Lords Sitting of 31 January 1979

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

AGRICULTURAL PAY INCREASE AND GOVERNMENT POLICY
Lord BOYD-CARPENTER: My Lords, I beg leave to ask the Question which stands in my name on the Order Paper.
The Question was as follows:
To ask Her Majesty's Government whether they are aware that the Agricultural Wages Board recently awarded a pay increase of the order of 13 per cent. to agricultural workers; whether this is now in accordance with Government policy on pay increases; and what action they propose to take.
Lord STRABOLGI: My Lords, the Government have noted that the increases in minimum rates prescribed in the recent award by the Agricultural Wages Board for England and Wales are in excess of the pay guidelines. These increases were confirmed by the Board on 19th January and came into effect on 20th January. The Government have no power to interfere with the decisions made by this independent statutory body.
Lord BOYD-CARPENTER: My Lords, I thank the noble Lord for that Answer, but does it indicate that the Government have now discovered, as did their predecessors, that wages boards and wages councils can constitute a considerable limitation upon an income policy; and will the Government do anything about it?
Lord STRABOLGI: My Lords, the Government certainly would have preferred an award squarely within the guidelines, but the noble Lord will have noted that the Board says that it also took productivity into account.
Earl FERRERS: My Lords, my noble friend's Question referred to agricultural
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wages, but is the noble Lord aware that the craftsman's rate for agriculture is 15 per cent. and not 13 per cent. and that the overtime rate for agriculture is over 20 per cent? Will the noble Lord explain how he thinks that the Government can have a prosperous British agriculture faced with increases of that nature, when his right honourable friend the Minister of Agriculture said that he was determined to see that this year, and in the years to come, there should be a freeze on farm prices? Is that really the policy of the present Administration as regards agriculture?
Lord STRABOLGI: My Lords, the award, of course, applies only to workers on minimum rates. My right honourable friend the Minister of Agriculture has said that he would welcome farmers entering self-financing productivity agreements with individual workers. There is nothing to stop them from doing that.
Earl FERRERS: My Lords, will the noble Lord be kind enough to answer the question; namely, faced with increases like that, how can we have a prosperous British agriculture when the Minister says that there is to be a freeze on farm prices?
Lord STRABOLGI: My Lords, as the noble Earl knows very well, productivity in agriculture depends upon a great many factors.
Lord SHINWELL: My Lords, does it not seem surprising that members of the Conservative Party who for donkeys' years have always been supreme in matters of agricultural prosperity and the interests of the farm workers in whom they take great pride, now seem to be protesting at this increase in their wages?
Lord HAILSHAM of SAINT MARY-LEBONE: My Lords, is not the noble Lord aware that there is no protest against these awards? What there is a protest against is the freeze on farm prices which prevents people from financing them properly. Is the idea that there should be vast productivity one which the Minister has thought up for himself, or is he not aware that British agriculture is already among the most productive in the world?
Lord STRABOLGI: My Lords, the recent annual review White Paper showed a fall in aggregate net income of the United Kingdom agricultural industry of 3·5 per cent. in cash terms in 1978; but if the potato figures were excluded the 1978 aggregate income figures show a small rise in cash terms.
Lord SHINWELL: My Lords, is my noble friend not aware that the freeze is unlikely to take place? He cannot give any guarantee that a freeze is likely to take place in agricultural prices, nor is it likely to take place. However, the one thing that has happened—and I am very glad that it has—is that the farm workers who never had a decent wage under Conservative rule are getting a decent wage under Labour rule.
Lord STRABOLGI: Yes, my Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend. Indeed, my right honourable friend the Prime Minister announced earlier this month a relaxation specifically designed to help the lowest paid. I am surprised that noble Lords opposite laugh. I thought that they would be behind the Government in their fight against inflation.
Lord HAILSHAM of SAINT MARY-LEBONE: My Lords, is not the noble Lord aware that he said in his original Answer that the Agricultural Wages Board is something over which neither side of Government has any control whatever? Will he explain that to his noble friend? That is why we were laughing.
Lord STRABOLGI: My Lords, I never know when the noble and learned Lord laughs. He laughs so often and we all enjoy it. As I said earlier, this award applies only to the minimum rates; for other workers wages are a matter for negotiations between individual employers and workers.
Earl FERRERS: My Lords, will the noble Lord take back to his right honourable friend the very real concern of those engaged in agriculture that, although they are delighted with the increase given to farm workers, they are concerned that the Minister has said that it is his determination that there will be a freeze on prices, which will mean that productivity from agriculture and the ability to pay
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the increased wages simply will not be there?
Lord STRABOLGI: My Lords, I think we must recognise that the agricultural workers are, of course, among the lower paid. However, we are concerned that it is precisely the lower paid who stand to suffer most if inflation is driven into double figures. As regards the other point made by the noble Earl, as I have said, my right honourable friend has said that he would welcome farmers entering into self-financing productivity agreements with individual workers.
Lord STRATHCLYDE: My Lords, can the noble Lord say whether the figures he has quoted refer also to Scotland?
Lord STRABOLGI: My Lords, no; they refer only to England and Wales.
Lord PARGITER: My Lords, is my noble friend aware that in talking about farm prices the Minister of Agriculture was referring to his negotiations with the EEC, which do not necessarily have a direct bearing on farm prices in this country?
Lord STRABOLGI: Yes, my Lords.
The Earl of ONSLOW: My Lords, can the noble Lord explain why he expects farm productivity and prices to increase by 23 per cent. next year when, according to his own figures, they went down by 3 per cent. this year? Did he not say that these wages must be paid for out of productivity? Top rates have increased by 20 per cent., and middle rates by 13 per cent., which I welcome. Produce value has fallen by 3 per cent. Where will the productivity come from next year?
Lord STRABOLGI: My Lords, I said that for the other workers—not those on the minimum rates—their wages were a matter for negotiation between them and their individual employers.
Viscount ECCLES: My Lords, will the Minister not agree that on most farms today we have reduced the labour force as much as possible? There is now no way of having one man fewer in order to pay these extra wages. Therefore, the crisis is bound to arise.

VIETNAMESE REFUGEES
2.44 p.m.
Lord HARRIS of GREENWICH: 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 international action they propose to initiate to deal with the problems caused by the exodus of refugees from Vietnam.
The MINISTER of STATE, FOREIGN and COMMONWEALTH OFFICE (Lord Goronwy-Roberts): My Lords, the Government fully support action being taken by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. We have decided to admit more Vietnamese refugees and have urged other Governments to do likewise. We have also made very clear to the Vietnamese our concern that they should ameliorate the situation which causes large numbers of their own population to flee the country at great risk to their lives.
Lord HARRIS of GREENWICH: My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend for his Answer. Perhaps I can specifically put to him the situation facing the Government of Thailand, which at present has an inflow in the region of 140,000 refugees from Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam. In terms of common humanity, I put it to my noble friend that it is desirable to take action to help the Government of Thailand; but, also, there seems to me to be an essential Western interest in terms of helping the Government of Thailand deal with this massive inflow of refugees from three countries which abut its borders. In that situation, can my noble friend tell me what action he contemplates taking with our colleagues in the European Community to deal with the matter and what other action the Government contemplate taking?
Lord GORONWY-ROBERTS: My Lords, I am most grateful to my noble friend for his reference to Thailand. As he said, it is of humane concern and it is also a clear Western democratic interest that we should do everything we can to support the Government and the people
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of Thailand, particularly in this very grave imposition upon them from outside. The figures which my noble friend gave are absolutely right. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees estimates there to be some 65,000 boat refugees in various countries of Indo-China, some of them in Thailand. But, as we have just heard, in addition there are about 134,000—it may well be 140,000 by now—refugees in Thailand who crossed overland from Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. The size of the problem will be apparent to the House, and also the enormity of the guilt of those who are responsible for this massive enforced exodus.
As to the steps we have taken to help these unfortunate people, I shall not detail them all, but so far we have accepted 1,400, of whom over 1,000 are Vietnamese. But a further 1,500 boat refugees from Vietnam will be admitted in the next few months, some of them specifically from Thailand. In addition, we have made very generous financial contributions to the funds of the United Nations Commission for Refugees. Indeed, I see that when my honourable friend the Under-Secretary of State, Mr. Luard, attended a meeting in Geneva last month, he was able to offer £1 million sterling towards the total of £12 million which was subscribed by all the countries represented there. I think that I can assure my noble friend and the House that we are, in fact, doing a good deal diplomatically, financially and, indeed, practically to assist the area. I might perhaps add that on 23rd January my right honourable friend the Secretary of State called in the Vietnamese Ambassador and spoke to him in very forthright terms about the responsibility of his Government for this situation.
Lord HAILSHAM of SAINT MARY-LEBONE: My Lords, have any of the Communist countries contributed to this appalling problem which has been created by their comrades?
Lord GORONWY-ROBERTS: My Lords, I take it that the noble and learned Lord is not asking me whether they have contributed to the solution of the problem. I have no evidence on that point. There may well be evidence that the creation of this problem springs from the dreadful vagaries of totalitarian government in Vietnam and elsewhere.
Lord MONSON: My Lords, is the noble Lord aware that according to a Communist Party newspaper published on 17th December last, the Vietnamese Government intend to collectivise all the farms in the Mekong delta, with the result that 7 million peasants will be dispossessed and will, therefore, obviously swell the total number of refugees to a very considerable degree? Can he give an assurance that the British taxpayer will under no circumstances be called upon to help out the Vietnamese Government—whether by the provision of subsidised merchant shipping or otherwise—so long as this kind of behaviour continues?
Lord GORONWY-ROBERTS: My Lords, I doubt that this Government, or any other Government, will allow any of the British taxpayers' money to be made available in aid to the Vietnamese Government. Equally, I cannot give a guarantee that, even though the fault lies squarely with the Vietnamese authorities, we shall not, as usual, do our best to help the unfortunate people concerned. However, the question raises the fundamental difficulty that there have been movements of refugees which the International Commission, assisted by countries such as ours, has more or less been able to cope with, but this situation is something else again. This is the expulsion almost of a population, or of a segment of a nation. It is an exodus in almost Biblical terms, without, say, the morality of that authority. We are addressing ourselves to the fundamental question: How do we stop the policies at source?—because that is where this particular problem will be solved, if at all.
Lord ELTON: My Lords, is the noble Lord aware that the problem is even larger than has been suggested?—because, although approximately 75,000 refugees have been resettled since I visited Thailand in 1977, the total now in that country is greater by many thousands than it was at that time. Furthermore, there are approximately 40,000 boat people now in Malaysia, another country which is struggling with a burden which it ought not to be called upon to bear. Will he accept that we on this side will support anything he can do to help resolve this problem, and look forward to any elaboration of his argu-
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ment that he will be able to give us on 14th February when we are to debate the matter?
Lord GORONWY-ROBERTS: My Lords, I freely and gladly accept the fact of consensus on this. It is a matter of humanitarian concern. I also recall that it was the noble Lord who raised the question of Cambodia some months ago when we had an excellent debate, in which he spoke rather presciently, I must say, about the present situation.
Lord HARRIS of GREENWICH: My Lords, may I put one final point to my noble friend, while thanking him for the full answer he gave to my supplementary question? I put to him the point about discussions within the European Community. Can he deal with that particular point? It seems to me to be desirable to discuss this matter with our colleagues in the European Community.
Lord GORONWY-ROBERTS: My Lords, I fear I telescoped my remarks when I referred to the interests of Western democracy, if I am within the recollection of the House. I had very much in mind what my noble friend said. We are in constant discussion with our friends and allies in the West about this and related problems, and indeed the Geneva meeting owed its relative success to the fact that we and like-minded countries from the EEC were able to give a lead and, more importantly, to make the contribution we did. I can assure the House and my noble friend that we shall be closely in touch with our neighbours in Western Europe in the future, as we have been in the past, on this matter.
Lord SEGAL: My Lords, does my noble friend agree that the Hong Kong Government deserves the highest praise for its humane approach to this appalling problem? Does it not serve as an example to us in this country to receive even more of these unfortunate refugees, who risk their lives under the most dangerous conditions to escape from the veritable hell which now exists in Vietnam?
Lord GORONWY-ROBERTS: My Lords, I think I have given figures showing that we have doubled the intake into this country of refugees in this category. We are always ready to look at these very

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serious situations and see what more we can do. I welcome what my noble friend said about the attitude of the Hong Kong Government. We all know the persistent difficulties the Hong Kong Government faces in accommodating refugees year by year. Many more than have come even now from other countries do come in from the mainland to Hong Kong, where the services are constantly being strained beyond endurance and resources. I should be glad to send a copy of these exchanges to Sir Murray MacLehose to show that his attitude and that of the Government of Hong Kong is appreciated in this House.

UGANDA: SUGGESTED TRADE EMBARGO
2.54 p.m.
Lord BROCK WAY: 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 consideration has been given to the imposition of an embargo on trade with Uganda whilst the present régime continues.
Lord GORONWY-ROBERTS: My Lords, we have enforced a total arms embargo, broken off diplomatic relations, and terminated all bilateral aid programmes. It would however be a very serious step to embark upon general trade sanctions, with implications for our policies in other areas.
Lord BROCKWAY: My Lords, have not the Government of the United States of America gone further than this? Have they not applied a trade embargo? In view of the evidence of revolt within Uganda and on its border now, might not a similar decision by our Government be decisive in overthrowing this tyranny?
Lord GORONWY-ROBERTS: My Lords, we sympathise, of course, with the motivation of American policy in this regard. However, trade with Uganda, so far as we are concerned, falls within the scope of the Community's common commercial policy. We are not, in the American sense, free agents for this
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purpose, even if—and I do not say we would—we decided that this was the best way to tackle this question. We should much prefer to rest on a decision of the United Nations in the normal way. We have not applied general trade sanctions to any legitimate country in the past. I see no likelihood of our doing it unilaterally in regard to Uganda, however obnoxious the régime may be to us. I see every likelihood of our obeying any decision of the international authority in this instance.
Lord HAILSHAM of SAINT MARY-LEBONE: My Lords, have any of the black African countries, who are so disposed to attack Britain and her past, shown any disposition to get rid of this bloodthirsty criminal lunatic?
Lord GORONWY-ROBERTS: My Lords, I think that there are quite a number of people in Africa of varying colours and creeds who would welcome the early withdrawal of the President from the scene. As to whether any constituted Government has taken commercial sanctions, no, I have no evidence of any African government having done that.
Baroness GAITSKELL: My Lords, would it not be more profitable for my noble friend Lord Brockway, with his close connections with African countries and close knowledge of many African leaders, to ask his African friends to say something about Uganda? In my seven years at the United Nations, I was present during three months of each year and I never heard one African country condemn Uganda. Is it not time that some of us on this side of the House took account of that?
Lord GORONWY-ROBERTS: My Lords, there is no doubt that there is a certain solidarity in the post-colonial world. No doubt the many individuals, and indeed organisations, whom I mentioned in my previous reply who are certainly totally opposed to the President of Uganda's policies, may in due course prevail upon their own Governments to take action. I think we should take into account a certain hangover from the colonial past in this respect. I would not condemn African Governments out of hand on this score. As to my noble

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friend Lord Brockway, I know how assiduously he has worked for peace in Africa and an understanding between all races there, including Rhodesia and Uganda. I also know of the sterling work which my noble friend Lady Gaits-kell has done in these matters in the United Nations.
Lord BOYD-CARPENTER: My Lords, would not the action recommended by his noble friend have a significant effect on exports of whisky?
Lord GORONWY-ROBERTS: My Lords, I am almost inclined to invite the noble Lord, who is an uncomfortably skilled parliamentarian, to put that question to another Department. I say so quite seriously because this is a question of exactly what is the trade between Stansted and Uganda. I have tried to find out, not by practical experimentation but by inquiry, but I really do not know what the situation is. We are looking into it very carefully, and I should be grateful indeed if a certain Department took upon itself to edge me aside and answer such a question on its own.
Lord HALE: My Lords, is it not a fact that at this moment the troops of Tanzania are engaged in operations against this gentleman, whom the noble and learned Lord accurately described in terms which I used in this House five years ago when he was a little more popular? Is it not a fact that this is an extremely sensitive and dangerous area, with the troubles in Rwanda-Burundi extending over towards the area of Congo-Zaire, where there are the most distressing complications, but coming from other European countries? On the whole, the African nations—
Several noble Lords: Question!
Lord HALE: As I say, on the whole, the African nations are showing as much concern for peace as they can, although they are not being let alone to run their own affairs. I would add that Kenya has also shown the same disposition.
Lord GORONWY-ROBERTS: My Lords, I appreciate my noble friend's statement on the situation in Africa. Of course, what he says is perfectly true;
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there are perimeters of friction there, quite in the European tradition of the 19th century, where sovereign States are attacking each other. What the position on that particular boundary is now I cannot say. There has been fighting, but I cannot say whether it has continued to this day, and I will try to find out. What my noble friend says is clearly true. There is at once a picture of remarkable forbearance in an area where there are deep-seated tribal as well as national enmities and competitiveness. On the other hand, there is the ever-present danger of friction and hostilities leading to more than local wars. That is what makes Central and Southern Africa of such worldwide importance today.

THE GUADELOUPE SUMMIT: FURTHER ANSWER ON STATEMENT
3.2 p.m.
Baroness WARD of NORTH TYNE-SIDE: 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 publish in the Official Report the answer which the Lord Privy Seal undertook to send in writing to the Lord Soames in reply to certain matters which he raised on the Statement on the Guadeloupe Summit made in the House on 16th January.
The LORD PRIVY SEAL (Lord Peart): My Lords, I have arranged for this to be done.
Following is text of the answer referred to:
"When I repeated the text of the Prime Minister's statement on the Guadeloupe summit in the House of Lords on 16th January, you asked whether consideration had been given at Guadeloupe to the setting up of an inter-Governmental forum whose duty it would be to keep a continuing watch over the threats of various kinds (overt and covert) outside the NATO area, both to the interests of the Western world and to those of our friends elsewhere. I undertook to look into this, and to let you know the result.
"The point you referred to was not discussed at Guadeloupe. The meeting was intended to provide an opportunity for relaxed and informal discussion of political and security developments of common concern; it was not an occasion for substantive decisions on matters of interest to our Allies and partners.

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"It may be helpful if I make the point that the scope of political consultation within NATO is not confined to developments within the NATO area. In the Declaration on Atlantic Relations adopted in Ottawa on 19th June 1974, NATO Governments agreed—
'to strengthen the practice of frank and timely consultations by all means which may be appropriate on matters relating to their common interests as members of the Alliance, bearing in mind that these interests can be affected by events in other areas of the world '.
"In the Government's view, NATO provides the right institutional forum for regular discussion with our Allies on security matters affecting our common interests. In addition to the consultation which takes place in NATO, we are of course in regular touch with our Allies and partners on international issues, both through meetings of Ministers and through diplomatic channels; they would be uneasy at the establishment of any formal, permanent group which excluded them from important decisions". 30th January 1979.
Baroness WARD of NORTH TYNE-SIDE: My Lords, I thank the noble Lord very much indeed. Is he aware that it is not very often that I get such a good Answer? I am grateful to him.

PICKETING OF FUNERAL FACILITIES
3.3 p.m.
Lord HAILSHAM of SAINT MARY-LEBONE: My Lords, I beg leave to ask Her Majesty's Government the Question of which I have given Private Notice, namely:
"To ask Her Majesty's Government whether they will make a Statement on the picketing of funeral facilities in the metropolitan boroughs of Tameside and Liverpool".
Baroness LLEWELYN-DAVIES of HASTOE: My Lords, with the leave of the House, my noble friend Lady Stedman will answer this Question in the form of a Statement after 3.30 p.m.

LOCAL AUTHORITY WORKERS: PAY DISPUTE
Lord SANDYS: My Lords, I beg leave to ask Her Majesty's Government the Question of which I have given Private Notice, namely:
"To ask Her Majesty's Government whether they will make a Statement on
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the breakdown of negotiations over local authority manual workers' pay.
Baroness LLEWELYN-DAVIES of HASTOE: My Lords, with the leave of the House, my noble friend Lady Stedman will answer this Question in the form of a Statement after 3.30 p.m.

ESTATE AGENTS BILL
Brought from the Commons; read 1a, and to be printed.
PUBLIC LENDING RIGHT BILL
Brought from the Commons; read 1a, and to be printed.

PROCEDURE OF THE HOUSE
3.5 p.m.
The CHAIRMAN of COMMITTEES (Lord Aberdare): My Lords, I beg to move that the First Report from the Select Committee be agreed to. I should perhaps draw the attention of the House to the first item in the report, "Questions on nationalised industries." This matter was first considered by the Procedure Committee on 11th April last year and was subsequently agreed to by the House on 11th May 1978. The recommendation was that Questions on the day-to-day running of the nationalised industries were undesirable.
On that occasion, there was some criticism in the House that the report had been taken without sufficient notice having been given. I have been into the matter and the facts are that the Motion was put on the Order Paper on Tuesday, 2nd May, but, unfortunately, due to printing difficulties with which we are all too familiar, the report was not published and available until Monday, 8th May. The report was not put before your Lordships until 11th May, so there were still three or four days between the publication of the report and the date of its consideration.
However, representations were subsequently made to me by certain Members of your Lordships' House that the decision of the Procedure Committee should be

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reconsidered. That was duly done, and the Procedure Committee reconsidered the matter shortly before the Christmas Recess, on 6th December last. On that occasion three of your Lordships who were not members of the Committee attended the meeting. They were the noble Lords, Lord Clitheroe, Lord Mottistone and Lord Trefgarne; they came before the Committee and argued their case. The Committee listened to what they had to say but in the end re-affirmed its earlier conclusion. I beg to move.
Moved, That the First Report from the Select Committee be agreed to.—(Lord Aberdare.)
The report was as follows:
1. QUESTIONS ON NATIONALISED INDUSTRIES
The Committee have reconsidered, at the request of certain Lords, their decision of 11th April 1978 (First Report, 1977–78) with regard to the tabling of questions on nationalised industries.
It was argued that there should be no restriction on the right of Lords to ask questions on the day-today running of the nationalised industries. However, having considered these arguments, the Committee re-affirm their decision that the tabling of questions on nationalised industries is undesirable, save for those asking for statistical information on a national basis or those which raise matters of urgent public importance.
2. UNOPPOSED BILL COMMITTEES
The Committee have considered a number of recommendations of the Select Committee on Practice and Procedure (First Report, 1977–78) in relation to Private Bill Standing Order 121(2) which reads as follows:
"Each Unopposed Bill Committee shall consist of the Chairman of Committees and such Lords as think fit to attend".
The Practice and Procedure Committee recommended that the Chairman of Committees should be empowered to invite specific members of the House to serve on Unopposed Bill Committees dealing with important issues of public policy. They considered that the existing wording of the Standing Order was not apt for this purpose.
The Practice and Procedure Committee also recommended that the role of Counsel to the Chairman of Committees in the work of Unopposed Bill Committees should be expressly recognised in the Standing Order and, further, that an Unopposed Bill Committee should be enabled to make a Special Report where they were of the opinion that there were special circumstances which should be brought to the attention of the House.
The Committee agree with these recommendations and accordingly propose that Private Bill Standing Order 121(2) should be amended to read as follows:

"(i) Each Unopposed Bill Committee shall consist of the Chairman of Committees
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and, should he see fit, such Lords as he may select from the panel of Deputy Chairmen appointed each Session, and no Lord who is not a member of the Committee shall take any part in the proceedings thereof.

(ii) The Committee shall have the assistance of the Counsel to the Chairman of Committees.

(iii) An Unopposed Bill Committee shall in respect of the Bill committed to them make a Special Report on any matter to which they consider that the attention of the House should be drawn".

3. EMERGENCY SITTINGS FOR JUDICIAL BUSINESS
The Committee have considered the present arrangements for recalling the House for Judicial business to a time earlier than that to which it has been adjourned.
The Committee were informed that there is no authority for such a recall, as there is in the case of Public business.
The Committee consider that there should be such authority and therefore recommend that Standing Order 14 should be amended by the insertion of a third paragraph, as follows:
"(3) Notwithstanding any adjournment of the House, the House may meet for judicial business at a time earlier than that appointed if the Lord Chancellor or, in his absence, the senior Lord of Appeal in Ordinary, is satisfied that it should do so and has signified that he is so satisfied and has given notice to such Lords as he thinks fit."
4. RULES OF DEBATE: RIGHT OF REPLY
The Committee have considered the convention of the House that the mover of a motion or an amendment has the right of reply at the end of any debate which may take place on his motion.
This convention has, in the main, been well observed but it does not carry the authority of the Procedure Committee, nor is it set out in the Companion.
The Committee, therefore, wish to make it clear that they consider it undesirable for a Lord to speak after the mover of a motion or an amendment has exercised his right of reply, except when the House is in Committee.
3.8 p.m.
Lord FERRIER: My Lords, before agreeing to the report, which I think we should do, I can say that the Chairman of Committees has saved the House a lot of time by describing exactly what happened as a result of the withdrawal of labour, the printers' strike, last year, which put great difficulty in the way. Living in Scotland, as I do, when the notice was put on the Paper on 2nd May, that Paper did not reach me in Scotland and I did not receive a copy of the report.
Like other noble Lords, I owe a debt of gratitude to the Committee. I too was invited to attend the meeting to which

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the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, referred at which the matter was considered, but unfortunately I was prevented from so doing. The first point I had intended to make has really been covered by Lord Aberdare in that it should be on the record that this interference with the business of Parliament took place as a result of the strike. If it had not been for that we should then have had the discussion which we are having now. I can discard many of the notes I had made, and only say that the report could not, as a result of that action, reach many Members besides myself. Indeed, I was speaking with my noble friend Lord Clitheroe on the telephone over the week-end. At the time he was thoroughly snowed in and said that he would be here if he could get through the snow, but it is clear that he is still snowbound.
I was one of those who wrote and I am grateful to the Chairman and his Committee for re-addressing themselves to the matter and inviting some of us to attend. Nevertheless, I am not happy with the wording of the Committee's resolution; namely, that
"… the tabling of questions on nationalised industries … is undesirable … save for those asking for statistical information on a national basis or those which raise matters of urgent public importance".
At a time when Parliament is being pressed from all sides to indulge in more open government I feel those words are too restrictive. I urge that when page 83 of the Companion comes to be re-drafted, as I imagine it will have to be following what has been decided by the Committee, the greatest care should be used in the wording of such amendment so that the responsibility for the wording of Questions can rest with Peers themselves—of course within reason, and they should not involve disproportionate use of time and expenditure.
While on the subject of the cost of answering Questions, may I say that I imagine that the Committee will soon be turning to the matter of the growing list of Questions for Written Answer. There were 14 of these answered yesterday, 12 in respect of the previous Sitting, and there are 60 more on the Paper today. As I struggle through the list I am absolutely deafened by the noise of axes being ground. With those comments I support the Motion.
3.10 p.m.
Baroness BURTON of COVENTRY: My Lords, I should like to say a few words on this matter, having what I might call a proprietary interest in nationalised industries. I shall be very brief, though there are one or two points I wish to make. I have noted the actual wording of the report regarding Questions about
"statistical information on a national basis or those which raise matters of urgent public importance".
I think that the problem is the question of what issues are thought of as being of urgent public importance, and opinions may well differ on this. I consider that Back-Benchers are placed in a rather difficult position over matters of this kind. Although I do not expect a specific answer from the Chairman of Committees, I should like to put a point to him.
I wish to hark back to 1973 when, through the kindness of this House, we waged the battle of the West London Air Terminal. At that time there were 1⅓ million passengers using buses out to Heathrow. Under these new rules, would that be termed as a matter of urgent public or national importance, or would I be told that it was not, and that therefore it would not be possible to table a Question about it?
With regard to statistical information, if one tables a Question which involves difficulties for the Department concerned (which does not wish to give a short answer if the questioner is right), there is a very real problem. I regret that on reconsideration the Committee has reaffirmed its decision. We laboured for a long time in the House of Commons under the difficulty that one could not table a Question on a nationalised industry. We are in a position of difficulty, and I should like to bring this to the notice of the Chairman of Committees, though I know that it is not his concern. If we cannot table a Question concerning a nationalised industry, and if a particular consumer council to which I am attached has no statutory standing upon which it can question a nationalised industry, then who is to do so? Here I declare an interest—the House knows my interest—but I think that there is a relevant point here. As I have said to those in authority

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on the Front Bench, I am disturbed at the way in which Members in this House, and elsewhere, are fobbed off when they really and truly require information. While the prohibition may be right from the legislative point of view, it makes the position difficult for us.
I am glad to have been able to have my say, though we may not get any satisfaction. I hope that if, when one wishes to table Questions, one can show ingenuity and establish that the matter is purely statistical or is not purely to do with day-to-day running but might be seen as relating to an annual basis, some consideration may be given to the setting down of such Questions.
3.14 p.m.
Lord NUGENT of GUILDFORD: My Lords, I should like to put forward a comment from the other point of view to that of the noble Baroness, whose view I well understand and always admire. I have shared her experience in the House of Commons. This problem, like many we have, is one of balance. We have large public corporations which run a very large part of our life through commercial and industrial utilities, and it is of vital importance that they should be efficiently run. Here we have the problem. To ensure that they are efficiently run it is necessary that the men, or indeed the women, running them, and who are appointed by the Secretary of State to be chairmen and members of the industries, should have the independence to manage them as efficiently as possible. Because they are appointed by the Secretary of State they are inevitably saddled with a certain political responsibility. They must keep the Secretary of State informed, but they will best run their national industry efficiently if, first, they are men or women of top calibre, able to carry big responsibilities and use commercial judgment; and secondly, if they are left independent and free to carry out those functions.
One of today's major problems, of which we are all aware, is the immense difficulty of finding men or women who have this capacity and who will take on these positions. If Parliament—this House and the other House—allowed Questions about day-to-day management, that would constitute an extra degree of
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interference with the freedom of action and the judgment of the leaders of the nationalised industries. These great national corporations would be so shackled that it would be even more difficult to get men and women of the necessary calibre to run them. The noble Baroness has, like myself, sat in the other place and heard many debates on the matter. The original conception was to have independence in the day-to-day management, while the Secretary of State and the Government of the day are responsible for the overall policies of management.
I feel sure that in the interests of running these industries efficiently we should be most unwise if we were to change the well-established custom regarding Questions. Of course, by the ingenuity of noble Baronesses, and perhaps noble Lords and Members of Parliament, it is possible to include a sharp point in a supplementary question, which to some extent gets past the convention, but I am sure that it would be a major mistake if we allowed Questions on day-to-day management to appear on the Order Paper. There is machinery for consumer complaints to be handled in one way or another in all these industries.
Having recently retired from the chair of one, I can assure the noble Baroness that we were most sensitive to the fact that we were supplying a monopoly utility upon which life itself depended and that therefore we must burst ourselves to ensure that we gave the best possible service. That does not mean to say that we always pleased everybody. A noble friend of mine who is seated nearby occasionally expressed his dissatisfaction; that is inevitable. However, I assure the noble Baroness that there is a great sensitivity as to the big responsibilities which these chairmen and boards carry and that they do their best, within the limits of their huge responsibilities, to satisfy individual consumers and individual complaints. Therefore, I hope that your Lordships will agree that we should accept the report of the Procedure Committee and that we should accept that, although we have not achieved perfection, we have probably the best balance we can attain: and that we should leave it at that.
3.19 p.m.
Lord CLITHEROE: My Lords, my noble friend Lord Ferrier was kind enough

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to telephone me during the weekend, and I have succeeded in getting here despite the snow, though I was rather late. I listened with great interest to what the noble Baroness said and I think that I agreed with all of it, despite what my noble friend in front of me has said in his remarks. In private business a public company has an annual general meeting at which any shareholder can ask questions about what has been happening. Moreover, there was a time many years ago when I was a director of a railway company, when we used to meet once a week and question the officials of the railway company about various matters which we thought were not quite right. Really there is nothing quite in substitution for that in what is proposed in this report, or in what my noble friend Lord Nugent has said.
Lord DRUMALBYN: My Lords, may I put a question to the noble Lord the Lord Chairman as to what exactly is meant here? I have some sympathy with my noble friend Lord Ferrier, because, as I understand it, what is intended here is that it is a matter for the Peer who asks the Question to decide himself or herself whether the Question is a matter of urgent public importance; that any Peer is entitled to put any Question down and nobody can stop him so long as it conforms with the ordinary rules. All I am asking is that Peers, as a whole, should get the criterion right. When we talk of urgent public importance, in this House we are normally thinking of a Private Notice Question on a sudden emergency. Nevertheless, it is bound to be a matter for every Peer to judge whether the matter is of urgent public importance. But, then, it is a matter for the Minister to decide whether to answer that Question; and I have a suspicion from my own past experience, not unconnected with the noble Baroness, that it sometimes comes a little hard on the Minister because the sympathy of the House very often lies with the questioner and not with the Minister replying. If the noble Lord could possibly answer that one question of mine, it might be helpful.
Lord PEART: My Lords, I think it may be convenient to the House if I could express the Government's position on this. Perhaps I may say to the noble Lord, Lord Ferrier, that I am grateful to him for contacting me and informing
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me that he was going to raise this. Perhaps I may also say to him that it is not a question of open government: it is really a question of a long-established convention concerning Government's relationships with nationalised Boards. So I welcome the views expressed by many noble Lords today. The Procedure Committee has merely given explicit authority to what has been a convention of the House for many years. Successive Governments have refused to answer Questions on the day-to-day running of nationalised industries on the ground of public policy. This has been a practice since 1945, and I believe there is no question of varying it.
The Procedure Committee considered this matter at my invitation following a suggestion from the noble Lord, Lord Carrington, the Leader of the Opposition. On 25th July 1977, the noble Lord, Lord Carrington, suggested that it might be possible to devise some procedure whereby time could be saved by not allowing Questions to be put on the Order Paper concerning the day-to-day running of nationalised industries. I think Lord Carrington's point, with which I wholly agreed, was that it wasted the time of the House and used up valuable starred Questions if Questions were tabled to which the Government could only reply, "This is a matter for the nationalised industry in question". My view is that the Procedure Committee were quite right to come to the conclusion that they reached, and, having done so, they were also quite right to stick to it. We are not talking about an unreasonable infringement of the rights of Back-Benchers. This is purely a practical question, as the noble Lord, Lord Nugent, reminded the House. There really is no point in having Questions before the House to which the Government cannot reply.
Lord AIREDALE: My Lords, perhaps I could say a word about Item 2 of the report—Unopposed Bill Committees. It quotes Standing Order 121, sub-paragraph (2), which is admirably short and which says:
"Each Unopposed Bill Committee shall consist of the Chairman of Committees and such Lords as think fit to attend".
The proposed Amendment to that Standing Order is going to sweep away

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the right of any other Lord to attend the Unopposed Bill Committee even if he sees fit.
This recommendation emanates from the Committee on Practice and Procedure, and I have diligently scrutinised the report of that Committee from which this recommendation comes for the ground upon which it is sought to sweep away this right which every Peer enjoys. The only ground that I can see upon which the recommendation was made is that Peers do not in practice avail themselves of their right to attend the Unopposed Bill S Committee. My Lords, I should not have thought that that by itself was a sufficient ground upon which to sweep away Peers' rights in the absence of some! existing mischief or some contemplated mischief, which could be pointed to, making it necessary to limit the right of Peers to attend this Committee. In the absence of some mischief being pointed to, I should have thought we might well remember the words spoken many years ago from these Benches by the late Lord Esher, who said that we should hesitate long before tinkering with an institution which we should never have had the intelligence to create for ourselves.
In place of this wide, universal right to attend the Committee, it is proposed to have an amended Standing Order which allows the Lord Chairman to invite such members of the panel of Deputy Chairmen as he may choose to assist him in any particular case. I should have thought that the Lord Chairman, confronted with some particular problem, might say to himself that "Lord So-and-so", with his experience and expertise, was the person he would most like to assist him in this matter. But "Lord So-and-so" might not belong to the panel of Deputy Chairmen. I should have thought that the one characteristic of the Lord Chairman and his deputies was that they alternate with each other, and, normally they do not act in concert together. If this particular recommendation goes through, I can see the criticism arising that the Unopposed Bill Committee has become a closed shop run by the Lord Chairman and his deputies, and nobody else is being allowed to have a look in. I hope that these points will be considered before any Motion is brought before the House
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to amend this Standing Order in the way that is proposed in this report.
Lord SHINWELL: My Lords, does it not depend on the definition of the term, used so frequently, "day-to-day administration"? I was responsible for preparing to a large extent the legislation upon which the nationalisation of the coal industry was developed, and also the electricity industry. Throughout the years since 1945, not only in relation to coal or electricity but transport, civil aviation, the Bank of England and steel, which subsequently became denationalised and was then nationalised again, this problem has always emerged. I do not want to argue the matter because it would take a long time if one went into details, but let me put a simple point. Take, for example, the coal industry. Of course, this is a fictitious example. I say it is fictitious because I do not want to appear to be criticising the National Coal Board.
Take the National Coal Board. Let us suppose that it finds itself in financial difficulties, that there are huge losses for which it cannot be held directly and primarily responsible—it may be because of a loss of exports; it may be that there are some geological faults in many of the pits; it may be that some pits have been closed down for economic reasons; it may be that all sorts of matters emerge and create difficulties. But, as a result of huge financial losses, it is on the verge of bankruptcy and therefore has to ask the Government of the day—whichever Government it happens to be; it has nothing to do with the political colour of the Government—to write off losses or to provide a huge subvention. Only the other day Sir Derek Ezra, Chairman of the National Coal Board, when being interviewed on television was asked what the Board would do if it found itself in difficulties because of the huge increases in wages which had been demanded by the miners. He said: "There are many devices that we can deploy. One is that we will go and ask the Government for more money." Is that a matter of day-today administration? Is it not a matter which concerns public policy?
I will give another example: the price of coal at the grate. This is an issue which was frequently brought up in the other place. Questions were frequently asked

