Lords Sitting of 25 October 1979

Preamble
The House met at three of the clock (Prayers having been read earlier at the Judicial Sitting by the Lord Bishop of Chelmsford):
The LORD CHANCELLOR On the Wool-sack.
The Duke of Abercorn—Sat first in Parliament after the death of his father.
The Lord Wynford—Took the Oath.
The Lord Fairfax of Cameron—Took the Oath.

CIVIL AVIATION ACT 1971: GUIDANCE
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 intend to issue to the Civil Aviation Authority a new and revised guidance under the Civil Aviation Act 1971.
Lord TREFGARNE: My Lords, it is the Government's intention to introduce new legislation before any change is made in the existing policy guidance under the Civil Aviation Act 1971.
Lord BOYD-CARPENTER: My Lords, can my noble friend tell me whether that legislation will deal with the current guidance issued by the previous Government which, as my noble friend knows, had a large hole torn in it by the admirable decision of the Court of Appeal?
Lord TREFGARNE: My Lords, I am afraid I cannot forecast the content of the legislation. I am afraid I must ask my noble friend to await its publication, but I can say that the publication will be very soon.

SALT II, ARTICLE 12: US ASSURANCES
Lord MOTTISTONE: 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 satisfied with American assurances over Article 12 of SALT II regarding circumvention.
Lord TREFGARNE: Yes, my Lords, the Government are satisfied that British interests are safeguarded.
Lord MOTTISTONE: My Lords, while thanking my noble friend for his reply, may I ask whether the Government are still confident that the United States have the capability for monitoring any testing, and so on, which the Soviet Union may conduct in the future, in view of certain happenings in relation to their land-based monitoring capability?
Lord TREFGARNE: Yes, my Lords.

INDUSTRIAL COMPETITIVENESS
3.4 p.m.
Lord CHELWOOD: 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 has been the trend in Britain's international competitiveness over the last two years in terms of a common currency, measured (a) by relative increases in export prices; and (b) in unit labour costs; and what are the forecasts for the next 12 months.
The MINISTER of STATE, TREASURY (Lord Cockfield): My Lords, I am arranging to have the relevant figures available published in the Official Report. Figures are available only up to the last quarter of 1978 for relative export prices and to the first quarter of the present year for labour costs. Both series show a loss in competitiveness compared with two years ago. Whether this continues depends upon a number of factors which it is not possible to forecast reliably.
Following are the figures referred to:

Relative export prices

Relative normalised unit labour costs

(1975 = 100)

(1975 = 100)

1977

2nd Quarter

102·2

87·2

3rd Quarter

103·6

88·1

4th Quarter

107·2

91·5

1978

1st Quarter

110·5

95·7

2nd Quarter

104·4

93·1

3rd Quarter

108·0

95·7

4th Quarter

109·6

96·7

1979

1st Quarter

Not available

98·6

Lord CHELWOOD: My Lords, would my noble friend agree that when we have a chance to look at these figures they will be very disturbing indeed? Is not one of the main reasons for that the fact that some major industries persist with long out-dated restrictive practices? If my noble friend agrees, will he say how the Government see their role in helping and encouraging industry—that is, management and unions—to get rid of restrictive practices as well as creating a climate in which industry can again flourish?
Lord COCKFIELD: My Lords, my noble friend draws attention to a point of great importance. An improvement in our standard of living can only come from an increase in national output. This depends upon productivity, and an improvement in productivity depends, in part at any rate, on the removal of restrictive practices. The Government are themselves doing their part by squeezing inflation out of the system by following a strict fiscal and monetary policy, and they are providing tax incentives in indirect taxation at all income levels. So far as individual restrictive practices are concerned, that is primarily a matter for the employers and employees of the industries concerned.
Lord WELLS-PESTELL: My Lords, may I ask the noble Lord the Minister whether the Government will resign in order to get rid of the greatest restrictive practice?
Lord COCKFIELD: My Lords, the Government are doing a first-class job in
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tackling the very great problems which have been exacerbated by five years of Labour rule, and I am sure that the success of their policies will be evident in the years to come.
Lord ELWYN-JONES: Would not a little modesty now be more prudent, my Lords?
Lord COCKFIELD: I was, my Lords, speaking with all due modesty.
Lord MISHCON: My Lords, would the Minister also speak with some veracity as well as with modesty, and would he in the circumstances agree that investment in industry is a much more important matter than the one he has just been discussing? Does he feel that investment in industry in this country has been facilitated by the complete removal of exchange control over the last 48 hours?
Lord COCKFIELD: Yes, my Lords, investment in industry is a matter of very great importance. Investment depends upon confidence. The Government are endeavouring to restore confidence in industry, not least by squeezing out inflation, which has been one of the greatest impediments to growth and one of the greatest deterrents to investment.
Lord ROBERTHALL: My Lords, would the Minister not agree that the 1944 White Paper, which has formed the basis of our attempts at full employment, calls for particular attention to the necessity for collaboration in the reduction of restrictive practices but that, in spite of all efforts, the problem has got worse rather than better? Will he not also agree that that accounts for the gradual decline in the rate of growth of the GNP?
Lord COCKFIELD: Yes, my Lords. I had the great pleasure of working with the late Lord Keynes at the Treasury while the White Paper to which the noble Lord referred was being written. Its emphasis upon removal of restrictive practices and improvement in productivity is just as valid today as when those words were written 35 years ago.
Lord PAGET of NORTHAMPTON: My Lords, does the noble Lord regard it

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as purely coincidental that this trend took a sharp turn for the worse when Britain changed Governments?
Lord COCKFIELD: My Lords, there has been no sharp turn for the worse as a result of the change in Government. In fact, on the contrary, the prospects of this country are much better than they were during the years of the Labour Government.
Lord HATCH of LUSBY: My Lords, will the noble Lord explain to the House why he believes that the removal of foreign exchange controls in this year will have any different effect in British industry from that which it had when it was tried under a previous Conservative Government—when it was tried in 1970 and 1972—when the capital released left this country for other countries?
Lord COCKFIELD: All the evidence, my Lords, is that investment from this country overseas creates export opportunities and therefore improves matters so far as British industry is concerned.
Lord TAYLOR of GRYFE: My Lords, will the noble Lord explain why the confidence that he has expressed in the future is not shared by the Stock Market?
Lord COCKFIELD: My Lords, I do not know whether the noble Lord wishes to look at the history of the Stock Market in any detail, but if he would care to examine the progress of prices under the Labour Government it would give him no great comfort.
Lord LEATHERLAND: My Lords, having inquired into the history of the Stock Market, may I ask the noble Lord whether it is not a fact that since the present Government came to power there has been a steady and uninterrupted deterioration in Stock Market prices?
Lord COCKFIELD: My Lords, the Government are not directly or indirectly responsible for Stock Exchange prices——
Several noble Lords: Oh!
Lord COCKFIELD: ——but if the noble Lord wishes to follow this point, may I remind him that in the heyday of the Labour Government the Stock Ex-
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change Financial Times Index reached the figure of 146, and that today it stands at three times that figure.
Lord LEATHERLAND: And when the Labour Government——
Lord DENHAM: My Lords, I hesitate to interrupt this bowling, which my noble friend is hitting for sixes every time, but the House may feel it is time to move on to the next Question.

PRIVATELY RENTED DWELLINGS
3.10 p.m.
The Earl of KINNOULL: My Lords, I beg leave to ask the Question which stands in my name on the Order Paper.
The Question was as follows:
To ask Her Majesty's Government how many dwellings have been lost in the privately rented sector in the United Kingdom since 1974, how many are at present unoccupied, and whether they will make a statement of Government proposals to revive the privately rented sector.
The PARLIAMENTARY UNDER-SECRETARY of STATE, DEPARTMENT of the ENVIRONMENT (Lord Bellwin): My Lords, the annual average rate of decline in the private rented sector in England between 1971–1977 is estimated at 125,000 dwellings. There is no estimate of the number of unoccupied dwellings which were formerly privately rented. The Government will be introducing a new form of shorthold letting in the Housing Bill this Session, enabling landlords to let on short fixed-term tenancies at fair rents. Landlords will be certain of repossession if they wish at the end of the term, and tenants will be guaranteed security for its duration. Shorthold will not apply to existing tenants. The Government will also bring forward an experimental scheme to encourage new building for rent by approved bodies.
The Earl of KINNOULL: My Lords, I thank my noble friend for that valuable reply, and welcome the recognition by the Government of the importance of the private rented sector in the housing programme. Can my noble friend give an

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assurance that the Government will review the Rent Act with a greater sense of urgency than the previous Administration, which took five years to do nothing other than grudgingly acknowledge the problem?
Lord BELLWIN: My Lords, the Government attach great importance to the private rented sector, which must be preserved. There are great numbers of people, particularly the young, the single and the mobile who do not want to be, or whose circumstances do not permit them to be, owner-occupiers or council tenants. Housing provision for them must come from other sources. Housing associations can make a valuable contribution, but cannot possibly fill the gap that would ensue if all private renting were to end. This is quite apart from the socially divisive effect of reducing the choice of tenure only to owner-occupation and council tenancy. That is why we are bringing forward proposals to preserve and to revive private renting, and to the extent that looking at the Rent Acts is a part of that we will certainly be doing so.

NORTHERN IRELAND: GOVERNMENT
Lord DENHAM: My Lords, with the leave of the House, at a convenient moment after 3.30 this afternoon, my noble friend Lord Elton will repeat a Statement on political progress in Northern Ireland.

PROTECTION OF OFFICIAL INFORMATION BILL [H.L.]
The PARLIAMENTARY UNDER-SECRETARY of STATE, HOME OFFICE (Lord Belstead): My Lords, I beg to introduce a Bill to make new provision for the protection of official information and articles. I beg to move that this Bill be now read a first time.
Moved, That the Bill be now read 1a.— (Lord Belstead).
On Question, Bill read 1a, and to be printed.

LABORATORY ANIMALS PROTECTION BILL [H.L.]
3.13 p.m.
The Earl of HALSBURY: My Lords, I beg to move that the Bill be now read a second time. In rising to put the Motion which stands in my name to your Lordships, and commending the Bill to your Lordships' good favour, I should like to start by thanking all those whose names appear on the long and distinguished list of speakers this afternoon. I am particularly gratified to see the name of my noble friend Lord Adrian, who has selected it for the subject of his maiden speech. His profession particularly well qualifies him to speak on this subject, and I am sure he will win his spurs to your Lordships' entire satisfaction. I shall listen to what he has to say with the greatest interest.
I have stated in earlier debates on other Bills in this field that it is not a field for Private Members' Bills, and my reasons for going into reverse and acting contrary to my previously stated opinions are multifold. Last year, at the season of the party conferences, legislation was discussed based on the slogan of bringing animals into politics. I then decided in my own mind that if this meant bringing them into party politics I was against it. I could imagine no more unedifying spectacle than the parties bidding for the anti-vivisectionist vote in marginal constituencies.
Secondly, I was increasingly exasperated by delays, of which every party and Government were guilty—although I shall acquit the present Government who have not been in office long enough—in bringing legislation up to date and implementing those recommendations of the Littlewood Committee which required legislation, with the result that laboratories of men of science are being vandalised and men of science are being threatened over the telephone, though their only guilt is in doing experiments to try to benefit mankind. These threats, of course, come from what I call the protestational neurotics who infiltrate, soil and sully every reform movement, however worthy. They do not have the support of the genuine animal welfare societies.
Thirdly, it seemed essential to provide the working party of the Council of

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Europe, which is seeking to produce a convention standardising animal welfare legislation throughout the European continent, with a lead based on a new model Act incorporating the one factor that we can contribute to Europe in this field—100 years of experience; the experience of the pioneer which no one else except we has had.
Lastly, I found myself able to recruit an exceptionally able team of helpers, all of whom knew the present Act, all of whom were aware of the ground which it did not cover. These were the recently retired Chief Inspector from the Home Office under the 1876 Act; the then immediate past President of the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons, the Professor of Nutritional Science at the medical school, the Royal Free Hospital; the late chairman of the Council of the Physiological Society and the chairman of the legal committee of the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry. Between them and others who helped, they covered the whole field necessary to contribute to this Bill. We have put in collectively a very hard year's team work and if, for the purposes of this Motion, I speak as I must in the first person singular, I would ask your Lordships to treat it as a colloquialism in so far as I am a kind of"we".
By the end of last year, I had the Bill in advanced draft form and have spent the greater part of this year in polishing it up and convincing my friends in the scientific and medical worlds of its merits as a successor to the present Act. I may say that this has not always been easy, but I nevertheless have gained their support for my introduction of it here this afternoon.
I am not going to take up time in arguing the pros and cons of using animals in the laboratory, 5 million a year, as opposed to killing them and eating them for food, 400 million a year; harvesting their wool and dairy products, putting them to the plough in days gone by, employing them as draught animals generally or entering them for steeple-chases culminating in the Grand National, where an expectable number of them get damaged and killed every year. I also leave aside our relationship with the animals based on their pestilential quality, which requires us to exterminate them
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quite ruthlessly when their activities are incompatible with human activities. I can say only that I think it wrong to inflict more pain than is avoidable in any of these contexts.
I accept that for an indefinite time to come there will be no universal alternative to the use of whole animals in all contexts, and the emphasis here is on my usage of "universal" and "all". I believe that nearly all sensible folk will go along with this view, albeit with variable degrees of personal reluctance. It would be quite wrong to suppose that men of science are strangers to this reluctance. They, too, are animal lovers. Working with animals fosters care for them, due to the need to keep them in good health during the course of an experiment. It does not breed indifference. I shall leave others to make these points in detail and will concentrate my own contribution to the debate on leading your Lordships through the Bill, starting with some very general considerations which we ought, all of us, to have in mind.
Legislation ought never to be conceived in a vindictive spirit. It is not an opportunity to get even with people who do not share our views. A law is not good in proportion to the number of convictions it secures but, rather, in the degree of law-abidingness and co-operation which it promotes. Almost all the ethical considerations inspiring animal welfare are situational ones involving acts of judgment. If a man's judgment leads him in unacceptable directions, that may be a good reason for correcting it or restraining it, but not for treating the individual at fault as a criminal to be imprisoned with murderers, thieves, prostitutes and others. For that reason, this Bill does not constitute a new branch of criminal law.
To give effect to this spirit, I have endeavoured to structure the Bill so as to strike as nice a balance as I can between what is done directly by statute, explicitly in the Bill, what is done indirectly by subordinate legislation and the machinery of regulations based upon statutory instruments and what is to be done by incentives to conform with an official code of good conduct which Clause 8 of the Bill requires the Home Secretary to publish under the title A Guide to Good Laboratory Animal Practice.

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The Bill is evolutionary, not revolutionary, in scope. It builds on the present Act, incorporates those recommendations of the Littlewood Report needing legislation—now, as I have said, over 15 years out of date—and seals off some grey areas which have inevitably developed since 1876, the date of the present Act. I should perhaps remind your Lordships that the whole—I repeat the whole—of immunology, hormone-based therapy, vitamin-based dietetics, chemotherapy, antibiotics, anthelmintics—modern medicine, in fact—has been developed since the present Act came into force, and that the consumer protection movement of recent years has added many animals to the list of those that are required every year.
In terms of modern biomedical technology, the relation between our exploitation of animals, in the general sense, in the laboratory and any reasonable definition of the word "experimental" is tenuous and very difficult to draw. The Bill is therefore based upon the more comprehensive term "procedure", the effect of which is to bring a rather wider range of animals under the protection which the Bill provides than is the case at present. This is reflected in its short title, "The Laboratory Animals Protection Bill."
To qualify for protection under the Bill, an animal has to have two conditions fulfilled. First, it must be the subject of a procedure which, in the absence of an anaesthetic or other means of pain relief, could be expected to cause distress, pain, ill-health—those three. Whether or not an anaesthetic is actually employed is irrelevant to the determination of whether an animal is a protected animal but, if a protected animal, it is entitled to the same degree of pain relief as would be the case if the procedure were carried out in the course of ordinary veterinary care and therapy.
Secondly, the procedure must have certain stated objectives which are listed in the Bill, and I shall come to them later. These do not include slaughter for food, shearing for wool or the production of milk or other dairy products—eggs and so on. These contexts are the province of other statutes. The ringing of birds and the implantation of radio-locatable bugs in wild animals in order
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to follow their movements for the purposes of field natural history and observations are excluded from the Bill.
This brings me to Clause 1 which provides that any procedure carried out on a protected animal is an offence, unless it falls within the restrictions imposed by the Act. This is the basis of the whole Bill, the rest of which is concerned with the power of the Home Secretary to control and relax this overall embargo in cases enfranchised by the Bill. Throughout the Bill the Home Secretary is made the keeper of our consciences in the context of animal experimentation. He is to be our watchdog. May I remind your Lordships of an old, homely proverb:
"Do not keep a dog and bark yourself".
The Bill does not tell the Home Secretary what to embargo. It contains no specific prohibition on particular experiments or procedures. Cosmetics are not picked out for special mention. There is no prohibition on inducing smoking habits in dogs. It will be up to the Home Secretary of the day, as it is now, to single them out and prohibit them if he thinks the circumstances warrant. The only constraint on him is that of public opinion, as expressed in Parliament.
This brings me to Clause 2 where the restrictions begin to be relaxed, under control. It is a long clause and one of the key clauses in the Bill. It lays down the need for a licence in respect of the person by whom and the place at which a procedure bringing an animal under the protection of the Act is carried out. In addition, it lays down the purposes of the procedures which may be licensed and requires a veterinary degree of pain relief. It also covers the special cases where procedures are carried out as demonstrations for teaching purposes. It protects the offspring of pregnant animals. It requires the painless killing of animals in pain. It embargoes the use of curare and curaro-mimetic drugs as an anaesthetic and requires all animals to be treated with compassion.
I will skip two clauses in order to come to the system of licensing persons and premises, taking them in that order. Clause 6 requires a licence application to be sponsored, but the system is quite different from sponsorship under the present Act, which is in the hands of very distinguished presidents of learned societies

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and colleges. Everyone knows that these distinguished persons are swamped by applications from strangers, of whom they know very little and who may be working in specialised fields, of which they know no more. The late Lord Platt used to tell your Lordships on many occasions what he thought of the bogus character of the protection which this system provided under certificates which he signed, more or less blind.
The Bill replaces the old system by a system of double certification. There must be two sponsors to every licence application. The first must sponsor the applicant personally, must know him and must state that he has the requisite qualifications to carry out procedures on animals. The second must be a recognised expert in the field of the proposed procedures, who must certify that they fall within the purposes enfranchised by the Bill and that there is no reasonable alternative to the use of animals for that purpose.
This removes from the limited number of inspectors the invidious task which would he imposed upon them if they were to be responsible for monitoring a virtually unlimited number of fields, from the standpoint of determining whether there was an alternative to the use of animals in those fields. The experts requisite for this category will be listed at the Home Office on the recommendation of the presidents of the learned societies and colleges. So these distinguished persons will continue to play a part in the system, but it will be the right part for them to play, and a real one.
If the licensee changes course or enlarges the scope of his work, then the licence will need to be amended correspondingly, so that it will come to appear over the course of a career rather like a passport with visas. This being so, the special certificates requisite under the present Act will cease to serve any useful purpose and they are dropped accordingly. The protection they gave to horses, dogs, cats and other domesticated animals and pets was largely spurious since the same authority issued them all. What they did was to ensure that the Home Office knew that these animals were either being used or that their use was in contemplation. But this will be automatic and a routine
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matter under the present Bill, where there will be no "blank cheques". Therefore they can be taken for granted and the system of alphabetically labelled certificates dropped.
I come next to the licensing of the premises under Clause 5. At present premises are not licensed; they are simply registered to tell the inspector where he can call to carry out his inspection. By licensing, as opposed to registering, a great deal can be accomplished indirectly. The licence to an experimenter is to a single individual who conducts a single procedure. The licence of the premises can be to the chief executive of an industrial organisation or to the vice-chancellor of a university or anybody representative of the owner of the premises where many experimenters may be carrying out their work in parallel. The occasion of granting this licence can be the opportunity to draw his attention to the guide and to express the hope that its provisions will be treated as practices to be aimed at on the premises. This will put everyone's work at hazard if anyone on the premises disregards the guide's provisions and risks the chief executive's or vice-chancellor's loss of the licence by revocation if representations from the inspectors go unheeded. Thus the vice-chancellor or chief executive and everybody on the premises will be in league to see that the provisions of the guide are kept on the premises. Thus in my view men should be governed, naturally and without effort, by providing them with incentives to the good behaviour which one wants them to exhibit.
The three clauses which I have recited, Nos. 2, 5 and 6, form the heart of the Bill. In order to present them sequentially, I skipped Clauses 3 and 4. Clause 3 carries the species protected to Schedule 1, which I shall deal with later, and Clause 4 repeats the embargo in the present Act against public exhibitions. Clause 7 is an enabling clause by means of which the Minister can make regulations which a later clause specifies as by statutory instrument. Clause 8 is the one requiring the publication of the guide to good laboratory animal practice. It is not, of course, in the Bill. It is the Home Secretary's responsibility to draft and circulate the guide, so the Bill does not tell him how to do his job. Clause 9

