell in my own remarks, which are of a more personal character, on the underlying philosophy and what I believe to be the basis of some of the faults and failings of the present situation, the frustrations that it seems beset us all the time in the present way of proceeding in European environmental matters.
It seems to me that, in addition to the defects which have already been cited in respect of these particular Directives, the present approach which the Commission,

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and this particular Directorate, have adopted does so little to harness the popular concern and care that already exists in Europe for the environment. It does very little, not enough, to develop public understanding of the environment. In fact, the more it makes the kind of mistakes that have been mentioned, the more it tends to confuse the public, public opinion in the schools and the colleges and among citizens at large. It does not seem to me to do enough to mobilise public opinion for environmental improvements. It is not really enough for environmental purposes to have a Treaty, the Treaty of Rome, which is fully conscious of one or two industries, notably agriculture, but, if you read it literally, virtually unaware of the environment which provides the setting for agriculture.
It is not enough to have a Council whose only resolutions on the environment, so far as I can discover and so far as I am advised, perceives the environment merely as a source of energy and a sufferer from pollution and ignores innumerable other aspects of far greater significance to the average European citizen. Nor does it seem to me to be enough to have a European environmental programme, which we have, which is merely a set of principles—though I admit that they are well expressed—approved for the guidance of the Commission in preparing its programme of work over a five-year period —a set of principles which, as it were, would be the basis of five Speeches from the Throne on environmental issues.
It seems to me that, in addition to debating Directives, we Europeans need to fashion an environmental ethic which we can all embrace, to which we can all aspire, a code of conduct towards the environment to which we can all subscribe, a standard of everyday environmental behaviour and responsibility by which we are all prepared to be judged by our contemporaries and our fellow European citizens, and a compact for the environment which will ensure that we hand over Europe in better shape than we found it to succeeding generations; in fact, a sort of charter for the Continent, the Continent which has already been the cradle for the civilisation we live under and which is already the workshop for nearly half of the world's trade. It seems to me important that we should work towards
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that, and sad that we have not got anything approaching it.
Of course, there is much, as the previous speakers in this debate have already shown, about which we would disagree, and we do disagree and will continue to disagree, within nations and among nations, in some of our aims. We do disagree, and I think we would continue to disagree, among the member nations and within member nations, about some of our priorities. We disagree and will continue to disagree among nations and within member nations, particularly about ways and means. But I believe that what we can agree about is far greater and far more significant than what divides us, particularly about aims, and would, therefore, be well worth stating more plainly, more boldly and more clearly than is already done, worth expressing in terms which can affect European behaviour right across the board, public bodies, private enterprises, individuals, and worth giving a status that will command respect and inspire support. I believe that in this way we could do something to establish and emphasise the wide agreement about aims which the noble Lord, Lord Ashby, has said in fact exists, and I agree with him.
If we could do this, in what form might it be promulgated? Of course, ideally and logically it should go in the Treaty, in the basic, comprehensive, simple kind of terms that set out the aims for European agriculture. But I recognise that to talk of amendments to the Treaty is to talk unrealistically. Failing that, possibly a Council Resolution or another Directive, or a statement by the European Environmental Bureau. The important thing is that such a charter should aim to reach down so as to affect everyone, as much as, say, the Highway Code affects road users in this country, or the Countryside Code affects visitors to the countryside, and not just in a document which is, as it were, an agenda for the Commission in Brussels.
Such a charter, of course, would need to be comprehensive. It would need to embrace, for instance, among its aims the following: the conservation of natural resources; the protection of natural flora and fauna; the safeguarding of landscape; sensitivity towards the cherished character of places where people live; raising the quality of life, both in terms of living and

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working conditions; and the thing we are chiefly concerned with, the reduction of harmful pollution. A comprehensive charter helps to set these things in perspective and in balance. Above all, it would also need to include and to emphasise the important principle which we are always stressing on the Commission and which the noble Lord, Lord Ashby, quite properly dwelt on so much; namely, the need to make proposals which are economical and to secure what is required in the improvement of the quality of life and the protection of the environment at the least possible cost—a factor which is clearly set out in the restated objectives of the Commission. That would be entirely in line with what in Britain we have long known as the best practical approach.