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about the price of coal being raised. Some said that it ought not to be raised because the consumer would suffer accordingly and so on. But supposing the question of the price of coal affects the steel industry. Is that a matter of day-to-day administration exclusively? Surely it impinges on public policy. Therefore, one has to be very careful in accepting the submission, the decision or the recommendation, (whatever it may be) by any Committee or by a Minister of any Government that certain Questions should not be permitted.
When I was in Opposition, I never found any difficulty in getting a Question across. It is true, as somebody remarked, I think it was the noble Lord, Lord Nugent, that one can always get in a supplementary question. Frequently in this House when Questions have been asked about civil aviation or coal the Minister on the Front Bench has replied, according to the convention: "Write to the Coal Board" or "Write to the Post Office." How often have we heard that? Or there is the other answer to which my noble friend Lady Burton referred: "You have the consumer councils." We had the Post Office Users National Council under the late Lord Peddie who was perhaps the most industrious chairman of a consumer council that ever existed, but he could not exert sufficient influence over the Post Office to prevent them from raising prices or affecting changes. My noble friend Lady Burton referred to the consumer council in connection with civil aviation. She has achieved some success but I would not say that it was complete success. She did her best. My Lords, that is all I want to say. This question will never be settled by any decision. Time and again Ministers will reply: "Write to the Post Office" or "Write to the Railways Board" or "Write to the Coal Board," et cetera. But Members will go on asking Questions and Ministers will try to escape; but skilled Parliamentarians—unlike myself, a comparative novice in matters of this sort—will find a way out of the difficulty.
3.34 p.m.
Lord BOYD-CARPENTER: My Lords, may I ask the noble Lord the Chairman of Committees to answer a question which was raised in my mind by the speech of my noble friend Lord Drumalbyn? If the House decides to accept the Motion
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which he has moved, would the effect of that be to inhibit any noble Lord from putting on the Order Paper a Question relating to day-to-day administration of a nationalised industry which that noble Lord believed, rightly or wrongly, to be of urgent public importance? I am not asking the noble Lord to say how, in a doubtful case, the Minister who replies should handle it. My view would be that that is a matter entirely for the discretion of the Minister. But I think it important to know whether at the initial stage—that is, at the tabling of the Question—the adoption of the noble Lord's Motion would inhibit the placing of that Question on the Order Paper. If it were to have that effect—and I await the noble Lord's answer—for my part I should be very unhappy about the Motion he has moved, and not only for the reason which the noble Lord, Lord Shinwell, has given. What is day-to-day administration and what is of urgent public importance is very much a matter of opinion. If one sits on that Bench opposite then one takes a totally different view from that of someone sitting on these Benches—as I know in the context of the activities of the noble Baroness, Lady Burton, since at one time, as she knows, I had some responsibility for drafting the answers which an unfortunate Minister had to read out and then be harried about by her. That is the question.
May I make two general comments? First, if this is really a further restriction—as I suspect it is, even if only by way of formalisation—on our right to ask Questions about the nationalised industries, I wonder whether the noble Lord appreciates that this is very much against the trend of opinion generally. The nationalised industries are a very important part of our national economy. The whole push of public opinion today is towards obtaining more, not less, information about them and about other activities of Government. It is true that the other place has a similar Rule. But the other place probes into the nationalised industries in another way through the machinery of Select Committees. Indeed, I myself will shortly be attending as a witness, with your Lordships' permission, before the Select Committee of the other place on Nationalised Industries. If our House had similar machinery I would not myself attach so much weight to Parliamentary

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Questions. But, as we do not, it would seem unfortunate when the whole desire of public opinion is to find out more about these and other activities in the public sector that we should be tightening up a restriction upon us.
Taking, finally, the point of my noble friend Lord Nugent about the calibre of the men who run these industries, I do not believe that a man of any calibre is going to mind providing information which he does not have to present—the Minister does it for him—to this House. If the Government are concerned about that aspect, then the best thing they can do—and I have put this before to the noble Lord the Lord Privy Seal—is not to worry about this but to pay them the proper rate for the job.
3.38 p.m.
Lord DENHAM: My Lords, I think it is probably right that something should be said from this Bench on this matter. Many years ago I used to stand at that Dispatch Box opposite and answer Questions which were addressed on Post Office matters. In something like nine out of 10, I had to give the answer: "My Lords, this is a matter for the day-to-day running of the Post Office." It was a great deal of fun and games which everybody enjoyed, not least myself. But surely here we have got to draw a balance. We have only four Questions in a day and we do not want to waste one of these four Questions by putting a Question which obviously the Minister cannot answer. On the other hand, we must not interfere with the individual freedom of individual Members of this House. That is where the balance must be drawn.
There is very great difficulty, obviously, in distinguishing between what is day-today running of a nationalised industry and what is a matter of more general public interest. My noble friend Lord Drumal-byn, if I may say so, is quite right: it has always been up to the individual noble Lord to decide for himself whether it is right for him to put that particular Question. It has always been up to the individual Minister replying to decide whether it is proper for him to answer that individual Question. And, surely, what the noble Lord the Leader of the House has said is right. This has always
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been the custom of the House. Nobody is seeking to take away any rights whatsoever. What the Procedure Committee has done is merely to confirm in words what has always been the individual custom of this House.
Lord FERRIER: My Lords, before my noble friend sits down, may I say that that is in respect of starred Questions, is it not?
Lord DENHAM: Yes indeed, my Lords.
3.40 p.m.
Lord TREFGARNE: My Lords, I wonder whether I may briefly intervene in this short debate. I must first thank the Lord Chairman of Committees for allowing me and other Peers to appear before the Procedure Committee, and indeed for putting this matter before that committee a second time. Having said that, I must say that, like other noble Lords, I too greatly regret that the Procedure Committee reached the conclusion that it did. I must say that I have a certain sense of personal inadequacy in this matter: I clearly failed to convert a single member of the committee to my way of thinking.
However, the decision leaves us in a difficulty with regard to the general management of nationalised industries. It is a problem which needs serious consideration, and it is certainly beyond the scope of any committee of your Lordships' House, no matter how illustrious, as indeed the Procedure Committee is. It may be that the answer lies along the lines suggested by my noble friend Lord Boyd-Carpenter: some strengthening of the select committee procedure which appears to be so successful in the other place. That is not a matter that I would wish to develop at this moment. I would however say that, despite my regret at what the committee has decided, I do not think that it would be right for the House to reject the report at this stage.
3.42 p.m.
The Earl of LISTOWEL: My Lords, as one who has had some experience of unopposed committees on Private Bills and not of the Practice and Procedure Committee, may I say that I welcome the recommendation in the report, provided only that the amendment to Standing

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Orders is drafted in the right way. We have not the amendment before us, but I hope when it comes it will be so drafted that it meets the point of criticism. I am in favour of an amendment to Private Bill Standing Orders. I think it ought to meet two difficulties which I experienced when I was in the Chair. The first is this: it is awkward for Members of the House, when they are interested in a Private Bill, to be unable to attend meetings of the Unopposed Bill Committee simply because they have an interest in the matter with which the committee is dealing. As the Standing Orders are now drafted, if they merely attend the committee they become a member of the committee and therefore must take decisions on the Bill. For that reason they are disqualified if they have an interest, even though they may wish to follow the proceedings of the Bill. In the case of a committee on public business, they would be free to attend a meeting of the committee even if they were not themselves members.
The other important point is that I often found myself sitting alone as chairman of the committee when it was dealing with Unopposed Private Bills raising important matters of public policy. It is undesirable for the chairman to be the sole Member of this House to have to take the decision on what is recommended to your Lordships on the Bill. It is clearly much more desirable if the responsibility can be shared with one or two other Members of your Lordships' House. It is also unfair to the House when the report of the committee is made to the House that there should only be the Chairman of Committees to deal with the issue of public policy which may be very controversial, and it is therefore very desirable that there should be other Members of your Lordships' House serving on the committee who can also express a view about a matter of public policy.
3.45 p.m.
Lord ABERDARE: My Lords, I am very grateful to everybody who has taken part in this short debate. I have no reason to enter into the controversy of it because I am only the chairman of the committee and I am reporting to your Lordships what the committee's views were on the two occasions that it considered this particular matter. I should make it clear that it is not
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quite such a dramatic decision as some of your Lordships have made out. Words like "questions not permitted" or "prohibited" were used. This is certainly not so. The word is "undesirable". No amendment which may be made to the Companion to the Standing Orders will prevent any noble Lord asking any Questions he likes. It is up to the House in the end whether they permit a Question to be asked, and it is up to the Government how they answer that Question.
If the Question was obviously a matter concerning nothing but the day-to-day running of nationalised industries—and it is impossible to define that, as the noble Lord, Lord Boyd-Carpenter, asked me to do—or a matter of public importance, it is up to the Peer himself. The clerk might say to him: "Do you not think that this is a matter of the day-to-day running of the nationalised industry and therefore probably better not asked?" But, in the end, the decision is for the Peer himself.
If I may say a quick word in reply to the noble Lord, Lord Airedale, although my noble friend Lord Listowel has spoken very powerfully to help me on this matter, Lord Airedale wanted some reason why we should make a change. The reason is that the Select Committee on Practice and Procedure, on looking at Private Bill procedure, found it was not all that satisfactory for the very reason—I think he called it a closed shop; it is now a closed shop—that it is me, sitting alone, who deals with unopposed Bills. Your Lordships who are at the moment able to drift in whenever you like do not in fact do so. It would be rather embarrassing if you did!
The Select Committee thought that it would be much better to make the situation rather more regular and orderly and allow me the chance to have two Peers sitting with me, as the noble Earl has explained, so that I do not have to take decisions off my own bat on matters of policy and without having any assistance. The reason why it was thought that the panel of deputy chairmen might be a useful panel from which to select is simply following the example of another place where they have a panel of Members who are appointed each Session. We thought as we had already had a readily constituted panel of, if I may say so, good men and true—a very fine body of men—it would be a suitable panel to use for this purpose.
On Question, Motion agreed to.

PICKETING OF FUNERAL FACILITIES
3.48 p.m.
The PARLIAMENTARY UNDERSECRETARY of STATE, DEPARTMENT of the ENVIRONMENT (Baroness Stedman): My Lords, with the leave of the House, I shall now repeat a Statement being made in another place in answer to a Private Notice Question on picketing of funeral facilities in the metropolitan boroughs of Tameside and Liverpool. My right honourable friend the Secretary of State for the Environment has said:
"Following last week's day of action organised by unions, selective strike action against local authority cemeteries and crematoria is continuing in certain parts of the country. According to the latest information available to me the action is most marked in the North West, in particular Liverpool and Tameside.
"I deplore this action and I made my views known to the General Secretaries and National Officers of the unions concerned at the weekend when I asked them to remove from their list of selective action crematoria and cemeteries. I was informed last night that advice had been issued by the unions to their members designed to limit the impact of action here on the public.
"I take this opportunity of urging the men concerned to reconsider their action, to understand the distress being caused to the bereaved, and the deep offence being caused to the overwhelming mass of our people, and to return to work."
Lord HAILSHAM of SAINT MARY-LEBONE: My Lords, I know that the House will wish me to thank the noble Baroness for repeating this Answer which has been given in another place and will share the sentiments which she has expressed—or rather which her right honourable friend has expressed—as regards the action taken and the plea which is made for a return to work. Does the noble Baroness agree that public anger is beginning to mount against these repeated outrages against human dignity?
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She has said that certain advice had been given by the unions concerned. Will she make available, if it is a lengthy piece of advice, or possibly summarise if it is not, the advice which has been given? Which are the unions concerned? Who are the persons organising this particular abomination? Is there no means open to the public to express their indignation and disgust at behaviour of this kind? Is it not time that we knew the names and addresses of those concerned and that they were published so that the public can bring to bear the full force of their anger at this particular form of conduct? Which are the unions concerned? Is one of them NUPE? Does the noble Baroness recall that during a public broadcast one of the national officers of that organisation, Mr. Fisher, expressed detestation of foxhunting on the grounds that he had compassion for what he called "the poor little fox"? Is it not time he showed a little more compassion for his fellow human beings?
Lord ROCHESTER: My Lords, we on these Benches would like to join in thanking the noble Baroness for having repeated this Statement. Along with the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hailsham, we certainly deplore this action. We find it not only offensive but, as he indicated, humiliating to be told only that advice has been issued on this matter, urging the men to reconsider their action.
One really does wonder whether the time has not come, with the public looking for action rather than words on the part of the Government, for something more to be done. The Government have said they have contemplated and indeed formulated contingency plans for the use of troops in certain cases—for example, in the gritting of the public highways. In saying this, I am conscious of the risks attendant on such action and of the danger of its being counter-productive; but I do suggest that the people feel the time has come for resolute action. May I put it in the form of a question: do the Government consider using troops, perhaps on a selective basis in these areas of Tameside and Liverpool, for this humane purpose in order to back public opinion in this respect?
Baroness STEDMAN: My Lords, I am grateful to the two noble Lords. At least we have agreement on all sides

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of the House that this is a very distressing mode of oppression which is being exercised by the unions, particularly in Liverpool and Tameside. We do not condone it for one moment. So far as the unions' advice is concerned, I understand that official backing is not being given to any strikes of more than one week and that appropriate action will be taken by the unions if they are advised that public health is in any way affected.
The noble Lord, Lord Rochester, asked what would happen if the union advice was disregarded and when the Secretary of State was going to step in and do something. The meeting last night was the one from which the advice has been sent out. The unions concerned were the National Union of Public Employees, the Transport and General Workers' Union and the Municipal and General Workers' Union, and I understand that advice has gone out to their members today. We hope the advice will not be disregarded, but if the burials and cremations continue to be held up the Government will give to the local authorities such support as the local authorities feel they need or is necessary.
The Secretary of State will have various options open to him in those sort of circumstances, which we hope will not arise. With permission, when my right honourable friend has made a further Statement to the other place, if that is necessary, I will repeat it in this House in the light of any future developments.
We are concerned about these delays. We think they are offensive, they are humiliating and they are degrading. Strike action is causing distress to the bereaved and we do hope that all those who are involved in the strike action will heed the advice of their unions and what we have just said. The noble Lord, Lord Rochester, referred to the question of troops. It is a little early at this time to give any definite indication of actions which the Secretary of State would feel he had to undertake; but I think I can safely say it would not exclude the use of troops if that were necessary.
Baroness PHILLIPS: My Lords, I notice the Minister referred to public health. One wonders at which point that is determined, bearing in mind the mounting piles of rubbish which are now filling the streets of our cities.
Baroness STEDMAN: My Lords, the mounting piles of rubbish, yes, we deplore those as well; but this particular Question is addressed to the attitude of workers at the crematoria and the cemeteries.
Lord HARMAR-NICHOLLS: My Lords, in the appeal which has gone from the Government through the unions to the people who are doing this awful thing has any time limit been laid down as to when they must desist from doing it or else the action to which the noble Baroness referred will be taken?
Baroness STEDMAN: My Lords, no deadline was suggested by my right honourable friend when he met the union leaders last night, but it is his intention to see the general secretaries again before this week is out and find out what is happening.
Baroness BURTON of COVENTRY: My Lords, may I ask my noble friend whether I heard her correctly—I was not sure. Did she say that the union leaders had sent, if you like, instructions or advice to the people concerned, and that they would not make official any strikes which lasted for longer than a week? If so, does that mean that strikes which last up to six days—just to get the point—are not going to be condemned?
Baroness STEDMAN: No, my Lords, we condemn strikes whether they are of one hour, one week, or one month; but the advice which has gone out is that they should not give official backing to the strikes for more than one week. We hope these are only token strikes. The situation is becoming a little difficult in two places referred to. In Tameside, I understand that all the cemeteries, except two, and all the crematoria are shut and in Liverpool all the crematoria and the cemeteries are shut. These are not conditions under which we can sit down: they are something on which we shall have to take action, and my right honourable friend will be doing that.
Lord GORE-BOOTH: My Lords, I think it is very important that we should take the most urgent notice of these particular happenings on which the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hailsham, pronounced words with which I think we can all strongly agree. However, arising

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from this, I think it is perhaps up to somebody to ask something about the future. On, I think, 7th December, a Minister answering a Question arising out of the strike at the Charing Cross Hospital hinted, or perhaps went a little further, that studies were being made of ways of preventing and circumventing these unacceptable strikes in the Departments of Government in order to see whether some way could be found of preventing, not through the use of force but by some new machinery, the occurrence of these strikes which ought not to happen at all. It is high time that somebody said that also.
I should like to ask the noble Baroness to decide that this is not going too far from the original Question for her to give me some indication that somewhere in the Government urgent work is being done on this question, since, if we leave the arrangements as they are now, all these things will happen again.
Baroness STEDMAN: My Lords, so far as the Health Service workers are concerned, I am sure that if that assurance was given in another place, then that work is going on. No such representations, to my knowledge, have been made concerning the grave diggers and people at the crematoria, but it is an interesting point, and, if there are any occupations which can undertake not to strike, this is one of the sections of the community that we ought to be approaching. I shall certainly bring this matter to the attention of my right honourable friend.
Lord LEATHERLAND: My Lords, is there not another step which might be taken to deal with this disgraceful strike at crematoria? Is it not possible for the strikers to be prosecuted for conduct that is likely to cause a breach of the peace?
Baroness STEDMAN: My Lords, I think that I should like notice of that question, and I should also like to take advice on it. But I shall certainly inquire about it, and will write to my noble friend.
The Earl of ONSLOW: My Lords, can the noble Baroness please give an undertaking that, in this particularly distressing picketing situation, the Government will
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encourage people to go through the picket s? Secondly, will the Government please give an undertaking that chief constables have been encouraged to enforce the picketing law in its strictest sense, as opposed to the recent examples of its laxest sense?
Baroness STEDMAN: My Lords, we certainly hope, if people are bereaved and they want to attend—as I am sure they do—the funerals and cremations of their relatives, that every possible help will be given to them to do so. But at the moment we have very few crematoria that are open in the districts concerned. While it is distasteful, to me at any rate—and I am sure to the rest of the House—to know that, at the moment, there is in some parts a restriction as a result of which you are advised to have a private service at your house or at your local church and then the vicar and the undertaker can do the actual committal at the crematorium, this is really just a question of sheer size, and of helping the fewer crematoria open to deal with the number of bodies that there are to deal with. It is something which we deplore, and I am sure all people, whatever their walk of life and whatever their Party, are outraged that the bereaved should have to suffer in this way. We do not condone it. We certainly hope that the advice which the unions have given will be taken and we also hope that the unions will be very strong with their members and will encourage them, and that they will take note of what has been said in this House and in another place and go back to work.
Earl FERRERS: My Lords, can the noble Baroness throw a little light on one situation? A few days ago, it was explained in the papers that there were in Liverpool 100 bodies awaiting burial, and that they were having to be put into plastic bags in the mortuary. Has that number been increased, and are they still waiting for burial? Also, when she said that the crematoria were shut, I take it she does not mean that the mortuaries are shut as well?
Baroness STEDMAN: No, my Lords. So far as I know, the mortuaries are open. The position in Liverpool as at this morning was that there were 150 bodies awaiting burial or cremation. Arrangements are being made and, in so far as my Department can help, it will assist the

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local authorities. But it is a pretty state of affairs when bodies have to be stored up awaiting the time for disposal.
Lord KINNAIRD: My Lords, may I ask the noble Baroness this question—it may be a small point, but it strikes me as an important one: These men—not necessarily those in this strike, but the men in all these very serious strikes—are told to come out on strike. They are not asked to do so. But they are asked to go back and do not. Can they not be told to go back, as they are told to come out?
Baroness STEDMAN: My Lords, this is a matter of individual union discipline, and I hope we shall see some discipline within our unions.

LOCAL AUTHORITY WORKERS: PAY DISPUTE
4.4 p.m.
Baroness STEDMAN: My Lords, again with the leave of the House, I shall repeat a Statement being made in another place in answer to a Private Notice Question on the breakdown of negotiations over local authority manual workers' pay. My right honourable friend the Secretary of State for the Environment has said:
"A meeting of the National Joint Council was held yesterday. I regret that no progress was made at this meeting. I shall be seeing the employers' representatives tomorrow and I trust that negotiations will be resumed in a few days."
Lord SANDYS: My Lords, I cannot thank the noble Baroness, who always has the ear of this House on so many matters, for repeating the Statement by her right honourable friend. Many of us have read her right honourable friend's Statement in another place yesterday, but of course the situation has changed quite dramatically in London. I think your Lordships have probably read in the papers that, since yesterday, over 500 ancillary workers have walked out from St. Mary Abbots Hospital, Kensington, St. Stephen's Hospital, Fulham, and Westminster Hospital, and that pickets have turned away supplies of food and oil from Westminster Hospital, as well as denying supplies of sterile dressings. My noble
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and learned friend Lord Hailsbam has referred to the mounting tide of public anger, and I think that he was totally justified in using those very strong words.
The situation is this. We believe that the criminal law should be invoked here, because it is assumed to be a criminal act in this country for one individual, or a group of individuals, to threaten the life of another individual or group of individuals. If it be a criminal act, I wonder whether the Government would say if the police have acted in this respect and have made arrests appropriately. Secondly, I believe that the denial of supplies has been going on for a number of days, and I repeat once again the question which has been asked by my right honourable friend the Leader of the Opposition in another place: has the Home Secretary sent advice to chief constables all over the country in this very particular regard?
Lord ROCHESTER: My Lords, we should like to thank the noble Baroness for having repeated this Statement and we wish to be associated with the general sentiments expressed by the noble Lord, Lord Sandys, at the start of his response. I have only one distinctive question to ask, and it is this. In the light of the views expressed recently by the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury, by my right honourable friend the Leader of the Liberal Party and by Mr. Edward Heath, are Her Majesty's Government prepared to consult with Opposition Parties, with a view to obtaining the widest possible agreement and, with that agreement, the support that it would bring regarding the immediate action to be taken in relation to disputes in the public services?
Baroness STEDMAN: My Lords, in so far as the questions of the noble Lord, Lord Sandys, are concerned, they go rather wider than the Question that we are dealing with, which relates to the breakdown in the negotiations over local authority manual workers' pay.
Lord SANDYS: My Lords, I must insist that this is a matter of great public concern. But in this very complacent Statement, the Secretary of State says that he trusts that negotiations will be resumed in a few days, as if it is a matter which can be taken in a leisurely fashion.
Baroness STEDMAN: My Lords, I was not suggesting that what is happening is not a matter of public concern. What I am saying is that the Question to which I was asked to reply was on the breakdown of the local authority pay talks yesterday. We deplore the actions that are being taken in the other parts of the public services. We have offered a comparability study for local authority manual workers, National Health Service ancillaries, ambulance drivers and so on, by which we hope to remove unfairness in public service as against the private sector. But that study will, of course, take a year to carry out and will not affect this year's pay negotiations, and at the moment it seems that the services involved are concerned not with what they might get as a result of a study taken this year and paid for next year, but with what they are getting now. The Government have laid down that in their opinion, which I think is generally supported by spokesmen from the Opposition side in another place, the country can afford a 5 per cent. target for wage increases. It was the Opposition in the other place who, when they refused sanctions, took away the prop which the Government might have had.
Lord DENHAM: Sanctions against the employers.
Baroness STEDMAN: Sanctions against the employers for paying more, which means that the door has been opened for a free-for-all. Therefore, all sections of the community are now after the going rate and, being human beings, one cannot blame them for that. There is an offer on the table, but at the meeting yesterday the employers' side did not make an offer which had been talked about with my right honourable friend the Secretary of State. We had taken into account the Prime Minister's announcement about a special offer for the low-paid people. They had done the working out on that, and it was agreed that that would amount to an increase of something like 8.8 per cent. The Government had indicated to the employers that they were prepared to accept that kind of an increase in the interests of achieving a settlement, and that it would be supported and underpinned by the rate support grant. That offer was not laid on the table at the meeting yesterday. We understand that the employers' secretary is anxious to have
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a further meeting in a few days, and we are hoping that that offer will be firmly on the table.
Lord HAILSHAM of SAINT MARY-LEBONE: My Lords, there is a point which my noble friend made to the noble Baroness, which really ought to be pressed. I am not talking now about sanctions, which have nothing whatever to do with the public sector. What I am putting to her is this. Is it within her knowledge that, I think Section 9 of the Conspiracy and Protection of Property Act 1875 has been retained in force by both the Labour and Conservative Parties when in office, and is now in force, and that it applies to people who endanger human life? Has the attention of the unions been drawn to the possible criminal action which may be brought against their members?
Baroness STEDMAN: My Lords, I cannot answer that question in the affirmative, but I will inquire whether that has been done.
Lord ROCHESTER: My Lords, would the noble Baroness give a specific answer to the question which I posed to her just now; namely, whether or not the Government are prepared to consult with Opposition Parties?
Baroness STEDMAN: My Lords, we are prepared to consult with anyone who will help us to get out of the state that we are in with our pay policy. We have said—and the Opposition have agreed—that 5 per cent. is the proper limit which the country can afford at the moment without going back to the days of rocketing inflation. Any help that we can obtain from any other Party or any organisation to get us back on those kind of lines we shall accept.
Lord WIGG: My Lords, leaving on one side the question of how far feelings were exacerbated yesterday by the refusal of the employers to put forward the Government's proposal, will the Minister note that the Opposition, if I did not mishear what they said, are now suggesting that where, as a result of that, workers withdraw their labour, chief constables should be invited to consider making this a criminal offence? That being so, would the Minister, as a practical person,

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be kind enough to bear in mind the suggestion that in order to implement the Opposition's proposal—and we know that the Opposition might be in Government very shortly—she should confiscate or requisition all of the major football grounds in order to prepare them for the reception of the prisoners? Will the Minister also be good enough to inform the House whether, if workers refuse to carry out the renovations necessary to receive the prisoners, they will be prosecuted as well and, if so, where they will be put?
Baroness STEDMAN: My Lords, my noble friend has asked a series of hypothetical questions at this stage to which I should not like to give an answer.
The Earl of LAUDERDALE: My Lords, on a more serious note, would the noble Baroness take it that there is great anxiety about the point raised by my noble and learned friend on the Front Bench regarding the principle of conspiracy? Will the noble Baroness take it that nobody in this House would dream of asking her to respond to a legal question put by a legal luminary, but will she also take it that there is a great feeling in this House that there is an air about the Statement which I can only describe as complacent? It is not the Minister's Statement, of course, since it comes from the other place. However, will the Minister take it that this House would appreciate it if she would convey to her right honourable friends the gravity with which this aspect of conspiracy is regarded in all parts of the House?
Baroness STEDMAN: My Lords, I have already said that I shall convey these views to my right honourable friend in the other place, and I do not usually make promises from the Dispatch Box which I do not carry out.
Baroness BURTON of COVENTRY: My Lords, may I say a word? I tried to raise this matter last week—
Several noble Lords: Question!
Baroness BURTON of COVENTRY: My Lords, I am going to put a question. Would the noble Baroness try to get it over to her right honourable friend that there is this very grave disquiet? It is not
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that people doubt that the Government deplore these actions, but in view of what is happening at the Westminister Hospital and elsewhere they feel that to deplore is not enough, and that somehow or another this feeling of indignation—and it is worse than indignation—must be put over to the country. It is not enough to deplore. If I may take up another minute of your Lordships' time, has the Minister heard of the woman patient in Coventry who had to have an operation for cancer of the breast; that the surgeon concerned had to choose whether to operate on her or whether to amputate the leg of another patient whose life was in danger; that he chose to amputate the leg and that the woman patient—with, I think, incredible courage which I could not have shown—said that she thought he had made the right decision, and that that decision had to be taken because of the industrial action which is taking place? I really think that something should be done about it.
Baroness STEDMAN: My Lords, they are certainly not empty words when we say that we deplore what is going on, and I shall certainly see to it that my right honourable friend knows about the feelings of this House and about what has been said here this afternoon. So far as the specific case which my noble friend has raised is concerned, I do not have any knowledge of it. Therefore, without the facts before me I cannot make a proper judgment.
Lord ORR-EWING: My Lords, would the noble Baroness take this opportunity, since pay negotiations have broken down, to tell this House and the country what are the average earnings—not the take-home pay, not the basic pay—of the ancillary workers in the Hospital Service? Secondly, may I ask the noble Baroness to consider whether or not it is illegal, under a recent ruling, to stop urgently needed medical supplies from going into a hospital and, if it is illegal, why no arrests have been made?
Baroness STEDMAN: My Lords, so far as the last question is concerned, I cannot answer why no arrests have been made, but urgent medical supplies are supposed to have been allowed to get through to hospitals. So far as average earnings are concerned, I do not have the

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particulars with me. They vary according to the different grades of the employees. I will obtain this information for the noble Lord and let him have it. If the noble Lord cares to put down a Question for Written Answer, we can also get the average earnings recorded in Hansard.
Lord BYERS: My Lords, could we not give more publicity to this aspect of the case? The noble Lord the Leader of the House was good enough last week to quote the answers which I wanted in respect of the lorry drivers. Could we not have, as a matter of routine from the Government, an authoritative statement of what is the basic wage, what are the average earnings and what are the bonuses and the fringe benefits in each case?
Baroness STEDMAN: Yes, my Lords, I will take care to obtain that information and, with the leave of the House, we might get it printed in Hansard.
Lord SHINWELL: My Lords, various suggestions have been put forward by both Opposition Parties. Yesterday, Mr. Heath stated that what is required is that Parties should get together to discuss the problem that is facing the country—not the long term problem but the present problem. I ventured to suggest in a speech which I made during the course of our debate only last week, that this is a national problem. We can talk about conspiracy and criminals and we can castigate and lambast each other, but we have to recognise that we are confronted with a national problem. May I therefore ask my noble friend whether or not it would be desirable that she should consult her honourable friend, who might then consult the Prime Minister, who might then consult the Leaders of the Opposition Parties and responsible people in the Opposition and, indeed, anybody who can offer suggestions? They should sit around the table, not a long time off but at once. That meeting, which should include representatives of the TUC and the CBI, should be convened at the earliest possible opportunity and the opportunity taken to face this problem, diagnose the complaint and try to seek a solution.
Baroness STEDMAN: My Lords, my noble friend is quite right. This is a
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national situation. We want to obtain the maximum possible national agreement and help in trying to get over our difficulties on all fronts concerning pay, not only on the local authority front. It is not for me to say that my right honourable friend the Secretary of State will consult somebody, who will then consult somebody else, and so on. However, I will see to it that my noble friend's remarks are brought to the attention of my right honourable friend in the hope that he can act on them from there.
Lord INGLEWOOD: My Lords, while recognising that the Government are not in a position to give instructions to any of our virtually independent police forces, where chief officers are responsible for the control of those forces, there is none the less adequate machinery for consultation between the different chief officers of police and also adequate machinery whereby Ministers can at least make recommendations to the police in this country, because, at a time like this, slow moving machinery can be disastrous.
Baroness STEDMAN: My Lords, I am sure that such machinery as is necessary is being used, in so far as Ministers and the police out in the counties are concerned. I am sure that the police know what their job is and that if they get complaints they will act upon them.
Lord HANKEY: My Lords, will the noble Baroness consider that there is very great support in the country for the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Shinwell, and is it not really a matter for the Prime Minister and the other heads of Parties more than for departmental Ministers, and, if the noble Baroness agrees, will she very kindly represent this to the highest authorities?
Baroness STEDMAN: My Lords, as I understand it, my highest authority is the Secretary of State within my Department and I have said that I will bring the views of this House to his notice.
Lord SMITH: My Lords, does the noble Baroness agree with me, as I feel sure she will, that the plight of patients in hospitals has become most serious and urgent? If she agrees with that, would she not further agree that, although the best way to help patients is the speedy reso-

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lution of disputes, speed does not always occur? During the resolution of disputes should we not be trying to find some way of doing more to help patients in regard to the results of the disputes, or should we just let patients take their chance? I do not believe that the House finds the present situation acceptable in any way.
Baroness STEDMAN: My Lords, the noble Lord is quite right, and that is how we should like to see things operate.