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requires licence holders to submit annual returns and of course the Home Secretary's annual report is based on those returns.
The provisions of the Bill would be ineffective without some teeth in the form of an inspectorate which is set up in Clauses 10, 11 and 12. These very largely follow the present Act but the powers of individual inspectors are significantly increased. They can order the killing of an animal which is felt to be in undue pain without regard to whether or not the purposes of an experiment have been fulfilled. So far as practice is concerned, this is somewhat of a distinction without a difference because the inspectorate possesses this power in effect now, not in virtue of what is in the 1876 Act but in virtue of powers that they take to themselves under the conditions for issuing a licence. But the public do not know this and they believe that the inspectorate has no such power. Therefore I think it desirable that it should be in the Bill.
In addition to the inspectorate, the Bill gives statutory expression to an advisory council in Clause 14 and lays down its constitution in Schedule 3. What I have in mind is a critical, collective opinion-forming body on questions which may be vexing the Home Secretary or the public or even the inspectors themselves. It is not conceived primarily as an ethical committee laying down standards of right and wrong but more as a body of advisers to whom the inspectors can turn if they, for example, do not agree about something among themselves, and to which they can refer matters on which they all of them feel unsure. They are, of course, experts. They are the normal advisers to the Minister; but even the most expert adviser sometimes finds himself in need of a commonsense lay opinion. That is how the constitution of the advisory council has been expressed.
My Lords, I have again skipped a clause to facilitate exposition. Clause 13 requires the Home Secretary to publish an annual report and Clause 15 provides for an agreed licensee to have recourse to the advisory council. I think this is important. The present Act can inflict injustice on a licensee and there is absolutely no redress or means of making representations.
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These are the principal features of the Bill to which I would draw the attention of your Lordships in this opening speech. I do not want to prolong it unduly as I am sure that I shall have my attention drawn to other features of the Bill in the course of the debate. Those I will deal with when winding up the debate. Many of the remaining clauses are formal or legalistic and what one would expect to find in an Act of this kind, and of course some are consequential on the three main clauses that I have dealt with. The "guts" of the Bill are in Clauses 2, 5 and 6 and I would recommend a study of them.
Before coming to an end, I should like to say a few words about the definitions in Clause 28. A "laboratory" is whatever premises are licensed for the conduct of licensed procedures on protected animals, so that in a veterinary or an agricultural context a meadow or a dairy could be a laboratory for the purposes of the Act. Then a "procedure" on a protected animal is defined by its purposes and it might be as well to recite these explicitly for the record. There are five of them, namely, testing a hypothesis, collecting information, testing or producing a substance, registering an effect of a substance on an animal or use for educational purposes.
The species of animals protected under the Bill are not listed in the Bill but carried into Schedule 1, to which the Minister has power of addition or deletion by regulation. In this way practice can be made to conform with what we learn over the years about life forms which might need more protection in the minds of our successors than they do in our own minds today.
So much for the Bill itself. If your Lordships approve it and approve the Motion for Second Reading, I shall then ask you to approve a second Motion committing the Bill to a Select Committee of the House. This was originally the idea of the noble Lord, Lord Houghton of Sowerby, and I owe the idea to him. I thought it a good one and I am happy to give him the credit for a good idea. The field is a controversial one, where conflicting feelings run high. I think it right and proper that an experimentalist who may feel that I have been too restrictive, or an animal welfare devotee who may feel that I have not gone far enough,

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should have the satisfaction of feeling that he or she has been listened to with that patience and attention which only a Select Committee can provide. It also gives the House, through its Select Committee, an opportunity to collect evidence over and above that which may be volunteered. I am quite sure that the noble Lord, Lord Houghton of Sowerby, will enlarge on these arguments and I do not intend to say more on that matter as I believe that T can leave the rest of it in his very capable hands.
My Lords, I very much hope that the Bill will commend itself to your good favour. It has been a labour of love by a dedicated team. Men of science played a distinguished and honourable role in helping to achieve the Act of 1876, which was a more or less corporate expression of British affection for animals and a determination that the rather horrible physiological experiments which were carried out in France in the middle of the last century should not be repeated in this country. So the men of science played an honourable role in putting the Act of 1876 on the Statute Book. During the century of their co-operation with it since, they have been continually traduced and blackguarded as monsters by the militant anti-vivisectionist Press—as total a stranger to the truth as can well be imagined. I want to see them, as a member of their community, play the same honourable role today in whatever measure proves the successor to the present Act. For that reason, my Lords, as well as for the protection of laboratory animals, on the Motion that this Bill be now read a second time, I beg to move.
Moved, That the Bill be now read 2a.—(The Earl of Halsbury.)

NORTHERN IRELAND: GOVERNMENT
3.41 p.m.
The PARLIAMENTARY UNDER-SECRETARY of STATE, NORTHERN IRELAND OFFICE (Lord Elton): My Lords, with the leave of the House, I shall now repeat a Statement being made in another place by my right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. The Statement is as follows:
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"Mr. Speaker, I will, with permission, make a Statement about the government of Northern Ireland.
"The Queen's Speech declared the Government's intention, to seek an acceptable way of restoring to the people of Northern Ireland more control over their own affairs '.
"Since taking office in May, I have, for this purpose, had wide-ranging discussions in the Province, and a series of private meetings with leaders of the main Northern Ireland political parties represented in this House.
"My discussions and meetings have confirmed the Government's view that it is right to transfer back to locally elected representatives some at least of the powers of government at present exercised from Westminster.
"The political parties in Northern Ireland themselves, in their election manifestoes, asked for this, and there is widespread support for it in the Province.
"There is, moreover, awareness that such a restoration of political responsibility can only be brought about in Northern Ireland by all parts of the community recognising and respecting the interests of others.
"It will in due course be a matter for Parliament to decide, on proposals put to it by Her Majesty's Government, what kind of powers and responsibilities are to be transferred to elected representatives of the people of Northern Ireland and through what kind of institutions they are to be exercised.
"The Government wish, however, to put forward proposals which, so far as possible, have the agreement of the people of Northern Ireland.
"We intend therefore to convene a conference of the principal political parties in Northern Ireland to seek the highest level of agreement that we can on proposals for a transfer of responsibility which the Government might put before this House in due course.
"We are, for this purpose, preparing a consultative document, which will be laid before Parliament, to serve as the basis of the conference.

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"The document will set out the range of powers and responsibilities which the Government for their part would be prepared to see transferred from Westminster.
"The document will set out as options for consideration by the conference a number of ways in which the transferred powers might be exercised; and in each case with what Her Majesty's Government would regard as reasonable and appropriate arrangements to take account of the interests of the minority.
"Responsibility for law and order in the Province, which—as I indicated in reply to Questions earlier today—remains the Government's overriding priority in Northern Ireland, would not be transferred.
"I shall shortly be approaching the party leaders concerned to discuss with them the arrangements for a conference to be convened as soon as possible and, I would hope, by the end of November.
"Our aim will be to secure from the conference, drawing on suggestions in the consultative document, workable and acceptable arrangements for restoring to the people of Northern Ireland greater responsibility for the conduct of their own affairs which we can then recommend to this House in fulfilment of our commitment in The Queen's Speech".
My Lords, that concludes the Statement.
3.45 p.m.
Lord BLEASE: My Lords, I wish to thank the Minister for repeating the Statement to this House. I have received a copy of it within the last few minutes. As this is the first occasion since the Summer Recess on which there has been an opportunity to mention Northern Ireland affairs in this House, I feel sure that all noble Lords will wish to join with me in expressing our deep shock and grief at the tragic murder of Lord Mountbatten. Also I have great concern about the continuing senseless and vicious campaign of violence being perpetrated against the Irish people both North and South. Our heartfelt sympathy is with the
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families of all the security forces and of all innocent victims, civilians, who have suffered much during these recent months through murder, maiming and malice.
I wish also to say that, along with noble Lords in this House and with Members in another place who realise in practical terms the problems of civilised living in Northern Ireland, we acknowledge the tremendous difficulties that confront the Northern Ireland Secretary of State and his Ministers in obtaining peace, justice and progress in Northern Ireland. The Statement today proposes further discussions and consultations by the Northern Ireland Secretary of State with the main representatives of political parties in Northern Ireland in the form of a conference.
In offering my support for these efforts, which I hope will be fundamentally based on democratic political persuasion, I would add some words of caution. I should like the Minister to indicate what hopes the Northern Ireland Secretary of State has at present, after having carried out a series of consultations with the representatives of political parties, that there will be agreement by the political parties in Northern Ireland to participate in this constitutional conference. If one or more of the parties boycott the conference, what will be the arrangements for the decisions that the Government and Parliament will have to take by way of option?
I note and welcome the fact that the text and terms of the consultative document will be generally released in another place and in this House and I would suggest that such a document ought to be widely available to the public. I say that because, from knowledge and experience of other similar conferences and assemblies held in Northern Ireland over the years, if this is not done there will be a series of leaks and ugly forms of speculation which can only harm such discussions. A further point I should like to suggest is that perhaps a record of the progress of the consultations may be made regularly so that the general public may in some way voice their opinions on the progress of the discussions.
I feel that I would be failing in my responsibility to the Northern Ireland people and to this House, if not to my own conscience, if I did not mention the

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great concern and frustration in Northern Ireland about approaches to security matters during these past five months. Whatever may be the particular need for measures to uphold law and order, I certainly welcome the point set out in the Statement which says that,
"Responsibility for law and order in the Province, which—as I indicated in reply to Questions earlier today—remains the Government's overriding priority in Northern Ireland, would not be transferred.".
I welcome that at this time in the affairs of Northern Ireland, whatever subsequent events may lead to; that is a very important principle which has my full support.
A further point that I feel I should like to stress is that while the Government must give full recognition to the elected representatives of Northern Ireland—and I stand by that wholeheartedly—I believe that in the present Northern Ireland situation efforts should be made to strengthen the pluralistic aspects of responsibility and influence in our society. Therefore, I would again suggest that the consultations and discussions would benefit by involving representatives of the business community, trade union representatives, the churches, educational and other professional bodies. Finally, my Lords, I would hope that these discussions and consultations will take place in an atmosphere of constitutional conference. I believe that it is vital that issues concerning social and economic matters should also be included. Homes, jobs and educational opportunity are closely linked with peace, progress and constitutional matters in Northern Ireland. So I thank the Minister for the Statement that he has made to the House and look forward to receiving progress reports from time to time.
3.50 p.m.
Lord HAMPTON: My Lords, we too would like to thank the noble Lord, Lord Elton, for repeating the Statement. We accept that unfortunately there is no magic solution to the problems of the Province and that the Secretary of State has needed time for consultation and discussion with the various parties over there. We now look forward to studying the consultative document planned to serve as the basis of a conference and certainly would not question its stated aim,
"to seek the highest level of agreement".
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The great problem which, of course, remains is how to get all parts of the community to recognise and respect the interests of others. None the less, we hope wholeheartedly that good may come from this endeavour, fully accepting that responsibility for law and order should not be transferred at this stage.
Lord ELTON: My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Blease, and to the noble Lord, Lord Hampton, for their reception of this Statement which marks the opening of a new and critical phase in the future of the Province. I am grateful also to the noble Lord, Lord Blease, for recording his sympathy, which all of us share, with the family of the late Lord Mountbatten. I shall not dilate upon that great gentleman in this place now, but we all know what we think of him.
The noble Lord, Lord Blease, recognised the difficulties which face us and we welcome his support. He asked me a number of specific questions, the first of which was: What would we do if one or more of the parties would not come to the conference? In our view that would be a most regrettable development and I trust that it will not happen. Both Parliament and the people of Northern Ireland would not understand why any party should not attend when less than six months ago they had all fought the election on the basis that they wanted to make progress. The noble Lord went on to ask what would happen if the conference were to fail. I do not believe in anticipating failure, but if it were to fail to reach agreement, the Government would put forward what they judged to be the best proposals for making progress in the light of the views that were expressed in the conference.
The noble Lord asked whether there would be a freely available record of the consultations. I believe that it will be best for this relatively small gathering to meet in private, although the members thereof may release as they wish what has proceeded there. On the question of security and whether that will hamper the proceedings of the conference, I think that it is only necessary to emphasise that it would be playing into the hands of the terrorists to accept that every further outrage they commit constitutes a veto on further progress, and that is what that would be.

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The noble Lord also suggested that we might ask the conference to look at matters wider than constitutional. The people concerned will be completely aware of these matters and I do not doubt that they will raise such matters as they see fit. The consultative document will not preclude members from introducing ideas of their own.
Lord PLANT: My Lords, I should like to associate myself with what my noble friend Lord Blease has said. I speak as chairman of the Human Rights Commission of Northern Ireland. I am circumscribed in making a statement here and I must put it as a series of questions. First, would the Minister agree that it is only the people of Northern Ireland who can put their own house in order and that by and large the great majority would welcome the Statement that he has made? Secondly, I recently attended the memorial service at Aldershot for the 18 soldiers murdered at Warren Point. Is the Minister aware that there is a memorial book in the chapel at Aldershot with the names of 300 soldiers who have laid down their lives in Northern Ireland?
My third question concerns the time-scale. The Minister has said that by November these discussions would be taking place. Can he inform the House of the time-scale envisaged after the initial discussions?
Lord ELTON: My Lords, I entirely agree with the noble Lord, Lord Plant, that it is only the citizens of the Province who can put their own house in order. It is the duty of the Government to try to bring about the circumstances under which they are able so to do and to provide the encouragement for those who may be reluctant to make the attempt. It will be a function of public opinion in this country—by which I mean the whole of the United Kingdom—to make it apparent to any who are reluctant to look and listen and speak rather than to shout, that this is something which the people will not tolerate.
I too have seen with proper humility the memorial to which the noble Lord referred and with real sorrow I see that it grows longer every week.
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As regards the timing, I very much hope that we shall have something concrete to proceed on by the end of this year.
Lord DERWENT: My Lords, I should like to raise one point with my noble friend. Did I understand him correctly to say that there was no chance of the public being kept fully informed during the discussions? If that is so I think it is most regrettable.
Lord ELTON: My Lords, subject to advice, my understanding is that there will not be published a Hansard account, as it were; on the other hand it is not human nature for there to be a revelation, after three weeks of silence, of a conclusion reached. It is possible that different interpretations may be put on the proceedings by different participants. However, we shall have to see how we go and grow wise with experience.
The Duke of NORFOLK: My Lords, I should like to ask my noble friend whether the Government of Southern Ireland have been consulted about this matter and will steps be taken to keep them informed as the conference progresses? I am one of the many people who believe that the secret of this dreary and terrible subject lies much more with keeping the Government of Southern Ireland informed and in trying to bring them along with us.
Lord ELTON: My Lords, I am aware of the dimension which the noble Duke has introduced. This is a United Kingdom matter, but of course the Government of the Republic are concerned; of course they will be kept aware of what is going on and I trust that their interest will be sympathetic.

LABORATORY ANIMALS PROTECTION BILL [H.L.]
3.58 p.m.
Second Reading debate resumed.
Earl GREY: My Lords, first may I apologise to the House for not being able to stay until the end of the Second Reading debate on this most important Bill. Unfortunately, I have a prior engagement which is unavoidable. My Lords, I welcome this Second Reading

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debate and also the setting up of a Select Committee which will be able to assess more fully the facts regarding cruelty to and unnecessary treatment of animals. The subject of laboratory testing evokes automatically strong emotional feelings—those for the continuance of and those opposed to the practice. I admit that I find it difficult to be objective without being biased.
Having read the Bill, I am not happy with some of the clauses contained in it, especially the ones dealing with pain and suffering. I do not think that it goes far enough towards ensuring the welfare and safety of animals, but I for one would rather be informed and convinced more fully before making a final decision. One reads of frightening cases of treatment and experiments. I do not know whether those accusations are justified, but, surely, in order to obtain the truth, could not the veil of secrecy which seems to exist be lifted and more facts be allowed to be published?
One solution could be the appointment of more inspectors. I believe that they number only 14, and that the number of experiments amount to a few million. I would approve that extra fully-qualified inspectors—and possibly some could be recruited from various animal welfare groups—should be given more powers. I believe that those inspectors should have the right of entry to any laboratory without having first to apply for permission to inspect. I cannot see any objection to that if all experiments are being carried out lawfully and there is nothing to hide.
I, for one, cannot condone the testing of tobacco on animals to find out which strains are harmful to humans. There must be any number of humans willing to smoke themselves to death, given the offer of free tobacco. Let them be the guinea-pigs. I also fail to see the justification in the experimentation of cosmetics in order to make women more attractive to men. There are enough products on the market for that already. If experiments are to continue, which will be the case, I think that the criteria should be purely on medical grounds. I shall follow closely the progress of this Bill, or any similar Bill, with a great deal of interest and concern. Finally, I look forward with interest to listening to the
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maiden speech of the noble Lord, Lord Adrian, who I understand is well qualified to speak on this very important subject.
4.1 p.m.
Lord ADRIAN: My Lords, I speak for the first time in your Lordships' House with a good deal of apprehension. I know that maiden speeches should be non-controversial and I know that the subject of today's debate gives rise to strong feelings. If what I say does likewise, I apologise in advance; I do not mean it to. I shall need all your Lordships' traditional kindness. At the outset I must make it clear that I hold a licence under the 1876 legislation to carry out animal experiments. I am a physiologist and I teach medical students. Being also a university don, I am forewarned, having read a most helpful article by the noble Lord, Lord O'Hagan, that your Lordships have no taste for lectures. I shall do my best not to fall into that, for me, very familiar mode of address.
Your Lordships will understand that I am one of those who hold the view that animal experiments can be justified, and indeed that they are necessary. They seem to me to be justified by the knowledge that they produce and, more importantly, by the benefits which stem from that knowledge; by the reduction of disease and the increase of the health of mankind and animals. I believe that the human and animal suffering which would be caused by denying ourselves the benefits of experiment would far outweigh the suffering caused by experiment.
As a physiologist with a medical training, I can see clearly how far the advances of medicine have depended on animal experiments. I do not doubt that there are in your Lordships' House several, and in the world at large millions, whose very lives depend on animal work on diabetes. The production, testing and standardisation of insulin has traditionally used animals. Now, however, we can look forward to the production of insulin by genetic engineering and to its standardisation by "alternative" methods.
The use of these "alternative" methods, as and when they become sufficiently developed and reliable, is very much to be welcomed; and I believe that their use