Some would say that there is scarcely any point in formulating and publishing such a basic, sweeping and unenforceable charter as that. Certainly every international conference on the environment, from Stockholm through Vancouver and many other places, is full of such aspirations, and that I acknowledge. I certainly recognise that it would not obviate the need for some environmental legislation of the right sort that bites at particular points. But I very much agree with the noble Lord, Lord Zuckerman, that the kind of Directives which we are now having, which would either be monstrously expensive to apply or which are based on unsound scientific evidence, will not help us.
I think that a charter could help to harness, inspire and focus all our diverse aspirations, and not least the whole range of non-statutory and voluntary effort which is available, for the sake of the environment of Europe. I believe it would help us somewhat to resolve the technical difficulties which have been raised in this debate and in all previous debates on these issues. I also think that it would be well worth attempting in itself, and the debate upon it would help to clarify some of the issues which at present are so confusing.
7.2 p.m.
The PARLIAMENTARY UNDERSECRETARY of STATE, DEPARTMENT of the ENVIRONMENT (Baroness Birk): My Lords, the Government very much welcome the opportunity to hear the
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views of the House on the Commission's proposals and also the opportunity to put their own views on record. I, personally, have found it incredibly interesting and stimulating to have had the opportunity of hearing so many Members of the Sub-Committee, including my noble friend the chairman of the Sub-Committee. We are all very much indebted to the noble Lord, Lord Ashby, for what has been a short but extremely stimulating debate about these two particular areas of environmental protection. The issues are complicated, but the broad view of the House, expressed by those who have participated, is one that the Government share.
Before I go any further, I should like to express the Government's gratitude for the work done by noble Members of the Committee in producing these valuable reports which, as always, are clear and authoritative. I was also interested in the extension to this, about which almost every noble Peer spoke. The noble Lord, Lord Ashby, referred to the philosophy of policies to protect the environment and that seemed to be exactly the right context in which to set these rather more difficult propositions.
My noble friend Lady White certainly raised a response in me when she asked whether we perhaps take the draft Directives too literally. The contribution of the noble Lord, Lord Zuckerman, that there is a wide variety of factors that affect our quality of life outside the area of pesticides or even pollution, was a very healthy input into these particular subjects. Also, as always the noble Lord, Lord Sandford, put it in a wider environmental context, and the noble Lord, Lord Skelmersdale, made an extremely interesting contribution in the particular area in which he has practical as well as committee experience.
First, I shall deal with the interim report on organo-chlorides. The Government basically agree with the Scrutiny Committee's criticisms and these will be recorded when the report comes to the Council of Ministers. In particular we support the Committee's view that the report does not justify further detailed Community action to control these substances.
I now turn to the proposal on plant protection products. As the noble Lord,

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Lord Skelmersdale, has acknowledged, successive Administrations in the United Kingdom have consistently aimed propressively to reduce the use of persistent pesticides by withdrawing them from the market as soon as effective alternatives become available. That policy has throughout been based on the scientific judgment of the Government's Advisory Committee on Pesticides. I very much took the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Zuckerman, when he differentiated between scientific facts and scientific advice.
In principle the Commission's draft Directive therefore follows a policy practised with great success in the United Kingdom for many years. But what we question is the Commission's view that there is evidence of any health hazard here. We are certainly satisfied that there is no such hazard in the United Kingdom; what we do believe is that chemical accumulations of this kind should be reduced, and, where possible, avoided altogether even though they may not present any human health risk. However, there are several features of the Commission's current draft where we have reservations.
First, we do not think that the "derogations" list of permitted uses of these compounds is adequate and we do not agree that some of these derogations should have set time limits. I believe that that is very much in line with what noble Lords have said. We cannot accept that our agricultural and horticultural production should be jeopardised by abandoning necessary pesticides prematurely. Although we hope that research establishments will come up with effective substitutes, it would be unrealistic to dictate in advance the time scale, and here we are not alone. Other Member countries have parallel reservations on the adequacy of these lists and they share our misgivings about time limits.