STATE AID TO POLITICAL PARTIES
4.21 p.m.
Lord HOUGHTON of SOWERBY Lord HOUGHTON of SOWERBY rose to call attention to the need for State aid to political Parties; and to move for Papers. The noble Lord said: My Lords, I shall begin with an announcement made by the Lord President of the Council, Mr. Edward Short—now my noble friend Lord Glenamara—on 29th July, 1974 in another place, when he announced that financial aid would be provided for Opposition Parties in Parliament; secondly, that a Select Committee of Members of Parliament would be set up to examine the support facilities available to Back Bench Members and, thirdly, that an independent committee would be set up to look at the question of financial assistance for political Parties in respect of their work outside Parliament.
The first step was taken on 20th March, 1975 when the House of Commons approved financial aid to Opposition Parties in carrying out their work inside Parliament. Qualifying conditions and limits were imposed on the financial aid to be given, but the outcome was that the Conservative Opposition in the House of Commons received the maximum grant of £150,000 a year and the Liberal and at least one other Party received a proportionate amount totalling, I think, altogether an annual expenditure of something over £200,000. That financial aid has been in operation in another place since the early part of 1975. In May 1975 the independent committee—the third proposal of the then Lord President of the Council—was implemented and the committee was appointed to look at the question of financial assistance for political Parties in
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respect of their work outside Parliament. I had the honour to be appointed chairman of that committee and two of my noble friends, Lord Wall and Lord McCarthy, were members. We reported in August 1976 but our report has not been debated in either House until now, so I thought I would take the opportunity of giving your Lordships' House 2½ hours to have a look at this difficult and possibly contentious subject.
My committee was divided and a social survey that we took of public opinion revealed that members of the public were divided, too. On the committee we favoured State aid to political Parties by two to one. In the country there was a marginal majority in favour of aid to political Parties, though I am bound to admit that many people in the survey held such a poor opinion of political Parties and Party politics that some of them wished to spend no time or money on them. But the majority of the more thoughtful people in the survey took the subject seriously and were concerned about the dependence of the Labour Party on the trade unions for money and of the Conservative Party on businessmen and companies for money.
I shall not go into the detail of the recommendations that we made because there was no real disagreement about the method if one could once overcome the difficulties about the principle. The majority of the committee made certain recommendations, with which I think the minority of the committee did not quarrel, as regards their financial provision, but they were still unable to overcome their objection to state aid to political Parties as a matter of policy and of principle. I will summarise what we did by saying that we proposed a modest injection of public funds into the resources of the political Parties under certain strict conditions and a modest contribution towards the election expenses of all candidates, irrespective of Party, who polled enough votes to save their deposit. As regards the candidates, we included local government elections as well as parliamentary elections and we indicated that our proposals should extend to candidates for the European elections as well.
The first proposal, the modest injection of funds into the central resources of the political Parties, was a grant of roughly

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25 per cent. of their then existing income from the then existing sources. The second proposal, to assist candidates irrespective of Party was really more electoral reform, assisting the democratic process, rather than aid to political Parties because the candidates could qualify if they saved their deposit whether they stood in any Party interest or not. The aid to Parties was aimed to improve efficiency and organisation, which on the whole we found rather poor. Compared with European political Parties, our political organisation and activities are virtually nondescript. They are really very bad indeed when compared with the scale and efficiency with which European political parties conduct their affairs. But the aid to candidates was to make candidature less dependent upon Party finance, and what we proposed for the candidates was that they should be reimbursed up to one-half of the maximum permitted expenditure laid down by law for the conduct of elections and that would have amounted to roughly £800 per candidate. The aid to the political Parties which we proposed was also—and I must be frank about this—to lessen the dependence of the two main political Parties on what we described in our report as their "traditional supporters".
Class divisions in this country are really deeply entrenched in our social, industrial and political life and we wanted to break them down a little. The divisions in this country really go very deep indeed—much deeper, I think, than many people realise. They are not so much differences of opinion as divisions of history, upbringing, education, outlook, and group or self-interest. The vision of what sort of society or what sort of country we want is much blurred in the Party conflict these days. We are now in a secular and an acquisitive society with a vengeance, and we are seeing the manifestations of that at this present time.
We pride ourselves on the voluntary principle in many activities: voluntary bodies, voluntary efforts, voluntary this, voluntary that. How pure and undefiled can voluntary be? How pure and undefiled is it? Even the closed shop is voluntary trade union membership. You do not have to join; you merely lose your
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job if you do not. The political levy is voluntary, but you do not volunteer to pay it; you merely contract out of something you have never volunteered to do. The Labour Party depends heavily upon the trade union political levy. The Conservative Party is supported by donations, a noble word which we heard so much of in the course of our inquiries; donations, some from companies, fewer than there used to be, still in my opinion too many, bearing in mind that there is no democratic assent to much of the money that companies give particularly to the Conservative Party. Donations are, of course, voluntary too. I have from time to time seen them being collected in first class compartments on railway journeys, and I have been impressed by how persuasive this exercise is.
I am not criticising. I am, however, in favour of doing something to neutralise to a limited extent dependence of the two main political Parties on their traditional sources of financial support. I would like to see some money go into the political Parties which is neutral money, free of all bias, without strings, tangible or imaginary. We were frequently told by political Parties in Europe that State money was the only neutral money to come into politics; all the rest had some strings attached. This may not be the moment to talk about more Government expenditure, but this surely is the moment to consider whether our political and parliamentary institutions are in some way failing the nation. At least I think we can all agree that the authority of Government and Parliament is scarcely being enhanced by current events. If our system of parliamentary democracy and our basis of electoral representation begins to crumble, if it shows signs of becoming unstuck, then I think the whole system of our parliamentary democracy is in peril.
Political parties are of great importance and should be of deep concern to all people. Political Parties formulate the policies of government. They supply the candidates and the candidates become Members of Parliament, and Members of Parliament become Ministers and they therefore constitute Her Majesty's Government. What hazards there are; what half-baked policies or incompetence can find their way to Westminster. Where do all the great debates go to, the forum of

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the nation? They all seem to fizzle out. What is the true nature of the sovereignty of Parliament? How much is mythology and how much illusion, how much reality of power? We have been having questions about that in the last few minutes. Something should be done by somebody, but it is not; probably it cannot be because there is no authority to do it. It is incredible to me how scornful and indifferent people can be about the only institutions of political power in the country today, the political Parties.
If we do not take politics seriously we do not take the government of the country seriously, and we do not take the future of the country seriously, either. We apply no audit of efficiency, diligence of research, wisdom of policies, competence of personnel or fitness to govern. All this is taken on trust. All this is left to the vague concept of what we call the democratic process, and there is no guarantee that it will yield the quality of Parliament or of government that the country requires. We in Parliament pontificate to the nation at large about productivity, efficiency, forward planning and all the rest of the requisites for success in the modern world, yet we leave our politics to the confrontation between the political levy of the trade unions and the cheque book of the businessman.
Who among us can look forward with any confidence to the state of Britain ten years from now, especially if we continue to regard our political institutions as purely private concern and best left to the pipers who will undoubtedly call the tune? And who will look even to the end of this year, with elections to Parliament, to Assemblies, to Europe, to local authorities, all in this year, with an unpredictable result of a parliamentary Election yet to come? Who can see how political Parties are going to get through this year without some consideration for their financial stability and ability to deliver what the nation requires in constructive thought and policies? We cannot treat political Parties as if they were some charity supported entirely by voluntary contributions. I conclude, what a way to run a country! How far are our prejudices going to stand in the way of a more realistic and a more rational approach to the question of our political Parties, on whom the fate of Britain
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really depends? My Lords, I beg to move for Papers.
4.38 p.m.
Lord THORN EYCROFT: My Lords, it may be convenient if I reply briefly to the remarks of the noble Lord. I am, as the House knows, Chairman of the Conservative Party, but I am not the master of the Conservative Party: I am its servant. I advise it and from time to time it may take my advice, but by no means always. I want to make my status absolutely plain. My advice to the Conservative Party on this matter is that it should depend upon its own resources and not rest upon the back of the taxpayer. I therefore differ from the noble Lord, but may I say, in differing from him, that that in no way detracts from my belief in the sincerity of the carefully reasoned speech which he has delivered or the quite admirable report which he has published, which is indeed a masterly study of a difficult and complex argument.
I reject for a number of reasons a suggestion that we should depend more upon the State. I feel that the role of a political Party is, among other things, and importantly, to provide a bulwark against the ever-rising power of the State and the bureaucracy. I do not want to over-state this argument. All I would say—and I think I might carry your Lordships with me—is that the more they depend on the State and the bureaucracy for money the less able are they really to criticise those who are giving them the money. I therefore prefer, and so advise, that we should maintain as great an independence from the State and the bureaucracy as possible.
I know the Treasury well and the noble Lord knows the Inland Revenue. J have never known the Treasury to part with cash without an audit and I find it hard to believe that public money will be scattered among political Parties without some attempt to watch what is going on and how it is used. I am not impressed with the precedents. I am aware, as the noble Lord said, that arrangements were made some years ago whereby the respective Whips' Offices and the Leaders' Offices are maintained by a parliamentary grant. I am aware that some European Parties, and may be Parties in other parts of the world, are in receipt of public funds. I do not

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think that we know enough about the effect on those other Parties and we may learn more from our contacts with Europe. I would only say that from the contacts that I have had so far I have not been very favourably impressed with the effect of State aid to Parties, wherever I have seen it.
There is another practical reason why I oppose the suggestions of the noble Lord—namely, that in truth the money is not there. If we look at this country at present we see that we are taxed to the limit; we are borrowed to the hilt and there are pressures being brought to bear which are pushing the interest and mortgage rates up. Effectively, if anyone anywhere suggests increased expenditure, they mean printing more money. That is an argument which applies more widely than to aid to political Parties.
If one looks at the scene today—and we discussed some of it a few minutes ago—virtually every power block is pressing for more cash, cash that has not been earned and that is not backed by production. It is hard to exaggerate the gravity of that scene, whether one looks at it from these Benches or from the point of view of the Government.
I accept that the amounts about which the noble Lord is talking are minuscule compared with the vast sums which we were discussing a short time ago as regards local government, lorry drivers and so on. However, I believe that political Parties are under some obligation to show an example in these matters. I do not think that this is a good moment for the political Parties to join the queue of all the other people who, effectively, are asking for more and more money from the State. Therefore, I believe that they should hold back and whatever the noble Lord's view may be I suggest that he waits a year or two before pressing it too far.
I believe this suggestion to be wrong for another reason—it is very bad for the Parties. Of course we need money and I am grateful to the noble Lord for giving me the opportunity to stand here and say how much money we do need. I am happy if any assistance or any words of mine, in so dignified an assembly as this, can encourage subscriptions to the Conservative Party, even. We need the money
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and it is always tempting when one is offered money from the public purse. There is no effort involved, just a vote in the House, and then the money comes in and one spends it. Actually, the things one spends it on tend to grow almost as fast as the rate that the money goes in. In my view the noble Lord has been taken slightly astray in some of the lusher pastures he has been examining. I do not believe that great offices and so on are necessary for political Parties. The people who work for them should be properly paid, but a certain decent austerity in a political Party is not a bad thing to go for as well, and it earns rather more respect from the public.
I have listened carefully to the case and obviously I have, as the noble Lord knows, read with great care the very full report and the minority report that were issued. It is interesting to note what the case is not. The noble Lord at no point suggests that any political Party was in urgent need of funds. No Party at present, thank God! is teethering on the edge of bankruptcy. Indeed, he does not say that it is and he does not urge that it is. The Conservatives have told him that they do not want the money. The Liberal Party no doubt will be offering us its views in a few moments. The Scottish Nationalists turn it down. Plaid Cymru reject it and the Ulster Unionists have no need for it. Therefore, it is not some desperate demand that is being put forward. Apart from what the Liberals may say, at present the only real claimant is the Labour Party.
Therefore, let me look for a moment at the financial situation. The Conservatives—and this was not really made plain in what the noble Lord said—in fact raise three-quarters of all the money they spend from small donations by private people; not donations from companies at all. Three-quarters of everything that we spend is raised by people holding coffee mornings, going from door to door collecting, and so forth. It is hard work and the fact that we do it is one reason why we have three or four times the membership of the Labour Party. We face up to it, we go out and we seek to raise these funds. The remaining quarter comes from industry and institutions, but the average subscription, even from those sources, is only £200. We

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cannot match the massive donations that come to the Labour Party. We cannot match the hundreds of thousands of pounds that come from some unions.
Over the past three years the Labour Party has been financed with over £7 millon by the unions. The Conservative Party has raised under £5 million from industry and institutions. Therefore, the Labour Party is, if I may say so, over-funded. I would ask the noble Lord to contemplate the fact that if only the trade unions had not treated the Labour Party with such lush generosity it would have been compelled to do what the Conservative Party has to do—namely, go out into the highways and byways and recruit members, raise small sums and finance its own constituencies. I hesitate to raise these matters because if the Labour Party follows my advice it will be a very much more efficient Party than it is at present. Perhaps I had better stop here. However, over-financing of that kind is, on the whole, a bad thing. The very necessity that has forced the Conservative Party to search for money has also had, I think, a very good effect in raising the membership.
The Labour Party is certainly spending money. It is just about to have a new headquarters south of the river in a very pleasant location, I am told, with all the conveniences that go with new buildings and offices of that kind. I think that it is doing it on a lease-back arrangement with its bankers, but at any rate it is not short of a headquarters. In this coming February the Labour Party plans to spend about a quarter of a million pounds in one month on poster sites, posters and advertising. I ask noble Lords to contemplate the scale of expenditure that goes on. The posters which are being put up at present say:
"Keep Britain Labour and it'll keep getting better".
I am told that in Shafestbury Avenue and Horseferry Road there are Labour Party teams out trying to pull them down; on the whole, they think that perhaps those words could have been slightly better chosen. I am not criticising their policies in public relations. I am simply saying that I do not see why I should assist in funding them; that is all. However, they are not alone in these things; I do these things myself. One must be a realist
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about this and see what one is paying for. Our poster saying:
"Britain isn't getting any better",
was actually designed before the present crisis, but it is peculiarly apt today as we see people queuing outside the hospitals even before the pickets were standing round them. People can criticise, applaud or do what they like about these things, but I do not ask the noble Lord to help finance it. I think that responsibility for that should fall fairly and squarely on the shoulders of the Conservative Party, its members and its supporters, and I think that that is right.
The noble Lord, Lord Houghton of Sowerby, said that there would be many other elections. It is a tough year for those at the top in political organisations. There are the European elections. The Labour Party has the cash—it has more cash than I have; it has enormous resources behind it. What it lacks is the will. If it really wants to fight the European campaign, it has plenty of resources with which to do so. A story has reached me of a certain doubt as to its freedom to spend the money on it. However, there can be no doubt whatever that the money is there.
In those circumstances, I would advise my Party not to touch these schemes. If legislation is ever introduced to try to enable public largesse of this kind to be made available to political Parties, my advice to the Conservative Party would be to vote against the Bill. If the Bill was passed, my advice to the Party which I am proud to represent is that it should reject the money even if every other Party took it—for I believe in freedom and independence in political Parties—and when it came to office I would advise it to repeal the Bill.
4.53 p.m.
Lord BANKS: My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Houghton of Sowerby, for raising this important matter this afternoon. I think that the House owes a debt of gratitude to the noble Lord and his committee for their report on financial aid to political parties. I am glad that at last we are finding time to discuss that report this afternoon. I must say that I agreed with a great deal of what the noble Lord said in opening the debate.

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The first important factor to consider when we approach this subject is the very great change which has taken place in the role of political Parties gradually over the last 100 years. During that time there has been the development of what is termed the "mass Party". The political Party has been brought from the periphery of politics right to the very centre. Unknown for so long to the Constitution, it has now found recognition in a number of different ways. Party affiliation of candidates is now shown on the ballot paper. In a General Election in this country electors are not really choosing between local candidates; they are choosing between different national political Parties and their leaders. We may regret that that is so, but it is a fact. In his book, An Introduction to Contemporary History, Geoffrey Barraclough says this, and I think it is relevant:
"Those who rebel against the modern mass Party and hanker for a return to earlier forms of representative democracy are indulging in a dangerous form of nostalgia. They ignore the fact that the only practical alternative to the two-Party or multi-Party State under present conditions, is the single-Party State".
The importance to democracy of well-organised Parties is clear. They are needed to articulate the views of large numbers of people; they are needed to educate people in the different alternatives open to society, to represent attitudes and philosophies and to develop policies related to them; to provide alternative teams for Government and to take on the tasks of opposition. But the Party system should not be too rigid, too highly disciplined or too centralised.
How many political Parties do we require in order to see that those functions are carried out? Does one political Party represent oppressive tyranny but two political Parties represent perfect freedom? I think that we need as many political Parties as the electorate are prepared to support. But should they all be represented in Parliament? Most electoral systems have a threshold: the 5 per cent. that a Party must score in Germany before it secures any of the topping-up candidates to make the result proportional; the quota under the single transferable vote which, for example, in Ireland a candidate must get, which would be about 17 per cent. of the vote in a five-Member constituency; or in this country, the need to come top
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of the poll in a single-Member constituency. That is the highest, steepest and most difficult threshold of all, and one which is a strong barrier against a third Party or a new Party breaking through, and one which makes it difficult—but not impossible—to change the existing political set-up.
If we were to adopt any system of financial aid to political Parties, I think: that it would be important to make sure that that system did not bring about any ossification of the situation, any institutionalising of the existing Parties, as has happened in the United States, where the Republicans and the Democrats are not so much Parties as Party machines. We must not accentuate the present bias against change.
Are the present financial resources adequate for a political Party to carry out the tasks to which I referred a moment or two ago? I am glad to say that I have never held the exacting office of treasurer of the Liberal Party, but I have had two spells as its chairman and one spell as its president. I have been fairly closely associated with the central direction of its affairs for some 20 years. I have no hesitation in saying that the resources available to the Liberal Party during that time have been totally inadequate for those functions to be as efficiently performed as they ought to be. In 1974 the Liberal Party may have polled more votes than ever before—that is, of course, a fact—but the real value of the Party's income has declined. Indeed, we see from the report of the committee over which the noble Lord, Lord Houghton of Sowerby, presided that the staff of the Liberal Party is now about one-half what it was 10 years ago. Also from that report we can see that it is very restricted on the research side. The research department is now very much smaller than it was when I was chairman of the Research Committee in the middle 1960s.
I think the Party has made a remarkable contribution to the political life of this country in view of the very slender resources on which it has had to operate. Finance has been a constant anxiety and a continuous distraction, for national leaders and for constituence officers alike. The authors of the minority report of the Houghton Committee say this:
"In no way could we justify proposing a nationwide scheme of State aid solely in order to meet the needs of the Liberal Party".

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I can understand that, but it is important to emphasise that we are considering here not only the Liberal Party but any third Party which challenges the big two on a nationwide basis and whose support is not concentrated but spread throughout the country.
I am certainly not suggesting for a moment that the Liberal Party, or any other Party, should be aided if no one votes for it. But, if for example, the Liberal Party continues to secure between 10 per cent. and 20 per cent. in General Elections—it may not; it may get less or it may get more—then surely its continued existence and effective functioning is a healthy thing for our political life, whatever may be thought of the policies which it is pursuing.
But of course it is not only the Liberal Party which has financial problems. According to the noble Lord, Lord Thorneycroft, the Labour Party has no financial problems. Perhaps we shall hear from members of that Party whether they agree with that, but at least there are some of them who do not agree with it, because I read in the papers that Mr. Reg Underhill, the Labour Party's national agent, contemplating the European elections which will come on top of a General Election, the local elections, and possibly the Assembly elections in Scotland and Wales, has said:
"We must have State aid to allow the elections to be carried out on a healthy basis".
George Clark, reporting in The Times towards the end of last year before The Times disappeared from view, said:
"Mr. Norman Atkinson, Treasurer of the Labour Party, plans to tell the Party's finance committee today that by the end of the year there will be a deficit of £100,000 in the General Fund".
We read that the National Executive wants legislation on State aid as a matter of urgency. So assuming that those pleas are justified, I come to the conclusion, bearing in mind what I have already said about the Liberal Party, that what the noble Lord called a modest injection of State aid is necessary. After all, the same economic difficulties beset most voluntary organisations today.
The Wolfenden Report on voluntary organisations connected with the personal social services and the environment declared:
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"The failure of private giving to keep pace with inflation is striking though really understandable".
The Wolfenden Committee recommended greater reliance on statutory funds, although they insisted that private giving will remain an important safeguard of independence. It seems to me that the majority of the Houghton Committee have come virtually to the same conclusion about political Parties. From what they say about the evidence which they have secured from abroad, where State aid has been implemented, there has been no great falling off in voluntary giving, and indeed membership has tended to rise. So I welcome the support which the Houghton majority gives for a limited measure of State aid.
As the noble Lord, Lord Thorneycroft, said, we are here discussing a proposal for a limited amount of money; and it is proposed in two ways. It is proposed, as the noble Lord, Lord Houghton, told us, first as a grant which would be based on votes cast in the previous Election and subject to a certain threshold which the Party would have to pass. But the Houghton Committee wished this money to be given for general purposes. We on these Benches would have preferred it to be given for specific objectives—for research and for regional organisation—feeling that by doing that we are avoiding putting too much power into the hands of the central organisation of Parties.
The second method was by the reimbursement of expenses, up to half the maximum, to candidates who secure one-eighth of the poll. We are not happy about the limit to those who save their deposit. Those who do not manage to do it may fail by a very narrow margin, having secured many thousands of votes. I myself lost a deposit by 200 votes, but I had over 6,000 votes. I do not think that anybody in that Election could have regarded me as a frivolous candidate. So we have doubts about that one-eighth of the poll, and we should prefer that the candidates should have to have a much larger number of nominations than they now have in order to qualify to stand.
We also feel that if there is to be State aid there ought to be a limit on the contributions of companies and trade unions; perhaps a top limit on contributions from any one source in any one year. I was

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much impressed with what Lord Houghton said about neutral money, and the way in which abroad the State aid is welcomed because it is felt that it increases, rather than decreases, the independence of the political Parties by making them less reliant on the money obtained from contributions from companies and trade unions.
With the reservations that I have mentioned, we support the recommendations of the Houghton majority. Experience abroad in a great many democratic countries has not shown any undermining of the independence of the parliamentary Parties concerned. Some people assume that in every sphere, and in all circumstances, our British system must be superior to all others. They ought to think carefully whether that view is sustainable any longer. We can learn from others in this sphere as in other spheres. There is in my view an increasing financial problem for political Parties; one which I think will grow. For the sake of our democratic system we must face that fact. A modest injection of State aid could go far towards solving that problem.
5.7 p.m.
Viscount MASSEREENE and FER-RARD: My Lords, in May 1974 I put down a Motion and moved a debate in this House on the advisability or not of State financing of political Parties. I am pleased that the noble Lord, Lord Lord Houghton of Sowerby, has now brought this subject to the fore again. So far as I am aware, this matter had not been broached in Parliament at all before I put down this Motion in 1974. I put the Motion down then because I was of the opinion that it was worth while to make an attempt to make political Parties as free as possible from financial pressure from organisations, or individuals, to pursue policies which might not always be in the public or the national interest.
I have always been a great admirer of our democratic process, our political system, but I was hoping that perhaps by having State aid in some form the fairness of our democratic system, of our political system, might be improved. I fully realise that there are advantages and disadvantages in having State aid. I do not know whether it was as a
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result of that debate, or whether it had anything to do with it that Opposition Parties in their Parliamentary duties now get quite a lot of help from State aid in clerical assistance and research, et cetera. While on the question of research, I should like to compliment our Library staff in this House for the very efficient research that they now provide for this House. Whether any of that comes from State aid I do not know, but it is a great improvement on the previous research facilities.
In the debate in 1974 I concentrated on the question of whether the State should subsidise the general expenditure of political Parties. This procedure is followed by six West European countries and by Israel, Canada and, to a certain extent—in presidential elections—by America. It is a highly controversial question and I am fully aware that my Party does not at present approve of it. However, one advantage would be that the political Parties would be free from financial pressures that might make them do something that was not in the public interest.
Consider the crisis we have in this country today; near anarchy or one might even call it anarchy. I am convinced that if the Labour Party was not a child of the unions and was not to such a large degree dependent for its funds on the unions we should have had stronger policies from the Government on strikes and on the refusal of many union members to obey their executives.
As for the Conservative Party, I was astounded to hear the noble Lord, Lord Houghton of Sowerby, say we get a lot of funds as a result of people canvassing in first-class train compartments. My experience of first-class train compartments is very limited, because I usually travel second-class, but such experience of them as I have had leads me to believe that a great many of the people using them are civil servants, trade union executives and the like. So if we get some collections from that source, I am only too happy.
I was interested to hear my noble friend Lord Thorneycroft, who is chairman of the Party, say in a forceful manner that we get three-quarters of our donations from fund-raising in local constituencies

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and from private individuals. There appears to be some criticism from the Benches opposite that we also receive funds from companies. There is nothing dishonourable about that. After all, if it were not for private companies managing their affairs efficiently we could have no Welfare State, because it is the private sector which produces the wealth to support the Welfare State.
West Germany adopted a policy of the State financing of Parties because it was considered that it would be fairer all round if all the Parties drew their financial requirements from the same source, namely, the electorate. I shall not call it the State: I prefer to call it the electorate for the purposes of this debate.
In the debate of nearly five years ago I suggested that if the political Parties here were to receive, say, £5 million between them per year from an electorate of 40 million, it would cost the public half a packet of cigarettes per annum. That would have been the cost then and while J do not know the total requirements of the political parties today, I suppose the figure must have increased to £10 million, which would mean a cost to the electorate now of round about a packet of cigarettes or 50p–60p per head. I would not call that a great burden on the electorate to ensure that their political Parties were really up to date on research.
Having been a constituency treasurer and having held virtually every other post in local constituencies, I know how hard it is—and it is becoming harder—to collect funds. I also appreciate that the basic foundation of at any rate my Party—I should like to see it applied to all Parties—is the constituency work, the fund raising and all the wonderful work done by the local agents. That is really the cornerstone of our system of democracy.
It could happen that, owing to inflation, no matter how efficient fund raising is, we may not be able to pay our constituency agents—I am speaking of all Parties—and do our research in a sufficiently expert manner to do justice to democracy. I feel that no expense should be spared in trying to explain to people the real meaning of our democratic system and the political questions of the day. I fear that many members of the electorate do not fully understand these matters.
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I should mention a danger which could arise from the State financing of the central organisations of our Parties and constituencies; namely, that the dividing line between the independence of the political Parties and the State might become merged, and that could be dangerous. For example, we might have a Government in power who might reduce the funds or deny funds to every Party other than their own, though of course that would be totalitarian government. I think, in order to prevent that, it would be necessary to have a written Constitution; that is the danger here if there is not a written Constitution.
I wish to congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Houghton of Sowerby, upon his report, which I found extremely interesting. I hope that one day there will be a Royal Commission on this subject. As so many members of the EEC have this kind of aid I feel sure that one day it will come to this country, for better or for worse. I appreciate my Party's point of view. It would probably be unwise to do anything about the matter for a year or two, but, in my opinion State financing of political Parties will come.
5.21 p.m.
Lord MCCARTHY: My Lords, I should declare an interest. I speak as a mildly puzzled member of the Houghton Committee who signed the majority report, and I began as a mildly curious opponent of State aid to political Parties for three reasons. First, I was concerned that State aid might affect the structure of political Parties and over-centralise them, and that it might ossify their development. Secondly, I believed that the British electorate would be overwhelmingly against State aid and might be resentful of any political Party, or Parliament, which introduced it; and, thirdly, at that time I was not sufficiently aware, as I fear not everyone in this House appears to be sufficiently aware, of the very considerable additional burdens which political Parties in this country will have to undertake as a result of the forthcoming Assembly and EEC elections.
I have changed my mind partly because I have been reassured on those three counts, and partly because of the arguments which have been put up by the opponents of State aid. In the first place, on the first argument, it seems to me that the

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Houghton Committee found a way of financing State aid which was acceptable on the grounds mentioned to all members of the committee, which did not affect the structure of political Parties, and which did not ossify their further development. That was generally accepted, and I think that it has been generally accepted by most people who have commented upon the report.
Secondly, in our survey of electoral opinion we discovered, quite surprisingly, that 45 per cent. of those whom we surveyed said that if the Party needed the money they would be willing to agree to State aid, 44 per cent. said that they would not be willing, and 11 per cent. did not know. So there was not the overwhelming resistance to State aid to political Parties which I thought had existed. Thirdly, I came to realize what will be the very significant burden which all political Parties will have to bear as a result of the two new sets of elections: the Assembly elections, and the EEC elections.
So I believe that we have found here an effective, fair-minded way of introducing a modest, or, as has been said, a minuscule, amount of State aid to British political Parties. I am puzzled by the opposition and the objections to this extremely mild, modest, moderate proposal. One of the objections we have had today—and we hear it consistently—is that State aid is in some sense an offence against our voluntary principle. Almost any proposal in this country can be opposed by saying that it is an offence against the voluntary principle. An appeal to the voluntary principle is usually a series of confusions. I believe that in this instance the confusion is to confuse voluntary with privately funded. What people are in favour of is a privately funded system of running political Parties; what they are against is a partially publicly funded system of running political Parties. It has nothing to do with the voluntary principles. Nobody is suggesting that it should be compulsory, and, as has been said by previous speakers, there are a very large number of voluntary organisations in this country—many of them were mentioned in the Wolfenden Report—which assist in running the social services, the arts, race relations, and
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indeed a whole variety of social functions; and they are State aided. They are increasingly State aided. Nobody suggests that the State aid given to the Royal Opera House affects the Friends of Covent Garden.
So this is a confusion, and if people really believe what is argued here they would reject the State aid that is given now. As we discovered in the Houghton Committee, there is a very substantial amount of State funding being put into political Parties at this moment. There is free postage in General Elections, free election broadcasts, and, as the noble Lord, Lord Houghton, said, £150,000 a year is given to the Opposition. For all I know some of the very speeches made against this proposal may be State aided. I note that we spent £1½ million of State aid on the referendum for Europe. So I cannot understand objection to the proposal on the basis of the voluntary principle.
The second point which I cannot understand, and which I am puzzled by and curious about, is that we are told that State aid for political Parties will kill the voluntary effort which goes into political Parties at the moment. The fact is that the amount of money which is being suggested is not at all likely to enable the political Parties to operate without voluntary help, in exactly the same way as all the other bodies which are used to assist the social services, and so on, are not able to get enough aid to run without voluntary help. All the evidence which we have had from other countries, and all the evidence in the report, indicates that in those other countries the injection of State aid—in many cases at levels far above what we are proposing in the report—has not had the effect of killing voluntary effort. If one understands the kind of motivation of people who work for political Parties, one sees that it is extremely unlikely that State aid will have any such effect.
It is also said that State aid will kill the independence of political Parties. Again, if we look at other countries we see that this does not happen. It was stressed to us over and over again in our foreign visits that at first there is a certain amount of opposition and concern that State aid will affect the independence and the running of political Parties, but that

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very soon, within a year or so, nothing is left of such objections and people begin to realise that State aid for political Parties is a convenient device, like the forms of State aid which we give to other voluntary institutions.
I do not regard as curious, but, rather, I find most reasonable, the argument that even if this is a minuscule amount of money, we in this country are in such a serious economic position that we cannot afford to spend any more money at this time, and in particular any more money on political Parties. I believe that the answer to that is the answer that is given in the Houghton Report itself. If I remember aright, it is an answer given by the chairman in his introduction, where he says that the only form of increase in public expenditure which can be justified at this time is something which can be shown to raise and to improve the efficient operation of the political or economic system. I do not want to go into this point, nor argue it because it has been fully debated by previous speakers, but it seems to me to be the argument which can be put forward under that heading.
The final point, which I find not simply curious but, I think, somewhat worrying, is the ease with which opponents of this measure dismiss the experience of other countries. Canada, Israel, Denmark, Finland, France, Italy, Sweden, Germany, Holland and Austria—none of these countries has anything to teach us, it appears! The fact that all these countries have had different kinds of State aid over different periods, and that virtually all the objections, fears and concerns that have been put forward by opponents of this measure have been found to be totally groundless, has no effect whatever, it appears, on the opponents of this argument! I find that degree of insularity worrying.
I may say that I even find it worrying in the minority report, which I think is a brilliantly argued opposition to our position but which, when it comes to dismissing the international arguments, seems to be less than just. We are told by the minority that we cannot learn from Sweden, it is too rich; we cannot learn from Germany or Austria because they have not been democratic long enough; and, as for Holland, one of the authors of the minority report actually met a man in the street in
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Holland who had never heard that they had State aid. This kind of refusal to learn from the experience of other countries is, I think, very typical of the kind of problems we in this country face. Even when we have relatively simple difficulties which have in fact been overcome and dealt with in other countries, we are so insular that we fear that that would not apply in this country. That I find profoundly worrying.
Finally, I would say that there is one objection, of course, which can be made to this—and I do not suggest it was put forward by the noble Lord, Lord Thorney-croft. I do not suggest that this was his argument, but there is one objection which can be made. It is, of course, that the present system benefits one Party—and I must say this because it is the case: it benefits the Conservative Party. It is not the case that only the Liberal Party and the Labour Party want State aid. If you read the chapter in the Houghton Report, you will see that the Labour Party is for it; the Liberal Party is for it; the Scots Nats, say they would be in favour of our paying the cost of printing and distributing electoral material and improved research; the Communist Party, for what it is worth, is in favour of it; and two Parties in Northern Ireland are against it. The two Parties which are most clearly against State aid in any form are the Conservative Party and Plaid Cymru.
I can appreciate why, if I was a member of the Conservative Party, I would argue against State aid. The fact is that the Conservative Party is the richest of political Parties. According to the Houghton Committee it has an income twice the size of that of the Labour Party and six times the size of that of the Liberal Party. It is, of course, quite true that most of the donations for running the Conservative Party come from individuals, but they have a better class of individual. But anybody who does not take that narrow view, anybody who looks at a reasonable solution to a serious problem, at very little cost, would, I think, support the majority of the Houghton Committee.
5.34 p.m.
Lord HARMAR-NICHOLLS: My Lords, the innocent Motion that the noble Lord, Lord Houghton, has put on the

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Order Paper for debate really raises a very fundamental matter indeed, and I think it carries with it fundamental dangers. I think we ought to look at it very carefully before, even by half praise, we give any encouragement for it to be pursued. Despite the eloquence of the noble Lord, Lord McCarthy, I am afraid I lost sympathy with what he was saying when his main argument seemed to be, "It is minuscule; it is tiny; it is not very big; it cannot do much harm." That was the implication. The principle of the snowball that gets bigger and the principle behind Parkinson's law has been so almost inevitable in everything that I have seen in my life that when somebody uses the excuse, "It is tiny", that is half an argument, so far as I am concerned, to show that they are not altogether enamoured of the fundamental behind it.
My Lords, why do I think it is fundamental and dangerous? It is because I believe that, unlike an ordinary job, those following a vocation should not have material security or easy comfort as their main aim; and I think that being a Member of Parliament should be a vocation, and not a job. If you wish to be in governmental arenas but you pine for fixed office hours and a rigid pattern of operations, with good pay and, eventually, a pension, if you want to play your part in government with those very understandable feelings in mind, then you ought to be a civil servant, because you are civil servant material; you are not of Parliamentary character, as I see Parliament would have to work. Just like the Member of Parliament, the same applies as regards the framework and the machinery for getting into Parliament; that is, in this country, a Parliamentary system based upon a Party system.
The formation of a Party and the preservation of a Party should depend upon its appeal and its self-help, and it should not be made easy or secure by way of an impersonal State subsidy. Unless its own strength and its own appeal can generate its own resources, then I do not believe that it has the base for having the great responsibilities that being the Government of the day, over people's lives, carries with it. For, paradoxically—and we find this outside politics, too—the insecurity arising from the cost of preserving and maintain-
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ing a Party is itself one of the safeguards for preserving democracy and the freedoms which go with democracy. The fact that you have to fight hard and work hard, be keen and produce ideas which are acceptable to the mass of the people, and that in order to get that over you have got to have the funds to propagate your ideas and the urge to get the money to do that, is one of the safeguards for ensuring that the views and the policies which come out at the end as a consequence of that are the ones which are more likely to be right.
If a Party's income is safe and certain by way of a Treasury grant, instead of being at risk if they should fall out of step with people whose views they claim to represent, then, when that happens, one of the levers for obtaining a Parliament and a Government truly acceptable to the people will have gone. Because what is the process for building a Parliament based upon the Party system, such as has grown up here? Does it not happen just like this? Recognisable groups of people interested in the art or the vocation of governing combine. They do not know one another, but they happen to have the same views on this important job of how a country should be governed; and, because they have similar views, they come together and work out their course of action.
When, as a group, they get together thinking about the type of government they want to have, what they have to decide upon and agree is how people should be disciplined, because Governments do not give you anything. Governing is how much discipline is needed to get society to work together; how much people want to give up to help the more unfortunate, and all that sort of thing; how much discipline can you attain without interfering with the impetus of getting the wealth and the good things that people need to share if their standard of life is to be good. That is what is aimed at by the groups getting together. Inevitably, each group is different from the other recognised groups, who have different ideas as to how the country should be disciplined in order to get the right sort of effort.
When the groups are big enough to begin to be recognised, and when they are powerful enough, as a result of getting together, that they can apparently get representation in Parliament, then they become a Party. It is only at that point,

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when the groups have satisfied their neighbours that their ideas are good and that they are prepared to finance it themselves, and not to have it underwritten by some money which they have not had to get together, that they become an established Party; and the different groups have differing and different ideas as to how the disciplining shall be done. So there develops the need for the Party to propagate their agreed policies in a way which will induce the voters at the next election to give them the power to govern.
At that point, the cost comes in. They have got together because they have the same ideas, they have the policies; but before they can turn those policies into governmental action they must get people into Parliament; and to do this costs money. To get pamphlets printed and so on requires money. Today, as always, the battle of propagating by Parties needs money and it needs a lot of money. It is this necessity to get the money which is the first safeguard of its being the people's genuine choice. If the group cannot enthuse a sufficient number of people to support it with cash as well as by instinct, it has not got to the point where it becomes a bona fide Party. As a consequence of that difficulty we are saved from having a lot of nuisance, crank Parties and we are saved from irresponsible splinter groups. They must have ideas and they must be able to impress sufficient people with them to give them not only their instinctive support but their cash in order to back those ideas. It is the lack of the final thing, of cash, which keeps at bay many of the irresponsible groups which many other countries have had and which would grow in this country if there was not that safeguard which is tied up with the need for their point of view to enable them to get the cash.
Then, even if the group passes the first test and if they become a Party, they must not be made to feel safe forever or to feel that, just because during one period their policy fitted in with the nation's need, they can go on as a Party and get a Government grant keeping them in automatic existence in perpetuity. We must not have that. The world changes, new conditions and inventions call for philosophies and policies which are not outmoded by these inevitable changes. If a Party has policies or personnel to
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present those policies which do not change or which change in the wrong direction so that they no longer attract the contributions from their past admirers, then that lack of cash is a safeguard for true democracy. Artificially, to keep in being a Party that has lost the enthusiasm and the financial support of its past admirers, to keep it in being by taking taxes that have been paid by its opponents, must bring about a phoney democracy. So I believe that making Parties earn their corn is a safeguard against that phoney development.
We have seen this in action during the lifetime of many noble Lords who are attending this debate today. We have seen how the Mosley Party came into existence when they presented an appeal which caused people to want to give them funds, but they did not last very long. It was lack of finance at the end of the day which ended the Party. If they had been enabled to remain in existence by Treasury grants, they would not have faded away as they did. We remember that after the war we had the Commonwealth Party. The same thing happened. The Hulton Press supported it. Their appeal was attractive at a certain time and for a short period, but it was not fundamental enough to generate finance in order to keep it in existence; so, thank Heaven! it faded. If it had had a Treasury grant it would not have done so.
Lord BANKS: My Lords—
Lord HARMAR-NICHOLLS: My Lords, I was coming to the Liberal Party. It may well be that that is happening to the Liberal Party today. Despite the Liberal Party's glorious past and despite the great contribution it has made to the development of our country in the past, it could be—and they perhaps would not be able to understand it—that their policies have been so diverse and so irresponsible on occasions that they have not been able to attract the necessary finance for them to keep their policies and principles on the move. It could well be, where they advocated in Liverpool a pavement policy and, somewhere else, a policy which was completely different, and in another constituency again a completely different one, that that irresponsible appeal which had had its attractions for a particular constituency lost

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its appeal as that of a recognisable Party which ought to be kept in existence. That is why they did not get the funds.
Lord BANKS: My Lords, all that I would say about that is that we had the largest vote in our history in 1974; and it was in the period in which we had this very acute financial difficulty. The point I wanted to put is this. Would not the noble Lord agree that the decline of the Commonwealth Party had nothing to do with finance but was due to the ending of the Party truce and the competition that it had to face from the Labour Party?
Lord HARMAR-NICHOLLS: My Lords, the Commonwealth Party declined, I believe, purely because of finance. I think that if they had had the funds they would have gone on; they would have been in existence. I think they did not pass the first test.
In reverse, my Lords, we have seen the "Scots-Nats", who have an appeal, and who have enthused it and have been able not only to get the support of the people but also their money. If they take the wrong direction and do not get their money they will fade away. If they keep on having an appeal to the mass of their people they will get support and their money. The noble Lord said that the Liberal Party had their best representation in 1974. They had! I thought that the Liberal Party were well on the way to growing again and I hoped that they would. It gives me no joy that they are sinking. But I believe there is a reason that they missed their opportunity. If their leader and their Chief Whip in another place at the time had accepted the invitation from Mr. Heath and had accepted a Cabinet post which was offered to them and had shown a sense of responsibility and realism, their funds and their power would have grown and they would not be in the position where I am able to say at this moment that I think they are fading away.
The strength of our system until now is that only the will and enthusiasm and the cash from the people, willingly given, has allowed this evolution from groups into Parties. I believe that to dilute this genuine growth by injecting money, not naturally produced, will lead to an ersatz, imitation democracy.
Lord DENAHM: My Lords, I hope that my noble friend will forgive me, but this is a strictly limited debate and there are three more speakers before the noble Lord the Leader of the House winds up.
Lord HARMAR-NICHOLLS: My Lords, I noticed that the three speakers who preceded me were showing on the clock more than I am at present showing.
A noble Lord: I do not think so.
Lord HARMAR-NICHOLLS: I think so. One was 16 minutes. In any case, while I agree that we are going to debate shorter speeches later—
Lord DENHAM: My Lords, it is a limited debate.
Lord HARMAR-NICHOLLS: My Lords, it is a 2½-hour debate; and now we have wasted three or four minutes of that. At the end of the day, is it just a school debate that we have come to here, where we take rigidly our allotted minutes? I know that one wants to confine one's words as much as possible. The last election was my 12th and, if you take local government elections, it was my 18th. I have been able to find time, while looking after my own businesses, to do that. I have been chairman of 42 constituencies in the Conservative Party and a member of the Conservative Party Executive for years. One has a certain experience. When a debate like this is taking place, I think one ought to be on the record. It may be pompous of me to say that, but I happen to think it, and I shall take advantage of having it on the record.
As to the present subject, those who are failing complain that it is unfair that the Socialists should have their cash collected and handed to them by the unions and that the Conservative Party should have a quarter of their funds in contributions from private enterprise organisations. What is unfair about that? The Socialists made it crystal clear that they will nationalise when they can; that they will tax for egalitarian reasons; that they will give trade unions preferential treatment under the law. If people want this, then they are entitled to finance its implementation, either directly or through the channel of the unions. If they want to