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is increasing. Ten years ago people thought that the numbers of animal experiments would continue to rise inexorably year by year. Instead the Home Office statistics show that since 1970 the annual total has, in fact, declined slightly. We may acknowledge the part that the noble Lord, Lord Houghton of Sowerby, and many others have played in this very welcome development.
I have said that I believe using animals in testing and experimental work is justifiable, but that is not to say that I think that all experiments or tests are justified. I do not advocate uncontrolled animal experiment—rather it should be done only under informed and responsible control; control of the kind that I believe has been exercised in this country for the last 100 years. But if we are to maximise the benefit and minimise the animal suffering, that control must be well-informed. This is indeed recognised in the composition of the proposed advisory committee, but it seems to me so important that I should like to see the role of that committee strengthened.
The advisory committee should be active in offering the Secretary of State and the Inspectorate advice on all aspects, scientific as well as ethical, of animal experiment, and their counsels should surely take into account the best available medical, veterinary and scientific knowledge. I should like to see the clinical and scientific members of the committee appointed from nominations by the Royal Colleges, the Royal Society, and relevant learned societies. I would also hope that in matters of appeal under Clause 15 the advisory committee's advice would normally be heeded. The importance of control, and indeed of self-control, is part of the outlook of biological scientists in this country who are jealous of their good reputation for animal care. I know that it is held that, because of lack of testing in the courts, the 1876 Cruelty to Animals Act is widely neglected. I can only say that in my own experience my colleagues take the provisions of that Act very seriously indeed and listen closely and with respect to the very knowledgeable advice of the Inspectorate; and that this attitude of willing co-operation extends to our professional associations.
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The Bill which your Lordships are considering today preserves a great deal that is well-tried in the 1876 legislation. But biological science has made very great progress in the last 100 years and it is hardly surprising that the 1876 legislation needs bringing up-to-date. The Bill of the noble Earl, Lord Halsbury, does just that—it implements many of the recommendations of the Littlewood Committee. The concept of experiment is replaced by the much wider one of procedure. The scope of control is extended. Sponsoring for licence applications is made less automatic and will demand that the sponsors know more about what and who is being sponsored. All this greatly improves the present position, and does much of what critics of the 1876 Act have demanded. But it must be admitted that the present position is not altogether bad— in fact, the existing Act, for all its detractors, works well. There seems to me to be some force in the argument that our efforts should be concentrated on achieving a satisfactory agreement in the ad hoc Committee of the Council of Europe for the Protection of Animals, and for delaying changes in our legislation until that agreement has been accepted.
But, on balance, I think that we have waited long enough. At the same time I should be sorry indeed if controversy over this Bill and over one which may reach us from another place should interfere with our efforts to influence what is yet to be agreed in Europe. Finally, I do not think that human beings will very readily give up using animals, for food, for work, for knowledge, for safety, even for sport. Individuals differ widely in what they themselves will do. But society has to set limits on all these activities and fiercely argues about where those limits should be. To set those limits in experimental science in the last 100 years this country has relied on a combination of legislation and the personal responsibility of scientists. On the whole, it has worked well. It has offered protection to animals and, be it admitted, to scientists also, as was the intention of the original legislation. The Bill before your Lordships' House builds on and develops that very well-tried approach. I shall support its Second Reading and, if it be so moved, its reference to a Select Committee.
4.9 p.m.
Lord HUNT of FAWLEY: My Lords, I am sure that all noble Lords will agree with me when I thank the noble Lord, Lord Adrian, for his splendid maiden speech. He is the distinguished physiologist son of a distinguished physiologist father whom many of us knew. Like his father, he has been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. His father was awarded the Order of Merit and was a Nobel Prize winner in medicine. We hope that our new friend will follow this splendid example and rise to those heights, and that he will speak to us often. We are proud and privileged to have him with us in our House. We thank him once again for his speech. It was, as it should have been, non-controversial. When I had been in your Lordships' House for four months the Chief Whip came to me and said, "It is time you made your maiden speech". I said, "What on?" He said, "Any non-controversial subject". I said, "What do you suggest?" And he said, "What about pay beds in National Health Service hospitals!" I had difficulty in making that really non-controversial.
May I return to the subject of our debate this afternoon—the Laboratory Animals Protection Bill. Many years ago when I was on the junior staff of the Medical Professorial Unit of St. Bartholomew's Hospital, I took out an animal-experiment licence with a grant from the Medical Research Council to investigate a possible connection between the pituitary gland and gastric ulcers. This involved working with rabbits which I had bred myself in my parents' garden in Surrey. As you know these animals multiply quickly. With the help of my family and others looking after them we soon had a considerable number. We became quite fond of some of them and we got to know them by name. When mature they were brought up to London, to the Dunn Laboratory at Barts. While there I remember, well, being concerned about their welfare. We did our best to be kind to them but I thought, then, that more regulations were needed to supervise and control experiments on animals.
This Bill introduced to your Lordships' today by the noble Earl, Lord Halsbury, sets out clearly possible lines along which such protective legislation, regulations,
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official advice, embargoes, codes of conduct and licensing (not only for the experimenter himself but also for the premises in which he works) could and should now be developed to alleviate as much as possible the ill-health, distress, discomfort or pain experimental animals may suffer. But, as the noble Earl has himself suggested, and as the RSPCA and others have pointed out to me, his Bill still needs amendments; first, perhaps, by a Select Committee and then by a Committee of the Whole House.
Modern medicine and millions of people owe an enormous debt to those who have observed animals under controlled conditions, or who have carried out carefully-planned tests, trials or experiments upon them. These scientists have played a large part in the prevention and treatment of a great number of very serious diseases ranging from diphtheria and tuberculosis to poliomyelitis and bubonic plague. At present we cannot do without these animal experiments, because the alternative methods of assessment, which are steadily being developed, are not yet good enough in all contexts.
Members of the public and their lawyers are becoming more insistent on adequate protection and safety in almost every aspect of modern life. The number of animal experiments is, we are told, increasing because of the eight or more workers' or consumers' protection Acts which have been put on the statute book during the past 25 years. And more and more work is being done in trying to find an answer to our many vital medical problems. It might be thought that a Bill like this, with its stricter licensing and tighter controls, would tend to impede or perhaps even reduce medical research. I believe that the opposite is the case; it should lead to more and improved scientific trials and experiments under better conditions for the animals concerned.
In some subjects more should have been done in the past. Last year my wife and I travelled to Salzburg by air, with about 20 "thalidomide" teenagers on a holiday jaunt, some of them with arms and legs only a few inches long. A more cheerful bunch of youngsters I have seldom seen; but during lunch one could not help wondering, as have many others, how much human anxiety and suffering

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might have been avoided had more adequate animal experiments been possible before thalidomide had been put on the market. They were attempted, we all know, but did not prove sufficient.
There are some people who think that this Bill is quite unnecessary because they believe all experiments involving animals should be banned. To them I would reply by paraphrasing what I said to your Lordships on 22nd February 1977: If there is the slightest chance of a new food additive, drug, antibiotic, hormone, vaccine, insecticide, or even a new cosmetic preparation such as a hair dye, making someone ill, perhaps even causing cancer or some other very unpleasant or fatal disease, would these people really prefer that the first sign of such an illness should appear in a son or daughter, mother or father, wife or husband rather than in a rabbit, guinea pig, mouse or rat? I think we all know well enough, in our hearts, how the majority of people would answer that question. Therefore, my Lords, as a doctor and on behalf of most of my patients and their loved ones, I beg you to give this Bill a Second Reading.
4.17 p.m.
Lord JANNER: My Lords, I find it extremely difficult as a layman to express adequately the admiration I have for those noble Lords who have spoken already, particularly the professional ones who understand this subject inside out. I ask your Lordships' forgiveness for intervening for a few moments as a layman. I should like to thank the noble Earl, Lord Halsbury, for having given us the opportunity of speaking and of hearing him on this subject. Most people are deeply concerned about how animals are treated, but I think that very few, if any, would deny that it is important in some way, and perhaps in many ways, for experiments to continue.
The importance of this Bill arises from the fact that an attempt is being made to deal with a subject in a reasonable and proper manner. I should also like to say, particularly to the maiden speaker, Lord Adrian, that of course anybody who has any knowledge of anything at all knows what a valuable service his father and he have rendered to humanity, and today
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he has exhibited it in his speech. There is not very much need to speak about its excellence because we all expected it, and we look forward with considerable pleasure to hear from him very often and again shortly. That is why I confine myself to a portion of the Bill that I consider to be of considerable importance, and which I hope your Lordships will agree is of considerable importance.
I agree with the views already expressed, that we in Britain are outstanding in the manner in which protective legislation to animals has been used, and I think particularly in the last 100 years to Europe as a whole. We in Britain have had a proud tradition for more than 100 years of the strongest legislation in Europe in this respect. I am concerned of course for the well-being of animals, as are such vast numbers of our fellow men, and I commend the Bill as being a step in the right direction; namely, that of bringing legislation concerning the protection of laboratory animals up to date. Many of your Lordships who have much deeper knowledge and experience of this subject than I have, have given, and will be giving, the benefit of their views, and those views will be listened to with interested attention by the House. I therefore propose to deal briefly with one aspect of the Bill which I consider to be of considerable importance; namely, the provisions of Clause 8.
All of us will agree that every method should be sought to carry out tests humanely, on any kind of animal, and that just as important is the need to try to minimise the need for, and the number of, animal experiments that are required in any particular circumstance. Clause 8 requires the Secretary of State to publish a guide for good laboratory practice and advice on alternatives to experimental animals. The concept of alternatives is not new, as we have heard, but the questions that present themselves are: What alternatives are suitable? And, are they valid?
I wish to quote, as an example of the importance of research, the recommendations of scientists known to me who have studied the subject extensively and whose work in SCIP I admire. One of the alternatives to the use of animals which they propose, and with which after long deliberation they consider to be suitable

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for testing certain chemicals in medicines and food additives, is an easily available human tissue, the placenta or afterbirth. They state that when a substance is being tested for safe use in man, the best alternative to animals is man himself. Since it is not technically possible to carry out many tests on man, the best alternative is to use a human tissue, and in the placenta there is just such a tissue.
Clearly this does not replace all experiments on animals, but it has been pointed out to me that some experiments which take place using animals perhaps use more animals than would otherwise be the case in order to arrive at certain conclusions which may fail. However, I am talking now about something which does not mean that at all; in some instances experiments with the placenta can be better than tests using animals.
The report of the work of these scientists has just appeared in a publication entitled Placenta—A Neglected Experimental Animal, by Dr. Peter Beaconsfield, MD, PhD, and the director of SCIP, a research organisation with which I have worked and in which I have been interested for a considerable time, the Research Unit of Bedford College, University of London, the Visiting Professor of the City University, and Dr. Claude Villiee, PhD, the director of the Laboratory of Human Reproduction at Harvard Medical School, Boston, in the United States.
In this volume a number of articles and discussions between members of the group are collected. These people are experts whose knowledge is very wide-ranging and world renowned, and all of them are qualified to express their opinions on the satisfactory use of alternatives to animals in research. According to them the placenta, being human tissue, is infinitely more suitable a testing material to assess the accuracy of certain reactions than many animals currently in use, for the simple reason that it is human tissue. The foreword to the book has been written by one of the group, the Swedish Nobel Prize-winner, Professor Hugo Theorell, and I quote from his opening remarks:
"The quest for a suitable model on which to base human medical research is as long as the history of medicine itself. Only time will show how important a milestone on this journey the placenta may prove to be. As yet, it has been neglected … somewhat surprisingly, when we consider how much effort has been applied to
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seemingly less satisfactory and less freely available alternatives. The placenta's remarkably complete spectrum of cellular and biochemical activity, as well as its hormonal and endrocrinological roles and its short life-cycle, adds to its suitability for studying the processes of cell replication, immune mechanisms … and perhaps ageing."
This second quotation amplifies the first:
"Although only one of many possible research models, the human placenta offers many advantages. It consists of human tissue, it is readily available and it possesses the unique properties of differentiating and growing from embryonal tissue to maturity and … senescence in only nine months."
On the subject of drug testing, for example, Dr. Beaconsfield comments:
"As the placenta is a rapidly growing tissue, it is a good testing ground for compounds which are being developed to slow down growth and interfere with certain aspects of metabolism."
Dr. Beaconsfield also comments:
"The validity of the placenta as an experimental animal is fully upheld … it can be kept alive and intact … and many processes can be studied on it."
I hope your Lordships will forgive me for quoting so fully, but to me, as a layman, it seems strange that this subject, which is considered very fully in the publication to which I referred, appears to have escaped the notice of the Home Office and those who should have been deeply concerned with this subject. I believe that this Bill, and in particular the clause to which I referred, will make it compulsory for the authorities to see that every incentive possible is given to those who are taking part in research work of this description.
4.30 p.m.
Baroness HYLTON-FOSTER: My Lords, I should like to open my speech by adding my congratulations to those already extended to the noble Lord, Lord Adrian, upon his most thoughtful and informative speech, and I hope that it is but the forerunner of many more to come. I welcome the Bill for three reasons. The first is that I am connected with, and interested in, research into migraine, as well as blindness. Secondly, I believe that the Bill should curb the experiments done by irresponsible people. My third reason can be expressed in the words of Professor Hutt, Counsellor for Research, and Director of the Max Rayne Institute across the water at St. Thomas' Hospital. Professor Hutt hopes that the Bill will help to demonstrate to the general public that research workers, who are often denigrated by prejudiced groups, are

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responsible people who really care about welfare of the animals they use and now accept the need for restrictive legislation. The professor also points out that the great majority of animal experiments carried out in this country, particularly in the medical and veterinary field, really are necessary if we are to develop new techniques for the prevention and treatment of disease and therefore of suffering by mankind and by animals.
In a Stephen Paget Memorial lecture in 1978 Professor Paton of Oxford University pointed out that scientists had been represented as pursuing wanton curiosity or lacking in social responsibility. So he drew attention to the many forms of animal suffering, such as dying from disease and being killed for food. He also referred to the unwanted dogs and cats which are destroyed each year if they are lucky, and are not otherwise starved to death or dumped on a motorway. Yet only one animal experiment which leads to a future reduction of suffering is the one that is most bitterly attacked. It is not always understood that the use of animals in medical research is for the benefit of both human and veterinary medicine.
I must join with other noble Lords in thanking the noble Earl, Lord Halsbury, for his brilliant and most comprehensive speech and for introducing the Bill. I must tell him that the director of the Max Rayne Institute says that he and his team could find in the Bill no point of principle to which they could take exception, but they would like attention drawn to three clauses. With regard to Clause 7 they suggest that all breeders of laboratory animals should be inspected regularly for standards and disease control. In relation to Clause 8 they suggest that all licensees should receive a code of conduct and regulations with reference to animals used within the institutes. Clause 14 deals with the advisory committee, and the director and his team recommend that there should be more than one representative for the industries listed under sub-paragraph (2) of paragraph 1 of Schedule 3, and they would strongly press for the inclusion of an experienced chief animal superintendent (technologist) on the committee.
Would the noble Earl agree with these three points, and if he does, would he draw them to the attention of the Select
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Committee if the Bill is committed? Finally, would the Government agree that the enforcement of higher standards will inevitably lead to higher costs which in these days of financial stringency many universities and medical research institutes will not be able to meet? Therefore this will mean a reduction in medical research of the very best type. I should be grateful if the noble Lord, Lord Belstead, would indicate whether the Government would give sympathetic consideration to this problem.
4.34 p.m.
Lord HILL of LUTON: My Lords, I will occupy your Lordships' time only very briefly. I want to underline, if I may, one point. Before I do so may I join in the congratulations to the noble Lord, Lord Adrian, upon his magnificent maiden speech today. Inevitably he reminded me of the gentle, extraordinarily able man who was my director of studies some 55 years ago—Lord Adrian. We welcome the noble Lord; we enjoyed his speech greatly.
In connection with the Bill I want to underline the significance—to which the noble Earl, Lord Halsbury, referred in his opening speech—in the change from the word "experiment" to the word "procedure". It really is a significant change that there will be brought within the strengthened control, which other provisions of the Bill will secure, any procedure which in the absence of relief would cause distress, pain, or ill-health—and that is whether experimental or not. Those actions are brought within the ambit of this strengthened control, whereas today many of them not involving experiment are not within the ambit of the existing Act.
This point is of immense importance, and I emphasise it for the following reason. Some of your Lordships may have listened to the seven o'clock news this morming and a contribution that followed from a spokesman for the antivivisection people, who described the Bill as a "whitewash". I think that this must be answered now. Is it a whitewash, first, to strengthen the control over experimental work (the existing arena) and to extend that control to cover this extensive and growing world of action—not experiment— concerned with vaccines,

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biological products, testing, and insulin, which is of course likely to be much more used as the consumer protection movement grows? Is it whitewash to do those two things? Whereas one can understand those people who, for sentimental or other reasons, would deny other people the great benefits of animal experimentation, nevertheless they have no right to describe as a whitewash a Bill that does a very important thing in bringing the law up to date by substituting the word "experiment" with the word "procedure".
If the noble Earl, Lord Halsbury, is to be thanked for anything—and he is to be thanked considerably for the amount of work he has put into the Bill—it is for proposing that change of terminology which means so much protection to many more animals, and which is a very real advance, particularly because at the same time the control is strengthened so as to be even more effective than it is at present.
4.38 p.m.
Lord DAVIES of LEEK: My Lords, first, may I say how grateful I am to have been able to listen to the noble Lord, Lord Adrian, with his vast experience and knowledge. Secondly, I want to thank the noble Earl for bringing the Bill before this Chamber. It is time that a Government, whatever their political colour, took the responsibility rather than leave it to the enterprise of Members from either side of this House or of the other place to try to put the situation in order regarding protection of animals in laboratories.
I have to declare a little interest here. I have over the years been linked with the work of the pharmaceutical laboratories and I have watched pathologists at work. Consider the situation if one is trying to sell the result of work of such men as the noble Lord, Lord Adrian, and his noble father, and others overseas who may be seeking a licence to sell a drug in Japan, perhaps through the FDA—the Federal Drug Association. Whether the British pharmacologists, biologists or others like it or lump it there must be put forward a vast amount of evidence before the drug can be licensed in the country concerned, no matter how good the drug may be. There must be some animal
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pharmacology, there must be some work on animals. Whatever legislation this country may introduce, if we want to export the results of the brain work of our people in the fields of drugs, gastroenterology, et cetera, some work must first of all be done on animals, and if it is not done here it could be taken to other European countries where there is less concern for the safety of animals than there is in this country. Therefore, those vivisectionists who, like myself, also love animals should remember that if we push these experiments out of this country, which is famous and noteworthy throughout the world for its love of animals, they could go to parts of the world where, whatever action is done to animals, the thought of cruelty to them will be the last thing in the minds of the experimenters and results will be the first. If one looks at the distinguished men and women—and I know some of them—who have contributed to this Bill, one can only pay tribute to the hours and hours of thought and discussion which have gone into the production of it.
My Lords, when we talk about the Littlewood Committee's report, I should like to point out that in 1976 the figure was given of some 5½ million animals having been used; and I should also like those of us who are interested in the prevention of cruelty to animals not to be so anxious and self-righteous about it. To my mind, the Bramwell Committee's report on the factory farming of animals showed that that is much more cruel than the gentle work which has sometimes to be done with animals in a laboratory. Anybody who has been to a modern chicken farm, where millions of chickens are living with their necks between bits of wire, and who have seen these neurotic animals, will, I am sure, agree—and it is now moving into the realm of pig farming and calf farming. Let us stop this attitude that it is only the scientists in the laboratories who are being wantonly cruel to animals. People who speak like that know nothing about what it costs to set up, from the pathological department right through, an experiment on animals. No scientist would have the background for simple, wanton research. Anyway, all research has to have approval—and it has to have the approval of men and women in a profession which has to be trusted,

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because it has the know-how so far as we laymen are concerned. Consequently, let me say that more work has been done to try to meet some of the feelings of the Littlewood Committee as shown in their report on laboratory animals than has been done in the field of agriculture as a result of the Bramwell Report on factory farming.
I want to thank my noble friend Lord Janner. I was fascinated by his story of the placenta. We have not got the time to do it now, but perhaps at the Committee stage or at some other time some noble Lord in the field of medicine or in this field, who knows about the work which is done on this matter—there must be some noble Lord who does can—tell us whether there is any reality in it. If there is reality in it, then I say to my noble friend Lord Janner that I am quite certain the scientists and others in Britain will be among the first to recognise the truth of this statement.
Lord JANNER: My Lords, I quite agree. I hope they will read the book which has been produced, which contains very full information about it, but I do not want my noble friend to think for one moment that I was in any way deprecating those who are in the scientific world.
Lord DAVIES of LEEK: My Lords, my noble friend missed my opening sentence. I was congratulating him. In fact, I used the words, "Thank you". My Lords, I must not speak for too long—and I have an apology to make to the House. It is not my custom to leave the Chamber if I have spoken in a debate, but I have a commitment with the Inter-Parliamentary Union. I shall stay here as long as I can, and I hope that perhaps the debate will be finished before I have to go. Let me take just another couple of minutes.
There are regulations and Acts which, whatever we may say at the present moment, imply that animals have to be used; and they require manufacturers, those of us in the pharmaceutical industry and others to let the Home Office know, and to let other authorities know, what is being done. There are the Medicines Act 1968, the Health and Safety at Work Act, the Consumer Protection Act, the
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cosmetic products regulations of 1976, and the regulations concerning the safe use of poisonous chemicals on farms. I am picking the noble Earl's brains now; he knows that. Then there are the 1978 regulations concerning approved products for farmers and growers, the proposed scheme for the notification of toxic properties in substances, the Food and Drugs Act 1955, two of the Pesticides (Safety Precautions) Schemes 1971—and so one could go on.
My Lords, I am about to sit down. We talk about Europe, and what we might do there. I do not think we have to wait for this. To cut my speech right short now, I hope that this House will approve and give a Second Reading to this Bill, so that we may have a Select Committee to give a lead and produce a piece of work which will do well for Britain and also (since this Government are interested in prosperity) for the drug industry and the research of our great medical, scientific and biological people who, for years, have given a lead to the world in the cure of diseases.
4.47 p.m.
Lord CROSS of CHELSEA: My Lords, until recently I was the chairman of the committee set up by the Home Secretary to advise him on problems arising under the 1876 Cruelty to Animals Act, so perhaps your Lordships will bear with me while I say a few words and they will be very few—on this Bill. In 1876 there were comparatively few animal experiments, and the main problem which faced the legislature 100 years ago was that of vivisection, the performance of surgical operations on unanaesthetised animals in furtherance of physiological knowlege. Today, the main problem, I think, is quite a different one. It is that created by the need to test for safety new substances—medicines, industrial chemicals, pesticides, weed killers, detergents and so on—which are constantly being devised and made available to the public. Nearly all countries—this country, the EEC countries and most developed foreign countries—have legislation which requires the use of animals to test the safety of new substances, and under that legislation, day in and day out, millions upon millions of rats and mice are being used for safety testing. The problem, of

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course, is to strike a fair balance between the safeguarding of the consumer and the limitation on the number of animals used.
My Lords, I would emphasise to your Lordships that this is not a United Kingdom problem. It is a worldwide problem; and, as the noble Earl who opened this debate emphasised, it is one in which this country, with its great experience of animal protection legislation, can lead the way—and I am sure I hope it will. But, of course, legislation in this field is something of a hot potato. There is necessarily, I think, a certain suspicion, or there has been, between, on the one hand, scientists and doctors and those predominantly concerned with the protection of the consumer, and, on the other hand, those predominantly concerned with the welfare of animals. Of course, those classes overlap; many doctors and scientists are animal lovers, and many people who are members of animal welfare organisations use medicines and detergents.
I think myself—this is the strong impression I gained in my work as chairman of the committee—that, based on a greater knowledge of the facts, there is gradually growing a greater mutual understanding on both sides than there used to be. That was borne, in on me as I heard the evidence in the inquiry the committee made into the LD50 test some months ago. But the time is undoubtedly ripe for a new Bill and thin, Bill is certainly an enormous improvement on the existing one. Speaking for myself, I should have liked to see it a Government measure. I do not think that the noble Earl will dissent from me on that. But assuming that the Government are not going to produce a Bill of their own, I would invite your Lordships to give this Bill a Second Reading, trusting to having it amended in certain respects in Committee.
My Lords, there are just one or two points of detail on the Bill that I would refer to. The first concerns the composition of the advisory committee which is to be built into the statute. It is not like the existing committee, which is not statutory at all. The Bill makes no express provision for the inclusion among the members of the committee of members representative of animal welfare organisations. I am not sure that that is wise. Certainly, in our deliberations on the LD50
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test we were greatly helped by having with us as an observer Mr. Jordan, a member of the Committee for the Reform of Animal Experimentation. Obviously, it would be inappropriate to put on to the committee a convinced abolitionist, a man convinced on principle of the wrongful nature of animal experimentation; and obviously such a man would not willingly serve on the committee. But I hope that the Select Committee, if this Bill goes to one, will consider the possibility of including members of animal welfare organisations on the committee.
The second matter is rather more personal. The Bill provides that the chairman of the committee should be a legally-qualified gentleman. In a general way I am all in favour of "jobs for the boys" even if the job, like this one, is unpaid; but I am not sure that it is by any means necessary that the chairman of the advisory committee should be a lawyer. I was very glad to hear that Mrs. Warnock, the Oxford philosopher, who has been a member of our committee, was prepared to take my place as chairman of it when it was a non-statutory body. That is the second point which I hope that the Committee may take into account. I commend this Bill to your Lordships.
4.53 p.m.
Lord FERRIER: My Lords, I am a layman but it so happens that I have had much to do with animals used in medical research and I have taken part in a number of debates in this House over the years—to such an extent that I feel justified in adding to the congratulations which have been showered on the noble Earl on the result of his expertise and enterprise and that of his team which produced this Bill which is praised as it should be. I think, on what I have heard, that I can assume that the House will give the Bill a Second Reading and refer it to a Select Committee; but that will not be the end of it for there are plenty of problems with other Bills in the other House, problems connected with the Common Market and the like and we shall no doubt hear from the noble Lord, Lord Houghton of Sowerby, about other projects which are in his mind. But I do not propose to refer to any specific part of the Bill for that is a Committee matter.