Secondly, the Committee note that the proposals at present would allow further bans to be imposed by majority voting. Whatever the merits of majority voting—and I do not intend to extend this into another area—it is surely not a sensible method for deciding measures which will have quite different effects depending on the particular methods of farming in individual Member States and depending
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also on the various pests or diseases to which crops are exposed.
Finally, the Scrutiny Committee noted that the Control of Pollution Act 1974 provides a broad legal framework within which proposals of this kind could be operated. The Government will, however, continue to use the Pesticides Safety Precautions Scheme. We shall do this because, as the Scrutiny Committee acknowledges—and the noble Lord, Lord Zuckerman, also spoke strongly for this—the scheme works and works very well. With others, the Nature Conservancy Council have testified to the scheme's success in their recent publication Nature Conservation and Agriculture. The Treaty of Rome leaves it to individual Member States to decide for themselves the "form and methods" for the implementation of Directives. The Government see the current safety scheme as a natural vehicle for operating our safeguards within the overall European régime which would flow from proposals agreed under this draft Directive.
Before I get down to the actual proposals for Directives setting quality requirements for waters capable of supporting freshwater fish and for those favourable to shellfish growth, I must emphasise that whatever criticisms the Government may have of these drafts, we entirely support the idea of defining quality criteria for water according to its use. The United Kingdom has always been in favour of flexible controls—and here the key word is "flexible" —designed to produce an acceptable quality of the environment rather than setting uniform standards for discharges. However, we are concerned that any obligations imposed at Community level should be scientifically soundly based and realistic. I have the feeling that in answering other debates, and one of the debates initiated by the noble Lord, Lord Ashby, I seem to have been saying the same words and that the same theme runs right through so much of this environmental policy.
So far as freshwater fish are concerned, the Government basically agree with the Committee's admirable report. One of the criticisms we share with the Committee is that it might be taken to imply designation of all rivers which support any fish life at all, or which could do so. I am glad to tell my noble friend Lady White that the Commission has now made it

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clear that they do not want our discretion to be so limited and that clearer wording should now be adopted, as I am sure she already knows. Once the objectives have been clarified, it is important to ensure that the technical standards should be both relevant and realistic. Unfortunately the Commission's proposals are neither.
This Directive is not addressed to human health, nor to the protection of the consumer. Yet the standards specified go far further than those required for the survival of freshwater fish. In fact, some seem to relate to the plant and bacterial life in the water and others to the taste of the fish. The Commission state one objective but the proposals certainly go far wider.
A more serious criticism—which the Committee report on at length—is that the standards proposed are often far more stringent than are needed to achieve the Directive's objectives. I think my noble friend Lady White made this point extremely succinctly. Many United Kingdom rivers which presently support fish life would not meet the standards in the draft Directive; the figures provided by the National Water Council in the Committee's report show that while fish thrive in nearly 90 per cent. of rivers in England and Wales, only a little over half of those rivers currently comply with the mandatory values proposed by the Commission, and only 30 per cent. comply with both the guideline and mandatory values. This means taking the philosophy of perfectionism extremely far. So, if all the rivers and streams which at present support fish were designated, we should be forced to incur very substantial unnecessary expenditure, as noble Lords have pointed out. In an ideal world we might like to have rivers up to this standard, but setting targets that are unrealistic now is both wasteful and counter-productive.
As the Committee noted, the proposed values are more stringent than those recommended by the group of scientific consultants who were consulted by the Commission. We fully endorse the Committee's view that where the provisions of the draft Directive are based on scientific advice, and the Commission want to depart from that advice, then they should state clearly their reasons for doing so. Here I take particular note of Lord
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Ashby's remarks—he took the trouble to write to me in advance about the points he was going to raise, for which I am grateful—about the inadequacy of the Commission's staff. There is no doubt that the staff of the Service is not very large in relation to the tasks imposed in the First and Second Environment Programmes, but I do not think that anybody could suggest that the size alone of the programme should govern the size of the Commission staff. In the past we have been critical of the over-ambitious nature and the unrealistic deadlines of the First Environment Programme.