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be in trade unions but do not want nationalisation, egalitarian taxes or union domination in politics, then they should contract out of the levy. That is the way in which it should be done, not by trying to drive them out by bringing in this phoney Treasury grant.
Similarly with the Conservative Party. The Conservative Party are the only ones who are likely to preserve the free enterprise system as we see it with lower taxes. If people believe that that is good for the country, if they believe it is in their interests to do what is good for the country and they make their contributions either as individuals or from their companies, then what is wrong with that? The very fact that they give their money is a confirmation that the policies are the ones that the people want. Nothing that has been said so far has shown that on the score of the allocation of money that there has been any weakness in the way that our Parliamentary system has worked. There are many weaknesses in the policies being pursued, but this is not the weak point. To present that it is, and to change it in the way that Lord Houghton of Sowerby's Motion suggests, would be both dangerous and wrong. I hope that whether it is discussed now or, as my noble friend who preceded me said, whether it is discussed in a few years' time, it will be turned down.
Viscount MASSEREENE AND FER-RARD: My Lords, before my noble friend sits down, as regards State aid enabling a lot of irresponsible parties to spring into being, I do not think that would happen. One would have to have a certain percentage of the vote before receiving any State funds—some 10 per cent. I should like to make that point, but I agree with a lot of what my noble friend has said.
5.52 p.m.
Lord WALL: My Lords, may I add my thanks to my noble friend Lord Houghton of Sowerby for making this debate possible. The report sets out fully the case for and against State aid to political Parties, and I have no intention of repeating what is so adequately stated in the report. Instead, with your Lordships' forbearance, I should like to explain why I, as someone who joined Lord Houghton's committee with a totally open mind—and, indeed, a totally ignorant mind—
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should have reached the firm conclusion that some State aid to political Parties was both necessary and desirable. So I supported, and I still support, the views of the majority of the members of the committee which recommended State aid under certain clearly defined conditions. My reasons can be expressed very simply, though the process of reaching these conclusions was far from simple. Like so many people, my knowledge of what we call parliamentary democracy was very limited. This may sound strange from someone who spent nearly a third of his working life in Government service. But during those 15 years, I came to regard politics mainly as a reason given by Ministers when they could find no other grounds for rejecting excellent advice.
During the course of the committee's meetings, there seemed to be a widespread opinion that parliamentary democracy, as we understand it in this country, was in growing danger. Political Parties had failed to adapt themselves to the massive expansion of Government activities, and to the impact of this upon the daily life of the public. Many people seemed to feel that never in the history of this country had Government, Parliament, political Parties and the national and local public organisations stood in such low esteem in the eyes of the public. I was not greatly impressed by the arguments of some of our political witnesses that if one leaves things alone they will come right in the end, so I joined those who thought that at least we should make some effort to restore the health of parliamentary democracy. I was strengthened in this view by looking round the world at alternative forms of Government. What I saw I did not like.
I realise that the reasons why Government, Parliament, the political Parties and the public sector as a whole, stand in low esteem are many and complex. One reason does stand out, as the Committee itself emphasised. Since the war, successive Governments have taken far-reaching measures which involve Government, Parliament and the public sector more and more deeply in the daily lives of each and every one of the 55 million people in this country. It is no longer a question of general policies but of the detailed day-to-day execution of so many things which affect our daily lives. In these circumstances, when things go

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wrong—as go wrong they do—the public has no one to blame but Government, Parliament and the public sector; they have the authority, they have the responsibility, they are to blame.
At the same time, the public sector—both national and local—has found it increasingly difficult to deal effectively and efficiently with its enormously increased tasks. In the eyes of the public, the public service—for so long a feature of this country—has been replaced by the public sector. This is a very sad development. All this was happening at the time when the rate of change in all aspects of our lives was accelerating at a disturbing speed. There is little hope that these developments can be reversed; it is hard enough just to stop them going further.
Against this background, the task of seeking to restore at least some of the public esteem which has been lost is formidable indeed. The committee's report, which is concerned only with the political Parties, obviously covers only a part of the problem. But there must surely be general agreement that action must be taken if Parliamentary democracy is to demonstrate that it remains the only acceptable form of government for this country. Admittedly any kind of action—essentially education and information—will be expensive. After all, the market we are seeking to influence is made up of some 40 million electors. Moreover, the process of education and information must not be restricted to the months just before an election. We need it all the time.
The committee was assured by some witnesses that any money required would always be forthcoming if it was really needed. I wonder whether this is so except perhaps at election time. It is worth recalling that the total contribution to all political Parties is only about 25 to 30 pence per elector per year; that is to say, one half the price of a gin and tonic or less than the price of a pint of beer a year is the value the electorate appears to put on our political Parties. This is a measure of the task which lies ahead. Moreover, I fully support the views of the committee that it is most undesirable to increase the dependence of the two large Parties on their two major sources of income: the unions for the Labour Party, and business for the
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Tory Party. It does not make sense to increase this polarisation. If Parliamentary democracy is to flourish, we surely want more workpeople (including trade union members) to support the Tory Party, and more businessmen and managers to support the Labour Party. This will make both Parties more representative and more effective. So I am more than ever convinced that if the political Parties really wish to improve their public standing, they will have to spend a lot more money and I do not see where that money is to come from year by year rather than just at election time, unless it is from State aid.
The opposition to State aid is substantial. After all, the committee itself was divided. But I personally do not find that opposition convincing. May I make just two points: first, we still hear a lot about the various form of "British disease". The disease of our political system is undoubtedly resistance to change. Many witnesses before our committee came with their minds made up and no amount of argument or discussion was going to change them. While listening to some of the evidence, I was reminded of my days in Unilever, when I was privileged to serve under that remarkable businessman, the late Lord Heyworth. Unilever decided to devote one of its world senior management conferences to the topic "Resistance to Change", and I had to write the main paper. I still recall Lord Heyworth saying: "Be on your guard against two kinds of managers, those who say: ' We have always done it that way ', and those who say: ' Anyway, we are different '".
It seems to me that the opponents of State aid fall neatly into both of these classes. And look where we are because we have always done it that way, or because we claim we are different. I repeat that it cannot be disputed that parliamentary democracy in this country stands low in public esteem: look at our voting record at elections and at the small financial contributions to the Parties. Let us also recall that parliamentary democracy as we know it is in a small minority among the various forms of government in the world. Why cannot the political Parties accept that the time to be worried is not when change happens, but when it does not?

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My second point is that there are certainly risks in giving State aid to political Parties, but the evidence from the democratic countries which do give State aid suggests that these risks are much less than the risk of doing nothing. May I remind your Lordships that State aid abroad is not confined to countries like Sweden. It is found also in the United States, which is still the bastion of private enterprise and less Government interference in our daily lives. There substantial public funds are given to political candidates, both at the Federal and at the State level.
I was myself unable to visit Europe with the committee but during a visit to the United States I did spend a little time in Washington. With the help of the Embassy, I met the Party managers of the two Parties and other people concerned with political affairs, and I also spent a day with the Federal Election Commission. No one I met seemed to be worried about State aid as such. What mattered was not whether you gave State aid—not the principle—but how much and how you did it. That view seemed to be shared by leading political scientists and observers. Professor Alexander, for example, said as long ago as 1972:
"American society has no excuse to tolerate a debt-ridden obligation-bound political system … there can be no question that the country can afford the amounts required".
And so we had the 1974 amendments to the 1971 Federal Elections Campaign Act, and these amendments recognised that the cost of running the political Parties was increasing substantially and that the traditional methods of financing had proved inadequate.
One feature of the American system, let me say right away, seems to me undesirable. Their system of State aid to candidates virtually prevents the emergence of any third Party. On the other hand, there are two features which deserve some favourable comment. State aid there takes the form of "matching funds": that is to say a candidate for public funds cannot afford to relax in any way his efforts to raise contributions from the traditional sources. This has met the objection that giving State aid might discourage private giving. There was no evidence in any country we visited that this was the case.
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Secondly, the disclosure provisions are severe indeed. As an example, when I was discussing with the Federal Election Commission the extent of the disclosure requirements, I was invited by the chairman to think of a name and then go downstairs and find out for myself. Needless to say, the first name which came to mind was that of the President, and so I went down to the ground floor, where any member of the public may inspect the files, and opened the drawer marked "F". Here I found the most complete statement of all the campaign funds received by President Ford from all sources. If we go ahead with State aid, I now think that it is worth while looking again both at matching funds and at the disclosure of sources of contribution; but these, my Lords, are only points of detail.
In conclusion, it is now two and a half years since the committee finished its work. The standing with the public of Parliament and the political Parties has certainly not improved since then. On the contrary, the polarisation of the main contributors to the two large Parties is greater than it ever was; questions like sponsorship are in the air, and so on. Our whole political system is very much on trial. It will take much time and effort to restore public respect for that system, and it will also require money. I repeat, my Lords, that the risks of doing nothing are, in my opinion, far greater than the risk of injecting some modest amount of State aid along the lines of the committee's recommendations. I hope, therefore, that my noble friends on the Front Bench will persuade the Government that something has to be done and done quickly.
6.4 p.m.
Lord GISBOROUGH: My Lords, I believe that the financial success of a Party surely is a measure of its strength or support. If few people are interested enough to support it, it is an indication, as was mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Harmar-Nicholls, that there are few people who are interested enough in having that Party at all. Where there is no enthusiasm for fund-raising in an area it is perhaps an indication that the Party may be fighting a lost cause or, more likely, a cause that appeals to a small group of activists and not to the great majority—people who may nevertheless

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turn out and vote on the day. Rather than bewail that lack of support, I believe that the Party in such areas should consider broadening its appeal by the adoption of moderate policies.
As the Scottish Nationalists and Plaid Cymru said in that report, if a Party cannot survive by its own efforts it should not be shored up by subsidies. To my mind, that is a very compelling argument. The inability to foster voluntary support indicates disillusion—that is another statement—and State aid would further this disillusion. Even if only a little aid is given, it would be difficult to avoid public misunderstanding of the situation. They would assume there was full Government finance, and that would reduce their efforts undoubtedly.
There are many strong reasons against State aid put by the various organisations which gave evidence. I believe it would certainly lessen voluntary participation by workers, notwithstanding what other people have said to the contrary. I think it would reduce the independence of constituencies of the Central Party too, despite the concept of the neutral money. It has also been stated that it would force people who hate politics to contribute, and they are already over-taxed. In addition to that, of course, there are many cases—among them, I believe, the Seventh-Day Adventists, although I am not sure of that—in which politics are against religious convictions.
Another factor about injecting public money is that inevitably it encourages waste. We have seen that wherever public money is involved it tends to be squandered. State aid is asked for in respect of better election expenses, for rate relief and for better this and for free this and that. Too much can be free. What is free is never appreciated and it only teaches man, boy or even dog to want more.
Some argue that it would overcome difficulties, particularly in a year of three elections, and sometimes more in some parts of the country; but I do not believe that a principle should be changed for the sake of a one-off situation. The answer, of course, is to get on with it and raise money. Most constituencies can, so why not the others? If people will not give,
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then the Party's policies should be made more attractive to them so that they actually want to work and to see that Party in power. It has been said it would help relieve the time-consuming burden of fund-raising; but it is just this that chiefly holds local Party workers together between elections, so that when elections come the team is ready there to work.
The report states that it is not in the best interests of maintaining a popular basis of democratic government when so many local constituencies do not have a full-time official. That may be so, but now, with television, all the political, information is presented to the public in their own living rooms; so I do not believe there is a necessity for a local agent or an office for the dissemination of political information in a locality. I think the need is highly doubtful. Indeed, where political meetings are held to instruct the public, we all know how few people in fact attend, because they are all busy watching television. It is estimated that to employ a full-time agent in each constituency in 1975 would have cost an extra £2·3 million to the Tories and an extra £4·7 million for Labour. Perhaps that would now be doubled at £10 million. In no way does the aid proposed in the report reach that sort of figure.
However, there is no doubt about it that the political Parties have a part to play—indeed, an increasing part—to compete with the Parties which are strong in Europe and which will be providing and supporting their Members in the EEC, where about £10 million annually is given to the political Parties. Undoubtedly these large sums would seem to put them at an advantage in regard to research for their elected Members.
There is also the factor in support of public funds of the sponsored Members, who are liable and tempted, and indeed often seen, to speak and act as much at the dictation of and in the interests of their sponsors as in the national interest. The more dependent a Party is on sponsored representatives, the less able they are, obviously to govern in the national interest, which is a factor in support of public finance and of election expenses particularly. However, the recommendation is for only a modest injection; not too high to discourage voluntary effort. I think that a figure of some 20 to 25 per

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cent. of raised funds is suggested. The trouble is that a further increase after that is inevitable. One sees that in the figures for Germany, where £1·1 million was given to the Parties in 1959 and, according to the report, this reached a figure of no less than £38 million in 1965, before these payments were ruled unconstitutional.
Such sums as are paid to the Parties in Germany would be totally unacceptable in this country, even if they were to be available. They would sap at the enthusiasm of the local Parties, despite what has been said, and create little need to maintain the strength of the Party workers between elections, which would contribute to ruining all local effort. They would very much reduce citizen participation. Furthermore—and this is the important factor—when money is produced by the State, it becomes much more difficult to raise funds for the balance. The report has not suggested a large public supply of money; but even if it remained small the effects would be the same, and the danger of the precedent is that, once started, the sums would inevitably creep up. Abroad, there is not only this vast State aid, but also a higher subscription by individuals who are members of the Parties. Subscriptions for Parties in this country are very low compared with the European Parties—25p for the Conservatives, 30p for the Co-operative Society and £1.20 for Labour are mentioned. This compares with the figure for the Netherlands of £2.25, and of Germany which is of the order of £5.
I believe that there is great scope for an increase here. It is important to press this source, not only from the point of view of fund raising. So many branches have few members and, as a result, activists can rule them. The last thing some of them want is more members who may, by their moderation, cause the curbing of the extremist arrangements at the branches. So that there is every reason to make more of this source, and for Parties actively and genuinely to increase their membership not only for the funds, but for the sake of democracy as well.
There is a host of different fund raising methods, of which we all know. Constituencies have only to get down to it. This, in itself, generates further enthusiasm and more efforts, as I know from experience. My constituency was brand-new at the
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last reorganisation and was highly marginal. We had no funds, no agent and no officers. In fact, we had absolutely nothing in that new constituency. We employed an agent, whom we could not afford because we had no money, but we worked very hard. Now, five years later, we must be, financially, one of the strongest constituencies in the whole country. It can be done all right. We had no sponsors and every penny we have was raised out of our efforts. No constituency is physically unable to raise money, whether by events, lotteries, diaries and all the gamut of methods which we know so well.
There is one suggestion about a tax concession of up to £50 in respect of donations from individuals. That suggestion has many adherents and it may be a good one. But it would be unreasonable for political Parties to be able to take advantage of that and to be singled out, unless the concession was also given to all other voluntary bodies which are equally hit by inflation. There are many suggestions regarding mechanics and the use of funds. There are two recommendations in the report, one at central level and the other at local level, which are subject to various qualifications in relation to votes, successes and so on. Those suggestions would very much help the larger Parties, but would be of no help to new or small Parties. This might be a good thing or a bad thing. It seems to me that the figure would work out at about £1,000 per constituency.
One suggestion was that there should be aid for local government elections, and I was very sorry to see that. One thing that bedevils local government is politics. Councillors should be as non-political as possible, and should have at heart the interests of their members and not the Party Whip. Therefore, I should be very sorry to see anything that encouraged further Party politics in local government. There is enough already, and funding it would destroy the independence of those councils which are still independent. There is a very strong case against, and there is a very convincing case for; but having read the report carefully, I come down very firmly against any State aid of any kind.
6.15 p.m.
Lord CHITNIS: My Lords, like other noble Lords, I am grateful to the noble

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Lord, Lord Houghton, for introducing a debate on this important subject. My interest in it derives from the fact that I have long been concerned with the provision of financial aid to political Parties, from both ends of the spectrum. First, I once worked for 10 years for a political Party, the Liberals, one of the least wealthy Parties, and thus was continuously concerned with the provision of funds for it. Then, for the last 10 years, I have been administering one of the few grant-making bodies which can, and does, make grants to various political Parties; indeed, every Party, or individual member of every Party, represented in the other place, with the strange and somewhat inexplicable exception of Plaid Cymru, has received grants from the Rowntree Social Service Trust over the past few years, for one purpose or another. I have therefore seen this problem from the perspective of both beggar and benefactor.
The first point which occurs to me, particularly as a benefactor, is the potentially deadening effect of block funding on pressure group type organisations, whether political Parties or not. A frequent case which we come across is that of a small group, perhaps analogous to a local political Party, which starts with a good idea, with a gleam in somebody's eye, which builds up a lively base of volunteers, many of whom have to spend a lot of their time raising funds to keep the organisation going. It then asks a grant-making body for a grant, because it feels that the time has come to institutionalise itself, to staff it professionally, and this is over-generously and rather foolishly given.
As a result, as I find from my experience, which I understand differs from that of some other noble Lords, the volunteers have a tendency to down tools, leaving the work to the hired professional, and a lot of the spark goes out of the organisation. I suspect that this could be true of local Party organisations as much as of any other group. I think, therefore, that even those who have the interests of their Parties at heart should perhaps have some hesitation about providing them with too easy funds.
Secondly, drawing on my experience as a Party agent and organiser, I am
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absolutely convinced that a lot of money spent on election campaigns is wasted. Expenditure is incurred on activities which have no better rationale than that such things have always been done, or simply because your opponents do something and you therefore feel obliged to do the same. Indeed, I suspect that most agents would agree with me that half of their activity is wasted, but would merely say that they have no idea which half. If that is so, then one thing which somebody could undertake is research into the effectiveness of various elements in an election campaign, at any rate before State funds are spent on that kind of support. When it is also taken into account that election time is, in my experience, the best time to raise funds, when there is an air of excitement about politics, my conclusion is that election campaigning should not be funded, or have its costs refunded, by the State.
It might be worth adding, as my contribution to the research that I suggest needs doing, that I found this view confirmed when, at the last General Election, having nothing better to do, I visited some 47 constituencies in the North of England, not to participate in the campaigns but merely to observe the activities of the Parties in them. After the election, I related the results there to what I had seen. With the exception of the tightly marginal seats, the results in all the others, which formed the vast majority, related almost exactly to the national norm or swing, irrespective of the scale of activity and expenditure incurred by various Parties in those seats, wide though the differences were. So I think we should be hesitant about providing funds for general campaigning between elections, poster campaigns and so forth. Again, I suspect that there is a fair amount of waste in these activities, and the provision of State funds would merely increase the number of car stickers, buttons and other such things which Parties increasingly produce, and which cancel each other out.
The third general point is one which other noble Lords have mentioned and it is that the giving of funds to the existing political Parties will, to some extent, ossify the existing political system. There is no reason to believe, because our political system has been well organised into the existing political Parties in the past, that this should remain so in the indefinite future, but surely State funding would

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encourage this. So, in other words, I reluctantly conclude that I am opposed to the major innovation suggested by the noble Lord, Lord Houghton, in that he wants funds available for campaigning, both centrally and locally.
The only exception I can think of would be the quite unusually difficult, from a campaigning point of view, elections to the European Parliament; but even if this particular case were provided for out of public funds, there would be no need for the election system decided on for the huge constituencies of the European Parliament to be extended downwards. But what I do support is an extension of the present system of giving aid to political Parties represented in Parliament and to Parliamentarians, once elected. This is not a new principle; it is not even new since the introduction of aid to political Parties in 1974. Even before then, there were provisions for giving aid to Opposition Parties—such as, for example, the salary paid to the Leader of the Opposition.
At present, the Leader of the Opposition very properly receives a not very large salary and is provided with a car. I wonder whether other Front Bench Members of the official Opposition, or, indeed, the Leaders of other Opposition Parties should not also receive financial support. Perhaps I can assuage my conscience about Plaid Cymru by saying that the Leader of Plaid Cymru has expenditure which he incurs as a Party politician and as the leader of a significant Party for which he should receive financial support.
Then, so far as the 1974 provision of State funds to Opposition Parties is concerned, I just wonder whether enough has been done. It is surely desirable that the Parties should have research facilities, not just to brief Members of Parliament on current Parliamentary business, which I understand is meant to be the terms of reference for the money that they at present receive, but to produce longer-term counter-proposals to those which are produced by the Government of the day and which have the full backing of the resources of the Civil Service. The only point I make is this: if funds are to be made available outside the existing scheme, to what central organisation should such funds be paid? The noble
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Lord, Lord Houghton of Sowerby, will remember that when years ago I was discussing with him giving assistance to one of the major Parties, the first question which had to be resolved, and which caused considerable argument, was whether it should go to the Party in Parliament or whether the central offices of the mass party in the country should receive it; and I am sure that that Party was not unique in having that difficulty.
In conclusion, may I say that I am sorry that I cannot agree with the noble Lord, Lord Houghton of Sowerby, on the main thrust of his proposals, which is that funds should be made available for extra-Parliamentary activities. I feel this particularly, because the noble Lord taught me most of what I know about the subject. Nevertheless, I am grateful to the noble Lord for having given to the House the opportunity to discuss this subject.
6.22 p.m.
Lord PEART: My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Houghton of Sowerby, has already put everyone interested in this question in his debt. He made a very fine opening speech. The noble Lord is responsible for the report of his committee on financial aid to political Parties. It is a comprehensive and detailed analysis of an important and fascinating subject. Apart from the expression of views which the report contains—which to some extent are bound to be subjective—I think that the report is a remarkable mine of statistical and other material. Much of it, I believe, had previously never been available—certainly never in such a convenient form. Whatever opinion noble Lords may hold about the conclusions which the majority of the committee draw from their researches, it will be impossible for anybody weighing up this issue not to rely to a great extent on the work done by the committee. The noble Lord has this afternoon added to our indebtedness by providing this opportunity to discuss the subject generally and the specific recommendations made in his committee's report.
May I say that the Government have not yet finalised their consideration of those recommendations. Therefore the views expressed this afternoon have an effective part to play. Naturally, the noble Lord, Lord Thorneycroft, who is chairman of

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the Conservative Party, made a characteristically rumbustious speech which explained a point of view which wished to reject the giving of State aid to political Parties. On the other hand, we have had speeches from the Liberal Party and also a recognition even by the noble Viscount, Lord Massereene and Ferrard, that some day it may well be that political Parties will receive State aid. My noble friends Lord Wall and Lord McCarthy also made powerful speeches, and there was an excellent speech made by the noble Lord who has just spoken. I shall carefully consider the views that have been expressed because, as I have said, the Government have not yet finalised their consideration of the recommendations of the Houghton Committee. Therefore it is important to study the views which have been expressed. The report has provoked controversy and this is good.
As the noble Lord has reminded us, the majority of his committee came down in favour of the principle of State financial aid to political Parties in this country and put forward a combination of two schemes that would cost jointly something in the region of £2¼ million annually. Under the first part of the committee's proposals, annual grants would be paid to the central organisations of the Parties for their general purposes, the amounts being related to each Party's support at the preceding General Election and subject to a minimum level of support. It was proposed that the amount payable should be calculated on a basis of 5p for each vote cast in favour of the Party concerned.
The Committee's other proposal was that at local level a limited reimbursement should be made of the election expenses of parliamentary and local government candidates. So far as parliamentary candidates are concerned, this would be restricted to those who saved their deposits. In either case, the amount to be reimbursed would be the candidate's actual election expenses, subject to a limit of half his legally permitted maximum expenditure. In this way, the committee propose that the Parties might be strengthened financially at the centre, and also that the electoral process as a whole should be reinforced by the reduction of the actual election expenses which a local party or an individual candidate has to bear.
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The initial reactions to the report, both Press and public, were, as noble Lords will recall, divided and, I think, largely hostile. I think that this is a fair description of the views expressed in today's debate. It is also reasonable to say, however, that a considerable amount of common ground has emerged or has been confirmed regarding the basis upon which this extremely important issue needs to be considered. In the first place, it would seem that there is broad agreement that if—and I emphasise "if"—the principle of State financial aid to political Parties were to be accepted, then the schemes put forward by the committee under the noble Lord's chairmanship would appear to provide an appropriate and fair basis on which to proceed. This, too, was the view taken by the minority of the committee in their own report.
Second, I do not think there is any dispute regarding the views expressed by the noble Lord, Lord Houghton, about the crucial importance of the role that political Parties play in the political institutions of the country, both with regard to the electoral process and in more general ways. It is, accordingly, of critical importance to the working of our institutions that the political Parties have the means to carry out that role in an effective way. If, for lack of funds, they were to withdraw from these activities, the effects would be incalculable.
Third, I do not think there can be any doubt that the financial burdens placed on political Parties and their need for additional funds, whether from private or public sources, have greatly increased in recent years. Like every other organisation and individual, political Parties have been faced with increasing calls on their resources. That will be particularly so this year. As noble Lords have said, this is the year of a General Election, of local government elections, of the devolution referenda and of the direct elections to the European Parliament. Tremendous stress will be placed upon our organisations in the country.
As noble Lords will be aware, the Government are still considering whether to introduce legislation to provide financial assistance in the special case of candidates in the impending direct elections for the European Parliament. In the course of their consideration, the Government will

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need to take account of the financial assistance which the European Assembly is itself making available to political Parties in connection with the elections. But this forthcoming series of elections apart, there can be no doubt that the financial burdens on political Parties have increased a great deal in recent years. In particular, this has made it increasingly difficult for them to maintain or recruit the staff they need if they are to carry out their work satisfactorily. So much I would see as common ground among both those who advocate and those who oppose the introduction of financial assitance to political Parties.
It is also, I think, common ground that there is a need to continue the present scheme of financial assistance to Opposition Parties at Westminster in order to provide some counterpoise to the assistance which the Civil Service gives to Ministers. But, as today's debate has shown, there is a wide division of principle between those who would see the acceptance of the Houghton Committee's proposals, or something akin, as a necessary and welcome strengthening of our democratic institutions, and those who would see such a step as a major breach of the political traditions of this country. The broad grounds on which opposition to State aid is based emerged very clearly in the minority report of the Houghton Committee and I think it has emerged equally clearly in our debate today.
I see the opposition to State aid as coming under two main heads. In the first place, there is a group of arguments which is to a large extent based on doubts as to the validity of various aspects of the analysis of the present situation on which the committee's proposals were based. The second group are of a more fundamentalist kind—what the minority report describes as a "gut reaction". These are essentially grouped round the fear that the introduction of State financial aid for political Parties in this country would undermine essential and desirable features of our political life and that, sooner or later, the independence of our political Parties would be eroded. In addition there are special and particular fears, such as the fear that State aid might go to extremist groups and might indeed encourage their expansion, or that it would unduly favour Party headquarters.
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Taking first the doubts expressed about the foundations on which the case for State aid is based, it is argued that it is impossible, in any objective way, and without telling political Parties how to go about their business, to specify the jobs that a political Party needs to carry out. Every politician has his own vision of how he can best make his contribution to public life. I am sure this will appeal to the noble Lord, Lord Harmar-Nicholls, who spoke very effectively. The same is true of Parties. Some attach more importance to certain functions than others. But unless it were possible to come to some generally accepted minimum standard, both in range and level, of the activities which a political Party ought to be carrying out, it is not easy to see how one can arrive at any agreement as to the appropriate level of financial provision required, either from private or public sources, in order to carry out these duties.
There is also the argument that while the committee under the chairmanship of the noble Lord have brought together a good deal of factual material about the actual incomes of the Parties, and their sources, there remains the imponderable of how far these incomes could be significantly raised if it were thought by their members that the Party's future, or its effectiveness, as they saw it, were really seriously at risk. As with other great institutions, one suspects that in practice there could be a substantial degree of elasticity about the potential incomes of the major Parties. And it might accordingly be thought by some that at least part of the financial difficulties encountered by the Parties in recent years are a temporary reflection of public disenchantment rather than a permanent problem calling for fundamental change.
I think that the third focus for doubt would be the assumptions made in the Houghton Committee's report that the present structure of Party financing—and the important role played by union and business financial support—prejudices the independence of the political Parties. But some would argue that there is little evidence of this. They would say that these links are rooted in the reality of the political situation, and that they help to prevent the political Parties from losing touch with their support. If political Parties were primarliy financed by the

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State, they might become abstract and divorced from their supporters. I think that view has been expressed this evening.
As a final ground for doubt about the committee's proposals, I think opponents of State aid would probably challenge—as the minority report does—the relevance of schemes already operating in Europe, on the grounds that their political background and history was in important respects different from our own. But as I have said earlier, the principal argument put forward against State aid is that it might in time erode the independence of the political Parties. Political bodies in this country have until now been traditionally voluntary bodies, and their financing has been organised on a voluntary basis. Clearly, the introduction of State financial aid would breach this principle, and it might also have considerable repercussions on the activities of political Parties which at present centre round voluntary fund raising.
As today's debate has shown, there are wide and important differences of principle involved here. The introduction of State financial aid would undoubtedly mark an important change in the political life of the country. What, I think, we are all agreed upon is that any scheme that might be introduced in this field would need to command the widest possible measure of general support, both in Parliament and in the country as a whole. As I have said earlier, we have not, as a Government, come to a conclusion on this matter. We continue, however, to take note of the development of parliamentary and public opinion. It has, therefore, been of considerable value to hear the views expressed this afternoon, and I can assure the House that what has been said will be carefully considered and taken into account before any proposals in this matter are put forward.
6.42 p.m.
Lord HOUGHTON of SOWERBY: My Lords, I should like to thank all noble Lords who have taken part in this debate, and especially my noble friend Lord Peart for the first analysis of the report and its recommendations and the arguments for and against them that we have heard from the Front Bench in either House so far. I think that is a bonus as a result of this debate and I hope that it will continue.
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The noble Lord, Lord Harmar-Nicholls, provided ammunition for those who oppose State aid and he provided ammunition also to the noble Lord, Lord Somers, who is about to open the following debate on the desirability of short speeches. The noble Lord, Lord Gisborough, just qualified for his place on the list of speakers in the subsequent debate on the desirability of short speeches, and J congratulate him upon that. Now I come to enemy No. 1, who is the noble Lord, Lord Thorneycroft. He provided ammunition for the opponents of televising this House. After all, he is against State aid; he does not want bureaucratic interference in the affairs of Parties; he does not want to take advantage of any resources whatsoever except those provided by the stalwarts of the Conservative Party. But he exhibited a Tory Party poster and showed it round the Chamber. My Lords, he will be a dangerous man if television cameras ever enter this Chamber. He will need to be kept out of debates unless he has been searched beforehand to see whether he has some free propaganda for the Tory Party which he wishes to exhibit to your Lordships' House and to the nation at large, free, gratis and for nothing.
I must tease the noble Lord a little further. At the end of his speech he ascended the pulpit and in a loud voice he rebuked sin. "We will have none of it," he said. "If sinful people propose this iniquity we will oppose it, and if money is on offer we will reject it." Ah, my Lords, but what happened in another place in 1975 when a proposal was before the House that grant in aid should be given to the Opposition Parties? There were murmurings and there were mutterings on the Conservative Benches from people who made to wound but were afraid to strike—if one dare mention that word just now!—and at the end of the day no Division was called. And what happened, my Lords? They took the money, and the £150,000 a year is going into the office of the Leader of the Opposition at the present time. When we on the Labour Benches were in Opposition we had to rely on the noble Lord, Lord Chitnis, and the Rowntree Trust to scramble together enough money—£25,000 a year maximum—to provide assistance to the then Shadow Cabinet. Now the Conservative Opposition in the House of Commons absolutely bask in the sun-

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shine of State aid to Opposition Parties. So there is a little humbug in all this, and I think we must guard against it.
I do not wish to delay the next debate more than a minute more, because we did start very late. I remind the House that State aid was given for the conduct of the referendum on the Common Market. I think it was the first time, and it appeared to be fully justified at the time. I realise the distinction between money to have that debate on a referendum against aid to specific political parties. Nevertheless may I say to my noble friend that I believe there is a big problem arising in connection with elections to the European Parliament. It will be a great shame if we make a mess of those, and there is considerable danger that that may be so. We have never seen constituencies of the size that we shall have for elections to the European Parliament. No one will have had experience of fighting elections or conducting Party political activities over such a wide area and with such a large electorate. I urge the Government seriously to consider that particular matter in the coming weeks.
Finally, I do not accept the view of the noble Lord, Lord Thorneycroft, that to accept State aid in some way brings bureaucracy in by the back door. We had a former Comptroller and Auditor-General, Sir Edmund Compton, a distinguished civil servant and a member of the Committee, who took very good care of the question of accountability; and that is fully explained in our report. I think the noble Lord, Lord Thorneycroft, will find that there is no more difficulty about accountability for the money which it was proposed should go to political Parties than there is about the money that already goes to the Leader of the Opposition. Great care was taken to ensure that money was properly cared for and properly spent without fussy interference by bureaucracy.
My Lords, I conclude by saying that in my opinion money is behind politics here, as everywhere else in the world, and money power is corrupting. State aid reduces the power of vested interests and in my view would make for the liberation and the independence of political Parties and relieve them of some of the shackles that exist at the present time under our present system. Noble Lords opposite
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romanticise party Political activity and politics generally. There is a reality here of vested interests on both sides of the great divide in this country to which we must have regard in considering this matter. Anyhow, I thank noble Lords once again. I think the debate has been well worthwhile, and in this period I think we have packed quite enough for the Government to consider. I beg leave to withdraw the Motion.
Motion for Papers, by leave, withdrawn.