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I intend to detain your Lordships for only a very short time to comment on the situation in general terms. First I should like to congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Adrian, on his maiden speech. He outlined a number of directions in which man's life is related to animals, and I should have liked to hear him add the word "companionship" in terms of animals. I have just been to the Kipling lunch and I think of his poem about "the firstest friend". He said:
"I love Binky my dog because
He is the same as the first friend was
And I am the man in the cave."
The problem has an emotional element, thanks largely to the divisive and sometimes hysterical campaigns by organisations in the anti-vivisection field whose sponsors' heart-felt sincerity must be respected although, alas! they allow their hearts to overrule their heads. The noble Lord, Lord Hill of Luton, brought that out in his reference to this morning's broadcast to which I shall refer again. Talking of the anti-vivisection people, with their substantial financial resources, they inevitably employ personnel whose merit in their employers' eyes rests on the stridency with which they "sing for their suppers." That is something that we must bear in mind increasingly today. It applies to trade unions but that is another matter. There are people employed to say these things.
Those of your Lordships who may have listened to Radio 4 at 7.15 this morning, to which the noble Lord, Lord Hill of Luton, has referred, will understand what I mean. I thought the BBC were interviewing someone on the Bill. I thought that their interviewer put up a very moderate and sensible case for the Bill in the face of the criticisms that were made and he dealt with the "anti's" strident and misleading condemnation of it. This brings me to the single point that I want to make. One result of the Bill, if it becomes law, will be to enable the Home Office to collect and publish statistics in a more generous way and in a more accessible form than at present. I cite this instance. I was in the woods the other day collecting chanterelles and wood hedgehogs—which I had not heard of but ate with relish. I took a book on fungi from my shelf and it opened at "Moulds". In the middle of the page
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was a description of Florey's original experiment, in respect of penicillin. I sent my name immediately to the noble Earl, Lord Halsbury, and said that I should like to speak. Your Lordships may recall that with the small pickle of penicillin that was available to Florey he inoculated 50 mice with streptococci and treated 25 of them with penicillin. Twenty-four of these survived and all the others died. No one, I think, can say that that was a waste of animal life. This, we know, is the sort of thing that happens. This experiment of his led to the saving of thousands of lives in the war and continues today into the millions.
Was the experiment necessary? I leave it to your Lordships to decide that. Was this one experiment or was it fifty? Here I am back to statistics. I think I am right in saying that at present it would be 50; but there are various other angles on this which are very interesting. Were the mice anaesthetised'? Of course not. If one turns to the Home Office publication Experiments on living animals: Statistics 1977, at page 18 one sees under the heading Rabbit, Applications of substance to the eye: 14,897 experiments. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Hill of Luton, who congratulated the noble Earl, Lord Halsbury, on pressing the use of the word "procedures" rather than "experiments" Ten animals and 10 control animals used in one test would be reported as 20 experiments. One animal used 10 times in 10 consecutive experiments which all gave negative answers would be reported as 10 experiments. On Page 18 at column 6 the returns are 14,897 experiments on rabbits used for testing the application of substances applied to the eye. This figure could relate to anything between 14,897 rabbits used once each with a positive result, and one rabbit used 14,897 times with a negative result in each case. The truth would lie somewhere between these extremes, but not in any discoverable way. This is indicative of the way in which I hope to look forward to see statistics turned out when the noble Earl's Bill is an Act and the law of the land.
This is where I cross swords with the "anti's". They know perfectly well that many of their accusations based on current figures are grossly misleading because the figures are misleading or capable of misinterpretation. If they do not, then they ought to. This Bill will go

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a long way to clear matters up. I deplore the divisive and accusatory terms in which these campaigns are waged. It was by chance only that I found myself concerned with the use of animal procedures. First, as a boy in a physiological laboratory under a well known research physiologist; and, later in my life, as chairman of a group manufacturing pharmaceutical products with our own animal laboratory. I mention this in order to refute the accusation implicit in too much of the "anti's" material, that researchers are, ipso facto, monsters of cruelty. They are not. The reverse is the case. This point was made by the noble Baroness, Lady Hylton-Foster. Individuals, with very few exceptions, are not callous. They respect life. Why else are they researching? Compassion and the love of animals does not reside on one side of the divide which has been created and none on the other.
Let us strive to press on with this Bill. It is far ahead of anything else that has been done. The speech of the noble and learned Lord who preceded me was most impressive on this direction. What more really can be said? Let us try to press on with it. It is far ahead of anything that has been done. It reflects the greatest benison on the noble Earl and his team. I repeat the word that he used in his own speech when talking about compassion. He referred to his work as "a labour of love by a dedicated team". So far ahead indeed is this Bill that one appreciates how wounding it must be to those who wish that they had thought of it before, or thought of it themselves. That is why I said early in my speech that there are problems ahead with various Bills in various directions. I do not think anything more meticulous or more well informed is going to emerge. The Bill is a huge step forward and I hope that the House will give it a Second Reading and commit it to a Select Committee.
5.4 p.m.
Lord DE CLIFFORD: My Lords, before I address your Lordships, I should like to offer an apology to the noble Earl for not being present when he made his speech, and to the other noble Lords whom I unfortunately did not hear because of the rather inclement weather that I encountered on my way here. Having said that, I shall not detain your Lordships unduly. It would be ill of me
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to make comments on this Bill, not having heard what other noble Lords have said. Any remarks I may make are purely my own views.
The noble Earl and I on a number of occasions have disagreed quite strongly on the subject of animal experimentations. When I obtained his Bill during the recess I was most surprised to find that I supported him practically the whole way through. This is the first really good attempt that we have had—and when I say "good" that is a masterpiece of understatement—at producing a Bill to amend the 1876 Act. The whole of the administration of the 1876 Act, until fairly recently, was clothed in the most appalling fog.
One of the things about which I agree most strongly with my noble friend Lord Ferrier is the totally incomprehensible statistics which have been produced. One of the reasons why there is such tremendous heat against animal experimentation is the enormous numbers—running into millions—of experiments being carried out on animals. The bulk of those experiments were probably justified; perhaps a lot were not. The trouble is that those of us who are on the periphery of these things are presented with only the very worst aspects. One never sees anything being pushed forward to suggest that certain scientific experiments on animals have been made which are going to advance everything for the benefit of mankind. But if one experiment goes wrong there is noise like the trumpets of Hell blowing to welcome the noble Earl, Lord Halsbury. That is wrong, my Lords.
I do not like experiments on animals. My personal feeling is automatically against them. But I hope that I am one of those who can see that these are necessary, and that, up to a point, we have to have them. Many advances which have been made would never have been made without experiments. I am not saying that I agree with the methods on occasions, but I can see that experiments have to take place. I say to the noble Earl: I thank you for taking the steps forward which you have.
I strongly support the noble Earl in moving that this Bill be committed to a Select Committee. I have heard of this House—particularly when we had another

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Government—having long hot summers; this Select Committee is going to have a long hot winter. The Committee is going to be exposed to flames of indignation and wrath day after day. I hope that those selected to sit on it will have a great deal of resistance to pressure, because they are going to suffer it. Apart from that, there are a few small items with which I disagree: some drafting; some minor matters of principle. I heartily support the noble Earl's Bill, and I trust that your Lordships will give it a Second Reading. I wish it the hest of luck in the Select Committee, if it is so committed.
5.10 p.m.
Lord RICHARDSON: My Lords, like the noble Lord, Lord Hill of Luton, I was a student of the late Lord Adrian and formed an admiration and a love for him which was very commonly held. It was thus with great delight that I listened to the enormous success of his son when he made his maiden speech this afternoon. My pleasure at this, however, was considerably muted by the fact that he said many of the things that I had wished to say and said them so much better than I would have if I had attempted to say them. So I must confine myself strictly to matters that he did not stress although he mentioned them.
One, I think, is very important—and in this I speak from experience—which is that this debate and this discussion is coming at a time when the Council of Europe is considering the legislation concerning these matters throughout Europe; and several noble Lords have made this point. Why I say I have some experience of this is that the first of the Directives directed towards the professions from the EEC was concerned with my own profession. It was extremely clear that the long experience of organisation of education in this country had a major effect on the tenor of those Directives. In fact, the assessment of sufficiency for medical student training would have been expressed entirely quantitatively had it not been for the introduction of the qualitative element by people representing this country. I believe the same is true in the postgraduate field where, again, we are well organised and know what we think. If in this country we can know what we think and know it in a modern setting—not just
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as it was 103 years ago in its starting—this Bill will have done a very great service to this country.
The noble Earl, Lord Halsbury, made very clearly a point about the sponsors for those who should hold licences. I am one of the 10 presidents of institutions who has the task of acting as a second sponsor and, like the late Lord Platt, I find it is intensely difficult and indeed invidious, because I do not know enough of the individuals and sometimes of the subject. I have to search my knowledge and try to find out, but I do not believe I always do this satisfactorily and I know that another president of another institution holds exactly the same views. In the future those who are sponsors not only will, in the one instance, know the individual and his work but, in the other instance, will know the relevance and importance of the experiments to be done.
We have heard this afternoon about emotion. It is not entirely on the side of those who would deplore animal experiments. It is held very strongly indeed by doctors who have to care for patients and who have the greatest and most intense gratitude when there is a specific remedy they can apply, and who have a sense of extreme pain that would amount to terrible anger and resentment if, when they cannot find a remedy that can be applied, the reason for their not finding it is a failure to experiment because of a false logic and a lack of balance as to the relative importance of man and his suffering in relation to that of animals, however greatly one might wish the animals not to suffer.
Mention has been made, as was inevitable in this debate, of penicillin. The experiments that the noble Lord, Lord Ferrier, has just told us about were relevant to penicillin. It so happens that last Sunday in the Central Synagogue in Great Portland Street there was held a memorial service for the last to die of the immortal triumvirate of Florey, Fleming and Sir Ernst Chain, and the Chief Rabbi, in a most moving memorial address, said of genius that there had been Darwin and Marx and Freud and Einstein. Then he said:
"Which of those has been responsible for saving the lives of millions and millions of men?"—Sir Ernst Chain

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He went on to say he did not think there was a single person in that vast building full of people who did not owe something to that discovery, either directly or indirectly. I believe this to be true of the Members of your Lordships' House. The emotion is not entirely on the side of the anti-vivisectionists.
5.16 p.m.
Lord AUCKLAND: My Lords, the debt of gratitude which this House owes to the noble Earl, Lord Halsbury, for instigating this debate this afternoon is very much more considerable than many people think, because we have had Bills, quite sincerely meant, from the other side of the spectrum but nothing in those Bills have ever given any real alternative to saving lives and to decreasing the numbers of deaths and disablements through malignant disease. Now at last we have a Bill which we hope will in due course reach the Statute Book, if not in its present form, in something like its present form, because it has very much merit in it.
Most of those who have contributed to this debate have themselves been distinguished doctors and scientists. I cannot classify myself in either category, although for many years my family and I—as I have had reason to mention before to your Lordships—have been involved in sitting on hospital committees of various kinds and have witnessed the use of drugs which have been able to be used, very largely through experiments on animals. I should like in this connection to add my own congratulations to the very erudite maiden speech of the noble Lord, Lord Adrian, whose father was a distinguished and much respected scientist who contributed most valuably to your Lordships' House.
The Bill has the merit of setting out with considerable clarity its aims. It places considerable obligations upon those who conduct these experiments. I think that is a very important point to remember. We were regaled in some of the popular Press recently with some quite loathsome experiments on animals in a certain Oriental country—experiments which would never be allowed here under the legislation at present in force and certainly not under the legislation which the noble Earl, himself a most distinguished scientist, has put in his Bill.
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Of course, this is an emotive subject. Any death of a pet, particularly a dog, cat or rabbit, is a matter for tragedy; but it is something like 0.25 per cent. of dogs which are used in experiments in this country. But let us get things into perspective. How many dogs get thrown out of cars on to a motorway because they are unwanted by families? I must declare an interest here, as we have a dog which was obtained as a small puppy from a lady who specialises in dogs which have come from the RSPCA and which, as puppies, have been ill-treated in some form or other. We have given homes to several such dogs which I am pleased to say have all, so far, lived to a fairly ripe age. We like to think that that is because they have been well looked after.
How many dogs, cats and other animals are kicked, have things thrown at them or have poison indiscriminately put down for them? We hear all too little of this from those who criticise what the noble Earl, Lord Halsbury, is seeking to do in his Bill. Of course, no legislation of this kind can be above criticism and no care can be too great to ensure that suffering does not take place. I think that the obligation to put all animals used for these experiments to sleep afterwards, though regrettable in many ways, is essential to make sure that no suffering takes place.
I especially welcome Clause 5 of the Bill, but I wonder whether my noble friend who will be replying for the Home Office, and the noble Earl would consider making this power mandatory, rather than permissive; in other words, substituting "shall" for "may". However, that is a matter for the Select Committee, if that is where the Bill goes. I believe that power to be most essential. Also, it should be extended to the kennels where these dogs are kept, particularly if they are some distance away from where the experiments take place. Similarly, the power in the very important Clause 7 should be mandatory, if it is not already so. I may be doing the noble Earl an injustice in asserting that it is not mandatory, but my reading of the clause is that at the moment it is a discretionary power. One reads stories about the transportation of animals in rather different circumstances, and this is something which is vital.

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It is obviously very difficult to obtain figures of people who have suffered from conditions such as asthma—and, since I suffer from sinus trouble from time to time, I can speak with some knowledge here—arthritis and certain cancers, who would never have seen the light of day for more than a few months or years of their lives, had it not been for these experiments. I have not witnessed many such experiments. I have witnessed one in this country and another at a well-known pharmaceutical company in Antwerp. The experiments were carried out under conditions of absolutely maximum cleanliness, hygiene and skill and there was no question of the animal being ill-treated. There was also no question of a show being put on, merely because several Members of Parliament went along in an official capacity.
I believe that this is a Bill which is well worthy of going to a Select Committee, particularly in view of the possible implications of EEC legislation. If we do not have a Bill such as this, two things will happen. First, animals will suffer very much more than they do now at the hands of all kinds of cheapjack experimenters working for profit, and, secondly, more animals will find themselves abandoned by those who do not know how to look after them. It may, in sonic cases, be a choice between evils. One can understand people's feelings when animals are used on experiments and, in the long run, have to die. But there has been very convincing proof in speeches this afternoon by those who really know and who have taken part in these experiments that much human life has been saved and that much remains to be saved in the future if these perfectly ethical experiments can go on with the Home Office inspectorate being ever vigilant to make sure that no malpractice takes place.
5.27 p.m.
Lord HOUGHTON of SOWERBY: My Lords, the debate that we have had today has been more than a discussion on the Second Reading of a Bill. I believe that it is the opening of a long and, I hope, fruitful debate on this difficult subject which is likely to continue in Parliament for some time. As an indication of public concern on this question, I would remind your Lordships' House that the
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three major political parties referred to this subject in their respective election manifestoes, and that is a clear sign that public concern about this question has made an impact on political opinion.
I think that we all owe a deep sense of gratitude to the noble Earl, Lord Halsbury, for his accomplished presentation of this Bill to us this afternoon. I have been grateful to him for a long time for his confidence and reports, as occasion arose, on the progress that he was making with this Bill. I say to the noble Lord the Minister opposite that, if he spends half as much time on a Government Bill on this subject as has been spent by the noble Earl, Lord Halsbury, then at the end of the day we shall have accomplished a fine legislative change.
The Government themselves have promised to introduce a Bill to update the 1876 Act, but now we have a Bill by the noble Earl, Lord Halsbury, in this House; we are to expect the Second Reading in another place on 16th November of a private Member's Bill introduced by Mr. Peter Fry on the same subject, and currently we have under consideration the draft convention of the Council of Europe, which is also about experimentation on living animals. So after a long period when there has been little happening on this front we have three new elements in the situation, and I think it will be of interest to the House to learn from the Minister how Her Majesty's Government see the legislative programme, the strategy for dealing with this complex problem during this next Session of Parliament.
The noble Earl, Lord Halsbury, will probably find that he is a kind of pathfinder for the Government. He is leading the way in thought on this subject. If the Bill is referred to a Select Committee, as I hope it will be, I think that the evidence which will be given to it will be of great value in considering the later stages of discussion and constructive thought on the subject.
I happen to be the chairman of a committee for the reform of animal experimentation, and in the course of today's debate I have not heard the kind of speeches on this Bill that I hear from my friends in the animal welfare movement. The debate has been one of tranquillity. The voice of sanity has