In November 1974 we told the Council of Ministers that more might be achieved if less were in fact attempted. We have long argued that it is fundamental to the success of the programme to establish clear priorities. I would say that this is still the case. The most effective use of the resources of the Community as a whole, and the relative importance and urgency of the work at national and Community level, are among the most important factors to take into account. I think that the noble Lord, Lord Sandford, made that point although in rather a different way.
It is obviously important to avoid duplication at Commission level of work already, and perhaps better, done in the Community as a whole. As the noble Lord, Lord Ashby, knows, the Commission makes extensive use already of national experts and consultants and of the information available within Member States. As he said, he himself and other members of the Sub-Committee have given their services not only here but in Brussels. What is important is that that information, once given, should be used wisely. Few are better qualified than the noble Lord to judge this and none, as I am sure the House will agree, could have worked harder on behalf of the Committee.
The noble Lord has criticised the Commission's disregard of the advice it sought. It does not follow that increasing staff will necessarily improve the quality of their judgment. The Commission is jealous of its independence in the development of its proposals. It consults and takes advice as it chooses. It is absolutely free to put in—or leave out—what it likes in its draft Directive. For our part, we send qualified and expert officials to Brussels to meet particular needs as they arise. They do their homework before they go. They

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give the Commission scientifically sound and forcefully argued advice—so they tell me! We cannot be blamed when the Commission has failed to take it: it is not, after all, bound to do so And the United Kingdom is only one voice among nine. We will continue to do our best but we cannot absolutely guarantee that our opinion will prevail. But it still is essential that we put it, and put it strongly.
The noble Lord, Lord Ashby, spoke about the cost-effectiveness of the Commission's proposals and the need for flexibility to meet local circumstances. We shall continue to press the Commission on these points, and I shall be very glad of any help that the noble Lord, or his colleagues, can give us. Taking account of local environmental circumstances is at the very heart of our quality objectives approach, and I freely acknowledge that we have still a long way to go in convincing our colleagues in the Community of the rightness of this. Like the noble Lord, and I think probably all noble Lords who have spoken, I am, and always have been, a very strong pro-European, but that does not mean that we do not have to argue in order to get things the way we think are right, certainly for us over here.
I also agree that in the past the Commission's proposals have lacked any really adequate assessment of cost-effectiveness. But the Second Environment Programme now contains a clear commitment to assessing the costs and benefits of proposals to improve the environment. We shall he looking hard to see this assessment in the new proposals from the Commission as they come forward.
The noble Lord, Lord Ashby, suggested that we should bring pressure on the Commission to adopt a different approach; that is, biological monitoring of the fish themselves rather than chemical monitoring of the water they live in. I have much sympathy with this idea, because apart from giving self-determination to the fish, which seems to me to be a good plan, it would, as the noble Lord suggests, save much effort and money.
The possible monitoring burden is one aspect of the Commission's proposals which has caused the Government concern; that is why we are convassing, during negotiations in Brussels, the idea that Member States should be able to waive the monitoring requirements for rivers
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with good fish populations which are unlikely to be at risk from preventable pollution. But there are, however, two reasons why I cannot support the noble Lord's ideas in their entirety. First, the Commission, and other Member States, would say that the Community has already adopted an Environment Action Programme which provides for EEC quality objectives for water capable of supporting freshwater fish. Second, discharge consent conditions have to be set in chemical terms and, since they must be derived from environmental quality objectives, it seems inevitable that those objectives must also be set in chemical terms. So biological monitoring should be sufficient for most of our relatively unpolluted rivers, though chemical standards will be needed where fish might be at risk. There is probably not so very much difference between us on that question.
Member States would have only five years in which to bring designated rivers up to the prescribed standard if the time-scale of the Commission were to be followed. It is hard to see why it should be as tight as this when, for instance, the bathing water Directive allows 10 years. We shall be arguing here for a more practical time-scale in the negotiations. The same goes for the shellfish proposal, which is still at a very early stage. Again the Government broadly agree with the Committee's criticisms. Most important, it is hard to see just what is the aim of this proposal. According to the Commission it is concerned with encouraging shellfish growth, not with protecting human health. But the bacterial levels proposed relate only to human health.