SHORTER SPEECHES
6.43 p.m.
Lord SOMERS Lord SOMERS rose to call attention to the desirability of shorter speeches; and to move for Papers. The noble Lord said: My Lords, many of your Lordships will remember that not long ago we had a debate on this subject introduced by the noble Lord, Lord Egremont. It was a good debate and at the time was very well received, so far as I can remember, but, unfortunately, it did not seem to have a great deal of effect. I think perhaps one of the reasons for that was that the debate did take on rather a light-hearted atmosphere, and possibly the Members of the House were not really taking the subject very seriously. But I do not intend to follow that line tonight. Since then, of course, we have had the clocks fitted, but, unfortunately, it has proved only too easy not to look at the clock.
Perhaps I should say a word or two as to why I feel that consideration of this subject is desirable. The first reason is one of pure practicality; that is, time. Your Lordships all realise, no doubt, that our timetable is getting increasingly crowded. When I first came to the House sittings on Mondays were unknown. They have become quite a commonplace now, and we very often sit till quite a late hour. When we have long debates, long lists of speakers, those who come at the end, who may perhaps have quite a long way to get home, are left in the unfortunate position of having either to remove their names or else stay in town. I think, perhaps, I should declare an interest there, because that is a position in which I have found myself only too often. That makes things very difficult.
However, I think what I really want to emphasise most is that long speeches really defeat the ends for which they are made, because they cease to hold the attention of hearers. One can tell that only too well by just looking round the House. As a long speech winds on its way, one can see noble Lords leaning over and talking to each other, others studying their Order Papers very closely, and others looking incredibly bored or perhaps even going out of the Chamber.
There is no doubt that a long speech, unless it happens to be a very brilliant one, is inevitably far less convincing than a short and clearly-expressed one. Of course, I realise that the length of a speech is really very largely a matter of opinion. I remember quite recently there was a speech by a noble Lord which I found absolutely fascinating from beginning to end, and I was really very surprised when I looked up and found that he had been speaking for close on half an hour. So it is largely a matter of opinion. But I do think that a short, clear speech is far more likely to convince the House and to achieve its end than a long and rambling one.
Also, when one has a long list of speakers, those who are near the end will almost inevitably find that everything they wanted to say has already been said. There is nothing whatsoever to be ashamed of in getting up and just saying that everything you wished to say has been said, that you agree very much with a certain point made by some noble Lord and would like to give your wholehearted agreement to it, and then sitting down. It would save a great deal of the time of the House and would do you no harm whatsoever.
I think it is worth while just considering what is the purpose of your Lordships' House. Is it a real House of Parliament which exists for the purpose of examining and approving legislation and so protecting and improving the conditions of the country, or is it just a platform for those who are fortunate enough to belong to it to exercise their powers of oratory? If it is the first—and I do not think there are any of your Lordships who would deny that—then we can serve it best by making it work most efficiently and by "efficiently" I mean achieving the most in the shortest possible time. I think it
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should be possible to make your point! clearly in about—and I say "about"; because I do not wish to lay down any! hard and fast rules—10 minutes. There may be occasions on which you feel you must go on a little longer, but I think that 10 minutes as a general rule would be quite good. It might not be a bad plan to have some remark to that effect put into the Companion to Standing Orders. It would be there for people who take the trouble to read it to remind themselves occasionally what is desirable. Of course, I make two exceptions to that rule: the introducer of the debate—incidentally, I shall not take any advantage of that tonight—and the speaker who winds up for the Government. Those speakers must have longer because there will be many more points for them to cover.
There are two other areas worth considering, one of which is Starred Questions. The Companion to Standing Orders says that they are:
"for the purpose of asking for information only and not with a view to making a speech or to raising a debate".
I have sometimes wished that more speakers would keep that at the back of their minds when Starred Questions come on. Of course, it is only too easy to make something sound like a Question by simply preceding it with the words, "Is the noble Lord aware…?" and that of course makes it comply with the regulations concerning Questions. Having said that, one can then go on speaking for about 10 minutes. That is not desirable. As the Companion to Standing Orders says, Starred Questions should be for the purpose of getting information and only that.
The other area is the moving of Amendments during Committee stage. The moving of those Amendments tends to be used as an opportunity for making what is often called in your Lordships House a "Second Reading speech", and it is unnecessary. All that needs to be done is for the mover to explain what the Amendment is, what effect it will have, and why he considers it desirable, and then to sit down. However, of course, many people are not content to do that, though as I have said, this is not a platform for displaying powers of oratory but is for the purpose of getting legislation

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through, and getting it through as efficiently as possible.
I sincerely hope that your Lordships will consider this question thoroughly and that perhaps something may be done. I have no intention of introducing any compulsory limit or anything like that. I should not like to see anything such as I suffered from when I was a member of a delegation to a Commonwealth Conference in Guernsey last year. We were told that we must confine our speeches to 10 minutes and when we had spoken for nine minutes a bell rung and we knew that we jolly well had to bring our remarks to a close. That, of course, would be totally unsuitable for your Lordships House. If we could have a little advice or persuasion from the Companion to Standing Orders it might be very useful. My Lords, I beg to move for Papers.
6.53 p.m.
Lord DENHAM: My Lords, I do not think that there are many of your Lordships who will disagree with a single word that the noble Lord, Lord Somers, has said. Equally, I do not think that there are many of your Lordships who, after today's debate is ended, will pay the slightest attention to it. The noble Lord has mentioned the resolution moved some 14 years ago by my noble friend the late Lord Egremont;
"That speeches in this House should be shorter";
and this was immediately embodied in the Companion to Standing Orders, with the attached comment:
"Long speeches engender tedium and tend to kill debate".
Since then, speeches have become longer and longer and bound volumes of Hansard have become thicker and thicker.
More recently, the 1976 Brief Guide to the Procedure and Practice of the House of Lords laid down guidelines very much on the lines suggested by the noble Lord, Lord Somers, as to what is an acceptable length of speech. Your Lordships will find them on page 9 of that invaluable guide:
"Lords opening or winding up debates, from either side, should try to keep within twenty minutes and should not exceed twenty-five minutes. Other Lords should try to keep within fifteen minutes and should not exceed twenty minutes".
I have never heard a long speech in your Lordships' House, good though many
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of them have been, that would not have been infinitely better had it been confined to 20 minutes or even more so to 15.
Noble Lords do not take the time and trouble to go through the mass of verbiage beforehand and winnow out what is worth saying from what is not. They leave it instead to their unfortunate audience to take the time and the trouble to winnow out what is worth listening to and what is not. Behaviour that I find quite intolerable is that of noble Lords who have made long speeches early in the day and then leave the House before the end of the debate. They are thereby sparing themselves from the extra 30, 25 or even 20 minutes of sitting that they have inflicted on their better-mannered fellow Peers.
If the noble Lord, Lord Somers, does not withdraw his Motion for Papers tonight, I have no doubt at all that it will be carried with acclamation. In parenthesis, it will be interesting to see with exactly what Papers the Table supply him. As I have said, I am not optimistic about any long term results. But even if only those noble Lords who are speaking today comply just for a short time with what they themselves say tonight, something at least will have been achieved. And it is in that pious hope that I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Somers, on his initiative.
6.56 p.m.
Lord Lord MACKIE of BENSHIE: My Lords, I rise to say that I speak officially for the Party. The Liberal Party is against long speeches, as we are against sin and various other matters. I must make a Party point and say that I have looked back at the timing of various speeches, and Liberal speeches are, in fact, much shorter than the speeches from the other two Parties, and, indeed from the Cross-Benches in this House, and the content, of course, is infinitely superior.
The noble Lord, Lord Somers, is greatly to be congratulated on moving this Motion because it is one with which everyone will concur and it will—contrary to the lecture read by the head prefect a moment ago—do a great deal of good. I am perfectly certain that noble Lords will follow the Liberal example and say a great deal that is full of worth in a very short time.
When I was wondering what to say about this evidently virtuous subject, I

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thought that I would look at the great speeches of the past. I looked first at the Gettysburg Address. I asked my long suffering wife whether she would mind timing me. I then ran through the Gettysburg Address. I was extraordinarly good; I was very fine and much better than the original. It took me exactly 90 seconds, and that shook me a bit. I then turned to Henry V and the marvellous speech before Agincourt. I really had fun with the speech that began:
"That he which hath no stomach to this fight"
to the lovely piece about:
"And gentlemen in England now a-bed Shall think themselves accursed they were not here".
By then my wife was wilting a bit but we went through that speech which is probably the most famous and stirring one, in three and a half minutes. Then, greatly emboldened, I turned to the Sermon on the Mount as set out in St. Matthew which I think is the most complete account, but the right reverend Prelate can correct me if I am wrong. I did not subject my wife, who by this time was tiring, to the complete sermon, but I read a column and then multiplied it. It took exactly 19 minutes. I thought to myself that those were examples that noble Lords could well follow. If we can lay down in 19 minutes all the ethics for the Christian religion, it should be possible for noble Lords, even the noble Lord, Lord Harmar-Nicholls, and the noble Lord, Lord Bruce of Donington, to express themselves in a slightly shorter time than that to which they have been accustomed.
With those offensive remarks, I now wish to back the noble Lord, Lord Somers, to the limit of my ability and hope that in future Members of this House will so shorten their speeches that they will be so full of pith, wit and wisdom that the Galleries will be crowded and the queues for the House of Commons will melt away.
Lord WYNNE-JONES: My Lords, before the noble Lord sits down, will he not agree that there is an element of predestination in all this?
Lord MACKIE of BENSHIE: My Lords, I have not studied Calvin, but
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interruptions of that sort lengthen speeches.
7.1 p.m.
Lord SEGAL: My Lords, "Brevity is the soul of wit". So said Polonius. Albeit, does this mean that any noble Lord who cuts his speech by half be deemed a half-wit? That would never meet accord. Far wiser are the words of Horace:
"Brevis esse laboro, obscuras fio",
which translated is: "When I struggle to be brief, I then become obscure."
While, up above, that silent digit
Reveals relentlessly each unforgiving minute,
As every quarter hour elapses,
Then why not make it chime, my Lords,
To stop the endless flow of words?
And, if convention doth decree
To moderate prolixity,
'Twere best your Lordships kept their glance
Adjusted to the map of France
And made their speeches, waiving all excuse,
Neither Toulon, nor yet Toulouse.
But better still, my Lords, by far,
To keep your speeches as they are.
The Earl of HALSBURY: My Lords, whenever I think of this subject I imagine myself at a dinner party held downstairs some years ago where the Leader of your Lordships' House, the late Lord Salisbury, and I were talking about the procedures of the House. He said that there were few things in this House that could not be solved in terms of good manners and consideration for others. He said that that was much more important than the rule book, and that if a person breaks the rules, someone will tell him that he is out of order; and if he takes it in good part and apologises, he can recover and will be forgiven. But if someone makes an overlong speech, there is no recovery and it shall not be forgiven.
If that is a good principle to work on and if it is known that as a Back-Bencher or a Cross-Bencher one is asked to confine oneself to 10 minutes, as a matter of good manners why not at least try to do so? Of course, it is not in mortals to command success, and if one feels a kind of rapport with the House and gets carried along on the wings of oratory, one may overshoot a bit. But there is a difference between overshooting by five minutes and taking three times the length of the target estimate: that is, half an hour or so. We all have an obligation to try to remember

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other people: the long list of those who will speak after us and those who have spoken before us and who have to sit it out and endure what we shall say.
It seems to me that there is a case for trying to remember what one is doing while making a speech in your Lordships' House by reciting all the things one is not doing. One is not delivering viva voce an introductory chapter to a text book on the subject for attentive students. That is the wrong target at which to aim. Nor should one imagine that one is delivering a lecture as opposed to participating in a debate. To prepare a manuscript of a set speech and then proceed to deliver it remorselessly, without regard to anything that has been said beforehand or is likely to be said afterwards is, to my mind, a lack of consideration for others.
If one has the good fortune to be speaking early in the debate, of course, one can make the points that one knows perfectly well all one's friends and fellow Peers will want to make later; so why not, in the words of someone who gave me my business training, say: "Always leave something for the other guy?" Without wishing to describe your Lordships as "guys", I think it is a good thing for people who speak early to remember that people will follow them, and not try to pinch all the other chap's points.
There is an obligation on everyone to know his personal rate of delivery when it comes to preparing a manuscript. I know that we all have our own methods of getting ready to address your Lordships, and I shall not describe or recite mine as if it were a sort of model for everyone else. But in order to clarify their own minds and order their thoughts, many people will write out their intended speeches in longhand beforehand. It may not be the speech they will deliver, but for many it can be a bit of self-discipline. It is a very simple matter to precalculate from Hansard one's personal rate of delivery. Every speech in Hansard is timed as to its beginning and one knows the time at which one's successor starts. If one has spoken for 10 minutes and that speech! occupies so many columns of Hansard at so many words per column, it is very simple rule—three sum to discover one's rate of delivery. In my own case it is
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about 100 words per minute. Therefore, if I want to speak for 10 minutes I have to confine myself to about 1,000 words, and as there is nearly always a bit of overshoot as a result of "ad libbing", responding to some remark that someone else has made, making a wisecrack or whatever it may be, it is as well to leave something in hand. If one has about 900 words prepared, that will cover only perhaps one or two points and leave the remaining points for others to enlarge on. I believe that that is the kind of approach which makes debates interesting and lively, in much the same way as a Committee stage of a Bill is interesting and lively if it is a Bill in which one is interested.
Of course, Committee stages on Bills dealing with subjects one knows nothing about are not particularly interesting. The Patents Bill last year was a subject about which a dozen of us in your Lordships' House knew something. It was an extremely lively and very interesting Committee stage; there was the true cut and thrust of debate the whole way through. If we could get a little more of that into Second Reading debates, Motions for Papers, and the kind of formal set-piece debate which makes for the interest of our House on Wednesdays, I believe that more people would be attracted to making livelier speeches, which would be a very good thing.
7.8 p.m.
Baroness WARD of NORTH TYNE-SIDE: My Lords, I am very glad indeed to have this opportunity to support my noble friend Lord Somers. I cannot say that I absolutely agreed with everything he said; indeed, there are one or two points on which I rather differ from him. It is very easy to make a political speech; one can make a political speech in a very short time. But if one is discussiong some very technical matter—and every now and again we have to discuss very technical Bills coming from the House of Commons—it is not so easy to be brief. If I were going to make a political speech, I could make it in a minute, because I would simply say, "I do not like this Government; I do not like their policies", and I would sit down. It would be a little mean of me to say that today when the noble Lord the Privy Seal was so nice over my Question. We both come from the same part of the world. He knows that for 38 years I have been

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fighting for my Party, and so sometimes I hope—I am sure he will—he will accept a joke from me.
However, there are the technical problems—for instance, of dealing with the mining situation. I am very fond of the miners; they have always given me an awful time politically, but I like them and I like putting forward some of the problems which they have to face. If you are making a complicated technical speech it is not so easy to be short.
There is another point, I should like to raise. Very often we in your Lordships' House know exactly what we are talking about—at least I hope we do. But when Hansard comes to be read it is sometimes very important for people all over the world who really do look at Hansard, because they learn quite a lot from it. For instance, the other day I intervened in the debate on China and I spoke for I think four and a half minutes. I have been to China, and I just thought of the problems of China, and the people who knew me when I was out there would not really have thought that a speech of four and a half minutes made in your Lordships' House was long enough. Of course, my noble friend who introduced the debate had a great deal to say too, and quite rightly.
If I might return to the question of the discussion on the mining position, it is hard for the miners, if they read Hansard, to see that one has spoken for only, say, 10 minutes, because you cannot deal with the mining situation in that amount of time. Therefore, I make a clear distinction between making a political speech which, as I say is too easy for words, and making a speech on a technical matter. I do not think this has been mentioned today, but it is important to remember that what goes into Hansard is read by a great number of people who will be interested in the points of view put forward. If you make a speech so short and leave out a lot of technical detail, it does not really help people all over the world who are interested in certain problems—and I am again referring to China. I knew that I had to be short, and I can be short, but I can assure your Lordships that I can speak for two hours without turning a hair. I am not going to today so nobody need be worried about it.
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I never make notes. I never write a speech. I dare say that my speeches would be better if I did, because sometimes I think that my grammar is appalling. But I find it easy to speak and I could just get up now and go on for two hours, and rather enjoy it. When you look at what is dealt with in Parliament, and remember that frequently Members speak with technical knowledge, it is a pity that they do not take long enough to ensure that the tetails of technical matters are included in Hansard. We might, however, get into the position that it would be awfully boring.
If I attacked the Lord Privy Seal, well, we are both Northeners, and I like him even if I do not like his policies. I like a lot of people who make boring speeches, even if I do not like what they are saying. It is tremendously important, when we are making speeches, to realise whether or not we are making a political speech which, in your Lordships' House, we can make easily, or whether it is a technical speech. I have been in your Lordships' House since, I think, 1974 and I have listened to some absolutely magnificent speeches, because most of the people who speak really have some knowledge to offer. I think we have a great reputation in the world, and if you offer knowledge to the world you may be helping the world to get over some of the difficult and frightening problems which have to be dealt with.
I am not going to speak much longer because that would be unwise. I think it was right of my noble friend to talk about shorter speeches, but I hope that we shall not forget the fact that it is quite easy to be political and it is not so easy to be technical. Some of the matters that have to be dealt with now are so technical that it would be a pity if people did not take a little longer and make a speech on the subjects about which they know so much. For instance, I sometimes listen to people talking about the mines. They talk as though all mines were the same. If you have been in a mining area you will know that one mine and another can be quite different, and they need different kinds of treatment.
I know that sometimes people talk about Rhodesia, but you can have quite a different view if you have been out to Rhodesia. I always think that I have been

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extremely lucky in that I have had an opportunity to travel all over the world. I know that I must be short in speeches. But when your Lordships who really have knowledge on so many important matters speak, I should like the Hansards which are being sent out all over the world properly to reflect that knowledge. Very often we are so busy in making our own speeches that we do not realise the influence that this country can have in these difficult world affairs that we are facing at the present time. I say thank you to my noble friend. As I say, some people say they do not suppose that anybody will take any notice of what we say, but, still, sometimes they do, and I have been delighted to have had this opportunity of speaking in this important debate.
7.17 p.m.
Viscount BARRINGTON: My Lords, it is always a great privilege to speak after the noble Baroness, Lady Ward of North Tyneside. She very nearly gave me immense relief because I thought she was going to touch double figures, and she almost did. Everybody else in this debate has admirably kept to their own prescription, the shortest speech being one minute and the longest being five. I feel that it would be unwise for me to go beyond five, and I hope that I shall not.
I have only one practical suggestion to make, and that is not one which will be thought acceptable. It would make speeches a great deal shorter if, instead of being spoken in political English, they were spoken in Latin. We have today had two Statements, both of which took a considerable time, followed by "Questions" and "Commands"; with the result that this debate of the noble Lord, Lord Somers, has—if I may paraphrase Shakespeare—had" all too short a lease", having come on at a very late time in the evening.
I know no more Latin than most of your Lordships, but I remember one of the shortest "Statements" in Latin (spoken from his own brief) was by Julius Caesar: "Veni, vidi, vici", which I suppose in political English would be, "I arrived on the scene, I took a look around, and I was an overwhelming success". That was an easy brief to speak to, but he wrote it himself. Supposing he had had to say: "Veni, vidi, victus sum", that would have meant not
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only four words instead of three, but seven syllables instead of six.
Before that, in an even more difficult position, a Roman Government had suffered—let us face it—a serious reverse at the Battle of Cannae, which was one of the great defeats in history. On that occasion, a Statement was made by an unfortunate member of their Lordships' House, or Senate, who came out on to the balcony to deliver it, in the words, "Magna pugna victi sumus". He had to use eight syllables and four words to say in literal English, "We have been defeated in a great battle", or in political English for anyone on either side of this House or possibly for the Liberal Party, "There has been an important engagement in which we have not perhaps succeeded in all our objectives, but nevertheless …" and so on.
That is why I believe that if speeches were made in Latin they would be shorter—first, because Latin is more succinct and, secondly, because fewer people would speak, if only because, like myself, they do not know how to pronouce it; in any other debate, I should be corrected.
The noble Lord, Lord Segal, quoted an admirable sentence from Horace,
"Brevis esse laboro, obscuras fio",
which he translated, probably rightly, as "When I am trying to be clear I only become obscure". I suppose one could translate it as, "If I have a Labour brief, the briefer it is the more obscure it becomes". That might not be a good translation, but I sympathise with any Front Bench spokesman who has a brief. Speaking from a brief or reading from a brief, as one is entitled to do, as the noble Lord, Lord Mackie of Benshie, pointed out, can be done well—and the noble Lord, Lord Denham, does it beautifully—or less well; and the longer the brief the more bored the reader becomes.
Back-Benchers of course do not read from briefs, and they are the worst offenders in the matter of length, of whom I am one. In their case, one must not think of the word "brevis" or "brief" but the word "curt" as in "courteous", which I believe is from the same derivation. How to be curt or curtail one's speech without being rude but being courteous? Both words come—I do not know the Latin word—from "to curtail"

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or "to confine" or "to condense" something, closing when one has said what one wants to say. I believe the noble Earl, Lord Halsbury, pointed out that there is no contradiction between being short and being polite; that is what we in this House are supposed to be.
All I would say is that the noble Lord, Lord Somers, in setting the standard for us, was doing what this House should always do, namely setting a magnificently high standard. To make a speech which gets a great many points in, to condense it and to make it audible and acceptable to the listeners is not an easy thing to do. The noble Lord, Lord George-Brown, can make a speech of 38 minutes sound like three minutes or less; he differs from some of us in that way because he has a great gift. There are others—I have been accused of it—who can make a speech of five minutes sound like 50. I notice that I have already spoken for five minutes, so I will sit down, thoroughly agreeing with everything that has been said about the desirability of short speeches. But they are not easy to make.
7.24 p.m.
Lord KILMARNOCK: My Lords, I have been a Member of your Lordships' House for only a little over two years, and if that does not seem a sufficient qualification for taking part in this debate, I can only plead that in this time I have become something of an aficionado of speeches in your Lordships' House. Persuing the analogy, there is no doubt that the matador who despatches his opponent with one thrust is deservedly more popular than those who take a number of stabs before delivering the côup de grace.
I also have read through the distinguished debate on the Motion by the late Lord Egremont in 1965. In that debate, the noble Lord, Lord Somers, to whom we are indebted for the revival of the subject today, made a speech of 31 words—it was too short for the time to be recorded—thus beating the record for brevity confidently claimed earlier in the same debate by the noble Lord, Lord Airedale, with 56 words, also taking a time too short to be recorded. Incidentally, just before the Leader of the House rose to reply on that afternoon, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Gardiner, pointed out from the Woolsack that there had been
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21 speeches in 86 minutes. I hope the reduced number of speakers today does not indicate complacency.
In that debate I do not think anybody was in favour of a statutory limit on the length of speeches. The noble Lord, Lord Mancroft, reminded the House on that occasion that the speech of the late Lord Keynes on the American loan, lasting nearly 1¼ hours, had not been a minute too long, while the late Lord Halifax had managed to swing the opinion of the Conservative Party on Indian Reform in nine minutes. Thus, there are no magic numbers.
In those perhaps more expansive days a voluntary 20 minute limitation earned the approval of a number of speakers. The late Lord Casey quoted the noble Lord, Lord Brabazon of Tara, who had said 10 years earlier:
"I take the view that if you cannot say what you are going to say in 20 minutes, you ought to go away and write a book about it".
On that occasion also the noble Lord, Lord Tweedsmuir, said:
"You can get any subject into 20 minutes if you know what you are talking about".
The noble Lord, Lord Carrington, said on that occasion:
"I do not know which alarms me more, the noble Lord who rises with a large bundle of typescript or the one who rises with no notes at all. The one takes a long time to end and the other does not seem to know how to".
As against that, the noble Earl, Lord Baldwin of Bewdley said:
"Speaking from scripts, except when obviously necessary, is discouraged, I know, but if they are good scripts, they can help to keep matters within bounds".
How do we keep matters within bounds these days? I have done a little research. In the past three debates on Motions for Papers dealing with broad general issues, the average speech lengths were as follows: in the debate of the noble Viscount, Lord Trenchard, on industrial recovery on 17th January, it was 19 minutes; in the debate introduced by the noble Baroness, Lady Robson, on 24th January on social and industrial policy, 17 minutes; and in Lord Carrington's debate on 25th January on the industrial situation, 18 minutes. It may be significant that the debate with the highest number of lady speakers, which was Lady Robson's, had the lowest average of the three.

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If we turn to debates on specific reports, whether of committees of your Lordships' House or of other bodies, we find significantly shorter speeches. The debate introduced yesterday by the noble Lord, Lord Greenwood of Rossendale, on the fascinating subject of relations between the Westminster and EEC Parliaments yielded a 15½ minute average. Going back a little, an EEC debate on 11th November 1977 on the classification and labelling of dangerous substances averaged out at 12 minutes per speaker; while a Motion on the report of the Post Office Review Committee, debated the following day, worked out at 16 minutes. On the whole, it seems that the average of this type of debate has recently been running at 14 or 15 minutes.
It must also be borne in mind that debates of that nature generally attract fewer speakers than those on broad general subjects. This would seem to suggest that the greater the number of speakers the shorter the speeches should be, but in fact the opposite is the case. My sample of three recent major debates yielded an average of 18 minutes per speaker, which is surely far too high when there are frequently between 20 and 30 noble Lords down to speak.
Of course, there are various rules of thumb for controlling speech length. The noble Earl, Lord Halsbury, has told us that his delivery rate is about 100 words per minute. There is also the kitchen clock or stop-watch method of timing oneself in private. If this method is adopted it should be borne in mind that 50 per cent. should be added for live delivery to an audience; eight minutes in the kitchen is 12 minutes in your Lordships' House. I suppose we might have a warning bell or red light or a buzzer operated by a button under the Woolsack or the Clerk's Table. I suggest, however, that the proper place for such a mechanism is inside each one of us. I see that I have now spoken for five minutes, and, my Lords, I must sit down—there is something jangling in my head!
7.29 p.m.
Lord GISBOROUGH: My Lords, once upon a time Gracian said that good things, if short, are twice as good, and Pliny agreed when he said,
"To be brief is almost a condition of being inspired".
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Horace said that,
"Every word that is superfluous flows away from a full mind",
yet warned that
"brevity is many times the mother of obscurity".
A speech should be short and like an epigram. What is an epigram?—a dwarfish whole, its body brevity and wit its soul.
7.30 p.m.
Viscount HANWORTH: My Lords, I am afraid that unlike many Peers I am going to make what is a fairly serious speech, and it will certainly last just over five minutes. I have grave doubts about the wisdom of speaking in the debate because my own stock in trade for some time has been short, terse speeches. If I am frank, I will admit that in part that is because I hope to get the attention of the House for a Back-Bencher who is aware of the giants who stand on all sides. In the main, however, the reason is that this approach comes most easily to me, and I am not good at constructing long, flowing prose. I am treading on rather thin ice, but I believe that it is necessary to get to the root of the matter and consider some of the reasons why long speeches are made. Many Peers continue to make them, sometimes with comparatively little real content.
I suggest that as with almost everything else motives, constraints and incentives are mixed, and it would be quite wrong to accuse anyone of speaking solely for his record with posterity where a full analysis of a problem is obviously appropriate; or for the quality of the prose style; or to cover the complete case for an organisation in which he is interested; or simply, in the common phrase, that he enjoys "holding the Floor" and hearing his own voice. All these motives would of course be considered undesirable, but I suggest that to some degree they affect any assembly, and I mention them so that each of us can search our own conscience.
I suggest, however, that most of the difficulty is due to much more mundane considerations. Relatively few people are capable of speaking or dictating as shortly and as succinctly as when they write a speech or a letter in longhand, and in speaking they get led away into elaboration or side-tracked. On the other hand, if a speech is written out in full, it is often very

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difficult to cut it down without losing the overall continuity and thus spoiling the effect. Moreover, the speech may well contain some choice passages which cannot be reintroduced after it has been cut down. Like the noble Earl, Lord Halsbury, I have been surprised that so few Peers to whom I have spoken, if they write out their speeches, count the number of words and realise that the rate is in the region of 110 a minute. If one does this, it is not difficult to decide how long a fully written speech will take allowing for a certain time, one hopes, for departing from it. One can always look up one's old speeches in Hansard and find exactly one's own rate.
What can we do about the situation, apart from exhortation? The real problem is that there are always some Peers, as has already been said in the debate, like the noble Lord, Lord George-Brown, to whom we can listen for a long time and think that it is only a few minutes. But they are usually experts in the subject under discussion, as of course he was the other day. It is invidious to try to make distinctions solely on that basis. One suggestion is that Peers, other than perhaps when introducing a Motion, should be asked to keep their speeches to under 15 minutes, except on not more than two occasions during any one Session. Most Peers who are the real experts in any field are very busy men and speak only infrequently: so they would be unlikely to be affected by this proposal.
Another possibility for shortening debates would be to encourage Peers to withdraw their names if most of what they intended to say had already been covered. At present when one does so, officials at the desk give one a feeling that it is "chickening out." To some extent they may be right, as it avoids staying to the end of what has become a boring debate, but with shorter speeches I think that the temptation to leave early should be much less.
I disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Somers, on one point, regarding Question Time. I think that one of the most interesting periods in the House is Question Time. Of course Question Time can get out of hand or go on too long, and people can abuse the privilege. Nevertheless, I should be extremely sorry if any genuine attempt
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was made to shorten the time taken. I think that the Questions are valuable, and that the Government very often make no endeavour initially to "come clean" and really tell us the Answer to the Question; so in a way they deserve what they get. In any case, Question Time is entertaining, and I should think that the people in the Gallery enjoy it far more than some of the very lengthy speeches. That was six minutes, my Lords.
7.36 p.m.
Lord PEART: My Lords, I know that the noble Lord, Lord Somers, will not take it amiss if I say that I shall reply to his Motion as briefly as possible. As Leader of the House I feel it incumbent upon me to set an example on this occasion, particularly as I found it necessary to make a very long speech last week—a speech of 30 minutes. I very seldom speak for as long as that.
The virtue of short speeches has been recognised by some, perhaps by most, of your Lordships for some time. We can go right back: Queen Elizabeth I held the same opinion as early as 1576 when she became impatient and interrupted the Lord Keeper, Bacon, and commanded him to cease when he was delivering a flowery speech of thanks for a subsidy Bill on her behalf.
In more recent times there have been several attempts to curb the verbosity of Peers. In 1887 Lord Denman introduced the Duration of Speeches in Parliament Bill. He recognised that some speakers might be able to delight the House for three hours, but for most 15 minutes was, in his view, adequate, and he implied that what was adequate was best judged by the House and not by the person speaking. I am sure this is true today. I am happy that no one speaks for three hours at a time now, but if the speech is a bad one, even 15 minutes can seem far too long.
I have no doubt that your Lordships are capable of brevity. In July, 1965, on a Motion by Lord Egremont in favour of shorter speeches, 25 Lords spoke by 5 o'clock in the afternoon. This demonstrates that it is quite possible to have a crisp debate in which a large number of Peers speak without the debate lasting for several hours. Our experience with Short Debates has shown the same result.

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Many short debates do not last for the full 2½ hours, but on occasions when speakers are numerous and it is clear that time will be divided between them, those speaking in the debate have always agreed to co-operate. Indeed, on very rare occasions speakers agree to confine their speeches to between five and 10 minutes in other debates, although I must say that on these occasions the request is often unpopular.
However, although we now have clocks in the Chamber and no one can claim that he does not know for how long he has been speaking, the records show that the presence of the clocks has not made any difference to the length of speeches. They have merely succeeded in making noble Lords listening more conscious of time, but somehow this consciousness vanishes when noble Lords are on their feet. I believe that the noble Lord, Lord Kilmarnock, mentioned clocks. That reminded me of an incident when I was in another place. A Front Bench spokesman who was speaking had a very fine wristlet watch which was fitted with an alarm which went off while he was speaking. The whole House shouted, "Hear, hear!" So clocks or watches would not be suitable.
The sad but inescapable conclusion which must be reached by anyone who examines recent initiatives to persuade Members of this House to be brief is that they have all come to nothing. As Leader of the House, I have no cure to offer save vigilance of Members of the House. I could not support the introduction of a time limit on speeches imposed by Standing Order. This is a self-regulating House, and its procedures have remained relatively simple and uncluttered because we have not multiplied Standing Orders unless it has been unavoidable. In this case it is up to individual Members of the House to encourage brevity. If noble Lords feel shy about interrupting a speech, they can always approach the noble Lord after the debate and let him know of their view.
We must remember that we do not have a Speaker, and I do not think that it should be incumbent upon the Leader of the House to take on a Speaker's functions. I find that I have to intervene all too often for my own liking to bring Questions and questions on Statements to a close; but
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I do so only if I feel that I am expressing the wish of the House. For these reasons, I should be opposed to any suggestion that the Leader of the House should be expected to control speeches in any way.
My own view is that 10 minutes is usually quite enough time in which to put forward a personal viewpoint. I regret that it is often not enough time to put forward a view which represents Government or Party policy; and, of course, it is unlikely to be enough for a Government spokesman who is expected by participants to answer points they have made during the debate. But here, my Lords, I should like to make a point from the Government angle. Government spokesmen all too often feel that the House or the initiator of a debate will regard it as discourteous if the Government reply is brief. The spokesman often feels obliged, by the acknowledged importance of the subject, to prepare to speak for 10 or 15 minutes in addition to the time required to answer points not covered by his prepared speech. If the House wants shorter speeches, I hope that it will also accept shorter Government replies.
In conclusion, my Lords, I can only join with the noble Lord, Lord Somers, and other participants in the debate, in exhorting Members of the House to be as brief as possible. Very few speeches benefit from great length, as noble Lords have said earlier, and short, incisive speeches are often those which provoke most comment and interest. However, as I have said, I am not a believer in imposing time limits on speeches, and in the last analysis I believe it must be up to individual speakers, and the Peers who have to listen to them, to do their best to ensure that more speakers speak briefly.
7.43 p.m.
Lord SOMERS: My Lords, I should like to thank all noble Lords who have taken part in this debate, and particularly the noble Lord the Leader of the House, who has had the onerous task of listening to two complete debates and answering them both. I should point out, I think, that I was not recommending any imposed length of speeches. It was merely a recommended one; and if noble Lords want to enlarge on a technical subject, as my noble friend Lady Ward was suggesting, there is

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nothing on earth to prevent them from doing so. They need the extra time, and they should have it. But this, as I say, was merely a suggested length for those who can keep within it.
I was sorely tempted, I must say, by the noble Lord, Lord Denham, not to withdraw my Motion, but I once read an account of what happened if one did not. That frightened me so much, my Lords, that I beg leave to withdraw my Motion.
Motion for Papers, by leave, withdrawn.

CRIMINAL EVIDENCE BILL [H.L.]
7.44 p.m.
Viscount DILHORNE: My Lords, after the short debate on State aid to political Parties and the short debate advocating shorter speeches, I nevertheless feel it necessary, in moving the Second Reading of this Bill, to explain what it is about. I shall do it with such brevity as I find possible, bearing in mind that I have been subjected to great but not improper pressure from the noble Earl, Lord Longford, who is waiting in the wings to make, obviously, a very short speech, after all that has been said today. I shall not, I am sorry to have to confess, be present to hear it.
My Lords, it may come as a surprise to some of your Lordships to learn that it was only during the lifetime of some of the Members of this House—during the lifetime, for instance, of the noble and perennially young Lord Shinwell, and no doubt at a time when he was a nice little boy—that it became possible for any person accused of a criminal offence to give evidence in his own defence. That was made possible by the Criminal Evidence Act 1898. It would not have been fair to allow an accused person to give evidence if in every case he could be cross-examined as to his past record and character, and so provision was made to protect him from that. If it had not been, it might soon have been deduced that any accused who gave evidence had a good character and any accused who did not had a bad one.
So Section 1(f) of the Act provided that, as a general rule, an accused who gave evidence should not be asked, and,
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if asked, be required to answer, any question tending to show that he had committed, been convicted of or been charged with any offence other than that for which he was then being tried, or was of bad character. That general rule was subject to three exceptions. The first was that he could be asked questions about previous offences if proof of them was admissible evidence to show his guilt of the offence for which he was being tried. The second was if he had put his character in issue, or if the nature or conduct of his defence was such as to involve imputations on the character of the prosecutor or the witnesses for the prosecution. The third, with which this Bill is concerned, permitted an accused being asked questions as to other offences and as to his bad character if he had given evidence against any other person charged with the same offence.
Your Lordships will note that that exception allows such cross-examination only if both are charged with the same offence; but persons are often tried together when they are not charged with the same offence. They can be tried together if the matters which constitute the individual offences of the several offenders are so related that the interests of justice are best served by their being tried together. So, if tried together but not charged with the same offence, one accused can, as the law now stands, give evidence against the other and, no matter how bad the record of the man who is giving evidence against the other may be, it cannot be brought out.
My Lords, a man with a bad record sometimes seeks to secure his acquittal by giving evidence against a co-defendant, or seeks to show that he played only a minor part in what happened by putting the blame on a co-accused. The accused against whom such evidence is given may well feel a considerable sense of injustice if he is convicted and punished in consequence of the evidence given by such a co-accused and his being unable to bring out that man's true record and character.
The Criminal Law Reform Committee drew attention to this in its 11th Report, published so long ago as 1972, and recommended that the law should be changed; and recently a case came before this House in its judicial capacity which raised the question. I should like shortly

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to tell your Lordships something about that case. It arose out of an accident on Western Avenue. The driver of a van on the East-bound carriageway had stopped at an intersection to cross into the Westbound carriageway. He saw a car 100 to 150 yards away. The driver of the car said that he was about 150 yards from the intersection when the van turned right, out in front of him. There was a collision, and the car went off the road on to the pavement and killed a woman. Each driver was charged with dangerous driving causing death, but the dangerous driving differed so they were not, this House held, charged with the same offence.
At the trial, the driver of the car sought to blame the driver of the van for the accident; and it was not disputed that he gave evidence against him. At the trial, counsel for the driver of the van was allowed to cross-examine the driver of the car to show that he was an unqualified driver without "L" plates and without a qualified driver with him; that he had been convicted of dangerous driving and of driving uninsured in 1973; and that in 1974 or 1975 he had sought to obtain driving licences by falsely stating that he had passed a driving test. The result of that trial was that the driver of the car was convicted and the driver of the van acquitted. In this House the conviction was quashed as it was held that he should not have been cross-examined as to his record as he and the van driver were not charged with the same offence. If the driver of the van had not been allowed to bring out the car driver's record and had been convicted, he would, I think, have thought it very unfair.
My Lords, what this Bill seeks to do is to secure that in future no accused against whom a co-accused has given evidence should so feel. It does so by altering the words in the Criminal Evidence Act 1898:
"charged with the same offence"
to
"charged in the same proceedings".
The Eleventh Report of the Criminal Law Reform Committee proposed many changes in the criminal law, some of them very controversial; but this change recommended by them will not, I hope, prove to be controversial and should, I feel, be made without waiting for any Bill
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to implement other changes recommended. It is now seven years since their report. I hope that there will not be much more delay because trials are going on in which this question may arise at any time.
My Lords, I should like to commend this to the House as an excellently drafted Bill. I do not think it is going to be easy to amend. I hope not; I hope it will have an easy passage. I say that I think it is an excellently drafted Bill because I do not claim to be the author of it. I should like to express my gratitude to the Government for enabling me to have the assistance of parliamentary counsel in drafting it, and I hope there will be no criticism of the drafting. My Lords, I beg to move that the Bill be now read a second time.
Moved, That the Bill be now read 2a—(Viscount Dilhorne.)
7.54 p.m.
Lord LYELL: My Lords, it falls to me to make my own apologies to the noble and learned Viscount for not being in my place when he introduced his very valuable Bill. This was not entirely due to my own fault. There was a slight disturbance, I understand, including pickets, outside in Parliament Square, which delayed my arrival for a minute or two. Certainly, my noble and learned friend Lord Hailsham, who is unable to be here, has asked me to apologise to the House for his not being present to hear the noble and learned Viscount who has just so ably moved the Second Reading of this useful Bill. My noble and learned friend would wish me to say on his behalf that he entirely supports this valuable Bill and that he regards it as a valuable correction in what we have heard to be—in this recent decision which was so ably spelled out by the noble and learned Viscount—a very serious anomaly which has been apparently created by the drafting of the various Acts which are proposed to be amended by this Bill. That is as much as my noble and learned friend wishes me to say. I am pleased to see that we had four noble and learned Lords in the House. I am not an expert in any of these matters. For my part, I believe it to be an admirably short Bill. I have listened to what my noble and learned friend Lord Hailsham had to say and to what the noble and learned

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Viscount, Lord Dilhorne, has had to say. I believe it is admirable and that we should support it from these Benches.
7.55 p.m.
The MINISTER of STATE, HOME OFFICE (Lord Boston of Faversham): My Lords, it may be convenient to the House if I were to intervene in the debate, I hope only briefly, at this stage. I should like at the outset to say that I am sure that we are all grateful to the noble and learned Viscount, Lord Dilhorne, both for his introduction of this Bill and for the clarity with which he introduced it. I should also like to thank him warmly for what he has said about the drafting help that he has received. This extremely short Bill proposes a useful and, as the noble and learned Viscount has said, entirely uncontroversial change in the law of evidence in criminal cases. The point involved is a minor one but one which in certain cases could make the difference between conviction and acquittal. It may be that it did so in the case to which the noble and learned Viscount referred in his opening speech, and I think it would not be improper for me to remind the House that, in fact, the noble and learned Viscount sat on that very case of Hill and delivered the definitive judgment on that case.
The present law in general protects an accused person who is giving evidence on his own behalf from being questioned about his previous convictions and character. But circumstances are specified in the Criminal Evidence Act 1898, and the equivalent provisions in Scotland and Northern Ireland, in which he forfeits this protection. One of these is where he gives evidence—and I quote from the Act—
"against any other person charged with the same offence".
Cases do, of course, arise where two or more persons are tried in the same proceedings on charges arising out of the same incident or set of circumstances, although they may not necessarily be charged with the same offence in the sense of being jointly charged with committing an offence together. It seems right where a person gives evidence against someone tried with him—which will very likely be given in an attempt to exculpate himself and throw the blame on the other party—
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that he should be liable to cross-examination about his own character, which may be relevant to the credibility of his own evidence. It also seems right—and I would agree with what was said about this—that this liability should not be limited, as it is at present, to cases where co-accused are charged with offences which are identical in every detail. The Bill would relax this limitation to the extent that common sense indicates, so that in future a defendant would be liable to this sort of cross-examination—about his character and previous convictions—if he gave evidence against anyone else charged—and I quote from the Bill—
"in the same proceedings".
The Bill is thus consistent with the approach that the accused should have an opportunity to impugn the character and record of a witness giving evidence against him, whether or not that witness is himself on trial. This is because it is important to test the credibility of evidence which may lead to a person's conviction.
My Lords, I do not think I need say more than that about the effect of the Bill. The noble and learned Viscount, Lord Dilhorne, has provided, if I may say so, an admirable explanation of the background and the defect in the law with which the Bill seeks to deal, and I need not detain the House by going over the same ground again. Indeed, there has been already a notable measure of agreement both from what the noble and learned Viscount has said and from what the noble Lord, Lord Lyell, has said. But perhaps I should add a word about the relationship between this Bill and the Criminal Law Revision Committee Report on Criminal Evidence and the work of the Royal Commission on Criminal Procedure. The law of evidence in criminal cases was reviewed by the Criminal Law Revision Committee, whose report was published in 1972. The draft Criminal Evidence Bill prepared by the Committee, and included in its report, contained a number of useful and in many cases uncontroversial reforms. But the Committee's recommendations have not been implemented because their principal proposals about, for example, the so called "rights of silence"—whether or not inference should be drawn by the judge or jury either from the accused's failure to give evidence at the trial or to

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mention at the interrogation stage facts on which he relied in his defence—proved to be highly controversial. These major issues are within the terms of reference of the Royal Commission on Criminal Procedure, and the Government consider that it would be inappropriate to promote any substantial revision of the law of evidence while the Royal Commission is sitting. There is no reason, however, to object to limited amendments, of the kind proposed by this Bill, to deal with particular defects which can be simply remedied and which do not themselves touch on the more fundamental issues surrounding the law of evidence. Indeed, the point with which this Bill is concerned was considered by the Criminal Law Revision Committee; and although the wording of the committee's draft Bill was slightly different from that in this Bill, they both have the same intention.
The Government consider this to be a useful amendment to the law of evidence, and I am pleased to be able to tell the House that it has the Government's support. The noble and learned Viscount will, I am sure, understand that in saying that I cannot give any assurances that we will be able to assist the passage of the Bill, particularly if and when it comes to be considered in another place. But I commend the Bill to your Lordships' House for its approval.
Viscount DILHORNE: My Lords, I should like to thank the Government and your Lordships for the way in which this Bill has been received. I listened with interest to what the noble Lord said about the Eleventh Report of the Criminal Law Reform Committee. I suggest this: there may be other completely non-controversial changes which were recommended by that committee and are long awaited; it would be a pity if they were delayed because of other much more controversial proposals they put forward.
I hope that if this Bill secures a speedy passage, other proposals of a non-controversial character may follow upon it. I omitted to mention, in my desire for brevity, that my noble and learned friend Lord Diplock, who sat with me on the case to which the noble Lord, Lord Boston of Faversham, referred, wished me to say that he very strongly supports this Bill but regrets that he has been unable to be here at this late hour.
On Question, Bill read 2a, and committed to a Committee of the Whole House.