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prevailed throughout. But it takes more than the voice of sanity to make the world go round. It takes the voice of passion, of deeply held conviction, of deeply stirred conscience. That is what we shall be listening to in the weeks and months to come on this and other measures for reform in this field. And we must not despise that. We must take account of the fact that public opinion is stirred more by emotional reactions to a matter of this kind than by the laboratory approach to the use of animals for research and similar purposes.
In my own work in recent months I have missed the late Lord Platt whose vast experience and moderate counsel on this difficult subject was of great benefit to me. I am quite sure that he would have taken part in the debate today had he been spared to comment on my noble friend's Bill. This Bill is to be welcomed for the good it does, which is not inconsiderable. It incorporates practically all the recommendations of the Littlewood Committee which have been neglected for so long because they needed legislative change. The opportunity has now come to incorporate them in the Bill.
The Bill strengthens the conditions under which licences are granted to persons who are suitably qualified. It requires the limits of their use of animals for particular purposes to be clearly laid down. The Bill improves laboratory practices; it imposes conditions for the alleviation of suffering and stress; and in many ways it seeks to make the life of the laboratory animal more tolerable. That is all to the good. However, I see nothing in the Bill which offers any hope of reducing the numbers of animals which pour into our laboratories happily alive but which come out of them miserably dead. I see nothing in the Bill to restrict the use of animals and to get the numbers down, which the leaders of both the Conservative and the Labour Parties have publicly declared to be their wish.
The Home Secretary can, admittedly, use his discretion under the procedures of the Bill to put the brake on practices which would give rise to public indignation if they became known or which would he an objectionable abuse of animal life. However, I cannot put too much confidence in Home Secretaries to use their discretion in Bills of this kind because the
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record of successive Home Secretaries on the Cruelty to Animals Act 1876 is quite deplorable. I know of no Act of Parliament which has been converted so freely by successive Ministers into a piece of elastic as the Cruelty to Animals Act 1876.
That is why I think that we must examine closely the two watchdogs in the public interest with which the Bill deals. One is the inspectorate and the other is the advisory committee. The inspectorate on the one hand and the advisory committee on the other ace the representatives of the public interest here. Clearly the public have an interest in what experimenters are doing. They are doing a great deal at public expense, anyway, and they are doing it under immunity from prosecution under the general criminal laws against cruelty to animals.
To the extent that cruelty or suffering and pain are inflicted on animals in laboratory work, it is done under licence. If it were not done under licence, it would probably be the subject of criminal prosecution. Indeed, not so long ago there was a case in Scotland where, had an experiment been carried out under the protection of the 1876 Act it would not have been open to prosecution; but since the experiment was conducted outside the protection of that Act the person concerned was prosecuted and convicted under the Protection of Animals Act (Scotland) 1912. Therefore those who are doing this work under the protection of the 1876 Act have an obligation to pay attention to public concern. That is why they must submit themselves to be monitored and supervised where suffering may prove to be unavoidable.
The inspectors are there to see that the law and the regulations are complied with. The Bill strengthens their position, and that is to be welcomed. However, they are not able by themselves to provide the Home Secretary with all the advice he needs to exercise the discretion which the Bill would give to him. That is where I think the advisory committee conies in.
Several references have been made by noble Lords to the composition and work of the advisory committee. In a very well informed and interesting speech, the noble Lord, Lord Adrian, referred

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to the advisory committee. Then a few moments ago we heard from the noble Lord, Lord Cross of Chelsea, who until recently was chairman of the advisory committee. The late Lord Platt was a member of the advisory committee and complained bitterly on more than one occasion about the infrequent use made of the committee by Home Secretaries of the day. That is why I am most anxious that the advisory committee provided for in this Bill should not only be statutory but also should have responsibilities and powers of initiative of its own. It should not be dependent wholly upon the call of the Home Secretary to examine a particular matter upon which he needs advice. It must be free. It must have the powers of a watch dog in the public interest.
The present Home Secretary has to some extent forestalled the provisions contained in the Bill relating to the future terms of reference and the composition of the advisory committee. In an announcement made a little while ago the Home Secretary appointed a new chairman—who is not to be one learned in the law, as the noble Lord, Lord Cross of Chelsea, pointed out—and he had fresh proposals to make regarding the terms of reference, which to some extent are satisfactory. However, there is still, unfortunately, a problem as to the composition of the advisory committee: who shall be on it, what kind of background they shall come from and what kind of interest one is to expect them to reflect in the work of the advisory committee.
This is a most difficult question. One can either have a completely neutral, non-professional committee or one can have a committee which has upon it those of experience and those with points of view upon particular aspects of the problem—professional, medical, animal welfare and so forth—and I think we have not finally resolved how the new advisory committee is to be composed. But undoubtedly we want to see on that committee a few intelligent laymen. After all, they are the representatives of the public interest. The public are lay people, but in a democracy their voice is as important, if not more important, than that of more sophisticated and well informed people. We cannot leave all these things to the
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experts. Your Lordships know as well as I do that very often experts, left to themselves, become dangerous people. Some of them even go "dotty" and they require the commonsense of the layman to keep them on the lines of rational thought and activity. That is the element that we want to see on the advisory committee.
The Littlewood Committee understood this when in paragraph 238 of their report they said:
"The role of legislation is to prohibit objectionable activities, to encourage humane practices and to provide for the aceountability to the public of all concerned".
My Lords, that is the keynote of legislation and that must be found in full measure in this Bill. I think that an examination of it will show that it has to be tested against that particular criterion. I strongly support the Motion to refer this Bill to a Select Committee. I support the Second Reading of the Bill, also, not because it is the final word, not because it reflects all that I would wish to see, but because its great value lies in the fact that it is the product of deep thought and consideration by scientific opinion. In particular, it might be said that it represents what the Research Defence Society feels able to accept and that is an important guide in the consideration of this matter.
If we have a Select Committee, I think it will help to receive evidence; not only to invite it but to summon it and let us hear the constructive proposals of those who have much to say on all sides of this argument, and in particular the animal welfare organisations. When animal welfare organisations have carried their message and their propaganda to the point of attracting the serious attention of political parties, the close attention of Government and of Parliament, who want to reform and change the law, then I believe the animal welfare organisations have a clear public duty to come forward with constructive proposals to enable all parties to arrive at an agreed conclusion. That is really what all this should be about and the noble Earl, Lord Halsbury, has started the process of that opportunity.
This is the first time for many years that we have had the opportunity of embarking on such an important phase of consideration of this matter. I know, as

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my noble friend Lord Davies of Leek said, that there are other worries in the field of animal welfare, but we cannot do everything at once and we cannot put one noble cause in competition with another. I think we have to deal with those things upon which we feel deeply, upon which we believe that we have the knowledge and conviction to advance the matter further and to try to get progress in that way.
The noble Lord, Lord Adrian, and other noble Lords have given their philosophical judgment upon the use of animals for experimental purposes. This is not the moment to open the moral argument, but so far as I am concerned—and I speak only for myself—I do not believe that we have any moral right to do these things to animals. I do not believe that man has any divine or moral right of dominion over other species. Personally I can never accept the doctrine of the sanctity of human life from those who regard animal life as being freely expendable and who will subordinate other living things to the greed and the arrogance and the selfishness of mankind. That is a personal point of view, but I do not let it blind me to other considerations and other points of view. Since we have to get a consensus if we are to get legislation, if we are to get public opinion behind us, if we are to get the response from those who are working in the laboratories, we must all try to come together and get a code and a standard of conduct which will be accepted by all of us as the best possible method of going forward in all the circumstances. Therefore, I hope the House will give the Bill a Second Reading and will adopt the Motion to refer it to a Select Committee, because I believe that the evidence which that Select Committee can obtain will be of enormous value in the later stages of this Bill.
5.47 p.m.
Lord SOMERS: My Lords, I had not intended to speak tonight and I hope your Lordships will bear with me for a few moments. The noble Lord, Lord Houghton of Sowerby, to whom I always listen with respect, particularly on this subject, regretted the lack of passion in today's debate. I think I may count myself as a modest representative of the animal welfare world: I am the president of the Council of Justice to Animals, I
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am chief patron of the Crusade against all Cruelty to Animals. I am also a patron of a trust which owns a large dogs' home, but I have always found that where one gets passionate defence of animals it is practically invariably from those who are either incapable of seeing both sides of the question or who do not want to see both sides. I believe that the only way in which to make any progress at all is to look at it from a perfectly balanced point of view and to see the pros and cons of the entire subject.
I owe a great deal to the medical profession. In fact if it were not for them I should not be standing here tonight and anything that can further their knowledge I am perfectly prepared to support. I can only say that I entirely support my noble friend's Bill and I sincerely hope that it will go to a Select Committee.
5.49 p.m.
Lord BELSTEAD: My Lords, animal experimentation is a complex and highly specialised subject. It also raises moral and social issues which are by no means the exclusive concern of the scientists. I think there are few other scientific activities which give rise to such strong instinctive reactions towards suffering to which many, in fact all, of your Lordships have given expression in the speeches which have been made today. With over 100 years' experience behind us in the working of the Cruelty to Animals Act of 1876, and in view of the developments which have taken place during that time in the fields of scientific research and animal welfare, it is clearly right that the most serious consideration should be given to placing on the Statute Book legislation which takes those developments fully into account. So our thanks are more than usually due to the promoter of a Private Members' Bill: to the noble Earl, Lord Halsbury, today, not only for introducing what I think is only the second attempt completely to replace the 1876 Act but also because by introducing this important Bill the noble Earl has attracted to the debate many of your Lordships who have a close knowledge of the working of the existing legislation. May I join all other noble Lords in welcoming particularly the speech which was made by the noble Lord, Lord Adrian. In fact the noble Lord has been frequently a patient listener in your

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Lordships' House and I welcome so much that he decided to come and speak on this subject today, a subject on which he has unrivalled qualifications to speak.
If I may say so, the noble Earl's speech and the speeches of other noble Lords have shown that legislation on this subject must maintain a proper balance between the legitimate requirements of science and industry and those of animal welfare. As I think all noble Lords who have spoken in this debate will know better than I do, the basic objective of the 1876 Act, which has continued substantially unchanged to the present day, is to regulate and restrict experiments calculated to cause pain in living vertebrate animals.
It is against that background that the most recent independent review of the working of the Act was carried out by the Littlewood Committee between 1963 and 1965. Perhaps I could just remind your Lordships in passing that the Committee found that the Act had been generally effective in preventing objectionable activities, in encouraging humane practices and in providing for the accountability to the public of all concerned. The members of the Committee concluded, however, that in what were then recent years the provisions of the Act had not matched up to modern scientific and technological requirements and that administration had not kept pace with scientific advance.
The Committee made 83 detailed recommendations. As the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Leek, said, actions were then taken to try and put at any rate parts of the report into effect. Over 20 of the recommendations were in fact implemented administratively, either wholly or in part, with consequent improvement to the effectiveness of the controls. The most obvious examples are the appointment of lay members to the Advisory Committee and the re-organisation which took place of the Inspectorate.
Perhaps I could just pick up the point which the noble Lord, Lord Houghton, kindly made in his speech: that on the 25th July the Government announced a reconstitution of the Advisory Committee with a new name, the Advisory Committee on Animal Experiments, with wider terms
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of reference and with a new chairman, following the period of service which the noble Lord, Lord Cross of Chelsea, had most kindly given to the work of that committee. The noble and learned Lord gave us advice as he saw it on how the committee could develop in the future with regard to both composition and function. Lord Adrian in his speech also referred to the Advisory Committee, as also did the noble Lord, Lord Houghton, and I do assure all three noble Lords and the rest of your Lordships that I will draw the attention of my right honourable friend the Home Secretary to what has been said not only generally in this debate but specifically on that particular subject.
Some 10 recommendations from Little-wood called for no specific action in that they endorsed provisions in existing legislation or in existing practice. Of the remainder of the Littlewood recommendations some 20 needed legislation. May I just say that the noble Earl, Lord Halsbury, has, I think, every right to claim, as he did in his speech, that his Bill aims to deal with those remaining recommendations of Littlewood which needed legislation. The Government have also had this in mind and this was why at the General Election our Manifesto undertook to introduce legislation updating the Act. When the noble Baroness, Lady Hylton-Foster, asks me about higher standards and what the Government would do to commit themselves to higher standards in this field, my answer is that updated legislation would be designed to continue to enable improvement in standards of animal experiments along with strengthened control for animal welfare.
As the noble Lord, Lord Adrian, mentioned in his speech, however, a United Kingdom delegation is currently engaged, in full consultation with the animal welfare organisations and with the research and professional interests, in discussions in the Council of Europe on a draft convention to protect animals used for experimental purposes. In fact the delegation only returned from the latest round of work last weekend. I understand that the overall shape of the convention is becoming clearer, but there remains a good deal of work to be done on the contents. I hope that after listening to Lord Richardson's professional testimony

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to the influence which the medical profession in this country has had on EEC Directives your Lordships will allow me to assert that I believe we are playing a leading part in these discussions on the European Convention, and this is a tribute to this country's long experience in this field. Although I cannot commit the Government at this stage, I very much hope that, not least through United Kingdom influence, a convention is going to emerge to which we shall have no difficulty in being able to give our assent. This would in itself almost inevitably mean that the Government would be required to bring in new legislation to meet the pro-visions of the convention.
In case your Lordships think that this is simply an excuse for saying that there-fore the Government are not prepared to do anything at the present moment, may I just explain the effect of what I have just tried to say. It seems likely that the Council of Europe convention will establish general principles of control while preserving a measure of flexibility as to method, so that each of the contracting countries would have a certain amount of freedom in adopting its own preferred control system. But really it is too early to be sure that United Kingdom legislation produced now would not need amendment in the light of the convention in its final form. There are several key issues which will receive further study in Strasbourg.
If I may give one concrete example, the latest draft of the convention covers the breeding and supply of laboratory animals, which is beyond the scope of the 1876 Act. In order to comply with the convention, therefore, we would have to provide for controls in this particular area. I recognise absolutely that the Bill of the noble Earl contains a provision about this, but with respect it is a very general provision embodied in Clause 7, and I think it is too early to say whether further provision would be needed to meet the requirements of the convention as the convention emerges in its final form. This consideration applies not only to the question of controls on the breeding and supply of animals. If I may weary your Lordships with one other example, it applies also to all aspects of animal experimentation which are to be covered by the convention.
Here is another example. The draft convention as it stands recognises as a
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legitimate goal of experimentation "the improvement of life of man or animal", and this is taken up in the noble Earl's Bill in Clause 2(c)(ii). But it is very much a matter requiring careful examination and further debate as to whether this principle, which could allow all manner of abuses, should be subject to further refinement and restriction. This question will almost certainly be among matters which must receive further study at the next meeting of the Council of Europe committee.
The noble Earl has indicated that his Bill has the broad approval of many of the scientific and research interests. The noble Earl's wish to demonstrate that those who are animal users are no less concerned with animal welfare than other people is certainly welcomed by all, and it is in that context that our debate this afternoon has been held. As we have heard, however, certainly from the noble Lord, Lord Houghton of Sowerby, there are wider issues on which the non-scientist expects to be heard and has a right to be heard. May I put it like this. What is the informed non-scientist pre-pared to accept in the use of experimental animals? I would suggest that he would not find acceptable some aspects of this Bill, which might indeed appear to compare unfavourably in concern for the welfare of experimental animals with the provisions of the 1876 Act, which they are intended to replace. That is particularly so as regards the purposes for which animals may be used.
I have already mentioned the question of experiments concerned with improving life, that is to say, non-medical experiments. As drafted Clause 2 (c) (v)—experiments done solely for the purpose of teaching technical skills—might also be unacceptable to some people. I acknowledge that some relaxation of the absolute prohibition in the 1876 Act is desirable to take account of the demands of the highest levels of modern surgery, and that Clause 2 (g) of the Bill requires a licensee to have the Secretary of State's permission before conducting an experiment for such a purpose. That is certainly a safeguard, but I do not know that it goes far enough. In general, the use of live animals for the purpose of gaining manual dexterity is surely to many people morally repugnant.

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I should have thought one would need to consider very carefully whether it could only be justified exceptionally.
Our informed non-scientists would also be likely to find difficulty with Clause 2 (h) which deals with infliction of pain on an animal during an experiment. I was interested to hear the noble Earl's list of forms of treatment, and the list of the noble Lord, Lord Cross, of new substances which have developed since the 1876 Act came into force. I can well under-stand why the scope of the word "pain" in the context of modern animal experiments, is now much wider than when the 1876 Act was drafted. I must say that I am not convinced that the drafting of Clause 2 (h) would adequately deal with the problem. It would, for example, allow prolonged pain if the experimenter could satisfy himself that the degree of pain was not too severe; and it is left to the judgment of the experimenter as to what is severe pain or distress. I realise that these are difficult issues which—as the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Fawley, and the noble Lord, Lord Richardson, said—must be put in the context of the saving of many lives. These are issues which rightly will be occupying much time at Strasbourg.
I should like to deal with one other point. A general feature of the Bill which gives it, quite wrongly, an incomplete appearance—"quite wrongly" because we know of the enormous amount of work and professional expertise which has been put in—is the considerable extent to which it would leave matters to be determined by the Secretary of State. Clause 7 in effect leaves the control of supply, breeding, transport, accommodation, veterinary supervision and laboratory animal care to subordinate legislation without any indication being given as to the scope of the regulations. If for no other reason than that such controls may require financial provisions, some further substantive provision seems essential if effective controls are to be established over all these matters.
I know that it is bound to give a mis-leading view of a Bill—indeed it may, if I may say so, give a rather impertinent view—to select the more obvious difficulties. Therefore, I should also like to say that I have been enormously impressed
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with the general aims of the Bill, with the noble Earl's speech and, without any Government commitment, I was most interested to hear the noble Earl speak of the licensing provisions of the Bill and of his idea of a guide to good animal laboratory practice. Of course, many of the provisions stem straight from the Littlewood recommendations. But, whether or not the differences of view concerning this Bill are capable of reconciliation, any legislation must, as I have already argued, be introduced against the background of the provisions which will be included in the forthcoming European Convention.
In the gracious Speech, the Government have declared their intention to introduce legislation when we know what the European Convention provides; but in the meantime, if close study of all the issues involved in the noble Earl's Bill can be undertaken, it would be an enormously valuable contribution to this country's revised legislation which we shall have to have. The noble Earl has indicated that if the Bill is given a Second Reading he will move for the Bill's referral to a Select Committee. The Government would support such a move in order to facilitate detailed examination of these difficult issues and we should, of course, give very careful consideration to the Select Committee's views.
6.5 p.m.
The Earl of HALSBURY: My Lords, in winding up the debate I should like to begin by thanking the whole House for the kind reception that has been afforded to this Bill. Without a single exception everyone has paid tribute to the work of the drafting and advisory team which I was able to engage. I should like generally to thank the whole House.
Without wishing to prolong the debate unduly, your Lordships will perhaps allow me to take up a few points that have been made by various speakers and reply to them. I should like generally to assure the whole House that as regards any what I call "Committee points" that have been raised, I personally shall be responsible for combing through the Official Report of today's date and ensuring that they are referred to the Select Committee, if your Lordships give the Bill a Second

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Reading and the Select Committee is set up. By giving that general undertaking I shall be able to shorten my remarks.
As regards the matters raised by the noble Earl, Lord Grey, I should like to point out that he has not quite under-stood the implications of Clause 18. Of course an inspector has right of entry, but what happens if that right of entry is withstood? Is the inspector to be given the right to break in?—No, my Lords. He must go to a magistrate, and a police officer must be given a warrant to break in and search the premises for whatever it may be. We cannot have people untrained in breaking and entering, other than burglars whom we send to prison. If anyone is to break and enter on a warrant from a magistrate it must be a police officer who knows his powers under that warrant.
The other matter which I thought the noble Earl had not fully understood was cosmetics. I want your Lordships to appreciate how general the term is and perhaps I can make it a little more personal by giving an example. Suppose the wife of one of your Lordships or some noble Baroness was involved in a motor accident and was very badly scarred. It would be only natural to want to disguise those scars by cosmetical treatment. Scarred tissue is abnormally sensitive to carcinogens and therefore it is particularly important that cosmetics used for that purpose should be free from carcinogens. To say that they may not be tested by putting some general embargo on the testing of cosmetics would be quite wrong. I do not want to elaborate the matter. The noble Baroness, Lady Phillips, and I discussed the matter fully on the occasion of her two Bills.
I was delighted with the maiden speech of my noble friend Lord Adrian. In addition to the other qualities referred to by your Lordships, I noticed at one point a little note of dry wit which always com-mends itself to your Lordships' attention and which we shall look forward to hearing in the future. I noted his point about nominations to the advisory councils and will bear it in mind in Committee.
I sympathise with the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, becoming over-emotionally involved with an experimental rabbit. I once nursed through all its childhood
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a small duckling with a broken leg which became, as it were, a toy for the children to play with and needless to say, it was known as "Donald". However, eventually came Christmas and we had to eat Donald. When we saw his broken leg on the dish coming out of the oven we were all deeply distressed to know that Donald had gone.
I was interested in what the noble Lord, Lord Janner, said about the use of the placenta. I shall follow that up by reading what he recommended. However, I must make one point clear on the use of these alternatives. To establish and validate an alternative to animal experiments means using many more supernumerary animals. This is an area where one should make haste slowly otherwise one will find that one is sacrificing an un-necessarily large number of animals to the validation of alternatives which turn out not to be alternatives.
Lord JANNER: My Lords, perhaps the noble Earl will allow me to make just one remark on that point. The experiments to which I referred needed no experimentation on animals at all.
The Earl of HALSBURY: My Lords, in order to establish that the technique of using whatever it may be—a placenta or tissue culture—gives the same result as that which would be obtained using an animal there needs to be correlation of the results on the former with the results on the animal. That is where the supernumerary animals must be used.
I was delighted with the support that I received from my noble friend Lady Hylton-Foster. I am only too happy to assure her that I can take the three points she made to Committee to see what can be made of them. I was most grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Hill of Luton, for his comments about extension of the coverage and his defence of the Bill against the broadcast this morning. I was telephoned at a late hour last night and asked whether I would give an inter-view and make a recording for this morning's broadcast on Radio 4. Rightly or wrongly, I said that I would not, that I wanted to go into a huddle the night before this debate, stew over my notes and think about what I was going to say, and not get involved in making a recording.