We need to clarify just what is meant to be the scope and application of this Directive. I am glad to say—I know that my noble friend Lady White feels the same—that the Commission has confirmed that it will be up to the individual Member States to decide which waters to designate. Such discretion is important here because otherwise there seems no limitation on how far the Directive is to apply geographically.
The proposed bacterial levels appear to be aimed at letting us crop shellfish directly from the water for sale for human consumption. Shellfish from many of our growing areas would not meet the proposed standards, but they can be

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made perfectly safe for human consumption if, as Lord Ashby said, they are cleared in accordance with our regulations operated by local authorities; we are pressing for the Directive to take account of United Kingdom practice.
The Commission has suggested that Member States should designate reference areas to give them standards of comparison for nearby shellfish-breeding areas. Like the Committee, however, the Government foresee practical difficulties in the application of this concept and we are anxious to find out how far Member States would be required to specify such areas, and what the Commission wants to do about those cases where no such areas can be found.
I am being as brief as I can, but this is a big subject and noble Lords will agree that a full reply is necessary so that the Government view may be on record. I want to say something about the idea that the purpose of the Directive could be achieved more simply by a strategy based on monitoring of the shellfish directly, rather than the water in which they grow.
This is interesting but it does have limitations. Direct examination of shellfish can give us an immediate impression of their state of health. But I am told that shellfish are generally most sensitive to pollution in their early stages. While certain environmental conditions would allow the adults to survive and grow, they might not be good enough for the larvae. So, if the aim was to protect shellfish, we would set standards for the water quality and monitor that as well as the shellfish themselves.
Such has been the reaction of the Member States to this proposal that the Commission has been forced to think again. The Commission will have to make radical changes to its proposals before they stand a chance of success and I can assure the House that we will be pressing for the revised proposals to be firmly based on reason and practicability. The noble Lord, Lord Sandford, has made some interesting suggestions about a European Charter based on some aspects of British experience and legislation. This obviously needs to be looked at in greater depth than we can give it today, and I will write to the noble Lord about it.
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Although we have been discussing some highly technical Commission documents, the general lessons to be learnt seem very clear. Once again we have proposals that are well-intentioned and probably desirable in principle, but there is a complete air of unreality surrounding many of them. We are indebted to the noble Lord, Lord Ashby, for drawing attention to the scientific failings of the Commission and we will continue to do all we can to ensure that the Commission has the benefit of our experience and knowledge, and, hopefully, it will take advantage of it. The Commission proposes, but it is the Member States themselves who, through the Council, adopt the proposals and implement them. The Member States are best placed to judge what is reasonable and practicable on the ground.
The negotiations in Brussels provide us with the opportunity to make sure that the Directives we finally adopt are reasonable and practicable, with due regard of course to the interests of our Community partners; I do not think we can be absolutely single-minded on this. We have managed to do so in the past and, I can assure the House, we shall not be prepared to adopt anything on this occasion that we cannot implement in good faith and with some confidence as to its results.
I have found the debate interesting and certainly instructive. I have tried to give the Government's view on the particular points of concern on these complicated subjects, and, while I have given rather a lengthy reply, if I have missed any points—I am sure there are some—I will be glad to write to noble Lords on the points they have raised. The Government take great encouragement from the support they have received for their policy and will make every effort in negotiation to secure their objectives.
7.24 p.m.
Lord ASHBY: My Lords, I do not intend to detain noble Lords from dinner and I hope that your Lordships will not be deterred from eating the fish course as a result of this debate. I am sure noble Lords would not wish me to sit down without expressing gratitude to your Lordships for taking part in this debate and to the House for considering, even

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at this comparatively late hour, such a complicated but, we think, very important subject. I would again like to thank the noble Baroness, Lady White, for allowing me to open the debate and to say that the debate has obviously been worthwhile because there seems to be so much consistency between the views which the Sub-Committee have reached and the views of the Government. Where we differ there is still time for argument. I well understand that our views cannot always prevail in Brussels, but it is excellent that in this House if our views do not prevail our dissent can be recorded.
On Question, Motion agreed to.