HOME OFFICE PENAL ADMINISTRATION
8.3 p.m.
The Earl of LONGFORD The Earl of LONGFORD rose to ask Her Majesty's Government whether they agree to the need for a thorough reorganisation of the Home Office in relation to penal matters. The noble Earl said: My Lords, I rise, suitably grateful to preceding speakers for their brevity, which I do not propose to emulate altogether. I must begin by warmly congratulating the new Minister, Lord Boston of Faversham, and the retiring Minister, Lord Harris of Greenwich, who I am so glad is going to speak later, on their new appointments. On behalf of myself and the whole House—both those who are here and the rather larger number who are not with us in the Chamber at the moment—I should like to express my good wishes to those two noble Lords. They are both well known for their all-round ability and public zeal. Lord Harris—and I am sorry that this compliment cannot wait until his return to the Chamber, because I believe we shall see him later—was always most courteous in answering the many questions and speeches which were placed before him in this House; and if I may say so, he was often highly ingeneous. I am sure that the noble Lord, Lord Boston, will prove a worthy rival.
I shall be dealing mainly with questions relating to prisons, directly or indirectly. That does not mean that I shall be embarking on a general survey of penal reform, treatment and prevention of crime, law and order or the compensation of victims. The House has often heard me on these far-reaching issues and, if I am spared, may suffer a similar fate in the future.
I do not, however, wish to restrict any noble Lord from interpreting the Motion as widely as he chooses. I could not if I wished, but I do not wish. Noble Lords of the utmost eminence are taking part, including my noble and learned friend Lord Gardiner, and my noble friend Lord Allen of Abbeydale, who was not

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only the Permanent Head of the Home Office, but Deputy Chairman of the Prison Commission; and the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, who was chairman of the Parole Board and is now president of the Probation Officers Association. I hope that before long we shall have a general debate on probation, initiated preferably by the noble Lord, Lord Hunt.
If it were usual to adopt a text in your Lordships' House, I know one that I would select for this evening:
"By their fruits ye shall know them".
In regard to penal matters—and I hasten to say I am saying nothing about the Home Office outside the penal area—the Home Office has been criticised more and more severely from many disparate quarters. It is a long time since I heard a good word said on their behalf, except by the noble Lord, Lord Harris of Greenwich, but that was part of his professional role, and no doubt it will be discharged with equal passion by the noble Lord, Lord Boston of Faversham.
We have reached a point where the prison governors, in an open letter to the Home Secretary, can say—and I am quoting:
"The total breakdown of the prison system is imminent".
If I said that of course I could be treated as some long-haired or bald-headed crank. But as it is from the prison governors, something more of an answer is to be expected. The prison governors refer unequivocally—and again I am quoting a letter to the Home Secretary—to:
"a deplorable lack of leadership from the Home Office".
In a rather over-ripe experience now of public life, I cannot recall such blunt condemnation of Government administration from those best qualified to offer a professional opinion. So that is where we begin, so to speak, this evening.
It is by no means clear whether the Home Secretary realises the gravity of the situation: the fact that there is not only a short-term but a long-term crisis. Under the pressure of industrial action, the Home Secretary has set up an inquiry with fairly wide terms of reference which I welcomed here when I spoke in November. He has called for a report by
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March. He seems to feel—and we shall have no doubt a more profound interpretation of his real state of feeling—that the main issue is one of improved remuneration for prison officers.
I entirely agree, as I have said before now, that prison officers, and, for that matter, prison governors, should be remunerated much more adequately and should receive the increase quickly, so there is no difference between my point of view and what may be the point of view of the Home Secretary on that matter. I am convinced, however, that the increase of pay, though important, is scratching the surface of the problem. Anyone who reads the governors' letter to the Home Secretary will realise that there are much more fundamental issues at stake. The opinion was expressed in an expert commentary by the organisation known as NACRO on the report of the House of Commons Committee published last year that it was full of excellent, if cautious, suggestions. It was said that this House of Commons report, excellent though it was, was not likely to be effective unless what was called the political will came into existence as it has not existed up to now. This assessment that our trouble up to now, the fundamental trouble, has been the absence of a political will is one on which we ought to pause for a moment.
It could of course suggest that individual Ministers were to blame. I am not taking that line tonight; I am not here to praise or blame Ministers. I am speaking at some length and I have not the time, therefore, to pay the tributes which sometimes clutter up these speeches. I shall, therefore, proceed without praising or blaming. For a real explanation of what has gone wrong, I look beyond the individual failing of Ministers. Most of these Ministers—and I am now casting my mind back to at least 10 Home Secretaries with whom I have had dealings since I became actively involved in penal reform—and their underlings have shown their capacity elsewhere. The present Home Secretary, for example, did a very good job in Northern Ireland on the whole and has shown himself a brave man in peace and war. I would say similar things of the civil servants concerned, but not with quite so much information as I should wish, because we are not allowed to meet them. We are told that we Members of the House of Lords are not allowed access to the advisers of the noble

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Lord, Lord Boston. That seems to be the present situation and therefore one cannot praise them unreservedly as one does not know them, but I am sure they are excellent persons.
The essence of what I am submitting is that there are structural defects in the whole Home Office—the whole set-up. That really is one of the main causes of our penal provisions being the least satisfactory and least edifying of all our social provisions. I realise, of course, as I have said many times in this House, that this period of steadily increasing crime is one which imposes special strains on the leading people in the Home Office, whether they be Ministers or officials; but that is a reason for giving even more attention, and not less, to getting the set-up right—and the set-up at least does lie within our power, although the crime rate may not, or not obviously.
Let us take first the ministerial issue. It has been clear for a long time that the Home Secretary of the day, irrespective of his personality and his Party, is far too busy with other matters, of course the present time is an exceptional case but, even apart from this kind of industrial crisis, the Home Secretary is far too busy with other matters to give the kind of leadership with regard to the penal system which the governors beg for and which they find so signally absent. No other Minister, under any arrangement we have seen hitherto in the Home Office, has sufficient authority to provide that leadership in the absence of its being supplied by the Home Secretary.
In the result, the real conduct of these affairs has fallen to the officials. Most of them move in and out of the Prison Department without acquiring much first-hand knowledge of prisons. I must be careful here, but I have never actually met a prisoner during many years of prison visiting who has actually met a Home Office official. I do not doubt that these Home Office officials occasionally visit them—perhaps in disguise, for all I know—but at any rate I have never met a prisoner who was conscious of having met a Home Office official.
It would be ludicrous to assert that what I called on an earlier occasion "these high-minded birds of passage" could be expected to formulate far-
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reaching schemes of penal improvement. It is just not part of their occupational prospectus. On the other hand, I can only use the words of my old master who was a well known figure here—Sir William, later Lord, Beveridge. He was asked by the War Office what he thought of their arrangements for using skilled manpower which he had been asked to investigate. He paused for some time and then replied: "A miserable show." He could not resist saying it again, because he was so pleased with the phrase: "A miserable show."—Now I have said it twice, and perhaps that is enough. The ministerial bottleneck strangles not only strategic planning but human lives.
Today's Home Secretary, in my recent experience—in fact in the last week—has taken exactly two months to confirm the negative finding of a Home Office committee regarding the parole of a prisoner whose circumstances were already well known to the Home Office, and at the end of the two months' deliberation a prison governor told me that he thought the recommendation of that committee would probably have moved across 20 desks by a process of what I believe is known in those circles as "passing the parcel". At any rate, two months are spent on this process and at the end of it all no reasons are given for this negative conclusion. No indication is provided that the preoccupied Minister, for all his personal humanity—and I hope anyone who reports me on this point will not forget to quote that sentence also—has any conception at all of the human being whose fate he determines.
On the ministerial aspect, I have been sure for some time that there is at least one obvious improvement to be undertaken. It is essential that a Minister of Cabinet rank should be publicly designated for penal affairs. I say in passing that I am not dogmatic about the title to be eventually chosen, but the phrase "penal affairs" indicates my argument. The new Minister would certainly be the ministerial head of the Prison Service. He should also be responsible for the all-important Probation and After-Care Service and for penal policy in a general sense. In the last resort, the ultimate responsibility for everything coming under the Home Office would have to remain with the Home Secretary.
After a good deal of reflection—there were arguments both ways—I have concluded that it would definitely be best if the Minister for Penal Affairs were actually a Minister in the Cabinet. You could have a Minister of Cabinet rank who was not a member of the Cabinet. There are plenty of examples of that, but I would submit that it would be best if he were a member. There are plenty of precedents for having two Cabinet Ministers within a single Department, the latest of them coming from the Department of Health and Social Security at the present time.
It seems to be agreed by everyone, including the Home Secretary, that the resources hitherto available to the Prison Service have been inadequate and should be expanded. The new Minister for Penal Affairs should be able to exert valuable pressure for more adequate resources in the Cabinet. He would do all this much more effectively if he were himself a member. I do not need to be told—perhaps I am one of those who least need to be told—that, whether in the Cabinet or out of it, the cause of penal reform is never likely to be a short cut to popularity. It has been said all too often in cynical moments that there are no votes in penal reform; but in the long run a wise penal system is in the interests not only of the criminal but of the general public. The Minister for Penal Affairs, actively assisted, I would hope, by his colleagues from the Prime Minister down, should rise to the challenge of educating public opinion in a fashion far beyond the capacity of any hopelessly overburdened Home Secretary.
I turn back to the prison governors. They may well feel that the ministerial structure is not their affair: at any rate, in anything of theirs I have read, they do not comment on it. They concentrate on the structure of officialdom at head office and a relationship between that structure and the structures at regional and prison level. The governors insist, in the first place—rightly I am sure—that their autonomy is being steadily diminished. They say that this tendency should be sharply reversed and they should get more, not less, independence.
There are admittedly two sides to this. On the one hand, there are governors and staff; and, if I may say so, prisoners and
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those who try to help them are beset with endless pettifogging restrictions—some directly imposed by the Home Office and others giving effect to what are supposed to be Home Office requirements. For example, it took me six weeks to get permission for a hand-painted Christmas card to be sent to me by a prisoner whom I was visiting regularly. It took almost two years for another prisoner to receive a copy of Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, the delay being due to the fact that the donor did not know the man before he went to prison. I could give many more examples. For example, I met a prisoner a few days ago who recently won the Koestler Award for one of the outstanding literary achievements of the year in the prison world. While he was drawing up notes for this literary prize-winning novel, he was twice penalised for possessing unauthorised note-books. One could go on and on with these horror tales of pettifogging interference.
One can say: "That is all due to the Home Office", and there is a certain truth in that, but it is not the whole truth. On the other hand, I know of a prisoner who, in an earlier prison, had been allowed to have his small child sitting on his knee. But when the child came and sat on her father's knee at the next prison, the child was sharply interfered with and removed from the paternal knee, from which followed a good deal of blood and tears. In fact, there was quite a battle. That small example illustrates the fact that there has to be some harmony between the practices in the different prisons. Therefore, I do not think this is only a question of throwing the reins around the horse's neck and letting the governors decide things as they wish; that might be going too far.
The inspectorate should be made a much more effective instrument than it is at present. As in most other branches of administration, a balance must clearly be struck between administration and local autonomy. But I say with absolute conviction that, at the present time, the centralising tendencies are having things all their own way, and the autonomy of the governors ought to be much more strongly asserted.
There are many other defects in the present arrangements which I can do no more than mention. The governors find themselves dealing with at least seven

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divisions within the Prison Department, which is bad enough, but even so they are not in direct relationship with the Establishments Division and crucial problems, such as those of staffing and industrial relations, are effectively outside the control of the governors. As the governors again point out in the open letter which they wrote to the Home Secretary, the Director-General of the Prison Service is not responsible nor accountable for the conditions and service of his staff, so that he is by no means the master of his own house, even under the Minister.
The relationship with the Probation Service is also of the first importance. Many of us believe—and I am sure that the noble and learned Lord, Lord Gardiner, believes—that the greatest penal issue of the immediate future is how to arrange a massive shift of resources from custodial to non-custodial remedies. This is obviously not an issue which the new form of prison commission, department, or whatever we like to call it, can settle unaided, but it is one which cannot seriously be tackled without the new prison commission being involved and bringing its expert knowledge to bear at every point. As I suggested earlier, the Minister for Penal Affairs should clearly carry the ministerial responsibility for co-ordinating the indispensable contributions of the Prison Service and the Probation Service. I know that the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, has given special attention to these problems, and I shall not be too dogmatic ahead of his speech.
The following propositions, at least, can, I hope, be acceptable in principle. First, in regard to penal matters, the Home Office needs a thorough reorganisation, in the light of the grave situation and the almost universal criticism. Secondly, a Minister of Cabinet rank specifically responsible for penal affairs should be appointed forthwith, though the ultimate responsibility for all Home Office matters must rest with the Home Secretary. Thirdly, a professional body, subject only to Ministers, with a professional head, should take over the work of the Prison Department. Fourthly, much more autonomy should be given to governors, along with a strengthened inspectorate. Much more opportunity should be provided for the constructive role of prison
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officers. Fifthly, the lines of communication between head office, regions—if they continue—and prisons should be much simplified. It should be understood that the new prison authority would be responsible for its own staff and industrial relations.
Of course, I am not arguing that if you get the structure right automatically you get the policy right, let alone its operation. A good structure does not guarantee a good policy; but a bad structure, such as we have now, guarantees a bad policy, as I am afraid we possess at present. As well as the great problem of how to obtain the necessary resources and the other problem of how to distribute those resources wisely between custodial and non-custodial treatment, the still deeper problem may be felt of how to make the whole thing vastly more human, sensitive and ethical. These problems will not disappear, however we reshuffle the cards at the Home Office. But unless we carry out a drastic overhaul there, we are not really giving ourselves a chance. The new Minister comes in at what may well prove to be a moment of destiny. I can only say to him what I said at the beginning, and I repeat it still more earnestly now that I have explained what seems to me the grim reality in front of him, "With all my heart, I wish you well".
8.25 p.m.
Lord ALLEN of ABBEYDALE: My Lords, I should like to begin by adding my welcome to the noble Lord who will be playing his second innings this evening and replying to this debate. We sat together recently on the Select Committee on the Bill of Rights, and it is very good to see him on the Front Bench. He needs no warning from me that the occasions when he speaks on behalf of his new Department will not always be very confortable ones. He has probably already discovered that the Home Office is invariably wrong, from whatever angle the critic may be looking at it. The only thing is that the angles vary a good deal.
I should also like to add my word of appreciation to the noble Lord, Lord Harris of Greenwich. I understand that, freed from the cares of ministerial office, he has been able to miscalculate the speed at which this debate eventually came on, but I know that he will be joining us

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later. I believe that his period as Minister of State in the Home Office was a notable one, and it is all to the good that he should feel free to make his personal contribution on an occasion like this, and even in the pages of the Daily Telegraph.
It is with some diffidence that I am joining in the debate, since for a number of years I was the Permanent Under-Secretary of State in the Home Office, and must take my share of responsibility for the state of affairs which is causing the noble Earl so much concern. But I felt that I ought to put my name down, partly because at one stage of my career I had some concern with questions of the machinery of Government, and mainly, as we have been reminded, because in the dim and distant past I served a period as Deputy Chairman of the Prison Commission. It seemed to me that this was particularly relevant as, for reasons which I can well understand, the noble Earl has tended to concentrate on the prisons in introducing this debate this evening.
The Prison Service certainly faces most formidable problems. I suppose it is hardly to be wondered at that the community puts prisons fairly well down the list when resources are scarce, and the persistent shortage of secure accommodation, with all that that involves, is certainly one of the main causes of present difficulties. It is not to be forgotten that bad conditions for prisoners make for bad working conditions for the officers. But as well, there are the problems of coping with prisoners convicted of terrorist offences, and the scale on which they are being dealt with is a comparatively modern phenomenon. There are now life sentence prisoners in numbers far exceeding anything that we have been used to in the past—nearly 1,400 of them—and they are not all let out after nine years, as the Press seem often to suppose. In a reply given to me today, I learned that 163 prisoners have already been in custody for more than 10 years—that is, life sentence prisoners. Then there are the alcoholics and the mentally disordered who ought not to be in prison at all. For the rest, the fact is that during the past decade the actual proportion of convicted offenders who are sent to prison has just about halved, which means that those who do go to prison are, more and more,
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the failures of the penal system who, before ending up in prison, have been through the whole gamut of non-custodial penalties.
Against this kind of background, it is not surprising that the staffs, scattered around the country as they are in comparatively small groups, sometimes feel that life is treating them hardly and that they are members of a service forgotten by an uncomprehending and ill-informed community. Nor is it surprising that there have been cries for reorganisation. When things get difficult, it is often tempting to think that they might be put right by some measure of reorganisation. I fear that experience suggests that this is not necessarily so. Looking at Government itself, we have perhaps seen rather too much for our comfort of Departments being put together and then taken apart again, to be quite sure that reorganisation of itself necessarily solves many problems.
Mr. Justice May and his colleagues in the working group to which the noble Earl referred will be going into all these issues, but I should like to make two points at this stage which I think are of some relevance. The first relates to the suggestion that the right course for prisons would be to revive the old Prison Commission, or something like it. On this, I should like to say that it seems to me that there are many misconceptions floating around about the Prison Commissioners. Through a golden haze of memory there seems to emerge a picture of a body of independent, professional men dedicating the whole of their working lives to the Prison Service. This is compared with the make-up of the present high command for the Prison Service, whom the noble Earl a moment ago referred to as "high-minded birds of passage." On another occasion, when in a less charitable mood, I think that the noble Earl referred to them as "itinerant civil servants," but I fear that the comparison really is not quite like this.
When I arrived in the Home Office, Alexander Maxwell had just come back there after serving for a period as Chairman of the Prison Commissioners, and he went on to become an extremely distinguished head of the office. He was succeeded by Harold Scott, who later went on to become the Permament Secretary of two great Departments of

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State and eventually Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis. Lionel Fox, who had a long innings, and who was indeed an outstanding chairman, was himself an administrator, if I may be forgiven for using so old-fashioned a word, and not a product of the Prison Service. Indeed, when I first knew him he was acting Receiver for the Metropolitan Police District.
Of the five Commissioners in my time, three of us were administrators—again using that word—and two were from within the Prison Service. There is not all that much difference between that set-up and the composition of the present Prisons Board. There is, however, one sharp difference between the Commissioners and the Board; namely, that the members of the Board are of a good deal higher status than ever the Commissioners were. The present chairman of the Board, for example, ranks as a Deputy Secretary. The chairman of the Prison Commission never did.
The Earl of LONGFORD: My Lords, if I may interrupt the noble Lord on that point, one of the complaints that I have made in this House for many years is that prison governors were never given sufficient status. If one looks at it in terms of honours, I cannot remember—although I am subject to correction—a prison governor who was knighted while serving as a prison governor. For a long time, no honours have ever been handed out to prison governors. They have been treated as a slightly inferior form of life by these eminent officials in the Home Office.
Lord ALLEN of ABBEYDALE: My Lords, happily it was not for the eminent officials in the Home Office to hand out honours. That was another's responsibility. I am afraid that this is not a matter for which I could assume any responsibility. What I can say, however, is that the Prison Service members of the present Prisons Board rank as Under-Secretaries, or near Under-Secretaries. The Prison Service members who were Prison Commissioners were much below that level in the old days of the Prison Commission. Perhaps it is hardly necessary for me to add that the old Prison Commissioners were not given a free hand to decide what demands they should make on national resources and to settle condi-
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tions of service for themselves in splendid isolation.
My second point is that the noble Earl's Question is perfectly right in its assumption that concern with prisons cannot be divorced from other aspects of penal policy. You cannot decide what you are trying to do in the prisons in isolation from what you are trying to do in developing alternatives to imprisonment and keeping people out of prison. The plain fact is that the way in which the Prison Commission was separately organised simply became out of date in the increasingly complicated pattern which evolved to grapple with the wide range of problems arising from the growth of crime and from the changing attitude of the community to what penal policy might attempt to achieve. The one thing which is clear to me is that overall responsibility for this penal policy must remain with the Home Secretary, with his concern for the preservation of the Queen's peace and all that that implies and which is absolutely central to the role of the Home Secretary in this country.
In the prisons, we are concerned with individuals who have lost their freedom by due legal process but who are still human beings entitled to some measure of dignity and respect; no two of them exactly alike; and pretty well all of them due to return to society, as 1,500 of them do every week. I simply cannot see how a Home Secretary could hand over to another Minister responsibilities for the broad treatment of categories of prisoners or for deciding the fate of individuals.
Just to illustrate this point, I think that the Home Secretary of the day was bound to take a direct responsibility for deciding whether there should be a number of separate units for housing particularly dangerous prisoners, or whether there should be a single fortress in the Isle of Wight, or somewhere, or whether some other solution altogether should be adopted, or, another example, whether prissoners who are nearing the end of a long sentence can properly be temporarily released for work in the community or on spells of leave. It seems to me that only the Home Secretary can take the final decision, whatever advice he might receive, on whether the time has come to release a life prisoner on licence—not on parole, another popular misconception. Only

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the Home Secretary of the day, I submit, could have decided whether the Price sisters should be moved to Northern Ireland. The Home Secretary can delegate certain day-to-day responsibilities to his Minister of State, but I fear that I cannot go along with the proposition that there is a place here for another Minister for Penal Affairs of Cabinet rank or within the Cabinet, nor do I believe that such a Minister in second place to the Home Secretary would have any greater success in getting more resources out of the Government for penal matters. I am now leaving what the noble Earl said. Nor at the other extreme can I see what responsibilities could be handed over, as some have suggested, to an outside quasi-independent body not directly answerable to Parliament.
Responsibilities here are of a totally different nature from those involved in providing, say, electric power or running railway trains—or not running railway trains, as the case may be. Indeed, I am left in some doubt whether there is really a separate role of management which could be divorced in some way from other responsibilities and carried out better than under the present arrangements, and whether the real causes of our problems do not lie elsewhere. But we shall have to await the findings of Mr. Justice May and his Committee. I see from today's papers, for example, that he has received proposals from the Liberal Party which do not bear much resemblance to the suggestions I have been putting forward this evening, and no doubt he will be getting a wide range of evidence from other sources.
There is certainly no ground for complacency, and no one would dream of claiming that the present set-up is in all respects ideal. I personally hope that the committee will have something to say on some of the other questions which cause me concern. Is the present prison staff college, for example, susceptible of improvement? Should more be done to involve the local community in the separate prisons and borstals? Should the rather odd form of Whitley Council in the Prison Service be overhauled? Are the relations between the prison medical service and the National Health Service the best that can be devised? Should something be done—and I take the noble
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Earl's point here—to improve the relations between the Prison Service and the Home Office establishment divisions? Is there a case for examining whether accountable management, in the sense that we on the Fulton Committee understood it in a Civil Service context, has been sufficiently developed? Have prison governors been given clear enough ideas of what they are expected to achieve, and enough discretion as to the way they are doing it? In closing this little list I am bound to go along with the noble Earl in expressing my wonder that the committee is expected to reach an answer to all these questions and other related questions by March, given that their remit extends to Scotland and Northern Ireland as well as to England and Wales.
My Lords, I have tended to speak mainly about prisons, and although my theme has been that they really cannot be considered in isolation from other aspects of penal policy, I have said very little indeed about those aspects. There may well be a case for looking at the parole system and for seeing how this plunge which we took into the unknown has worked out in its first few years. There is, too, the long-term problem of the future of the Probation Service, nearly 400 of whose members, incidentally, work in the prisons; but my noble friend Lord Hunt is well equipped to speak on both of those aspects. I certainly must not embark on these issues and on the link-up with the Home Secretary's concern with the criminal law and with the police, on which I hope the noble Lord, Lord Inglewood, may have some words to say, when I have already spoken for much longer than I intended, and that on a day when we have had a debate on the desirability of shorter speeches!
I should like to end by saying that although I have differed on a number of points from what the noble Earl said, we all owe him a debt of gratitude, with his continuing interest in penal matters, for raising this interesting Question tonight. But I should also like to say that there are underlying problems here which go a good deal wider and deeper than the organisation of the Department in which I was proud to serve.
8.46 p.m.
Lord INGLEWOOD: My Lords, the noble Earl, Lord Longford, who intro-

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duced this debate put the emphasis in his speech on prisons, but he invited other noble Lords to widen the field, and I should like to submit that any review of the Home Office organisation affecting penal matters must include some reference to the police—the crime detection agency without whom there would be fewer prisoners, empty prisons and in consequence fewer of the problems which we have been talking about for the last three-quarters of an hour.
While, like the noble Lord, Lord Allen of Abbeydale, I should be opposed to any transfer from the Home Secretary of responsibility for the police and other services which come under the general heading of penal matters, I should like to know more about the current Home Office organisation and attitude towards police responsibilities. Some of the events of recent times have aroused misgivings that police thinking and organisation is falling behind the times and becoming out of date. In saying that I am not at all criticising police officers in the lower ranks, whom most of us admire greatly and who are taken as a model by many foreign countries. I am referring to what appear to be weaknesses in the system of organisation seen against, for example, what has happened recently in Lancashire. As we debated that story not so long ago I do not want to go over the same ground again, but it cannot be denied that misgivings have arisen.
Where are these weaknesses to be found? I think one is in the constitution and organisation of the inspectorate. Of course the inspectorate is not responsible for the Metropolitan Police, but it is responsible for all the other police forces in the country. The inspectors are, I believe, all former chief constables of distinction, but they have virtually no powers—or at least so they tell one after they have retired. So far as I can learn, they make no unannounced visits, and the inspection of our provincial police forces is largely carried out on an "old boy" basis, which is all right when all goes well, but when they run into difficulties that system is not quite good enough.
The Secretary of State also has few powers. Forty-two forces plus the Metropolitan Police—that is 43 forces in all—are in a certain sense independent of him and he is in no position to give them
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instructions, except in the very narrow field where Parliament has given him powers. Hence his communications with the chief officers of police consist mostly of recommendations. Up to a point again the system undoubtedly works well, but there can be difficulties. Not having the police too closely tied to the government of the country is, on balance, a good thing, but it does produce its own problems and we must look at them. For example, does an inspector make an annual report on chief officers when he inspects the force?
I have asked the noble Lord, Lord Harris of Greenwich, that question across the Floor of the House on a previous occasion and, not having obtained a very clear answer, I am now trying it on his successor. Does an inspector in his annual inspection make a report on chief officers? If not, he surely ought to do so. Is the Minister happy about the general run of relations between chief officers and police authorities, the system which was set up under the 1964 Police Act? I would submit that police authorities in general are too large to be efficient. One rarely hears chief officers pay compliments to their police authorities. I have heard them do so, but it is rare. And similarly, on the other side, I have rarely heard police authorities say they consider the conduct of business and the example set by the chief constable as helpful as they would hope it to be.
Having said that, let us look at the background against which chief constables and police authorities have to work. The wording of the 1964 Act—which is our parliamentary responsibility, and not theirs—says that police authorities are responsible for maintenance of an adequate and efficient police force in their area. Then in the next section, it goes on to say that such police forces shall be under the direction and control of the chief constable. In practice, it must be extremely difficult to draw a dividing line between those two fields of responsibility, even with the best will in the world, because if one party or the other is slightly unreasonable you have the beginnings of trouble.
There is another flaw in the police authorities, as I see it, which is that there is no independent view. You have two-thirds county councillors and one-third

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magistrates. It has seemed to me for some time that there might be an advantage in having, say, not more than two members who are genuinely independent of either of those two lobbies, the council lobby or the magistrates' lobby. Such members would have to be very carefully chosen. In order to show that I have given thought to this, I make the suggestion that they might be chosen for a period of years from among the deputy lieutenants of the county. But some independent view where the member is not responsible to the electorate or to his fellow councillors, or for the voting of the money, or again is not a representative of the judiciary could be an advantage.
I come to my last point, and I am really hoping to be short on this day when everyone has been so exhorted earlier on. My last point concerns the Police Advisory Board, an organisation which was set up under the 1964 Act, and about which we know very little indeed. What I may say, therefore, may not all be correct, but if so I can only say I am sorry and it would perhaps be better if we all knew just a little more. The members are drawn entirely from what one might call the police lobby, representatives of the staff associations, councillors, magistrates, Home Office officials, and the Minister or his Minister of State in the Chair. Again you will notice that there is no member of that body who is truly independent and I would suggest again that there would be an advantage. The police world is very inward-looking. If there could be two or three members of great eminence who brought a different experience of life from those categories from whom all the members at the moment are drawn it could add much.
No doubt the noble Lord, Lord Harris of Greenwich, may be able to enlighten us here, but I am told that the full meetings of the board occur at the most twice, and sometimes only once, a year, that it is not always the case that a Minister takes the Chair, and that much of the business is in fact done through appointing subcommittees to study a subject, and then considering their reports. I would feel that with such membership, and particularly with the strength of the staff associations among the members, the decisions come to are much more likely to be compromises than anything very
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clear. Certainly the only report that I have ever seen—which I hasten to say was sent to me by the Home Office, and not extracted from any waste paper basket—was a very weak compromise document.
Of course, a large amount of the work of planning police forces must be confidential, but, apart from that, there is room, I think, for more information to reach us both from the Home Office and again at the local level about what the police in these difficult times are trying to do. They will not get the support they deserve from the general public until there is rather more knowledge; without that knowledge there cannot be sympathy. When I suggest independent minds, it is no more than the non-executive director principle which is common to all big and successful public companies.
What we have heard recently has been due largely to the fact that a Royal Commission is sitting and some of the evidence submitted has reached the Press. Instead of a flow of information about routine business of what the Home Office is trying to do for us, we have heard from the Commissioner the age-old police cry of more men and more powers; from the Police Federation, in their propaganda statements, the age-old police cry of more pay and more powers; and the last time I read of anything uttered by the Superintendents' Association, the chairman or president was crying out for less to do with politicians; that is an age-old police cry, too. Of course, some of the police do look on politicians as something to be rated with the lesser criminals! I should like to think that we could get more regular authoritative information than we do at the present time, and that the people of this country have not got to depend quite so much on extracts from evidence sent in to Royal Commissions and headlines in the Press.
No one during this time has spoken of the need for better quality intake, better training, rewards for proficiency, or particular ways of winning the suppport of the public—no; one man has. The really responsible body in this field, the association of Chief Officers of Police, maintains throughout dead silence. It may have been a good tradition in the past, but I would like to think that today they would let us know rather more of the way they see

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things. The Home Office and the police do appear to be too inward-looking. I am in no way hinting at a breakdown, such as the noble Earl quoted earlier on as something which was feared by prison governors—not at all, because we have a Police Service in this country that none of us would like to change for the Police Service in any other. None the less, I think it could be a better service still, and I hope your Lordships think I have made the case that in any reorganisation of penal matters in the responsibility of the Home Office, there should be reference to the police as well as to the Prison Service.
8.58 p.m.
Lord HUNT: My Lords, I should not wish to be left out of the welcome that has been offered to the noble Lord, Lord Boston of Faversham, on taking high office in that Department of State about which I can claim to be the least ignorant of all the Departments of State during my time in your Lordships' House. I would formally and sincerely thank my noble friend Lord Longford for providing us with the opportunity to discuss organisational improvementsin our penalsystem, and I am flattered that he should think that I might be able to make a worthwhile contribution. I am not at all sure that that is likely to be the case. It is true that I have one advantage, which perhaps my noble friend, Lord Allen of Abbeydale and other civil servants at the time would have seen as a disadvantage, of having spent 6½ years lodged in the Home Office while I was with the Parole Board. In case he is anxious about that remark, I would hasten to say that I was full of admiration for the high abilities, the friendliness and the helpfulness of all the officials with whom I had to deal then, and with whom I still deal peripherally as President of the National Association of Probation Officers.
Both Lord Longford and Lord Allen were talking at length and mainly about the Prison Service. It is very tempting for me to offer some remarks that I should have liked to make, but in the interests of brevity I will not follow them but try to strike a middle line between their contrasting views. Therefore, I shall, as I was invited to do by the noble Earl, Lord Longford, move straight on to the parole system. Here I am in danger of speaking after too long an interval since I was chair-
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man of the Board. However, I can claim to see it now from the viewpoint of the Probation Service, which has to make the parole system work and which is also involved with the problems of the families of prisoners who are eligible for parole. It is a different perspective.
Of course, an internal review has been in progress in the Home Office for many months and I hope—I have no means of knowing—that it will shortly see the light of day in the form of a Green Paper for public debate. Given that prospect, I see no case at present for an independent review such as was recommended by the House of Commons Expenditure Committee.
I hold the view that, by and large, parole has served the public and the nation well during the 11 years of its existence. I think that it has become fashionable to "knock" parole and there has been too much knocking of parole of late. There surely can be no denying the benefit of the conditional early release of some 35,000 prisoners over that period of 11 years, given that the recall rate has been, on average, well below 10 per cent. and that of that 10 per cent. only about half have been recalled for fresh offences during the currency of their licence. I am told that at any one time now some 3,500 offenders are with us in the community serving the rest of their sentence outside rather than inside. I would guess that that number could fill about eight reasonably large prisons.
However, the two main areas of criticism—the anxiety-making slowness in decision-making and the denial of reasons for refusal of parole—are still valid and overdue for reform. There is a great deal that I could say about this, but I shall limit myself to the Question posed on the Order Paper: whether, and if so how, changes in Home Office organisation might help to solve these problems and otherwise improve the parole system. I am inclined to think that progress in both these matters might now lie in decentralising much of the centralised work to regional boards contiguous with the Prison Service regions. Only a limited number of cases, which would have to be judged by carefully contrived criteria, would be referred to the national Board—it now handles at least 5,000 cases a year,