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I was extremely interested in the remarks of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Cross of Chelsea, who spoke of the change of emphasis that there has been between the parties, who hitherto had been at daggers drawn. This is well represented in this House by the cordial relationship that has subsisted now for quite a number of years between the noble Lord, Lord Houghton of Sowerby, and myself, who have been in one another's confidence over progress in this area. I take the noble and learned Lord's point about the seats for animal welfare; there are vacant seats on the Council which could be used for this purpose. Again, it would be a Committee point to argue out whether they should be nominated for a specific purpose or whether the seats should be left open at the discretion of the Home Secretary.
I was delighted with the exposition of the noble Lord, Lord Ferrier, on, as it were, the arithmetic of the annual report, because this is something that tends to be extremely misleading. I shall deal with that again when I come to some of the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Houghton of Sowerby.
Having wrestled with the noble Lord, Lord de Clifford, in years past, few people's speeches have pleased me more than his. The concept of wrestling with the noble Lord must be taken in a very general sense because, many years ago as little boys, we used to wrestle together when playing in Ranelagh Gardens. I am delighted to have his support. I was very glad that my noble friend Lord Richardson stressed the contribution that Britain can make to leadership by drawing on his experience in medical matters, and I was also delighted with the support of the noble Lord, Lord Auckland. As regards the mandatory as opposed to the permissive element in Clause 7, it reads, "The Secretary of State may". When the noble Lord speaks of making it mandatory, I take it that he wants Clause 7 to read, "The Secretary of State must". There is a certain drafting difficulty in making this mandatory because we cannot say that the Secretary of State must make a regulation on a matter if he may not want to make a regulation. There must be a point where we trust the Home Secretary to do what
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we expect him to do. If he does not, then we must chase him all over the horizon in Parliament, which is the right place to bring pressure to bear, rather than put it into written words, which can be so treacherous.
Lastly, I turn to what the noble Lord, Lord Houghton of Sowerby, had to say. The noble Lord called me a pathfinder. I had thought of myself more as a pace-maker, but I shall deal with that when I reply to the remarks made by the noble Lord, Lord Belstead, on behalf of the Home Office. With all respect to the noble Lord, Lord Houghton of Sowerby, I believe that to take numbers as a criterion is to pursue a will-o'-the-wisp. There are no magic numbers in nature, politics, or anything else. But numbers are not policy determinants; they are policy consequents. We cannot have a policy for animal experimentation based on, for example, the use of 4 million animals rather than 5 million. We are dealing with an on-going situation, never an equilibrium. Old methods are always falling into desuetude, new methods are coming into practice. New alternatives are being found and at the same time new demands are being made which entail the use of animals. At the end of the road the final balance is what it is. If we think that it is too much, we must attack it at some other point and not simply say, "Let us reduce numbers".
There are some points in common between the noble Lord, Lord Houghton, and the noble Lord, Lord Belstead, which I should like to emphasise to your Lord-ships because we must face reality. Human beings are at the apex of the predatory pyramid on this planet. No animal species can withstand us: save on the rare occasions when we have to meet a rogue elephant single-handed, we always come out on top. Nothing stands between any animal, individual or species and blue hell but the conscience of humanity. We must incorporate that conscience into statutes as best we can. There comes a point when we have to trust the Home Secretary to do what we want him to do, and that is where I join my notes on the remarks made by the noble Lord, Lord Houghton, with the remarks that I want to talk about made by the noble Lord, Lord Belstead, concerning the intentions of Government.

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There is many a slip twixt cup and lip. I appreciate that the Government would like to introduce new legislation, and that they would like to string along with Strasbourg. I am disturbed to find that Strasbourg meets only twice a year for this particular purpose. At its last meeting it only managed to get through the second half of the first draft of this convention. Having read the first half, I conclude that an enormous amount of work needs to be done on it. If we are to wait upon Strasbourg, I am afraid that it may fall in the lifetime, not of this Government but of the next Government, or possibly the one after that. Therefore, regarding myself as a pacemaker, I intend to press ahead with this Bill. Both during the last Government and during this Government's time in office I have been in touch with the Home Office throughout. I have never made any secret of the fact that, if I can pilot this Bill safely through this House, I hope the Government will take it over and, needless to say, make the necessary amendments to it. I hope that they will make it a Government Bill and see it through its hazards.
In my next remarks I shall attribute motives to all Governments that have ever been. I do not know whether in logic there is such a thing as a "trilemma" as opposed to a dilemma, but this situation is one in which there are three alternatives which no Government would like. In the other place Governments never want to put the Whips on on an emotionally laden subject; they like to give such a subject a free vote. On the other hand, Governments never want to have responsibility for administering a Bill which may have been mutilated in Committee by enthusiasm in an unwhipped House. Finally, Governments do not want to lose face by having to withdraw their own legislation from Parliament because it has been mutilated. The result is that the system has been biased in favour of inactivity.
When I was going through the early period of gestation before producing the Bill this afternoon, it seemed to me that, if I could take upon myself the onus of the initiative, if I had to I could withdraw the Bill—I am not a Government; I do not lose face; it is just another Private Member's Bill that does not get proceeded with. I could perhaps get the Bill to the stage where the Government
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could take it over, knowing that they could back it fairly effectively without the risk of it being mutilated.
I hope that, if the Bill goes to a Committee, the Government will give evidence in Committee. I should hate to feel that they might rob us of their wisdom and experience, for these definitions of "pain" and so on are very difficult. We are dealing, as I said in my opening remarks, with situational ethics, where you are pitchforked into a situation not of your making and you have to make the best of it. With those remarks, coupled to my firm intention to press on with this Bill so long as it is in your Lordships' House, I beg to move.
On Question, Bill read 2a.
The Earl of HALSBURY: My Lords, I beg to move the Motion which stands in my name on the Order Paper.
Moved, That the Bill be committed to a Select Committee.—(The Earl of Halsbury)
On Question, Motion agreed to, and Bill committed to a Select Committee.

BBC OVERSEAS BROADCASTING SERVICE
6.21 p.m.
Lord BUXTON of ALSA Lord BUXTON of ALSA rose to ask Her Majesty's Government whether they will ensure that in the national interest there will be no curtailment of the BBC's overseas broadcasting services, despite the need for general economies, because of the long-term importance of maintaining both the British viewpoint and uniquely impartial sources of information to peoples throughout the world. The noble Lord said: My Lords, this is I believe an extremely critical issue that we are about to debate. I am therefore greatly encouraged that so many of your Lordships are following me. I am also reassured by the formidable authority of those who are going to speak. In my view, we are at a crossroads. We have suddenly discovered ourselves at a crossroads affecting our standing in the world, and if we take the wrong turning now we can start an adverse slide that we may be unable to arrest.
The majority of countries in the world do not have a free Press or independent broadcasting. The majority do not have either. Authoritarian regimes thrive on the principle that they can achieve their objectives and, they believe, perhaps miracles, provided people are kept in the dark and do not know about their failures and shortcomings. They in fact welcome and approve ignorance. Are we in Britain now going to give encouragement to this conception?
I have no vested interest, but I should perhaps mention that I am a director of an ITV company, Anglia, in the East of England. But if I do have an interest it is one which I believe is shared by millions of people at home and by countless millions around the globe; that is to sustain and, if possible, expand the reception of the British viewpoint in the world and of our uniquely impartial news services and information. I hope that the sequence of events which has led to this impasse or threat will be chronicled by the Government when they reply.
As I understand it, the Foreign Office, required earlier this year to make cuts like every other department, required part of their cuts to be made by the BBC External Services. Rather than find the additional sum internally, or somewhere else, it was considered that our most valuable export, the best export we have left, could be mauled and amputated. This has caused very great concern in many countries, and not only in the countries where the BBC is listened to, but especially in the United States where there has been a great deal of agitation and coverage in their Press.
I feel that the Foreign Secretary and the Government must be blameless up to now because of the timing. Frankly, it looks to me like a standard and probably quite excusable departmental banana skin. But sadly this misjudgment has some of the characteristics of much of our foreign posture over the last two decades: an apparent disposition to opt out, disengage, and to off-load responsibilities. Seen by the ordinary citizen there appears to be a yearning to have as few obligations in the world as possible. So now it has been proposed that even the British voice, the only voice for millions of freedom and truth, should be sacrificed along with what
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remains of our prestige and influence—just to save the cost of about one military aircraft.
Could it also be that the power of broadcasting, the power of the BBC over-seas broadcasts, are a worry to somebody? Are they a worry to the Government? I do not know. But if so we should be en-lightened, and that would form an important and interesting subject for debate. I understand that the cuts to be imposed will have a much greater impact than is generally understood. In fact, according to the Economist it may reduce us as overseas broadcasters to the level of North Korea or Albania. Now just consider that when Britain, through the BBC, has been the pioneer and the premier voice on radio around the world for over half a century. I feel that one can hardly hold this Government responsible for the history of declining influence, but they are now responsible at the eleventh hour for saving this nation from an ignominious withdrawal from the radio shortwaves—thus making way for less truthful Governments where freedom may not exist, to fill the vacuum.
Perhaps it is not properly understood that we cannot expect to reopen on these frequencies if, in the future, we change our minds. Let us be quite clear about this: once out we shall almost certainly be out for ever. There are three reasons why once out we may not get in again. They are, first, that the expert team of foreign journalists which has been thoughtfully built up and welded over the years by the BBC External Services will have been disbanded and will not be available. You cannot just pick things up like that over-night. Secondly, the listeners will not be there because they will have been switched off and lost to other countries and other services. But, primarily—and thirdly—the frequencies will not be there because they will have been surrendered and will not be recoverable. You do not own the frequency. You are entitled to use it by international agreement. But if you opt out and fail to exercise the right you have registered, other nations will fill it. It is standard practice to fill any holes which exist.
May I quote the recent words of an Asian Ambassador which were reported last month in the New York Times.

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He said:
"To the degree that British foreign policy has any influence outside Rhodesia, it's only because of the impact of the BBC. Mrs. Thatcher doesn't seem to know it, but shortwave is this country's most important export."
That was an Asian Ambassador. I am quite sure that the Prime Minister does know it and, when the full implications of this critical prospect are made known to her, that she will not hesitate to respond.
Apart from the possibility that perhaps the Foreign Office might be apprehensive about the power of the BBC broadcasts in parts of the world—I have no idea whether that is so—it is not relevant to this debate if some BBC external broadcasts occasionally sound as if they come from the East and not from the West. The same could be said of course on odd occasions about BBC internal services, and of television, including ITV. But that is not relevant to the subject of cutting the volume of overseas broadcasts, because the question of bias and impartiality should be dealt with quite separately.
Those matters have to be dealt with by the authorities concerned who have the statutory power to act, and maybe they are sometimes guilty of pussy-footing and possibly well-meaning tolerance, which usually finishes up by being interpreted as plain funk. We all have these problems in the media. But this question of bias is a red herring when it comes to the critical subject of curtailing our national broadcasts to the rest of the world. It cannot conceivably be dealt with by cutting the budget. That is like amputating your foot because you have stubbed your toe.
The second aspect which should be ignored in the context of this debate is the question of the BBC's finances, and whether its home services are efficiently and economically run or not. This is not relevant to the subject of the external services. The licence fee and the domestic revenue are for the home services, radio and television. These funds should not be appropriated for overseas radio. I suggest that the public, when paying for a licence to receive television programmes at home, would have something impolite to say if part of this payment was to be used for External Services. Whether for better—or one hopes not for worse—the External Services are the responsibility of the
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Foreign Office. Therefore, there is no place in the context of my Question for points about the general economy of the BBC. Only details about the economy of the External Services would be relevant.
May I start by expressing my own clear feeling or conviction. I believe that no Government, neither this nor any other Government, have the moral right to cut off millions of human beings anywhere in the world from the voice of Britain, from the sound of truth, from the message of freedom. The Government may have the statutory power, but they do not have the moral right any more than they have the right to snip the lifeline of a North Sea diver; any more than they have the moral right to cut the hawser of a cable car when there are miners underground; any more than they have the right to pull the bung out on a boatload of boat people. The Government do not have the moral right, after only six months in office, to throttle any part of the service on which human beings of so many nations have been relying for so long.
If the Government do exercise their statutory power in this way and plunge millions of the West's friends and potential allies into silence and loneliness, that will be shameful for this country and it will be a grievous blow to our prestige and self-esteem in the eyes of the world just at the moment when the Prime Minister is doing so much, so successfully, to revive both.
It has been reported that rather than cut broadcasts to the Middle East, Africa and perhaps South America, we should discontinue the vernacular broadcasts to Europe and to developed countries. Apparently somebody considers it reason-able—if the voice of freedom has reluctantly to be discontinued for the benefit of listeners in Asia, Africa and so on—and a useful solution to cease broadcasts to most of Europe as a sort of compromise, to cease conveying the British viewpoint to the landmass from Turkey right round to France. Evidently somebody is not aware that the battle for men's minds, the struggle between the Soviets and the freedom of the West, is primarily being fought out in Europe and among the developed nations. How can the oldest, longest-surviving champion of freedom and democracy— how can Britain, to whom all the world looks for hope and example, how can the country to which refugees

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from the workers' paradise consistently flee, how can Britain of all countries seriously contemplate stopping communications in their own language with individual human beings in Europe, East and West?
Everybody hopes there will never be strife again in Europe involving this country, but only a dreamer would consider it impossible. In war as in peace communications with individuals abroad is absolutely vital. Suppose there was another war and the survival of this country and the West was at stake. Would anyone want to be the Foreign Secretary of the day and have to admit that the country, when hostility started, had no way to talk to the people of Europe and the developed countries, that there was no way to convey the voice of democracy and hope to individuals in their homes? Are this Government to go down in history as the one who surrendered our broadcasting facilities to Russia or Albania or any other political puppet? Is this in years to come to be the Government's skeleton in the cupboard?
Take the other situation. Suppose that mercifully there is no war and that things conceivably start to move in favour of freedom and democracy and that the light of the West starts to burn more brightly. Communications with all parts of the world then become imperative to give leadership and inspiration, especially in Europe, but again the Foreign Secretary would then have to say to the country, "I am sorry, but the Conservative Government stopped all that in 1980 because that was the only way they could find a few million quid".
Can we seriously contemplate such a prospect? This Government are thank-fully seeking to strengthen our security, and none too soon, both at home and abroad, with the support and approval of the vast majority of the British people. They are endeavouring to redress the dangerously weak state of our defences and restore our position in NATO. A vital component of our contribution to NATO, in addition to our Forces and equipment, is our long-established foreign broadcasting services, more experienced and more independent than any other in the world. The radio services in numerous foreign languages to which people in all
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the countries in Europe cling must be an integral part of our strategy; they were and are a key component of the West's position over the years.
In cutting news, information and the British viewpoint to foreign countries, the Foreign Office would blatantly be marching in the opposite direction to the Prime Minister who has recently expressed Britain's determination to strengthen our position in Europe. You cannot improve defence and the scale of our contribution while at the same time cutting the vital component, information. That is irrational, to put it politely. Again, I do not believe this or any Government have a moral right to sever these vital human links and relationships in Europe for the sake of financial savings. If they exercise their statutory power in this respect, that is one thing, but it would earn scorn for our country across the world, and to do that we do not have the moral right without even the consent and approval of NATO.
Even the Central Policy Review Staff in the Berrill Report, which recommended savage cuts in overseas broadcasting along with a diminishing of our presence in the world, conceded that external broad-casting
"is the most effective instrument the U.K. has for keeping alive knowledge of the values and ideas of a free society. It can justifiably be claimed to be one of the U.K.'s success stories".
The cuts in external broadcasting recommended in the Berrill Report were then considered with great thoroughness and care by the Expenditure Committee of the House of Commons in its report last year, and they were rejected. The conclusion of the Expenditure Committee was:
"We believe that the BBC External Services form a vital part of Britain's overseas representation. The BBC has a unique reputation for objectivity and reliability, built up in a time of war as well as peace, and based in no small measure on the fact that it operates a genuine World Service free from an incubus of political motivation. It would therefore be madness, in our view, to impose swingeing cuts on the present service precisely at a time when, as the CPRS acknowledge, other countries are stepping up their efforts…We therefore strongly urge the Government to find the extra finance for much needed improvements to audibility in key parts of the world. The money at present devoted to the external services represents, in our judgement, one of the most cost-effective items of expenditure within the Government's programme and one which would richly repay a further modest investment".
That was last year. Impulsively to curtail the BBC's foreign broadcasting therefore

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would be acting in defiance of the considered view of the all-party group of Members of Parliament who expressed that view only 12 months ago. There would be no ally or support for the cuts that are proposed, except from the authors of the Berrill Report, which Conservative spokesmen then in opposition roundly and fiercely condemned.
If the Foreign Office has got itself into a corner where it has no room for manoeuvre and can apparently contrive no other way of saving the prescribed sum, then with the greatest respect the Government must intervene in some way or another because people in different parts of the world must not lose these precious sources of information. We are talking about human beings—actual live listeners—not colours on the map.
It is a meaningless exercise in seeking to justify some cuts to ask, "Where will discontinuing the British voice matter least?" Does that mean which country or area has the least number of people, or where are the BBC broadcasts are least popular, or which is the country most friendly, or most unfriendly, or what? Such criteria are frankly unreal, whichever one adopts, because what is at stake is human beings, individual listeners. Surely an individual in some wilderness is just as entitled to hear British sources of information as somebody in the heart of a European city, and vice-versa.
A hurried last minute search for groups of the human race who can be denied the British voice, the voice of freedom, is fruitless, cynical and, frankly, shameful. The Administration of this country and its financial accounting cannot be so inept that a sum of £4 million, or £1 million or £2 million or £3 million cannot be saved somewhere. I can think of several ways myself, but I do not want to raise new or contentious issues today.
Finally, I urge the Government that such external matters, those affecting Britain's place in the world, should be regarded separately from the management of the domestic economy. One is simply not comparing like with like. The fear that by maintaining the cost of the BBC's External Services there might follow a wave of demands in connection with domestic issues from other departments for similar immunity is, in my view, unreason-
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able and unacceptable. It is a question of Britain's future in the world that we are talking about. We do not want any fudged solutions to this critical problem which is causing so much concern at home and abroad. We do not want financial tinkering to wriggle through the impasse which may seem to have been created.
We need a clear response that the BBC's External Services will not be curtailed and will in fact be strengthened, as recommended by the House of Commons Committee last year. We need this assurance. My solution is simple. The budget for the External Services should, in my view, be marginally increased and not cut at all, as the Expenditure Committee implied. This would place foreign broadcasting in a different and separate category from home problems, thus silencing inter-departmental argument as it occurs. Apart from the recommendation of the Expenditure Committee, there is one further voice in support which I should like to quote. I refer to a statement made by a present Minister of State at the Foreign Office, who said in a Conservative political pamphlet published in 1977:
"We should strengthen the external services of the BBC".
I agree with that, my Lords.
6.40 p.m.
Lord GLADWYN: My Lords, I am extremely happy to be the first to be able to associate myself with everything that the noble Lord, Lord Buxton of Alsa, has so eloquently said. We are told—and I only hope that this may be denied by the Minister who is to reply—that it is the intention of the Government to cut the budget of the BBC's Overseas Service by 10 per cent.; that is to say, by £4 million. Such cuts, if made, would, we understand, for reasons given in the speech by Lord Buxton, result in the services concerned being permanently suppressed. We are also told that it is likely that the Government will in the circumstances recommend the maintenance of our admirable World Service and retain also those directed towards Communist countries in Eastern Europe and perhaps also those to the Arab world, thereby in effect accepting the proposals which were put forward by the "Think Tank" two years ago. That would of course mean leaving £4 million to be recovered on the remaining services;