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which is far too many—which would also be charged with providing a forum for liaison between the regional boards and the local committees. The national Board would have oversight over consistency in decision-making, and be the authority in matters of principle and general practice.
Talking of practice, I believe that the time has come, after 11 years of operation, to dispense with much of the elaborate and time-consuming processing of cases which is carried out in the Home Office parole unit. It is far more elaborate, and the case dossiers are far more voluminous than anything I have seen in other countries which operate comparable systems and with no less success than we do. It was quite essential in the early years, but the great body of knowledge acquired by the board and the committees about the types of offence and offender and the problems of reconciling the interests of prisoners with those of the general public, strengthens the case for simplifying and speeding up the system now.
At the same time, I am not one of those who make a case for changing the principle of discretion in granting parole or for changing the principle that formal responsibility for the decision to grant parole must rest with the Home Secretary, on grounds of his accountability to Parliament.
Before turning to my main point, I should like to say how glad I was to see that the noble Lord, Lord Harris of Greenwich, has turned up. He was inadvertently almost responsible for making me a defaulter this evening. I should like to offer him publicly, as I have already done personally, my good wishes on his new appointment as Chairman of the Parole Board. He was sitting a short time ago on the Cross Benches and I was about to say how delighted I was that he had come to join us. I am not sure of his real intention, but he will be very welcome if he decides to come.
I shall be straying from the strict terms of the Question of the noble Earl, Lord Longford, but he has very kindly said that I might offer a few thoughts which go wider than the ambit of the Home Office. I am not one of those who would equate the book of my friend and one-time colleague Sir Robert Mark with the
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Gospel according to St. Mark, but I did find a useful quotation in it which I propose to use. He was quoting at length from his BBC Dimbleby Lecture in 1966 and was pointing out that the prevention and investigation of crime—which, of course, was his particular province—is only part of the system of justice. He referred to four stages: the enactment of criminal laws; the task of the police to enforce them; the criminal trial and, in his own words,
"what to do with the guilty"
all of which your Lordships would say with me is obvious. However, he went on:
"Each of these stages is the province of a different group of people. None of these groups is obliged to give much thought to the problems of the others or to consider the working of the system as a whole. This"—
suggested Sir Robert—
"is unfortunate, because the different parts are intimately connected".
That passage was Sir Robert Mark's cue for launching into some trenchant comments about the law, about lawyers—crooked or otherwise—the system of trial and the question of punishment. But I am using it as my cue to suggest that there could be, in logic, a case for a Ministry of Justice which would have in its purview all those four stages. I hasten to say that I do not believe that so drastic a reorganisation in our machinery of government, which would amount to rather more in principle than a mere large-scale administrative merger, is either desirable or acceptable. I fancy that the basic tenet of the independence of the Judiciary would make it suspect. Nor do I think that mergers of the executive services, which perform distinctive tasks and have specialist skills, are the answer in any organic changes at the level of central or local government. I am very unhappy about the present generic training for the Probation Service and the social services. From all I have heard about it, the merging of the Probation Service in Scotland with the social services has been a positive disservice to penal treatment.
However, I believe that Sir Robert Mark's thesis calls for more interaction through continuous consultation and, where appropriate, co-ordination at both central and local government levels between all Departments and agencies

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which are involved in penal matters, in particular in the first and most important stage, that of preventing crime.
I believe that an authoritative link is needed in central Government, both to ensure co-related action and to demonstrate the need to emulate it in practical ways throughout the country in order to highlight the seriousness of crime among the nation's many other problems. I should like to see an inter-departmental committee consisting of Ministers and senior civil servants from all those Departments of State involved in, or able to contribute towards action in, the prevention of crime, the treatment of offenders and, not least, the interest of victims of crime. As an earnest of its importance in the affairs of State, the committee might be served by a secretary assigned by the Cabinet Secretariat. I suggest that its chairman should be a senior Home Office Minister, and that the committee should be answerable to the Home Secretary.
Apart from departmental action in Whitehall, I would also lay on that committee the task of stimulating interaction in local government and circulating practical ideas for crime prevention. The police cannot fulfil that first-stage task alone. It calls for massive support from other services and agencies as well as from the general public. I do not think that there is enough talking together—let alone acting in concert—between the various agencies which have, or should have, the same objective of preventing crime; for instance, between the Probation Service and the police.
I am delighted that this year Mr. John Alderson, who is the Chief Constable for Devon and Cornwall, is to address the annual conference of the National Association of Probation Officers. There is a great deal to be learned from his experiences in communal policing. I shall not give the details here. But it is perhaps not without significance that, whereas juvenile crime has continued to soar elsewhere, the number of offences attributable to juveniles in Exeter has been held to 4 per cent. of the total.
Returning to the Motion, I wonder whether, notwithstanding the Crime Policy Planning Committee and the unit which serves it, there really is effective liaison in the Home Office between those Depart-
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ments and divisions which deal with crime in its various aspects. Those doubts—and as noble Lords have gathered, I have doubts—were recently renewed during a visit to the Probation Service in Dorset. I was informed there of a recent increase of 100 in the establishment of the constabulary in that county following a visit by the Chief Constable to the Police Department in the Home Office. I do not for one moment question the need for that increment. What I do question is whether the consequences of that reinforcement were taken sufficiently into account—that is, more arrests, more offenders brought to the courts, with consequent increases in the workload imposed on the Probation Service in making more social inquiries and in supervising more court orders; all that without any parallel additional resources in manpower or amenities being granted to the Probation Service.
That brings me to my last point: the Probation Service, especially in view of the Government's explicit policy of shifting the emphasis in the treatment of offenders from closed penal establishments to a range of alternatives in the community. The present establishment of just over 5,000 has been virtually frozen for the past two years. It will have to be increased if the more difficult offenders are to be placed under closer supervision in the community. There are welcome moves in some prisons to involve prison officers in welfare work, in collaboration with probation officers serving in prison welfare departments. To me there is nothing outrageous—indeed there is a precedent for it elsewhere—in the notion that this collaboration might be extended outside prisons, with some officers from the Prison Service being seconded to the Probation Service in order to meet the need to supervise greater numbers of more difficult prisoners.
However that may be, I believe that, despite its understandable reservations about having, in order to match the Government's professed intention, to switch its own emphasis from the relaxed tradition of after-care to the more disciplined character of supervision in some cases, the Probation Service would be prepared to accept the additional responsibility and the extra work, always provided that it was adequately manned and appropriately trained and equipped for the job.
9.14 p.m.
Lord GARDINER: My Lords, I too am grateful to my noble friend Lord Longford, for enabling us to discuss this important Question tonight. Perhaps I ought to say that although President of the Howard League for Penal Reform and Vice-President of the Institute for the Study of Frequent Delinquency, naturally any views I shall express are entirely my own. The subject matter is a little difficult because the proposition advanced is that there are certain things wrong in our penal system and that all, or some of them, are due to wrong organisation in the Home Office. Therefore, one has to ask oneself first what one thinks there is wrong in our penal system, and then see whether or not the alternatives provided by the noble Earl would be the right answers.
To be realistic, one has to start with the proposition that a country gets the penal system that it is prepared to pay for. The difficulty, or so much of the difficulty, has always been resources. Very largely we have simply to persuade the public, who are not easy to be persuaded, that homes and hostels even in their own area are more sensibly provided than more prisons. Of course, the first requirement is preventatives of crime. The noble Lord, Lord Inglewood, and I have too often said to repeat again that it is clear in any police station you like to go into and look at the facts, that if the conviction rates goes up crime goes down; if the conviction rate goes down then crime goes up. Every Government since the war have failed to increase the police force to deal with the increase in crime. However, that of course is not in any way due to the organisation of the Home Office.
The second question is how, having provided for an adequate police force, you then deal with the resources which are available for, broadly speaking, the treatment of offenders. When I say "the treatment of offenders" I am not using "treatment" in the sense of doing them good, or rehabilitating them, but the way in which they are disposed of. Are they to be sent to prison, or disposed of in some other way? At the present time there is an unhappy dispute going on, as no doubt the noble Lord, Lord Harris, knows, between my right honourable friend the Home Secretary and practically
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everybody else. When I say practically everybody else, I cannot think of anybody that I know who shares the Home Secretary's view. The Howard League of Penal Reform, the ISTD, NACRO, the Expenditure Committee of the other place, the Liberal Party, and many others take the view that we are spending much too much of our resources on building more and more prisons when what we ought to be concerned with are alternatives to imprisonment.
I have heard the noble Lord, Lord Harris, play down the numbers slightly, but I am talking about tens of thousands in prisons, if you include all the fine defaulters, maintenance defaulters, alcoholics, cannabis users, those convicted of soliciting, those convicted of sleeping rough, and even those awaiting deportation because they have served the sentence imposed on them by the courts but they are kept in prison because they cannot get an answer from the Home Office as to whether or not a deportation order is to be made.
Then of course there are all the passive inadequates. I have never heard any very satisfactory definition of them, but I remember in the first conference ever held by the British Institute of Human Rights that the chairman of the conference, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Kilbrandon, said this:
"Most prisoners are not like you and me. I was struck very forcibly in Edinburgh prison when I went into a room where a lot of men were sitting in silence. They were doing a job which you don't see very often now. They were sewing mail bags. I said to the governor, ' Are these men not allowed to speak to one another? ' He said, ' Of course they are, but these are people who never speak. They are solitary. They are non-communicators. They have no friends. They have nobody to visit them. They never get a letter, and when they leave prison they won't be out very long. They will be back here because they like sewing mail bags in silence'."
We have far too many in our prisons who prison is not doing any good. Our re-conviction rate for prisons, borstals, and detention centres is about the same; 70 per cent. will be re-convicted within two years. However you dispose of them you could hardly have a worse result than that. On the face of it, the prison policy of the Home Secretary, if I understand it, is that if there are any extra resources available it is all going on prison building.

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There is nothing personal in this. I have the highest regard for my right honourable friend the Home Secretary. As my noble friend Lord Longford said, he is a brave man in war and peace. I know a bit about Northern Ireland having been one of three Privy Counsellors to inquire into interrogation methods there, and later as chairman of the Government committee to overhaul security laws in Northern Ireland. I thought he was a most admirable Secretary of State in relation to Northern Ireland. But on the face of it, this has nothing to do with Home Office organisation. I am sure my right honourable friend would be the first to say that this was entirely his decision, that he is responsible, as a Minister, and that this is a matter he had to decide.
I also feel, with great respect to my noble friend Lord Longford, that I do not see what putting Lord Harris in the Cabinet would really do. After all, if he had been in the Cabinet all this time, what would have been the result? The present Cabinet is 24; I can quite understand that with a 12-12 division it would be useful for the Home Secretary to have a casting vote, but on the face of it this has nothing to do with Home Office organisation.
The Earl of LONGFORD: The noble and learned Lord has missed the point of my argument, my Lords, no doubt because I did not put it clearly enough. I am saying that the Home Secretary is too busy to consider these grave questions. Where the noble and learned Lord, Lord Gardiner, and I and so many others agree on these grave matters of the right distribution of resources is that the present Home Secretary, responsible for law and order in the midst of strikes and the rest of it, has no time to give to that sort of problem, and therefore if the noble Lord, Lord Harris of Greenwich, had been in the Cabinet he would have been able to tackle them. However, if Lord Gardiner did not understand that point, I do not suppose anybody else has because he is the most acute mind here and therefore I feel rather depressed.
Lord GARDINER: My Lords, I am not going to oppose Lord Harris, or anybody who takes his place, or the noble Lord, Lord Boston of Faversham, whom I am equally delighted to see here. I remember going to Faversham to try to
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get the voters there to vote for him and I am delighted to see him in his present position. Certainly, I have no objection to his being in the Cabinet; I just cannot see how it would cure the problem.
When one considers whether this has anything to do with the organisation of the Home Office, I have to wonder. I shall be corrected by the noble Lord, Lord Harris, in what I am about to say because I have access only to public works of record, but, as I understand it, the organisation of the Home Office is this. The chief civil servant is of course the Permanent Under-Secretary of State and underneath him there are three deputy Under-Secretaries of State, and although I say "one, two and three", they are all on the same plane; it does not mean that one is the head of two and so on. They are in charge of the three main departments—one, prisons; two, police; and three, establishment. Then, on a lower plane, underneath them, the three Deputy Under-Secretaries, there are 10 Assistant Under-Secretaries, and they are in charge of the following departments: one, the general department, as it is called; two, broadcasting; three, criminal policy; four, fire; five, community programme and equal opportunities; six, criminal justice; seven, radio regulation; eight, immigration and nationality; nine, statistical departments, and ten, probation and after-care.
If that is so, Ministers must depend to some extent on advice, and all the advice of the powerful committees, particularly the powerful Prison Department Committee, is obviously of a superior standing than probation and after-care, which is the only department which represents the view of alternatives to imprisonment.
Lord ALLEN of ABBEYDALE: My Lords, I am not up to date with the organisation of the Home Office, but I do not think the noble and learned Lord has it quite right. I can remember when I was the sole Deputy Under-Secretary of State in the Home Office some years ago, but in accordance with general practice numbers have expanded and I think one would find that all the different parts of the Home Office, including probation and criminal justice, are represented by the Deputy Secretary level.
Lord GARDINER: I can only take it, my Lords, from the current edition of

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Dod's Parliamentary Companion, which purports to set out the principal officers of the Home Office. No doubt my noble friends Lord Harris of Greenwich and Lord Boston of Faversham will correct me if I am wrong.
It seems to me extraordinary that, as I understand it, it is still deliberate policy that any additional money available is going to the building of more and more prisons at a capital cost of between £2,000 and £4,000 per place, let alone the running costs. This is extending into the 1980s, in circumstances in which it is doubtful whether there will be the prison officers to staff these prisons if they are built. That seems to me extraordinary when one bears in mind that today it costs over £100 a week to keep a girl in a borstal. This seems a tremendous financial cost when compared with the alternatives, which of course do not cost nothing because, first of all, we should have to have more probation officers.
This matter has been considered by, among others, the Commons Expenditure Committee, and evidence has been provided by the Home Office and all kinds of bodies. They have done formidable work on this. They have characterised the alternatives, very much as the Howard League and other bodies have done: (1) Probation, (2) Intensive probation, (3) Day training centres, (4) Day centres, (5) Supported works schemes and sheltered workshops, (6) Intermediate treatment for children and young persons, (7) Community service orders, (8) Senior attendance centres, and (9) Bail hostels. The Howard League has similarly spoken about more day centres, hostels, crisis centres, community service, and so on, and has said
"Their results are no worse, and often better, and most are much less costly",
but they would obviously require a quite considerable expansion in the Probation Service.
If this is the last word of the Home Office on how any additional resources are to be spent, I find it difficult to believe that at least one of the reasons for this is wholly divorced from the fact that the body in the Home Office which deals with prisons is so much more powerful than that body in the Home Office which is responsible for probation and after-care.
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What, in the general reorganisation of the Home Office should be done, is again entirely a matter of opinion. I do not like the word "bureaucratisation", but everything seems to have to go to headquarters. Governors have less responsibility than they used to have. I would support, as the Expenditure Committee of the other place has done very strongly, a strengthening of the powers of the inspectorate of prisons and the proposal that they should report direct to the Home Secretary. As in so many fields, everything seems to have gone more and more to head office. I suppose that the nationalisation of the prisons was inevitable, but they have lost their local contacts. I agree with my noble friend in thinking that more power ought to evolve to the regions and to prison governors.
I remember the shock I received when, after great difficulty, I obtained a vast collection of the standing orders and circular instructions issued by the Home Office to prison officers. The first thing that was obvious was that an enormous number of civil servants must spend all their time thinking out new standing orders and circular instructions for officers. The quantity of the papers was so enormous that I could not understand how any prison officer could possibly remember what was contained in them.
Take the situation regarding letters. I do not believe that any censorship of outgoing letters, except perhaps from category A prisoners, is necessary at all. Of course incoming mail must be censored in case of contraband. There is no censorship now in C prisons, and nothing awful has followed that change, but look at the time that prison officers have to take reading prisoners' letters and having to decide, "Is he to be allowed to say that in this letter to so-and-so".
Lord HARRIS of GREENWICH: My Lords, if I may interrupt my noble and learned friend, he is making an extremely interesting speech, but could I put this particular point to him on censorship? The only reason why censorship continues at Category C prisons is because the staff associations have refused to agree to an abolition of censorship in those prisons. That is entirely the reason. It has nothing to do with the Home Office officials and Ministers, who wish to abolish it.
Lord GARDINER: My Lords, that again shows an unhappy state of relationship, I should have thought, between the Home Office and the prison staff. One of the things that the Howard League, at least, has wanted to see for very many years is an improvement in the position of the prison staff themselves and, in particular, in their being taken into consultation when the Home Office are formulating policy which affects them. I understand that there is really no consultation all through the Home Office. There is with prison governors, but there is no consultation with prison officers at all when policy is being formed.
My Lords, what is supposed to happen to the letters is this. If there is a dispute with the prison officer as to whether or not the man is to be allowed to say something in a letter, in theory the governor decides. But nowadays everything seems to have to go to head office. I am told by somebody I believe—I am open to be contradicted—that there are, in London, buildings in which there are 300 Home Office civil servants doing nothing at all, every day, every week, every month, but deciding: Is this prisoner to be allowed to say this in this letter to so-and-so? We now have five cases admitted by the European Court which are under consideration, and these all relate to prisoners' letters. There is too high a degree of centralisation.
What, in these circumstances, is to be done? The Howard League is, I think, in favour of a commission for penal affairs, whatever one might like to call it. They say that both custodial and noncustodial services should be co-ordinated within a joint commission for the treatment of offenders or, if the word "treatment" is regarded as outmoded, joint commission for the penal system. They point out that a first, small step towards that would be the publication of joint reports on both prisons and after-care; and that consideration should also be given to bringing together the services to victims, such as official liaison with victims' support schemes, and crime prevention in the wide sense, involving community crime prevention and not merely security practices. This joint commission would not only run the penal system, but would explain its work to the public. That would not be wholly outside the Home Office, but it would mean that
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the same body would be considering both prison and alternatives to imprisonment.
The noble Lord, Lord Hunt, would like in a sense, I think, to see something which went further and also brought in to some extent the judiciary and those who decide who are to go to prison, the police and everybody affected by this system. My Lords, I do not know whether or not this was engineered by my noble friend Lord Longford, but this morning I went to Whitehall Place and I obtained from the Liberal Party the only remaining copy of their evidence to the Prison Inquiry. I think some photostats have since been made. They carry a good deal further, I think, what both my noble friend Lord Longford and the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, have said. They think that prisons ought to be taken away entirely from the Home Office. This is now the official policy of the Liberal Party. I do not know whether we are to hear a speaker from the Liberal Party, but I regret very much that we have not heard from them so far.
This may to some extent appeal to the noble Lord, Lord Hunt. I do not know whether the Liberal Party and Sir Robert Mark have been getting together, but what they say is this:
"The present illogical system which separates the policies that determine the number of prisoners and the periods of their imprisonment from those concerned with their housing and treatment must be ended. Responsibility for the Prison Service should be taken away from the Home Office and the prison department should form part of a new organisational structure which—

(i) Allows the work of the courts (i.e., the Lord Chancellor's office) and the prison service to be closely integrated.

(ii) Provides a career service with opportunities for those working in prisons to reach the highest levels.

(iii) Is capable of laying down clear objectives for the Prison Service, whilst permitting maximum flexibility in the treatment of offenders in each prison.

(iv) Encourages full cooperation including interchange of staff, between those concerned with trial, treatment and aftercare of offenders.

There are several ways in which these objectives could be achieved including an independent Prison Commission and a new organisation covering prosecution, sentencing policy, the Courts, treatment of offenders, the Probation Service and aftercare. Such reorganisation however raises the question of the future role and structure of the Home Office and ministerial responsibility for trial, treatment and aftercare of offenders. In view of this we recommend an urgent enquiry into this matter".

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My Lords, I am far from saying that any of these bodies, or, certainly I personally, have the perfect solution. I feel that there ought to be at least one body which is responsible and can look at both prison treatment, on the one side, and treatment outside prison, on the other side, with an even hand so that their resources will receive more equal treatment. Whether we should go further than that I do not know. I was unaware of these views of the Liberal Party—as I think anybody was—until this morning, but I am sure your Lordships will agree that at least this debate initiated by my noble friend Lord Longford has given us a lot to think about.
9.37 p.m.
Viscount ULLSWATER: My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Earl, Lord Longford, for introducing this Question for debate today. It is a great honour to follow so closely such eminent speakers whose knowledge and experience is so great and so broad. I want to deal more with the policy of the Home Office rather than its reorganisation, because my interest lies mainly with the young adult offenders aged between 17 and 21. To begin with, I should like to point to one or two reasons why these young people end up in custody. It always concerns me to read the statistics of how many young people finish school without qualifications, without being able even to read or write. Because of high labour costs, industry and commerce are unwilling to provide enough opportunities for the below-average-intelligence school-leaver to find employment, although the Government have now created the very useful Youth Employment Service. Having too much leisure and too little money when unemployed is more difficult to cope with than having too much work.
Modern society is very complicated and life in that society is tough for all—and tougher for those who are inadequately prepared for that life. We have to accept that we do not have unlimited freedom. From an early age we have to learn the disciplines imposed on us by the society in which we find ourselves. The young of all generations tend to push at the extremities of tolerance and in doing so sometimes persuade society to shift its position. However, the mere fact that we are a
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civilised society imposes limits on all our behaviour beyond which it is unacceptable to go.
Some of the crimes that young offenders commit and that bring them into serious trouble and so into custodial sentences include muggings, assaults and arson. This shows a lack of concern for other people; and some of the muggings of old people for quite paltry sums demonstrate clearly to me that we have failed to teach in our schools and homes any form of respect for our fellow human beings. High rise flats and large tenement buildings breed a callousness that is evident to all and not easily overcome; and, more often than not, the fruststrations of the young inhabitants overflow into violence and anti-social behaviour, sometimes encouraged by the uninhibiting influence of alcohol.
Almost more important is the pitiful lack of self-respect that we witness among the drug users and abusers. To lose one's self-respect is a dire misfortune, and to see so many young people with no respect for themselves or others is a sad reflection on the standard of our society. Before we can hope to see the end of juvenile crime, we shall have to find a cure for the mistakes that we are making collectively in bringing up our children and preparing them for the life that they will be leading as adults. Bearing these things in mind, I want to move on to the ways in which we now deal with young offenders and to how perhaps we should deal with them in the future.
At present there are three sentences available to the courts for offenders aged between 17 and 21: detention centre, borstal and imprisonment. The distinctions between the three have exercised the minds of the courts considerably, and I believe the differences that were originally conceived for the three sentences have now become somewhat blurred and this has added to the difficulties of the Home Office in the need to allocate places in different parts of the country to satisfy the local needs of the courts. The sentences have to be specific when they are handed down by the courts and there is always a chance that not all the options are available to any one area at any one time because of the limited places at each establishment.

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The Green Paper, Youth Custody and Supervision, A New Sentence, published in December, 1978, points the way to a much more satisfactory solution, whereby the existing sentences of detention, borstal training and imprisonment would be replaced by a single custodial sentence. Magistrates would still retain the power to sentence offenders up to a limit of six months as at present, and the Crown Court would have the power to sentence for a longer period. I believe that every alternative form of disposal should be considered before a custodial sentence, but if it is felt that there is no alternative to a period of custody then custody it should be.
It may be useful in some very exceptional circumstances to suspend this sentence, but, more often than not, in those circumstances the offender—and remember I am talking about the young offender—is seen by his mates to be walking out of the court scot-free. How much more sensible it would be to have the power under Section 47 of the Criminal Law Act 1977 (which is not yet in operation) to suspend part of a custodial sentence—something which I note with regret is not recommended by the Green Paper. Detention sentences were originally conceived to give a short, sharp shock and were like the treatment one might expect during basic training in the Army. As a soldier, however, one emerged from the training, battered and bruised maybe, but with a sense of achievement and pride in oneself at having overcome the obstacles placed before one, and one gains the respect of one's fellows in the unit. Although it may be that to survive such a detention sentence may give the offender a sense of pride in achievement, I think it should not rate any esteem in the eyes of his fellows and certainly should be nothing to boast about.
It must be a very harsh sound for the prisoner to hear as the prison gates clang behind him. The deprivation of liberty and inability to make contact with home or family must have a nerve racking effect on most human beings. However, man has shown that he is very adaptable and can tolerate the most extreme pressures, and so will a prisoner learn to cope with his new environment. He may not like it but he will live with it until his release, and will prepare himself for that stay, however long. Once this has
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happened, the effectiveness of the punishment as a deterrent ceases and society's retribution remains. With a part-suspended sentence, the offender suffers the nerve-racking part and the deterrent effect, and on his early release knows that if he offends again he will be sending himself back into custody.
Lastly, I would urge the Home Office to adopt custodial régimes which involve attendance in community work outside their establishments, as well as the utmost self-sufficiency inside. These two measures would rectify in some degree the two main causes that have led the offenders to their present positions—a lack of respect for other people and a lack of respect for themselves. There are, sadly, many disadvantaged people in our community, from the handicapped child to the mental patient and the elderly; but the young offenders would soon find, working with these people, an increase in their social awareness and their respect for others. Learning how to cope with day-to-day life and providing for themselves, that self-sufficiency in the establishment will return to them the self-respect they need and have so often lost. Let us do our best to create a structure of community existence that reduces the temptation to commit evil deeds and to teach our children, in a manner that they want to learn, the limits of acceptable behaviour, and so relieve us of the sad necessity of putting young men and women behind bars.
9.47 p.m.
Lord HARRIS of GREENWICH: My Lords, may I begin with an apology to your Lordships and particularly to my noble friend Lord Longford, for not having been here at the beginning of the debate. I can produce no convincing explanation for my absence, other than the fact that I assumed that those speaking in favour of shorter speeches would make rather longer speeches than in fact they did. I am particularly sorry because I wanted to follow as closely as possible—and certainly I shall do that as far as Hansard is concerned—the analysis of my noble friend, who I know has devoted an enormous amount of time and enthusiasm to this question. Also, of course, I wanted to hear the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Allen of Abbeydale, with his very substantial experience as Permanent

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Under-Secretary at the Home Office. However, I think I can judge without a great deal of difficulty the general line of my noble friend's speech today, which follows very closely on that which he has argued in this House on previous occasions; and I should like to deal with some of the issues which I knew, because of a conversation we had, he was going to raise and also to deal with several other points which have emerged in this debate so far. I am doing this on what is probably the last occasion for perhaps three years when I shall be entitled to make a speech touching on this particular area, given the fact that on 1st March I become Chairman of the Parole Board and then for at least three years after that I shall not be able to address your Lordships on these particular issues.
Let me say at the outset that I should like to deal with two points made by the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, and also with an argument put forward by the noble Lord, Lord Inglewood. If I may deal first with the arguments of the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, on two specific questions, he first raised the matter of whether it was not desirable to have far closer contact between the Police Service and the Probation Service—a point which, if I may say so, I very strongly agreed with. For the five years I was at the Home Office I was responsible for both, and I certainly share his view that it is highly desirable to ensure that there are close day-to-day contacts between the members of those two Services. I was therefore particularly glad to have the opportunity, at a conference at Ditchley Park last March called by the Home Office for a number of chief officers of police, to preside at a meeting which took place on that occasion when there were representatives of the social services and education departments of the two large local authorities and also two representatives of the Probation Service.
As a result of that meeting, a Home Office circular in the names of my right honourable friend the Home Secretary, the Secretary of State for Education and the Secretary of State for Social Services went out in, I think, December, saying that meetings should take place within six months, bringing together chief officers of police, chief probation officers, directors of education and directors of social
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services. Maybe it is very obvious that such meetings should already have taken place, and perhaps in many areas it is arguable that they have taken place. But, for the first time, it has been suggested formally by the Government that chief officers of police, who would be the people calling together these conferences, should take the initiative. I believe that this is an extremely important initiative, and I hope very much that it proves to be successful.
If I may say so, I dissent on one point made by the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, on the question of the establishment of the Dorset police. He will forgive me for dealing with this matter, but for two reasons I know a fair amount about it. First my parents happen to live in Dorset, and I worked there for a fairly substantial period of my life, so that to some extent I regard it as a home police force. Secondly, I took the decision, so far as the establishment of the Dorset police was concerned. The noble Lord asked: if the police were given 100 extra men—it was, in fact, a figure more modest than 100, though I cannot remember off-hand what it was—why should not the Probation Service get a significant increase as well? That appears a very logical argument, save for one thing. If we are to approach matters in precisely that way, then, as I am sure the noble Lord will on reflection agree, one is faced with a rather tiresome problem as regards the situation in the Metro politan Police area. There has been no variation in the establishment of the Metropolitan Police for around 50 years. But in that period—
Lord INGLEWOOD: My Lords, when the noble Lord quotes that figure, ought he not also to mention the very large increase in the number of civilians employed?
Lord HARRIS of GREENWICH: Of course, my Lords. It was a Question which the noble Lord, Lord Allen of Abbeydale, put down and I remember it very clearly. But even making allowance for that, and calculating the growth of crime in London in the last 50 years, it demonstrates a number of rather significant points. All I am saying is that if that had been the attitude of the Home Office, one would not have had the very substantial growth in the Probation Service in London, which has multiplied

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several times over within that period. Therefore, I do not think it is possible to look at police and probation establishments as though they were largely the same thing, because they are not. With great respect to the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, of whose interest in the Probation Service I am well aware, I do not think it is true that the Probation Service has been badly treated in the last five, six or seven years. So far as the establishment is concerned—and I had direct ministerial responsibility for five years—the Probation Service has been very reasonably treated by the Government.
Lord GARDINER: My Lords, I reflect on the evidence of the Home Office given to the Committee on Expenditure. I thought they said that there had been an absolute freeze on the Probation Service since 1974.
Lord HARRIS of GREENWICH: My Lords, if the noble and learned Lord will examine what I have said, he will see that there was not. There has been a significant growth since 1974. I do not have the papers in front of me, but certainly there was quite a significant growth during the period of my office as Minister of State, responsible for the Probation Service, and further growth is already planned, which will take place after 1st April, which is approaching, in the next financial year.
That deals with two points made by the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, and I come now to the point to which I wish to address myself raised by the noble Lord, Lord Inglewood, who put one or two questions concerning the Police Service. I do not think it is at all right to say—though I understand the motivation of the noble Lord, who takes a very close interest in these matters—that inspectors of constabulary are members of an old boys' club who do not go in for rigorous inspection of the police organisations within the areas for which they are responsible. As the noble Lord rightly said, all the inspectors of constabulary are former chief officers of police, with two exceptions. One is the present Chief Inspector of Constabulary, who was formerly a Deputy Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, and the other is the Inspector for Wales and the South-West, who is a former Deputy Assistant Com-
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missioner of the Metropolitan Police. However, it is perfectly true, as the noble Lord says, that the others are former chief officers of police.
I am not quite clear, however, how one could get an inspector of constabulary to be taken seriously—as he should be, given the responsibilities of that office—if he was not a former senior police officer. They have to be senior police officers if they are to be taken seriously by their peers. That is absolutely inescapable. Although the report upon the very unhappy situation which arose in Lancashire was not written for us by an Inspector of Constabulary, it was written by a brother chief officer—by the then Chief Constable of Hampshire, Sir Douglas Osmond. Having read that report, I must say that it was a report of considerable integrity, of the kind that one would associate with Sir Douglas Osmond.
Lord INGLEWOOD: My Lords, I made no comments at all about the report on the late Chief Constable of Lancashire. When I said something about the old-boy network, I was not assuming that it was inefficient in any way but simply that it did not have behind it the power that it ought to have. However, as the noble Lord has referred to Lancashire in this way, it is true to say that the Lancashire force was inspected a number of times over the years before that detective sergeant made his complaint. And nothing happened.
Lord HARRIS of GREENWICH: My Lords, about two months ago the noble Lord and I had a fascinating debate on this question. I think that it would be a mistake for me to go over that ground again, except to say that I do not accept that what the noble Lord has said totally accurately summarises the case that I then attempted to put before your Lordships' House.
Having dealt at the outset with those two particular questions, may I come to the substance of what I should like to say to the House today. I agree at the outset with a great deal of what I am sure my noble friend Lord Longford said—in my absence, I am afraid—and with what was said in my presence by my noble and learned friend Lord Gardiner about the need to limit the size of the prison population. It is an easy thing to say, but no

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Government have any power to control the size of the prison population; they have to receive into custody those who are awarded custodial sentences by the courts.
In the final analysis, therefore, the first way in which a Home Secretary can determine the size of the prison population is by creating a series of non-custodial alternatives—by creating bail hostels and so on. This has been done to a significant degree—and rather more than was suggested by my noble and learned friend Lord Gardiner. The only other way in which the Home Secretary can deal with this matter is by coming before Parliament and making specific recommendations that certain offences, which at the moment are imprisonable, should be non-imprisonable. I shall come to a particular example of where a change is arguably desirable. I believe that, if Parliament really wishes to take this matter seriously, it is to this area that it must apply its energies in the future.
Let me illustrate the kind of problem that arises at the Home Office. I am particularly glad to be making this speech in the presence of my noble friend Lord Boston of Faversham who has succeeded me at the Home Office. I am no doubt covering some of the ground which he would otherwise be covering, but he and I have had the opportunity to work together, just as my noble and learned friend Lord Gardiner had the opportunity to go down to Faversham at the time that my noble friend the Minister of State was a Labour candidate in the by-election. I am glad to say that the result was extremely satisfactory, as I am sure his speech today will be. I extend to my noble friend my very sincere good wishes. It goes without saying that anything which one can do in the future to make his task in this House more easy one will do, given the fact that we devote a great deal of attention to matters of this kind.
May I now come to one particular question about bail, to try to demonstrate the kind of problem with which Home Office Ministers are confronted. It is, of course, easy to say—and, indeed, it is argued by many—that there are far too many remands in custody. There has been a fairly significant reduction in the number of remands in custody. Certainly
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that is very fortunate because conditions, at both Brixton and Pentonville, which are the remand prisons of London, are so intolerable at the moment that were there not to have been a reduction in the number of people remanded in custody there would have been the creation of an exceedingly serious situation in both prisons. Having said that, I must say that there is often a great deal of public anxiety, and often anxiety expressed by senior officers of police, about the consequences of courts allowing people bail.
I am a strong supporter of the Bail Act. I supported it in this House. Indeed, it was my duty to do so as I was the Minister in charge of the Bill, but in my view it happened to be the right thing to do. However, it is only fair to acknowledge that one meets operational detectives who give one a list of offences which are committed by people with significant criminal careers in the past but who, notwithstanding that, have been given bail; and they say: "It is all very well for you, Minister, to say that the Bail Act is a good idea, but may we point out the consequences of giving bail to X and Y and Z?" This is a serious matter, and despite the fact that I am a strong supporter of the Bail Act it is only right to acknowledge that there is often significant anxiety, so far as both the police and also a wider public are concerned, about the operation of the bail system. Yet I repeat, were it not for a more liberal attitude towards bail the situation in the remand prisons of London would be even worse than it is already. There is no easy answer to this particular problem but it highlights the need to examine the make-up of Britain's present prison population.
I submit at the outset that there are only a limited number of ways in which we can influence the size of the prison population, but let me be as constructive as I can by giving two examples of what I believe can be done. As I have already indicated, I believe that we must examine much more seriously than we have in the past the question of making some offences nonimprisonable. The most obvious and to some extent the easiest example is the question of how to deal with the prostitute. I do not pretend to know how many women convicted of this offence are at the moment in prison, but I suspect that the number is significantly over 100. This is

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a fairly high proportion of the total number of women in custody, which is somewhere in the region of 1,400.
I am well aware of all the arguments that we have had on this issue in the past, but I believe that we shall have to look at this matter far more carefully in the future. Women's prisons are even more overcrowded than men's prisons and, with my right honourable friend the Home Secretary, I had to take the sombre decision of deciding that a new establishment just outside the Rochester borstal, which was going to be for young men between the ages of 17 and 21—I am sure my noble friend Lord Boston of Faversham will know the place because it is close to his former constituency—was in fact not going to be used for young men between the ages of 17 and 21, who were going to be kept still in most unsatisfactory conditions at Canterbury and various other establishments, but was going to have to be made over for women offenders, simply because of the pressures of the women's prison population. Therefore, I think there will have to be a re-examination of this particular matter.
I recognise that even if courts no longer have the power to sentence these women to prison, some of them will end up there because of their refusal to pay fines. Nevertheless, I believe this is one area where we must adopt a bolder policy than we have sometimes followed in the past, not of decriminalising this offence, because I do not think that would be possible, but certainly giving the courts the power only to award perhaps a very substantial fine indeed, and arguably a greater fine than at the moment the courts have the power to inflict on women who are convicted of soliciting.
Secondly, I want to raise the question of the inadequates, the social inadequates, who are imprisoned: I particularly want to raise the matter with my noble friend Lord Boston. I went to Pentonville Prison perhaps a year and half ago, and I was deeply disturbed to see the number of people who were clearly social inadequates, people simply going in and cut of prison the whole time. The governor said to me—and I think I reported it to the House at the time—that some of these people came in and out so often that it was impossible to know whether a particular man had been out before the governor saw him on
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the next occasion. As a result of that we decided to put in hand some research to try to work out with some degree of precision how many people with these recidivist qualities there were in the prison population at that time. As a result, when I gave evidence to the Public Expenditure Select Committee in another place last Summer I gave them to understand that the results of this research would be made available to Parliament within the next 12 months. I should be grateful if my noble friend Lord Boston could confirm that the Home Office can in fact implement that particular target date.
My Lords, I wanted to come on to only one other question in this debate, and that is the undercurrent which has been visible to me from all the speeches that have been made on the question of the organisation of the Home Office Prison Department and whether some totally different system would be an improvement on the existing situation. Let me begin by saying that I start off with one very clear prejudice. I do not, I fear, agree with my noble friend, even when he is so beguiling as to suggest that I should join the Cabinet, that there should be more Ministers. Indeed, if I may say so, expressing an extremely heretical opinion, I believe that there should be fewer Ministers.
The Earl of LONGFORD: My Lords, I was not saying that there should be more Ministers, but I was suggesting that there should be more strongly placed Ministers.
Lord HARRIS of GREENWICH: My Lords, that again is an attractive idea from my noble friend, but I am making this point in a week when we have heard, or seen in the papers this morning, a recommendation of a committee saying that there should be a Minister responsible for marriage. I know my noble friend Lord Brockway is in favour of a Minister for disarmament. All I am saying to my noble friend, indeed to the whole House, is that I believe that Governments in the last 10 years, not simply the present Government but Governments for a significant period of time, have had far too many Ministers. I do not include the Home Office, the House will not be astonished to hear me say, in this censure; but I must say that when one looks at the

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establishment of Ministers in some other Departments it raises the question in one's mind whether they are being operated on as cost-effective a basis as they properly should be.
I doubt, for some of the reasons given by my noble and learned friend Lord Gardiner, whether reorganisation of the kind suggested by my noble friend Lord Longford would necessarily achieve the objective that my noble friend has in mind. Let me just instance this by replying to one particular point raised by my noble and learned friend, Lord Gardiner. I do not believe it is true that the Home Office has given such high priority to prison building at the expense of non-custodial alternatives to imprisonment. That simply is not true. With great respect to my noble and learned friend, he did slightly, if I may say so, understate the number of Home Office Deputy Under-Secretaries; no doubt it is a mistake made in Dod's. I would assure him that there is certainly a Deputy Under-Secretary of State responsible for the Probation Service. Indeed when I had meetings on these particular questions within my Department I had a Deputy Under-Secretary who was in charge of the Prison Department and also a Deputy Under-Secretary of State who had a responsibility including that of the Probation Service. So, certainly so far as the structure of the Home Office is concerned, there is simply no truth in the suggestion that those within the Department who are responsible for non-custodial alternatives to imprisonment are under-represented at a decision-making level. I doubt whether a further Minister or even a Minister with greater powers is, in fact, what is necessary.
The Earl of LONGFORD: My Lords, I hope that before the debate ends the noble Lord, Lord Harris of Greenwich, or perhaps the Minister, will reply to the governors' criticism that there is a deplorable lack of leadership in the Home Office. Spokesmen for the Home Office are too much inclined to ignore that. Can the noble Lord say anything about it?
Lord HARRIS of GREENWICH: My Lords, there is a deep temptation to make a speech as though one were speaking from the Front Bench, but, with great
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respect, I am not speaking from the Front Bench. However, I am sure that my noble friend Lord Boston of Faversham can be relied upon to deal with those particular questions. I would only say that if prison governors have taken that view I am sure that my noble friend will deal with the matter. I do not believe that by creating some totally different apparatus or structure the situation will improve as radically as is believed. I do not believe that the recreation of something like the Prison Commission would be in any way a sensible idea. I say that as one who was rather in sympathy with the attitude of my Party when we opposed the proposal of the Party opposite to abolish the Prison Commission. It was a decision taken by the Party opposite when it was in office before the 1964 General Election. I thought at that time that it was a mistake. Everything that I have seen since has persuaded me that the Party opposite were right to abolish the Prison Commission. I do not believe that it would in any way be a sensible idea to start creating it all over again.
Having addressed the House for as long as I have, I do not want to go into the very detailed arguments within the Home Office as to why this simply does not make sense. However, I can assure my noble friend that there is no way in which one can insulate the Prison Department from all the other policy-making departments within the Home Office. I would point out to him that my opportunity of studying this matter goes back to 1966 and 1967 when I was special assistant to the then Home Secretary, Mr. Jenkins, who came into office fairly soon after the Prison Commission had been abolished. I must say to the House quite bluntly that some of the problems with which we were confronted at that time were created because of the existence of that separate Prison Commission. Some of the most serious problems faced by the then Home Secretary were entirely due to that factor.
Therefore, I must say to my noble friend that, although I understand that there is a strong current of opinion among governors and others who look back to these, what they regard as, golden days, when there was a separate Prison Commission, I believe that cold analysis of what in reality happened at that time does not, in fact, in any way justify that belief.
10.14 p.m.
Baroness MASHAM of ILTON: My Lords, I should like to add my congratulations to the Minister for his elevation to the Front Bench and also to thank the noble Earl, Lord Longford, for raising this debate. My experience with penal matters has been as a member of the board of visitors of a borstal; helping with summer camps for borstal boys and undergraduates from Oxford; and from being connected with NACRO—the National Association for the Care and Resettlement of Offenders. For about 18 years I have met hundreds of young men, some of them still only boys. All of them have problems. Most of them come from disturbed and often deprived families, and the majority have some degree of damaged personality.
This year is the International Year of the Child. The Home Office has let it be known that it intends to reorganise the young offender establishments, doing away with detention centres and having one type of establishment run on borstal lines. I think that a very close look ought to be taken at what those institutions will do in the future. Are they to train and try to rehabilitate these young people, both males and females? Very many of these young people are the most at risk parents of the future. We hear so much about child abuse these days; we hear about the cycle of deprivation and how those who batter or abuse their children have very often had disturbed and battered childhoods themselves; they have not had good parents to set an example, and many of them just do not know how to bring up children.
Having spoken to paediatricians working in the field of child abuse, I know that these parents are nearly always emotionally deprived and immature. They are often socially isolated and cut off from their families, in financial difficulties and mostly living in bad housing. Very many of the inmates of our young offender establishments will have all those problems before them when they become parents.
When these young people are collected together in an institution, is it not an opportunity at least to try to teach them how to be good parents, how to look after children and that it is important for their wives or girl friends to attend antenatal
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clinics when pregnant? This training could be given with well-organised classes as part of their education programme. I have talked with boys who are themselves worried about what they may do to their families. A few weeks ago one young man in borstal told me that whenever his young child cried he wanted to shake it. The parents must learn the basics, that babies do cry when they are cold, hungry or want something. Paediatricians see the terrible results of child abuse. I know that they would be willing to help organise such classes. Having had borstal lads in my home when our children were babies, I know how well they respond, and very many of them would enjoy and benefit from training for parenthood.
There are just a few general points which I should like to mention. Being connected with both the Prison Service and the Health Service, I believe that sadly there seems to be a need for more secure units with specialised treatment and a high staff ratio. No doubt that unhappy fact reflects our confused society. The existing institutions trying to cope with these very difficult young people, with inadequate facilities and under-staffing, find that they are being disrupted. At present, many borstals do not have adequate psychiatric support. Would it not be practical if these secure units were joint-funded and staffed? It seems that with such a huge Department as the Home Office, it might be of benefit to the Prison Department if it had its own department linked by the Home Secretary at its head. I know that the noble Lord, Lord Harris of Greenwich, is not in agreement with this, and I am not a Liberal, but many people working within the Prison Service feel this way. After all, the Prison Department caters for about 42,000 prisoners of all sorts of categories and it employs over 20,000 people.
I should like to ask the Minister a question, and if he does not know the answer tonight perhaps he would write to me. Are governor grades of staff represented on the Prison Department's Whitley Council? If not, should not all grades be represented? I conclude by expressing the hope that when the young offender establishments are reorganised, it will not be a herding together process, but that the individual needs and problems

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will be assessed and treated. The problems are very complex. There are many pathetic inadequates, and there are many tough guys who should not have their image reinforced. I am a believer that violence breeds violence. Perhaps the deterrent for crime should exist outside the institutions. Without an adequate, contented, well-trained staff who have energy and enthusiasm and who care, good morale and hope for improvements in the future of our young penal establishments will not succeed.
10.20 p.m.
Baroness ELLES: My Lords, it gives me great pleasure to follow the moving speech of the noble Baroness, Lady Masham. This debate has been in the great traditions of this House. The noble Earl, Lord Longford, has put down an important probing Question, and we have had a combination of what one might call the collective wisdom of your Lordships dealing with many aspects of this vital problem. As so often happens in this House, nobody has agreed with the proposals of the noble Earl, but nevertheless I think he could end this debate being very happy with the extraordinarily helpful and constructive contributions that have been made by noble Lords on the subject that he has enabled us to debate this evening. I am sure that the noble Lord the Minister will find as his first homework that he will be kept busy for many weeks. We from these Benches wish him well both tonight and in the hopefully few weeks which he will have in which to complete his homework as a result of this debate.
The proposal that the noble Earl has made, of having a Minister for Penal Affairs, of possibly Cabinet rank, immediately raises the hackles of anybody who has any pretentions at all to being a student of constitutional affairs. I have always believed that the Government are responsible to the whole of the electorate for their wellbeing and security. Therefore, I should not have thought that it would be justifiable to have one Minister of Cabinet rank, one out of 24 or 25, solely concerned with penal matters. Clearly these are serious problems and they affect society, but the philosophical
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approach of the noble Earl would surely lead to the logical conclusion that we would also have a Minister for Unemployment, a Minister for Ill Health and Social Insecurity, and one could go on right through the gamut of Cabinet offices each with their alternative responsibilities for the tragic consequences of the work that they are meant to be doing for this country.
It would certainly seem to me that whoever is responsible in Government for the maintenance of law and order within the United Kingdom must also, by the nature of his responsibility and the authority which lies within this responsibility at his command, be responsible for the politics relating to those who break the law, and who in fact cause breaches of the peace within the community. I cannot think that it would be right that the Home Secretary's powers should be split in the way that the noble Earl proposes.
I recognise the validity of many of the remarks that the noble Earl made, and I am sure everybody in this House would agree that no one knows better than he, with his long record of compassion and concern for those who have received prison sentences, and that one should take with the greatest of seriousness the comments that he has made. But I believe also that any new Ministry that he is proposing would in fact merely create a further bureaucratic machine, with all the waste of public money and manpower that that would entail.
Also, there would be no absolute guarantee of having any other Minister who would be more capable of remedying many of the problems to which the noble Earl referred. I do not think it is a question of a new machine: it may be a question of a new approach; it may indeed be a question of a new Minister. I say this in no way as a personal attack on the present Home Secretary. I do not think that that kind of remark is helpful. I am merely speaking in general terms. I would say the same of the Civil Service. After all, civil servants have to do the job they are told to do, and I do not think it is helpful in any way to attack any particular branch of the Civil Service who, I would say, give remarkable service to the community.

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But the organisation of the Prison Service, which is the main subject this evening, is of course being reviewed by the May Committee, as many noble Lords have already mentioned. This is a committee which we on this side of the House, and indeed in another place my right honourable friend Mr. Whitelaw, welcomed. We look forward to hearing the conclusions and recommendations of that committee. Subject to those findings, I understand that when we are in Government we shall—it is only natural that we should—have a look at the prison governors and the staff structure in relation to the administration by the Home Office, but it would be irrelevant to pretend what the answer might be, and in any case I do not think any comments would be helpful until the May Committee has reported.
The Earl of LONGFORD: My Lords, surely this is an excellent moment, if one has something to say, to say it. I am giving evidence to the May Committee, but why not say it publicly? The May Committee is not a very strong committee; it has one or two people with a long interest in prison matters, but some of them are completely ignorant of such matters, and I suggest that we could help them a lot.
Baroness ELLES: My Lords, I am sure that in the generality of matters individuals should give evidence to the May Committee, but it would be foolish of me from this Box to commit a Party which might be in Government in a few weeks as to the kind of policies they might follow. I do not think that would be the right approach to take at this juncture. Undoubtedly individuals in my Party are well aware of the difficulties and may wish to give evidence, but that is an individual matter and not a Party matter at this juncture.
In any case, there are certain aspects of the problems which the noble Earl and other noble Lords have raised, particularly in regard to sentencing and accommodation for prisoners, which must affect the working conditions and morale of the prison staff and where I believe some action could be taken within the existing legal and administrative provisions without any reorganisation. I think far too
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much emphasis has been placed on the idea of reorganisation without looking at what the problems are and how they can be dealt with within existing circumstances. I would even add that they do not all involve extra financial resources. The noble and learned Lord rather stressed the need for additional resources, but certain matters could, I believe, be put right even without any further public expenditure.
We need only look at the very good example of Golda v.the United Kingdom, which took six years from the time of application to the European Commission to the time when a remedy was ordered by the European Court in Strasbourg and when the necessary changes were eventually made to the prison rules; in fact, I do not think they were made until 1976. That was nothing to do with reorganisation; it was a question of dealing with what was clearly a defect in the way the prison rules had been drawn up. That is not to apportion blame to any particular person. Nevertheless, here was a clear case of somebody who was being denied human rights, who was not able even to write to his MP, if I have understood the case—I have not read it right through, but that was one of the grounds for complaint. It seems extraordinary that it should have taken six years until some action was taken by a Government Department.
In my view, that has nothing to do with reorganisation. It is something which could be put right with goodwill. The noble Earl referred to the political will to do something, and here was a case which I think could have been remedied. There are many other examples on which I could draw, but I do not intend to delay the House by giving a full list of problems which I believe could be put right without reorganisation.
I have given the Minister notice of the questions I intend to put and I should particularly like an answer to this: what measures have the Government taken to implement the provisions of the Criminal Law Act 1977 relating to partially suspended sentences? My noble friend Lord Ullswater referred to this matter. The Government agreed with the Opposition at the time of introducing an Amendment in another place in 1977 that the introduction of this approach would be a

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helpful contribution both for the offender and for conditions of accommodation in prisons, but, so far as I am aware, nothing has happened in the last 18 months. May we be told why nothing has been done?
I am given to understand that accommodation in open prisons is at present used only to the extent of about 50 per cent. I also understand that an undertaking is given to the neighbourhoods where open prisons are set up that no one with a record of criminal violence will be sent to an open prison. Surely there must be many cases of prisoners in other than open prisons who have been sentenced for failing to pay fines or maintenance defaulting, or for other similar reasons. They are the kind of people who could perfectly well be placed in an open prison, if they have to be detained in prison at all. I have always believed that a prison sentence is not satisfactory for people who fail to pay fines, and it would relieve the enormous pressure on prison accommodation if they were not so sentenced, but, if this is the law as it stands today—and, after all, we are here to uphold the law—why cannot at least some of these people be placed in open prisons?
Situations arise which, I am sure all noble Lords in the House would agree, are totally shameful. For instance, the issuing of unruly certificates in respect of young offenders means that in the end some of these young offenders are sent to adult prisons. That surely cannot be right by any standards, whatever we may call ourselves, and I feel that we cannot call ourselves even a civilised society if we allow this kind of thing to happen. I quite understand that community homes are allowed to refuse these cases, but surely the Government can find alternative accommodation for them. It cannot possibly benefit any child under the age of 21—and I use the word "child" as a generic term—to be put into an adult prison in the kind of conditions in which prisoners have to live in our country today.
These are the kind of matters I wish to raise, and I am very grateful to the noble Earl for being able to raise them, because I believe that they should be brought to the attention of both this House and the
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public. Furthermore, they are matters with which the Home Secretary and his Department can surely try to deal more effectively than they have done.
I do not believe that reorganisation of the Home Office would provide ipso facto remedies for these failures to implement existing legal provisions within the existing opportunities, but, like the noble Earl, Lord Longford, all of us in this House with wide experience of social and legal activities over the years would certainly wish to see improvements in the implementation of the law, better protection for the law-abiding citizen and, certainly, the fair treatment of the offender.
10.32 p.m.
Lord BOSTON of FAVERSHAM: My Lords, I should like to thank my noble friend Lord Longford most warmly for his very kind remarks about my new post; these I found immensely encouraging. I also wish to thank the noble Baronesses, Lady Elles and Lady Masham of Ilton, and the other noble Lords who have been kind enough to make similar remarks. I hope that they will forgive me for not mentioning them each by name, at least at this stage in my speech. Their remarks are no less appreciated for that, and I am very grateful indeed. I include in my thanks my noble friend Lord Harris of Greenwich. I have already had an opportunity to pay tribute to his work, and I would join with other noble Lords tonight in wishing him well in his new post.
I am sure we are all grateful that my noble friend has given us the chance today to have this debate on Home Office organisation in relation to penal matters. His dedicated commitment to the cause of penal reform commands considerable respect and attention, even though we may sometimes differ from him in opinion on the matters in issue. I am all the more sorry, therefore, that in my first encounter with him in your Lordships' House since taking up my new duties, I must begin my Answer to the Question he tabled on, I fear, a rather negative note. I shall have something to say a little later on about the scope of his reference to "penal matters", but as he dwelt mainly on prison questions I want to begin with his proposals for radical change in that area. In doing that, I also wish to thank him for his kindness

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and courtesy in having given me notice of points which he planned to raise in tonight's debate.
My noble friend first urged the immediate appointment of a Minister for prisons, to be answerable to my right honourable friend the Home Secretary, but to have Cabinet rank; indeed, to be a member of the Cabinet—
The Earl of LONGFORD: I am sorry to interrupt my noble friend, but perhaps the copy of my notes which I sent him contained a crucial misprint. I emphasised that it was a Minister for penal affairs. That is the essence of it. He would co-ordinate prisons and the Probation Service, for instance. It was not just prisons.
Lord BOSTON of FAVERSHAM: My Lords, I am happy to accept my noble friend's further information on that point, and I am sorry for having got it wrong initially. I feel it only right to say straight away that Her Majesty's Government do not think that such an appointment as this is necessary; nor, indeed, would be helpful—in fact, rather the reverse. Doubtless there are many causes, in addition to penal matters, for which there are quite strong cases for representation in Cabinet; and I am sure that strong cases could be made out, and very vigorously sought, both by individual Members of your Lordships' House and, indeed, by Members of another place as well, for a variety of additional Cabinet posts. But we have to recognise that Cabinets have to be of a manageable size if they are to be effective. That would be quite a compelling objection in itself, I would suggest, to my noble friend's proposition, were there not a more direct objection—and I know, too, that other noble Lords who have spoken tonight share in the view which I am putting forward about this, including the noble Baroness, Lady Elles, and the noble Lord, Lord Allen of Abbeydale, with his very extensive experience of Home Office matters as Permanent Under-Secretary there, as well as my noble and learned friend Lord Gardiner.
In this more direct objection I would refer to the fact that my right honourable friend the Home Secretary, by reason of his responsibilities for the law and order
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services as a whole, is in fact already admirably placed in Cabinet to give, so to speak, strong voice to the interests, both of the Prison Service and, in fact, of penal matters generally. I would suggest that to introduce a subordinate Minister (for that, indeed, is what he would be, though a member of the Cabinet) for penal matters would tend to complicate as well as divide the collective effort against crime which it is, after all, the Government's aim to unify. Perhaps I might interpose this thought in mentioning this particular point. I feel there has clearly been something of a conspiracy in your Lordships' House tonight to keep me out of the Cabinet. I can only make a confession to your Lordships, and it is that that is a conspiracy in which I join completely willingly as a co-conspirator.
The second point which my noble friend made was that he criticised the structure and working methods of the Prison Department, and commended the management, status and style of the Prison Commission.
The Earl of LONGFORD: My Lords, may I again interrupt? I am sorry, but I said that one would not expect to reproduce the old Prison Commission exactly, but I asked for a dedicated body with a professional head.
Lord BOSTON of FAVERSHAM: My Lords, with his customary expertise my noble friend has in fact anticipated the very next point I was coming to—the reservation which he has in fact himself placed upon his proposal. But the indictment, as I would suggest it is, in fact ranged quite widely. There was, it was suggested, lack of leadership, ineffectual career civil servants, bureaucracy and centralisation. I might also interpose another point here. It is perhaps a comparatively minor one, but nevertheless it was one which my noble friend mentioned in the course of his speech. He said he had never met a prisoner who had met a Home Office official. Here, I am able to provide him with very rapid reassurance. In fact, I myself saw that very thing happening only two days ago, on Monday, when I made the first of what I hope is going to be a series of visits to the Prison Service.
The Earl of LONGFORD: My Lords, I am very glad about that new departure. The Minister has already brought about a change.
Lord BOSTON of FAVERSHAM: My Lords, I am grateful, although I do not accept commendation quite so rapidly as that. It is something which has been going on, and I was pleased to see that it had been going on, long before I got there.
There was also what I must call sombre reference to a decline in the morale of the Service; to the vexation of governors; and to the risk of total breakdown of the system. I feel that this is not the moment for me to deal specifically with all of these criticisms and I do not suppose that my noble friend expects me to do so today. There is a particularly appropriate course open to noble Lords. I feel sure that my noble friend, among others, will be submitting his views on these very important issues to the Committee of Inquiry into the United Kingdom Prison Services appointed by my right honourable friends last November under the chairmanship of Mr. Justice May. Whether or not the central management of the Prison Service needs reorganising is among the very matters covered by the committee's wide terms of reference. Although it is not for me to anticipate what view the Committee of Inquiry is likely to take on a particular piece of evidence, I feel sure that it will treat all the evidence that it receives, from my noble friend, from other noble Lords and from eleswhere, very seriously indeed.
There is a further point, while I am dealing with this series of criticisms that have been made, to which I ought to make further brief reference. That is the question of whether or not the Home Office would deal with the allegation by prison governors that there has been a deplorable failure of leadership. This has been posed and I feel that I should make some reference to it. The Inquiry into the Prison Services has been asked to:
"inquire into the state of the Prison Services and to make recommendations on a variety of matters including the management of resources and the organisation and management of the Prison Services".
The governors, of course, as others, have full opportunity to make their views known to the Committee of Inquiry and I clearly
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hope that they will be doing so. But it would be quite inappropriate for me to comment on what they may have said before the Inquiry was established or what they might say to it, and to attempt to anticipate those matters in any way.
My Lords, the prison system cannot be isolated from the criminal justice system itself. This was a point that the noble Lord, Lord Allen of Abbeydale, made in his speech. Its role can have no meaning unless it is shaped by the general criminal justice strategy and resources are allocated accordingly. My noble and learned friend Lord Gardiner made a substantial point, if I may say so with respect, on the question of resources. That in no way implies that the Prison Service should not be reformed to enhance its efficiency, satisfaction in the work there, and sense of corporate identity, if reform seems desirable. If the Inquiry should recommend new patterns of structure and management, a new deal for the regions, for example, even the relief of governors from what has been described as "castration", the Government will certainly give these most careful consideration.
Be that as it may, my Lords, L think the criticism of what has been called Home Office failure, since the Prison Commission was abolished, to formulate radical schemes of penal improvement, overlooks the very sizeable amount of work that has been done. Since 1963, there have been many positive developments within the prison system, for example, in prison industries, education, welfare, notwithstanding the accumulating demands upon inadequate resources. These improvements in their own way have matched the many innovations and developments in the non-custodial services. This was mentioned by a number of noble Lords tonight. Both programmes have sought to reduce pressure within and upon the prison system without loss of public confidence. There is a risk, I would suggest, when contrasting the current scene with the Prison Commission era, of exaggerating the present malaise within the Service. We should remember that we are in a new climate of openness and candour about work problems, whether in private industry or in public services.
The third major point which my noble friend raised was his suggestion that the

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Home Office is ignoring the "fundamental issues". I know it is a keen disappointment to him that the inquiry into the Prison Service has not been empowered to consider wide issues of penal reform such as alternatives to imprisonment and sentencing policy. The reasons for this are simply that the Inquiry already has a large enough task as it is in reviewing questions of organisation, management, structure and pay in the prison services, and that it is in everyone's interest that it should complete that task as soon as possible.
Before passing on to other wider issues, I should like, as it were, to interrupt myself at this point and deal with some of the matters which have been raised by noble Lords during the course of this very interesting debate tonight. Perhaps I may turn first to the matters which were raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Elles. I should like to thank her very much indeed for her courtesy and kindness in giving me notice of the specific points that she was proposing to raise. The noble Baroness asked about the Government's intentions concerning Section 47 of the Criminal Law Act 1977, which enables a court partially to suspend sentences of imprisonment and which has not yet been brought into operation. Also the noble Viscount, Lord Ullswater, mentioned this particular point of partially suspended sentences. I cannot make a definitive statement tonight.
The Government have been keeping this matter under very close scrutiny so far as the potential help that this provision might afford to the hard-pressed Prison Service is concerned, and we shall certainly continue to do so. Up to this point, however, they have felt it right to adopt a cautious approach. There is a risk, to which several Members of your Lordships' House drew attention when the House discussed the inclusion of this provision in the Bill, that the courts might use the new provision in such a way that at any rate the first effects would be to increase the prison population. That is a risk which in present circumstances the Government have not been prepared to run when the prison system has no margin to spare. It is clear of course that to introduce the provision could not initially reduce the adult population because it would not affect the numbers of people received into prison, but rather the length of time they
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stayed there. The administrative processes would add somewhat to the burdens of establishments. I am able to assure the noble Baroness that the Government will certainly be giving further consideration to this matter and to the points that she has raised.
Baroness ELLES: My Lords, I thank the noble Lord for that reply, but he will accept that it is a bit disappointing. When this matter was raised in another place, the Minister, as I understood it, gave unqualified support to this idea. It was not a question of merely sending people to prison who might not have gone there otherwise, but of shortening the sentences and therefore making such places as are available more readily available when needed. I think that the Minister might see whether something could be done about this. It would make a really useful contribution, apart from the fact that it might be beneficial for the prisoner himself. The basis was that the short, sharp sentence of imprisonment would be just as beneficial, if not more beneficial, to the offender as keeping him there for a longer time. The question of not having any supervision order afterwards was something which I know the Government were not keen on at the time, but they may now regret not having introduced the necessity for a supervision order for somebody coming out of prison. I shall not pursue this any more, but I hope that the Minister will take this on board and have something done about it.
Lord BOSTON of FAVERSHAM: I am most grateful to the noble Baroness for not wishing to pursue this in further detail. I can certainly confirm the assurance that I have already given her that this matter will be actively further considered.
The noble Baroness also raised the question of open prisons and suggested that we could make much greater use of open prisons. In fact, the position is not quite as stated by the noble Baroness. On the 15th January, I understand that the numbers in open prisons totalled 2,947 and there were 581 vacancies. I can certainly assure her that every effort is made to find suitable prisoners for open conditions, but I fear this is probably too large a subject to take up in detail tonight.
So far as fine defaulters are concerned—a particular category she was concerned

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about—there are about a thousand in custody at any one time. More than half of them are committed for one month or less, and a quarter of them settle their debt within three days. So there are comparatively few for whom transfer to an open prison is a possible move. In October last there were about 40 defaulters altogether in open prisons, but nevertheless it is something which is being catered for.
The noble Baroness's other specific point concerned the question of unruly young people and the question of secure accommodation in relation to that. I think this was also something to which the noble Lord, Lord Allen, made reference, in a rather different context, in his speech. During the last two years well over £53/4 million has been made available to local authorities from central Government in the form of capital grants for secure accommodation. As the noble Baroness will appreciate, this is very much a matter for the Department of Health and Social Security and the local authorities rather than my Department. However, when the number of places at present planned or under construction are completed, the existing provision will be more than doubled. I know there are problems about running costs, but local authorities' revenue expenditure on children's services has, I understand, increased by 30 per cent. in real terms between 1974–5 and 1977–8. If there are further details to be given, I would be happy to provide them for the noble Baroness, if she would be interested—
Baroness MASHAM of ILTON: My Lords, I also mentioned that matter. Might I ask the noble Lord how many secure units are there at the moment, and where are they?
Lord BOSTON of FAVERSHAM: My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Masham, for reminding me that she also raised this matter. I am just rapidly looking through my papers, and I do not think I am able at this moment to provide her with the answer she needs. My right honourable friend Mr. Moyle, in another place on 24th January this year, referred to 34 community homes in England as having secure places attached, other than single separation rooms. He said that there were
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296 long- and short-term secure places in community homes. Then he gave a table with specific details. Perhaps that goes some way towards meeting the point of the noble Baroness, but I will, if I may, follow up her query specifically and write to her.
Baroness ELLES: My Lords, I apologise for interjecting again. Is it not a fact that the community home can refuse to have somebody who has what is termed an "unruly certificate"? And is not that one of the difficulties in dealing with these specific cases and one of the reasons they are sent to adult prisons? Again, I will not press the matter now, but I should be grateful to have an answer from the noble Lord at a later stage.
Lord BOSTON of FAVERSHAM: My Lords, I will certainly do that, and I am grateful to the noble Baroness for the way this has been raised. Perhaps I can send to both noble Baronesses the information they have asked for.
It might also be helpful if at this stage I were to deal with one or two other points which have been raised in the course of the debate. I have already made a reference to one of the points made by the noble Viscount, Lord Ullswater; and, in a constructive speech, if I may say so with respect, he also dealt with the question of young adult offenders. He particularly referred to the Green Paper, Youth Custody and Supervision: A New Sentence. I should very much like to follow that up and give him further details, but in view of the lateness of the hour I know he will forgive me for not going into further details. Perhaps I might say, however, that the House is very grateful to him for having drawn this to our attention during the debate.
This Green Paper is a good example of forward thinking by the Home Office. Perhaps I am in a reasonable position to say that, because the forward thinking was done before I got there, and so it is credit which I am passing on to other people. Comments are invited on the Green Paper by June this year and again, thanks to the noble Viscount, this provides an opportunity for those both here and outside to be reminded that there is this date to be aimed for. This was also a matter which the noble Baroness, Lady Masham, mentioned, and I would join

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with the noble Baroness, Lady Elles, in saying that her speech was characteristically thoughtful and constructive, and was, indeed, a most moving one, too. In the course of her speech, Lady Masham asked about the Whitley Council, and I am able to say that governors are represented on the Home Office Whitley Council. There is a Prison Department Whitley Council, on which the Prison Officers' Association is represented. The future form of industrial relations machinery is one of the matters on which the inquiry into the Prison Service has been asked to advise.
Then there was reference to police matters in the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Inglewood, and I am grateful to him for letting me know that he was thinking of raising those points in this debate. He has, of course, taken a long-standing and very close interest in police matters. These are subjects which do not always attract as much public attention as they ought to do, so I am grateful to him for raising these matters tonight, as I am sure we all are. I should also like to join with him in recognising that penal affairs and the Home Secretary's responsibility for prisons must be seen in a wider law and order context.
So far as some of the noble Lord's individual points are concerned, one or two detailed questions have already been answered by my noble friend Lord Harris of Greenwich, to whom I am grateful, and, I can say—it is not really for me to say so—with complete accuracy. He mentioned the question of inspections. He also mentioned the Police Advisory Board, and it is the case that a Minister is always in the chair there. Again, I will certainly very happily provide the noble Lord with any further details, should they be needed, on the points that he raised.
My noble and learned friend Lord Gardiner raised a number of points, to one of which I have already referred. But in the course of his remarks he raised the rather hair-raising spectre of—according to the information with which he had been provided—some 300 people dealing with the letters that he mentioned. I am very happy indeed to be able to give him a firm assurance, which he will be able to pass on to the source of that information, that that is not the case.
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In fact, this number of people would represent broadly the strength of all ranks at Prison Department headquarters at Eccleston Square in London. I do not have the precise numbers of people who are engaged on this work, but I can assure him that it is a modest number.
At this point, it would perhaps be right that I should extend my response to the remarks of my noble friend Lord Longford a little beyond the area of prisons, and perhaps I may do this rather rapidly. For my own part, I confess—with the diffidence of one who is new to these matters seen from this angle, at least—that once or twice I was left in two minds whether the suggestion to reorganise the Home Office was confined to the Prison Department and the Prison Service or whether it went a good deal wider. Is it being suggested, for example, that over the whole field of Home Office law and order responsibilities there was a failure of Ministerial and Departmental leadership, an ineffective structure and organisation, a failure to grasp the gravity of the situation and so on? If so, I feel it only right to make clear that Her Majesty's Government emphatically reject any such assessment. If not, then it seems to me that, however well-intentioned, this view of the troubles of the Prison Service was taken within too narrow a focus. We should not forget, I venture to submit, that the Prison Service is a part—a very important part, but a part all the same—of the criminal justice system as a whole; nor should we forget that it is crucial to the criminal justice system that there should be a co-ordinated view of policies and administration.
The need for unity within the system imposes important constraints on its various parts. It demands, for example, the recognition of a common purpose and a strategy, a sensible sharing of available resources, the encouragement of mutual support between services and informed interest by the public. These are the objectives that my right honourable friend the Home Secretary and his colleagues have been seeking in recent years and which were described in the working paper A Review of Criminal Justice Policy 1976, published by the Home Office at the end of 1977.
One example of the inter-relationships within the criminal justice system is the

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problem of what are often called—indeed, tonight they have been referred to in this way—socially inadequate offenders. To illustrate this point, I should like to refer further to the programme of research that we have in hand on this subject, in which my noble friend Lord Harris of Greenwich took a special interest. I am sure that we are grateful to my noble friend for raising this matter today. Indeed, I am grateful to him for having given me notice that he was going to mention it.
There is, I think, a fair measure of agreement that imprisonment should be used as a last resort for offenders convicted of serious offences, particularly those involving danger to the public. Yet recidivist petty offenders serving short sentences continue to form a substantial part of the prison population. This group of offenders, many of whom are without stable community ties, in general constitute more of a nuisance than a danger to society, and a prison sentence is often an inappropriate method of dealing with them. It is clearly important to try to find alternative ways of dealing with these offenders, both in their own interest and in order to reduce the severe pressure on the prison system, and it is for that reason that we are actively undertaking a programme of research to examine this matter, particularly the three critical points—arrest, sentence and discharge from prison—at which it might be possible to intervene in order to reduce the frequency of contact between socially inadequate offenders and the criminal justice system.
There are separate projects for each of these three areas, as my noble friend Lord Harris of Greenwich will know. The first—arrest—is designed to look at current police practice towards socially inadequate offenders to see whether any changes in approach would be desirable; the second—sentence—to discover more about the problems faced by magistrates in sentencing such offenders in order to see whether more can be done to encourage greater use of non-custodial alternatives to imprisonment; and the third—discharge—to explore ways in which the provision of after-care for these offenders can be strengthened.
Each of these projects has a different time scale, and it is hard to say when
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final results will be available. Nevertheless, as my noble friend Lord Harris of Greenwich indicated to the Expenditure Sub-Committee in another place last July, we plan to publish an interim report on these projects in the summer, so I am able to confirm that that date is to be adhered to.
Many points have been raised. I think that we may well have an opportunity to have exchanges on some of them in the near future. There is, however, just one other matter which I should mention tonight; namely, the question of cost. Certainly, when we are considering alternatives, the cost of keeping a person in prison—about £5,000 a year—is much higher than the cost of fining him or of making a community service order, although facilities such as probation hostels and day training centres are not much cheaper than prison. But the cost of each place in prison is largely made up of staff salaries and maintenance costs. The Government cannot abruptly stop spending on these as a preliminary to a transfer of offenders to non-custodial treatment. They would first have to reduce the prison population to a point where fewer staff and buildings were needed. With the present rate of overcrowding, and with the continuing need to maintain a network of establishments throughout the country, the reduction in numbers would have to be very substantial indeed before any saving was achieved, and even then a reduction in prison expenditure would mean that we should have to carry on with the old and unsuitable buildings which we have now.
There are other alternatives to custody which have also been suggested but which, because of the late hour, it is not possible to go into tonight. However, a point which has been raised by the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, the question of parole, is a particularly important aspect. Perhaps therefore I should just refer to that point.
I shall conclude the Government's Answer on the wrong note if, therefore, I do not finally qualify my rather negative response with a note of realism. Of course, circumstances change and systems and practices become out-of-date. The Department constantly keeps its arrangements under scrutiny. The present structure of the Prison Department arises

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from a comprehensive management review of the Home Office as a whole conducted in 1975 in conjunction with the Civil Service Department. As I have said, if the Inquiry should recommend further and radical change, its recommendations will of course be most carefully considered. Indeed, one example of this is the question of parole. I take the point made by my noble friend Lord Longford, that there is a case for re-examining the present arrangements. I think the case arises, however, not because of deficiencies in the present scheme—and I think that view was also taken by the noble Lord, Lord Hunt—but because it is always desirable to examine new policies after a period of time. That certainly is something which is being done.
My Lords, although I have not been able to give as positive a response as my noble friend would have wished, I feel that in fact we can join in ending on a positive note, for I think we are all agreed on the need for action. There is dissatisfaction, otherwise there would not have been an inquiry and the need for one, and there may be other matters on which we share similar views and beliefs. Not least, I would hope that we are optimists, and one feature which gives grounds for optimism is the quality of people in the Prison Service itself. They do an immensely difficult task and they deserve our warm thanks for that. I have already been impressed by the quality of people in the Service and with the potential that is there. We must all seek to harness that and try to ensure that the feeling of enthusiasm, of which I have no doubt at all they are capable, is released to the full. If we can all join in that there are real grounds for hope.

CUSTOMS AND EXCISE MANAGEMENT BILL [H.L.]
Reported from the Joint Committee with Amendments, and re-committed to a Committee of the Whole House.
CUSTOMS AND EXCISE DUTIES (GENERAL RELIEFS) BILL [H.L.] ALCOHOLIC LIQUOR DUTIES BILL [H.L.] TOBACCO PRODUCTS DUTY BILL [H.L.]
  MATCHES AND MECHANICAL LIGHTERS DUTIES BILL [H.L.] EXCISE DUTIES (SURCHARGES OR REBATES) BILL [H.L.] HYDROCARBON OIL DUTIES BILL [H.L.]
  Reported from the Joint Committee without amendment, and re-committed to a Committee of the Whole House.