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namely, those (in the local languages) to Asia, Africa, Latin America and Western and Southern Europe.
If all this is so, it would seem that, given the necessity in any case of maintaining various powerful transmitters which are essential for the audibility of the World Service, together with other overheads, the cuts in various individual services would perforce be very severe; no less, we understand, than 12 to 16 out of 38 services having to be closed down altogether—that is, permanently—and the total broadcasting time reduced by any-thing from 17 to 25 per cent. In other words—and I do not think that this can be, or will be, disputed by the Government—the effect of a 10 per cent. financial cut would be not only disproportionate, but also highly disruptive of a service that has been carefully built up over many years.
More particularly, it has been calculated— and here again the Government will be able to confirm or deny—that if the World Service and services to the Arab world are to be maintained in their entirety, a cut of £4 million would result in a suppression of services of the order of magnitude—and I say "of the order of magnitude"—of all those, in the local languages, to Western and Southern Europe and Latin America, or alter-natively all those (again in the local languages) to the Indian sub-continent, the Far East, and Africa. In other words, about 40 million people, mostly in countries where Communism is making great or considerable headway, would cease to hear the voice of the BBC at all and thus be deprived for the most part of their only reliable sources of information. As I believe the noble Lord, Lord Buxton, said, one can imagine their feelings.
My Lords, these same proposals were of course debated by your Lordships two years ago and were indignantly rejected by a very large majority in the House; and they were also rejected in another place. Seeing that their party is now in office, I venture to give one or two quotations from the sentiments then expressed by very prominent Conservative leaders. The first is that of the voice of the noble Baroness, Lady Elliot of Harwood, who has told me that unfortunately due to another engagement she has had
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to scratch her name from the list of speakers. With her consent I can quote her and report she sticks a hundred per cent. to what she then said. It was, as reported at columns 925 and 926 of the Official Report of 23rd November 1977:
"our Overseas Service of the BBC is the best broadcasting on radio … of any country in the world … To suggest that that is something on which we should cut down seems utterly and absolutely wrong".
Then there was the noble Lord, Lord Campbell of Croy, who is not present this evening. He said, as reported at columns 939 and 940:
"To cut as drastically as is suggested … would be to throw away valuable and irreplaceable assets … Should we willingly discard these means of direct communication, greatly envied by other countries? Surely the answer must be, No."
Then there was the noble Lord, Lord Home of the Hirsel. Do I see him here this evening? Yes, I do. With his permission I should like to quote what he said. He said, as reported at column 887:
"The Overseas Service of the BBC is accepted far and wide as the most objective presentation of world events … It is a British asset which should not be put at risk by paring and pinching. Indeed, an increase in its budget would he a good investment".
That sentiment was repeated in the House of Commons a little later, on 14th December 1977, when Mr. Farr, apparently speaking for the Tory Party, after roundly condemning the CPRS proposals, made much the same point when he said that he would have thought that one of the options that should have been considered was the possibility of an increase in BBC External Services.
So it is clear that only two years ago Conservative leaders were unanimous in repudiating any proposal to cut the budget of the BBC's Overseas Service by a penny. They even thought that the budget should be increased rather than pruned or cut. So how comes it that a Tory Government may now be proposing to cut these same services by anything from 17 to 25 per cent.? The only possible answer seems to be that, since it has been decided as a matter of policy to cut Government expenditure by 10 per cent., expenditure in every branch of govern-mental activity must be reduced by exactly the same percentage. Well, if this is really so—which I can hardly believe—it is logical lunacy. Even admitting that

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expenditure must be reduced overall, it does not follow that all Departments and all branches of Departments must be cut by precisely the same extent. Of course not! All cuts are unpleasant, but obviously some are less unpleasant than others, and some in the simple interests of national survival should not be made at all.
Of course, all Ministers confronted with the necessity of cuts will say, "Not me". But it should then be for the Prime Minister to say which of them, if any, should be exempted. As I understand it, she has already exempted the Service Departments, and if she is to stick to her undertaking to increase defence expenditure to the extent of 3 per cent. per annum, that is an exemption which of course must be made. But having done that, then she should presumably have considered whether for political or social reasons, or whatever, other Departments might be asked to cut rather more than the general average and others perhaps rather less. These priorities having been determined, it surely should then have been left to the Departments themselves to decide which among their own sub-departments should have, as it were, priority. For instance, in the case of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office it might well have been considered that the additional £4 million of cuts in its budget, necessary if the Overseas Services were exempted altogether, should be made in other parts of the diplomatic and consular vote in addition to those already announced, I understand, in the Press.
Surely, for instance, a cut or a further cut in the frais (as they call it) of members of the foreign service everywhere would be preferable to the closing down of the voice of Britain in many of the countries concerned. For example, it might be unpleasant for a First Secretary in Jakarta to have to reduce the number of his guests by 15 per cent. rather than 10 per cent., but most people in this country, I believe, would think that that would be a lesser blow to British interests than the suppression of the BBC broadcasts to Indonesia. Additionally, or alternatively, what about closing down yet more diplomatic establishments (more especially those which have only a minor role in pushing British exports) and perhaps asking one of our European Community
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colleagues with a major stake in the area concerned to look after our interests? That suggestion has been made before but has not been followed up.
My Lords, it may be said that such suggestions do not come well from an ex-member of the service, and, naturally, I should not welcome further cuts in the frais as such; of course not. But, really, if—and I only say "if"—it is a straight choice between that and crippling the BBC, I believe that many members of the present Foreign Service would shoulder the burden cheerfully. I may be wrong in this, but I believe that, in addition to the suppression of certain posts, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office may be asked to make economies of scale that might result in some of its staff becoming redundant. But I submit that that is something which was bound to happen in any case. There are probably many too many people in all Government Departments engaged in writing letters to each other in strict accordance with Parkinson's Law; and, though painful, I do not see how, given our present parlous economic position, this kind of cut can be criticised or resisted. It would certainly not be self-defeating, as would be an attempt to curtail the Overseas Services of the BBC.
Or, my Lords, take aid. Are we really satisfied that the relatively tiny sum of £4 million might not with advantage be deducted from the total aid budget (I do not know whether that comes under the Foreign Office or not), some of which, at least, is suspected of getting into the wrong hands or of being otherwise misdirected? For instance, is it true that this year we are contributing £11 million of aid to Nigeria, by all accounts now a rich oil country, which, in any case, has just been nationalising BP without, as I understand it, very much compensation? How would our interests be served by paying out such sums at the virtual expense of one of our greatest assets? My Lords, it does not make any sense to me, and I do not think it will make any sense to your Lordships.
Finally, there is yet another good reason for not cutting any of the overseas programmes of the BBC. They are the only means we have of disseminating news about what we are now doing in Brussels and in Strasbourg to carry out our obligations under the Lomé Convention

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and in accordance with the various association agreements of the European Economic Community—to the great benefit, of course, of a large number of developing nations. It would clearly not be right for such news to be conveyed, if it is conveyed at all, to these peoples by French or by other non-British media. I would ask the Government to consider this argument very carefully.
Anyhow, my Lords, for all these reasons, we can only hope that, when and if a proposal to cut the Overseas Services of the BBC comes before the other place, a sufficient number of Members will be found who will vote in accordance with their beliefs, and not just troop into the Lobbies to silence, or at least partially to throttle, the chief voice of freedom in a dangerous and increasingly totalitarian world. Even if they do not, and even if the Government (as is quite likely, I think) evade the issue in some way which is open to them, it is surely possible that the crippling of the Overseas Services will not find, to say the least, very much support here in your Lordships' House. We are, after all, my Lords, no longer under imminent sentence of death if we occasionally vote in accordance with our convictions, and the Government really should not think that they can get away with anything here, however demonstrably counter-productive.
Even if for technical reasons we could not actually prevent the cuts being made by the Government—that is, if the Government finally insisted on them—we could at least organise a pretty formidable protest which might even, I suggest, influence votes in a good many of the constituencies of this country, and that is something of which the Government might well take note. It will be seen that I look forward with interest, if with little immediate hope, to what the Minister responsible is going to say this evening in answer to Lord Buxton's Question.
6.55 p.m.
The Lord Bishop of GUILDFORD: My Lords, I am assuming that tonight the pressing of this Question is not set in the context of economies made in general throughout our country. I would feel I needed to reserve my position in that. I assume that what we are talking
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about is the much more narrow question of pressing upon the Foreign Office that they should reconsider the relative work of the BBC Overseas Service in comparison with the total cost of presenting British interests overseas. I am not going to speak about the details of the problems which have been presented to the BBC by the cuts proposed, although the papers which I have read and the people I have consulted have left me in no doubt that the cuts proposed would seriously cripple the Overseas Service. Nor am I speaking about religious programmes in particular, though perhaps I could say that I regard them very highly and, in particular, the efforts made recently to take notice of religions and world views besides our own.
What I want to do is to draw attention to two general points which I hope the Government will take into consideration when seeking to answer the Question asked by the noble Lord, Lord Buxton. The first is that I hope the Government will recognise the effectiveness of broadcasting in reaching a much wider range of people than the Diplomatic Service can, however energetic or hardworking the staff of embassies and cultural centres may be. I spent a good deal of my working life in Africa and the Middle East, much of it in a very isolated part, and I recall only one visit by a member of the ambassador's staff in the country concerned during the seven years that I was working in that part of the country. But the radio was a constant accompaniment of everyday life. In fact, for one period I began every morning at six o'clock by doing the five-minute physical exercises in tune with what was being broadcast by the World Service. More seriously, in the crises which affected our lives we turned to the BBC Overseas Service to gain a real understanding of the position and to draw some sense of security by recognising that what was going on around us was known to people elsewhere in the world and had been assessed by them.
A trivial incident which took place soon after I moved to Guildford made this point very clear to me. We had in the diocese a priest who was then head of religious broadcasting in the Overseas Service. I wanted to meet him, but I was unable to do so until I had been in

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Guildford for perhaps a year. Then, at the cathedral one night, by chance, I made his acquaintance. I made my apology to him, that I had not met him before, and explained that I had 160 parishes to look after and it was difficult for me to get to know all the clergy in the diocese very quickly. He replied to me, "Bishop, I do understand. I number my parish in millions". I was very envious of him. I realised that, through his work on the Overseas Service, he had the privilege of intimate conversation, through the radio, through the loudspeaker, with millions of people in the homes in which they lived, and that those people were people with whom our embassies and other institutions abroad would probably make little contact.
In these days, when radios are available in such quantity and so cheaply, the broadcasts of the Overseas Service are listened to in villages and small towns, in the fields and in people's cars, by all manner of ordinary people who would have no other way of contact with the British point of view or with British interests.
I believe that it is of the utmost importance that we speak to these people in the way in which the Overseas Service has done. This is why the specialised language broadcasts which are threatened by the proposed cuts are of particular importance. Of course, we want to represent British interests to the top people in countries where our embassies, trade missions and British Council institutions are; but the circle of people that they can touch is very limited and the radio is a most effective and yet at the same time very cheap way of presenting British people to the ordinary people in the countries across the world. I hope that the Government will bear this aspect in mind in assessing the relative worth of our Overseas Service in comparison with the whole cost of representing our interests abroad.
Finally, my Lords, the second point is a much more general point. I believe that the major question facing us today, as noble Lords are well aware, is that of achieving a harmonious world community in which every different nation, every different race, has a part to play and a share in the prosperity of the whole. It is the communications explosion which
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has played a very large part in making our world one neighbourhood. I believe that it is of tremendous importance in that one neighbourhood of the world that the particular contribution made by the BBC Overseas Service should be maintained at as high a strength as possible. Its responsible news broadcasts, its dissemination of worthwhile information and, above all, its presentation of democracy at work day in and day out in all the ups and downs of political life is a most valuable, and, as it were, clear presentation of a way of life that we ought to offer to people not only behind the Iron Curtain but in the turbulent Africa of our day which is going to have such great importance in decades yet to come. So, my Lords, I would simply ask the Government whether they have considered how worth-while an investment it is to make the broadcasts that the Overseas Service gives in the world community of our time.
7.3 p.m.
Lord WEIDENFELD: My Lords, the received wisdom of political life that doctrinaires in Opposition frequently turn pragmatists in office seems to have been strikingly enriched by a new twist; for here, under our eyes, we see a party which, taking pride in its empirical and commonsense approach while on the road to power, once there begets a government tempted by doctrine—the doctrine of indiscriminate curtailment of public expenditure. How else can we explain the wisdom of cutting, and, as, I think, crippling, the External Services of the BBC? For this is bound to be the effect of the intended Budget cuts which, for a saving of 10 per cent., would reduce broadcasting time by between 20 and 25 per cent. and endanger the whole overhead structure, quality, in some cases audibility and continued availability of wavelengths and ultimately the efficacy of what will remain.
Moreover, these cuts fly in the face of the Government's avowed, and I think seriously meant, pledges and claims, to aid the economic recovery and export potential of this country and to stiffen and strengthen its defence posture within the Western Alliance. There is no doubt that the BBC's External Services are an important and powerful sales aid to British industry. Approximately 60 hours each week of BBC transmissions going

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abroad are concerned with promoting exports directly or indirectly. This is just under 10 per cent. of all external broadcasting in a total of 39 languages. Twenty-five of these 60 hours consist of direct promotion of British products and over 30 hours deal with invisibles; that is, research, the facilities of the City of London, consultancies, and tourism.
In projecting the British and Western way of life to the disenfranchised listeners of the Communist world or to citizens of repressive régimes elsewhere, the BBC has always been a powerful arm of democratic defence. Its role for instance, in the Portuguese revolution was of outstanding importance. Its reports on the tumoil in Africa, Lebanon and Central America have been landmarks of responsible and courageous news gathering and commentary.
It is, or course, true that the Government directive through the Foreign Office to the BBC asked for the retention of the World English Service and of the programmes to the Arab and Communist worlds; but their retention within a drastically cut budget will cause such havoc in the structure of the service as a whole that the end result may well be grossly damaging to the whole service. In fact, the three optional "packages" which the Corporation has put forward by way of illustrating how the residual services would work, are all Pandora boxes, each creating invidious problems of their own.
Take Package One, for instance, which would involve the closing down of all vernacular services to Western and Southern Europe and Latin America: German to the DDR as well as to the Federal Republic, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Greek, Turkish and Finnish. Thus, our friends and neighbours in Europe would be entirely cut out. This is absurd as well as dangerous. In normal times, political, economic, and cultural programmes serve clearly-defined and useful purposes by ensuring continuity of contact. In times of crisis, the voice of Britain is even more relevant.
Package Number Two would, with one magisterial sweep, eliminate our broadcasting to the Indian subcontinent, Iran, Burma, the whole of Southeast Asia and the Far East as well as Black Africa. The third
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package would involve the whole of Western and Southern Europe plus the Arabic Service. And none of these, faulty as they may be, would achieve the total saving required; so that more, fresh, savings would have to be found elsewhere.
One of the paradoxes is that if we were to remove all broadcasting to Europe west of the Communist world we would only pinpoint the political warfare character of the remaining services to Eastern Europe. Both the man in the street and the authorities in those countries would feel themselves targetted, singled out for special attention, while today they can hear for themselves that BBC news and comment is universal and neither angled nor targetted in a narrow, propagandist way.
In fact, these cuts are the sort of recommendations proposed by the ill-fated Berrill Report which was so overwhelmingly rejected by opinion formers and the public alike some 12 or 18 months ago, and it is not without irony that the party that helped to bury Berrill now wishes to exhume him.
My Lords, previous speakers in this debate, and, I feel quite sure, those who follow me, are nearly unanimous on the great achievements, past and present of the External Services, It is no secret that representations on the highest level have been made in the United States and Western Europe to Her Majesty's Government to desist from these short-sighted cuts. Many noble Lords may have seen editorials in the Herald Tribune emanating both from the Washington Post and the New York Times, explicitly appealing to the British Government to keep the BBC's external programmes intact. I think that a Conservative Government should be especially mindful of tradition and continuity in recalling the record of the BBC's External Services. There is no need to dwell nostalgically on the past only; no need to go back either to the Bronze Age of British Broadcasting under John Reith and Stephen Tallents or to the Heroic Age of William Haley and Noel Newsome. The immediate past and the present are just as creditable.
I would urge the Government to desist from carrying out these cuts and to let the Corporation carry on. It is for the Government to explore where the money can be found. Perhaps it can be found in

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Whitehall, and the departments concerned with overseas trade and tourism could surely dig into their pouches. Defence expenditure, which the Prime Minister has pledged to maintain and expand, should include contributions to the spreading of the democratic message in the Communist sphere. Already the Defence Department pays, if I understand rightly, one-fifth of the expenditure of the BBC's monitoring service, an invaluable source of reliable reference which should on no account be diminished in scale. To the argument that money is wanted everywhere else at the same time in Whitehall I submit that sometimes, given a sense of perspective and priority, it is quite justifiable to rob Peter in order to pay Paul.
My Lords, in sum, external broadcasting is an essential public and national service, and only as a last and desperate result should it be considered, if all else fails, to explore how the private sector, industry and trade might possibly share part of the burden. There are plenty of examples: Some of our cultural institutions, for instance, are kept afloat by a judicious mixture of grants from the Exchequer and private contributions. Our great industrialists and traders have every reason to help keep the BBC's External Services healthily alive. The Economist has recently even dared to say a cautious word in favour of institutional advertising (although this may perhaps be anathema to the hierarchs of Portland Place).
But I believe that, all in all, the best, indeed the only just solution, would be for the Government to pause, reflect and withdraw their request for cuts, and to allow the BBC to continue to project an image of Britain and her people, their quality of life, their achievements and grave challenges, in a manner which is essentially truthful and, on balance, truly admirable.
7.12 p.m.
Lord CHALFONT: My Lords, I am reluctant to believe that it is a reflection of our priorities that a House that was so full and attentive during a debate on laboratory animals should become so relatively empty for the Unstarred Question of the noble Lord, Lord Buxton of Alsa. I personally am extremely grateful to him for raising this Question this even
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ing and doing so in such an impressive and moving way.
I understand from certain news reports this morning that we may be pushing at an open door. I have been unable to confirm these reports. In the absence of any reliable newspaper of record—a situation which I hope will be remedied on 13th November—I can only conclude that possibly we still have a problem with which to confront Her Majesty's Government. The basic arguments in this case have already been eloquently deployed: the political arguments by the noble Lords, Lord Buxton of Alsa and Lord Gladwyn; the more technical ones from the depth of his experience by the noble Lord, Lord Weidenfeld; and the moral arguments by the right reverend Prelate. We have heard—and heard it put cogently—about the need for a British viewpoint to be expressed around the world in a way in which the BBC Overseas Service so eloquently does it at the moment. We have heard about the need for the continuation of impartial sources of news and information. We have heard also about the irreversible nature of these cuts. If they are made in the way in which it is at present proposed, they cannot be reversed. There are many powerful reasons why this is an irreversible trend.
Having accepted all those arguments and expressed my total endorsement of them, I want to bring up one rather special point in this debate. It goes back to something that the noble Lord, Lord Buxton of Alsa, said about the information battle that goes on in the world. It seems to me ironic and tragic that, at a time when we in this country are proposing to cut the volume and quality of our overseas information service, Radio Moscow should be developing one of the best and most effective world broadcasting services on the air at the moment in English and in the vernacular language.
In my own experience—and I travel a good deal around the world and carry with me a specially equipped radio set—it is already easier in most places in the world to listen to Radio Moscow doing its World Service broadcasting in English on what they call a five by five transmission service—in other words, a perfectly clear atmospherics-free transmission service—than it is to receive the BBC.

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Radio Moscow's World Service is now broadcasting a virtually 24-hour service around the world in English. Some 19 hours a day come from Radio Moscow World Service—RMWS. Part of that is provided by a station called Radio Peace and Progress which, coincidentally, uses the Radio Moscow transmitters.
That leaves a gap of five hours in the day from 11 o'clock at night until 4 o'clock in the morning. That gap is now being filled by Radio Moscow broadcasts, also in English, to the North African subcontinent. As I say, this means that Radio Moscow is now broadcasting 24 hours a day in English—I am speaking only about their English service broadcasts at the moment. On the 27th July, in a broadcast on the Radio Moscow World Service, the presenter of the programme conceded that the whole of this new Radio Moscow World Service was patterned upon the BBC World Service. He said they now had a happy balance—those were his words—between news, comment and features. He went on to say in that light, ironic way that Russian announcers have: "Perhaps listeners might find some outward resemblance to the BBC World Service". It is not an outward resemblance, it is practically a carbon copy of the BBC World Service. There is a news bulletin every hour; not on the hour because that is when the BBC puts out its service, but at ten minutes past every hour, after the BBC has put out its news service. This is followed by features: "Twenty-four Hours", "The World Today". The names are even the same as those of the BBC World Service. Then there is half an hour of music designed to keep the listeners' attention until the next cycle begins. It is exactly upon the pattern of the extremely successful service that the BBC has been putting out for so many years.
There is now a listeners' letters programme that goes from Radio Moscow in English beamed directly on Great Britain and Ireland. It has a staff—this is information from Radio Moscow, not from me—of several thousand people and it receives 300,000 letters a year from the area to which it is beamed. The conclusion to all this is that we are now being confronted by the Soviet Union for the first time in a systematic and organised way in the information field. It seems to
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me that it will be disastrous at this stage to impose any cuts at all upon what is without any doubt the best broadcasting service in the world. I am not speaking now of our domestic services, about which I have certain modest reservations. I am speaking of the World Service of the BBC, which I say without fear of any contradiction is quite simply the best broadcasting service in the world.
These cuts are not marginal. One cannot say: "We will make a 10 per cent. cut" and imagine that is going to be 10 per cent. of every programme, 10 per cent. of every hour or 10 per cent. of every service. It is a radical cut and an irreversible cut, as the noble Lord, Lord Buxton of Alsa, has said. It is being proposed at a time when the Soviet Union—at least a potential enemy; I do not think that anyone would argue with that characterisation—is beginning to realise the vital importance of influencing world opinion through its broadcasting. Field Marshal Templer, who was my commander-in-chief in Malaya when I was a soldier, coined a phrase—
"Winning the hearts and minds of the people".
That, he said, was the only way in which we would win the battle against the Communists in Malaya. It was the way that we won it. I believe we are now in danger of losing the battle for the hearts and minds of the people of the Third World, and of the people of the world as a whole.
I recognise, as I think everyone in your Lordships' House will recognise, the need for cuts in public expenditure. Perhaps not everyone would agree with that basic premise, but if we were proceeding from it I believe, as the noble Lord, Lord Buxton, said in his moving speech, that it is important not to make cuts across the board and not to extend those cuts, for example, into areas which might affect our national security and survival. I shall not talk this evening about the defence budget because it is not immediately relevant to this debate, but I would say, and say with the utmost seriousness, that part of our defence and our apparatus of survival and part of the way of pushing back the forces of darkness in the world is the spreading of information, impartial information, objective comment and a clear, unequivocal endorsement of our way of life.

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Are we really, seriously, for the sake of an "across the board" cut in public spending, going to destroy that? If we are, then as Ernie Bevin once said in his inimitable way:
"Once you open that Pandora's box, you never know what Trojan horse is going to come out".
The BBC World Service, my Lords, is the only service in the world capable of discharging this task. "The Voice of America", technically brilliant, cannot do it. They are identified with a certain kind of political prejudice in the minds of people who listen; and that identification does not occur in the case of the BBC.
I want to conclude by coming back to my point about Radio Moscow. The Radio Moscow World Service—and note that even the name is a copy of our own—is now becoming required listening all over the world. I spoke earlier about its efforts in the English language. Perhaps we ought also to remember that it broadcasts in over 80 languages and dialects for a total of more than 2,000 hours every week. Of those, about 270 hours are, as I have said, in English. This comprises—and I repeat it because I think it needs repeating—a round-the-clock service in the English language, beamed to this country and to all the other countries in the world where there are English-speaking people. I think we are in danger of being confronted now not only with a predominant and overwhelming military apparatus by the Soviet Union but with a superior information and communication apparatus as well. I believe very seriously that we should not at this stage be cutting what the noble Lord, Lord Buxton, has rightly called "our finest export".
I trust I shall not introduce too abrasive a final note into what has been up to now a reasonably constructive and well-mannered debate, but I trust that Her Majesty's Government will not take this matter lightly. This is a matter at least as important, in my opinion, as those matters with which the noble Lord the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs is dealing perhaps elsewhere at this moment. The noble Lord, Lord Gladwyn, has said that this is a matter which might even go outside Parliament. It might even be a question of appealing to the common sense and to the deeply-held opinions of the people of this country about the role of this nation in the world.
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I should like to come back to the Motion of the noble Lord, Lord Buxton. He asks Her Majesty's Government
"Whether they will ensure that …there will be no curtailment of the BBC's overseas broadcasting services…".
That is a fairly unequivocal question, and I hope that the noble Lord, when he answers it on behalf of the Government, will be able to say that there will no such curtailment. I would conclude my remarks simply by saying that, if he does not, I hope that Her Majesty's Government will not believe they have heard the end of this matter.
7.26 p.m.
Lord HILL of LUTON: My Lords, already in this debate, opened so strongly and so vigorously by the noble Lord, Lord Buxton, there has been a severe condemnation of the proposal to make cuts of the order of which we have read. We have no firm indication of what has been planned, but I should be surprised if there had not been a spreading of some "guidance" or some information which gave quite accurately the indications that we have read in the Press. We cannot help remembering that almost exactly two years ago we were discussing the proposals of the Think Tank, and your Lordships will remember that the underlying principle was that the best form of persuasion was economic success and, if you were not being economically successful, then cut down the persuasive effort.
In a debate in this House, that policy was destroyed, as indeed it was elsewhere. It was destroyed, and in that debate a great deal was said on all sides of the House about the immense value of the BBC's overseas services. And now, I am making the assumption that the proposal was to reduce the expenditure on the Overseas Services by 10 per cent., or some £4 million. I hope it will be denied and I hope we shall be told that this is entirely false and there is nothing in it. So I am going to speak on that assumption. Now the proposal is to do in one fell swoop what in fact the Think Tank proposed to do over a number of years. It is a more severe proposal than that which was put forward by the Think Tank. At least they put forward some arguments, even though we destroyed them. As yet we have heard no arguments,

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apart from the general one of economy in public expenditure, put forward in support.
I wonder whether I might just try to quantify what the proposals for the saving of £4 million might mean. As others have done, I assume that we are well informed and that the World Service in England will remain. I assume there will be other services; for example, those to Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Thirdly, I assume with some irony that it would be an odd change of policy if our voice were to be silenced in the oil-rich States of Arabia. On those assumptions, what could this amount to? Staff would have to go—some hundreds of staff would have to go—-and so would the services in which they work. The choice will be Latin America, Iran and, as others have said, the Indian subcontinent, South-East Asia, the Far East and Africa—any one or all of them. In these areas the services in their own languages will go, but the World Service in English cannot replace services in the countries to which the broadcasts are directed. After all, if you take the population of India, only 2 per cent. speak English and some of them not very well. Nine out of 10 of the BBC's audience in Northern India listen to the BBC in the vernacular. So let no one pretend that the preservation of the World Service will do much to reduce the impact in many parts of the world. Even where English is the second language, broadcasting in their own language is far more effective.
If the service is cut by 10 per cent., then it is likely on my calculation that services in 12 to 16 languages will have to go. Even half of that cut would mean serious damage. The possibilities are no broadcasting in German to East or West Germany, Austria or Switzerland; no French to French-speaking Africa or Metropolitan France; no Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Greek, Turkish, or Finnish; no broadcasts in Portuguese to Brazil or in Spanish to Central or South America. That is the size of it, even though there are choices within that range. Money can be dredged by cutting services to the Commonwealth or the Third World. Losing the only three vernacular languages in which the BBC broadcast, the cuts would extend to
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broadcasts in Persian, Bengali, Tamil, Malay, Indonesian, Thai, Vietnamese, Hindi, Urdu, Japanese, Burmese and Chinese. This is the scope of the reduction which is likely to follow a cut of 10 per cent. in the BBC's grant, or £4 million.
That is what we are talking about, two years after the debate in which we condemned cuts that were to be imposed more slowly and for another reason. It really is astonishing how frequently this comes up. Surely the Government realise the immense value to the country's reputation of these unbiased and objective broadcasts. It is their very existence, as well as their informative and educative effort and the reputation for objectivity, which is part of this country's good name overseas; and it is their professionalism, reliability and comprehensiveness which have ensured this international significance.
I would repeat the point made plain by the noble Lord, Lord Buxton. Broadcasting cannot be turned off like a tap. You cannot turn it off and then turn it on again. If you stop a language service, the audience goes to a less desirable, less amiable service, to put it mildly. The staff disperses, the frequencies are usurped, pinched, borrowed and occupied by other countries. You cannot stop one month and restore the service the next. That is absolutely clear and undeniable. If you cut a service, you no longer have a BBC time, place or wavelength on which to build a larger audience when you want it at a time of crisis. It is finished and over and done with.
I shall say no more, because so many valuable contributions are being made covering the same ground, but I must just say this. Broadcasting is an aspect of a nation's own view of itself. That is what external broadcasting is. Surely the Briton of today, however difficult the time, has not so small a conceit of himself that he prefers silence, abdication and the triumph of untruth—for that is what has been demonstrated by the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Chalfont. I would urge the Government to think again.
I saw a good deal of this service until seven years ago. I have no reason to advocate it, to speak for it, except the recollection of its own magnificence. It really is a tremendously important part of the presentation of Britain overseas. There is a capacity to make democracy

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work. There is a serenity—it is difficult to find the words—and there are qualities in this country which are admired throughout the world, although we do our best by our own troubles and our own self-criticism to destroy the image. It would be a tragedy if this damage were done to our Overseas Services and to our country—for that is what is involved—in many parts of the world, and to their image of us, for £4 million.
I hope that the Government's spokesman tonight will confirm that what we read in the Daily Telegraph yesterday was a quiet hint of an impending reversal of view, although it could possibly have been one of those comforting little noises which have no more meaning than to gain a day or two. The Government will go up in our estimation if, having looked at this subject and having heard the arguments expressed, they decide that these cuts are not for us to make. We cannot afford to make them.
Baroness GAITSKELL: My Lords, before the noble Lord sits down, may I ask him whether it would be not only a tragedy but a disgrace?
Lord HILL of LUTON: My Lords, we must each choose our own words. I have been trying to be a good boy tonight and not use unseemly words, but I would not demur at the suggestion that the word "disgrace" would not be inappropriate.
7.38 p.m.
Lord MORRIS: My Lords, I have often thought that the conduct of a nation's foreign affairs—surely, the most subtle of all the governmental arts—might be likened to a highly sophisticated, high fidelity sound reproduction system, in that its performance can only match the quality of its weakest component. It is a waste of time and money to match inferior speakers or a cheap pick-up head to a sophisticated amplifier. The Government of the day can be likened to the owner-operator of the system. They choose, finance, maintain and operate the equipment. The Whitehall apparat can be likened to the amplifier which synthesises the input, attenuates the power and controls the output. It is the information services which can be likened to the speakers, whose quality makes the performance arresting or otherwise.
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If the owner-operator starts poking about with the equipment, there will result wow and flutter, distortion, loss of audibility or, indeed, no sound at all. The sound will lose its fidelity. The audience will lose faith in what they hear—if they hear anything at all. They will go away and, as other noble Lords have said previously, they will never come back. This is precisely what Her Majesty's Government are threatening to do. We should take no heart from what I am sure the Government spokesman will say, "These proposals are minuscule; they will have very little effect", for, as you have heard from other noble Lords they will have a terrifying effect. The analogy which was used in a letter in the Daily Telegraph only today was the "salami effect" of the cheese-paring and the cutting of costs in previous years. This is the final slice that lops off the nub of the salami.
I beg to remind your Lordships that notwithstanding previous years, the BBC put into effect cuts of £390,000 in 1974–75. At the same time, spread over a period of four years, cuts of £1,760,000 were made. In 1976–77, cuts of £288,000 were made. In 1977–78, cuts of £541,000 were suffered. And in 1978–79 the BBC were asked to absorb cuts of £732,000.
Allow me to give your Lordships a concrete example of just one of the effects of these cuts. In the case of the Latin-American service, every single one of the supporting services has been completely eliminated. The publicity, the promotional services, the travel services and the research back-up just do not exist any more. Only direct broadcasting costs remain. The BBC have not got one office in the whole of Latin-America—not one. They used to, but it has all gone. How the BBC maintain the standard that they do without these back-up services I cannot understand, yet they are being asked to absorb even more cuts. Meanwhile, the Voice of America has overtaken us in the Latin-American theatre, as have Russia, Germany and the Warsaw Pact countries.
I keep asking myself, as many noble Lords must have done, why the Foreign Office have not cried out in pain, "Enough is enough. Leave this most effective instrument of our foreign relations alone". The only answer that I can see lies in the conflict of interest, in that the

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Foreign Office represents Government speaking to Government, whereas the BBC represents nation speaking to nation, people speaking to people. And, my goodness me! do they not do it better! It appears to me that in full view of the whole world Her Majesty's Government are attempting to throttle themselves and the nation.
With your Lordships' leave, may I quote one short leading article as an example. It is from an Argentinian publication called La Prensa which, believe me, has in the past been in no way friendly towards us. On 10th October they wrote:
"The Argentine republic has been traditionally friendly to the United Kingdom. Aside from certain matters, the long-standing political and economic bonds remain between the River Plate and Britain. They watched the dawn of our independence with favourable understanding. Over the years, among us and also among others of significance, an Anglo-Saxon culture has taken root and extended to literature and public law. Lastly, the economic relations with the hub of the British Empire"—
I like that—
"have been multiple and productive. That and, above all, the community of fundamental political interest should persuade Mrs. Thatcher's government not to sever a magnificent system of radio-communication that is a bond of union between their country and so many on this continent."
Governments may choose not to heed public opinion, if they must, but I beseech Her Majesty's Government to listen with great care to the great men—to one of our most distinguished diplomatists; namely, the noble Lord, Lord Trevelyan, who wrote in 1973:
"The most effective British activity in the wide realm of information is the Overseas Service of the BBC".
And similarly to the noble Lord, Lord St. Brides, who, in a memorable maiden speech in November 1977, said:
"To my mind, a country which can no longer achieve all its ends by the sheer weight of military and economic power needs to put more, not less, effort into the protection of its interests by other means. Britain's position in the international community has certainly changed since 1945. But the means of maintaining and developing influence in the world have changed, too. They have become less palpable. They require more intellectual and imaginative effort, and less brute force. In the new, much more open, situation which has resulted, we can more than hold our own if we wish, and provided that we continue to manifest a will to excellence and the desire to compete, and if possible to lead, which goes with it".—[Official Report, 23/11/77; col. 885.]
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Above all, however, I beseech the Government to listen to the words, quoted so pertinently by the noble Lord, Lord Gladwyn, of my noble friend Lord Home of the Hirsel in that same debate. Big Ben does not toll only at Westminster. It tolls in the hearts and minds of oppressed and muted millions and, indeed, in what is left of the Free World.
I beg Her Majesty's Government not to muffle our nation's future.
7.47 p.m.
Lord HANKEY: My Lords, I want to support a great deal of what has been said in this debate, notably by my noble friends Lord Weidenfeld, Lord Chalfont and Lord Hill of Luton. I shall not repeat the information which they have given but I can certify that it is absolutely valid.
I have much experience of the BBC External Services. For a great many years I travelled as a diplomat, and I have also travelled since my retirement. I, like the noble Lord, Lord Chalfont, always carry with me a short wave radio. One can always hear the BBC, literally anywhere in the world, at 8 a.m. local time—generally loud and clear. And there are numerous other broadcasts as well. I can certify that the BBC is very widely listened to abroad, both in English and in local languages, often by distinguished people. For instance, when I was Ambassador in Sweden Mr. Tage Erlander, the very distinguished Prime Minister, listened every morning to the BBC, to my certain knowledge. There are huge audiences in the Middle East and in Africa. I agree entirely with what the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Guildford said about that.
The second point I want to make is that an audience, especially one of interest and respect such as the BBC has, really cannot be turned on and off like a tap. My noble friend Lord Hill of Luton made this point, and I want to drive it home. At least you can turn your audience off, but you cannot turn it on again. Once it has gone it has gone. I had a tragic experience of this. When I was Ambassador in Stockholm there was one of these periodical economy drives. They are very necessary, as I know only too well. The Foreign Office decided to abolish the information section of the embassy, and the result was absolutely disastrous—as, I must frankly say, I had

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foretold that it would be. We just could not give the journalists and others all the support that they needed. After a year and a half or so, the Foreign Office changed their mind and sent back a really excellent information secretary. However, it took him a year and a half to get going, and we lost virtually three years of work over this to-ing and fro-ing.
When the Foreign Office sent back the information secretary they decided to suppress the British Council post. The Swedes were immensely upset about this. They took on the running of the British Institute and, frankly, they ran it every hit as well as we did. They supplied English teachers to the whole of the Swedish educational system. It was admirably done, and I think that they still do it that way. In due course, the British Council sent back a very good man, but we had lost an immense number of contacts; and especially we had lost respect and contacts in the universities, the schools and among the intellectuals. So the lesson from that, as the noble Lord, Lord Hill of Luton, so wisely told us, is that we must not go to-ing and fro-ing; we must not chop and change. This is a cardinal British sin. We must have the strength of mind and the character to do things well and jolly well stick to them.
My third point is that any of your Lordships can easily hear for yourselves what the BBC external services are like. You do not need a short wave set. All you have to do on a Saturday morning—and I say Saturday because it is easy; you do not have to go pounding off to the office—is to turn on the medium wave at round about 450 metres and you will hear a truly admirable news service which is much better than the domesticities of Radio 4, giving a balanced account of everything that is happening in the world, followed by a newspaper review, followed by a review of the weekly periodicals which is of fascinating interest. It is a broadcast of real intellectual perspicacity. The BBC are greatly to be commended on the way they do this and if your Lordships listen on Saturday morning I am sure you will share my view.
That brings me to my fourth point. One cannot imagine how valuable and important an objective source of news and balanced common sense and real intellectual perspicacity is overseas in the world we live in. All too often as we travel
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across the world the local presentation of the news is distorted by ideology or propaganda or plain prejudice. I can give a striking personal example. In May 1968 I went to the Soviet Union with a parliamentary delegation, and incidentally with my short wave radio. Every morning at 8.15 I went down to breakfast and gave the other parliamentarians, British and Soviet, the news of the day as presented by the BBC. It happened to be a rather dramatic period. It was the time when there was a student revolt in France, the barricades were up in the Quartier Latin in Paris; there was a general strike with seven million men on strike in France. General de Gaulle had to cut short an official visit to Rumania and come back to control the situation. There were rumours of Soviet troop movements in the south of Poland, near the Czechoslovak frontier, described by an official Polish communiqué from Warsaw as"preparations for summer manoeuvres". The Soviet Prime Minister had talks in Prague, described in an official communiqué issued by Mr. Dubcek's Government. There was a naval incident in the Arctic with an American aircraft carrier and a Soviet pilot who was buzzing it, who missed his foothold—if that is the right term—fell into the sea and was pulled out by the Americans. Not a word of any of this appeared in the Soviet press.
I think it was either in central Siberia or the Caucasus that our extremely kind, courteous and generous Soviet hosts said to me over the breakfast table"Now look here, Lord Hankey, a joke is a joke is a joke. You have really had us on quite long enough. Do admit that it is all fun". I said "Honestly, it is not. Come and listen to my radio tomorrow morning". As a matter of fact, the Soviet Press carried the news the next day and our dear Soviet hosts were horribly embarrassed and indeed dumbfounded to find the extent to which the wool was pulled over their eyes by their own information services. I should like to say that in Eastern Europe there was at that time a great deal of radio jamming but one could always hear the BBC because the Soviet authorities themselves wanted to know what the BBC was saying, so there was always a window and, with a little ingenuity, one could always find it.

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In this case I say, "Well done, the BBC". They did a magnificent job and they are still doing it and have been doing it ever since. In varying degrees it happens all over the world where truth is being suppressed or modified. In a world where truth, mercy and justice—those cardinal Christian virtues—are being undermined; in a world where democracy really has its back to the wall in so many places and where the moral and political ideals to which we are firmly attached need constant restatement and emphasis; in this world where our whole liberal civilisation and all our human rights are now at risk ; how vital it is, not only to Britain but to Europe and America and all our friends in every continent, to give the news objectively and to say fearlessly what we think and believe day by day across the wireless waves to the whole world in the excellent world language which is our marvellous heritage and also in the languages locally used. I beg the Government to take my heartfelt plea seriously and so far as possible to keep the BBC External Services going, on at least their present scale, and above all to hold on to our well chosen wavelengths and maintain the power of the transmitters.
7.58 p.m.
Lord FERRIER: My Lords, before the noble Lord sits down, as it were, he referred to the "Weekly World" on the Overseas Service: Why can we not get it here? We get "News Stand" at five minutes to 10, but that is not half so good. However, that is by the way. Something that my noble friend Lord Buxton of Alsa said towards the end of his excellent speech reminded me that I received a letter over the weekend from the "boy" who was in my service for nearly 30 years. I would remind your Lordships that "boy" is a corruption of "Bhai" meaning brother. I think that is not generally appreciated. This dear friend of mine and my family, now, alas! quite blind in his home in Gujarat, where he has a first-class radio set, in his letter dictated to a letter writer, said:
"I am listening daily to the radio and sometimes I hear of your Scotland".
I think that is very nice of him; presumably of course in the vernacular, and as the noble Lord, Lord Hill of Luton, pointed
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out these vernacular broadcasts are of great importance in this vital service.
However, this is a trivial matter compared with what the noble Lords, Lord Buxton of Alsa, Lord Chalfont, Lord Hankey, and all the "big guns with whom I am mixed up at this moment, have been saying. Nevertheless, the item is a little window on the dangerous world in which we live. The Prime Minister has done the right thing in drawing attention to the menace of Russian superiority in men and weaponry. The noble Lord, Lord Chalfont, has said it better than I could and so I shall not develop the point, but I should have liked him to go further. He said, "No cuts". Of course, but if we cannot match the weaponry, why can we not match the weapons of the sound waves by increasing the advantage which the BBC service—thank goodness!—still holds and has worked at for so long? It is not that we cannot afford to: my Lords, we cannot afford not to.
8 p.m.
Lord AUCKLAND: My Lords, this is a most opportune time to discuss the problems facing the BBC's Overseas Services, particularly in the light of the substantial cuts which Her Majesty's Government are being forced to make in many areas and which the vast majority of responsible people regard as being a necessary evil. But, my Lords, there must be some discernment as to where these cuts are to take place. In recent years this country has been the butt of some scurrilous denigration, much of it within our own shores, but some of it, alas!, from overseas, and some of it from sources overseas where one would least expect it. How better to counteract this kind of problem than not to cut but to strengthen our Overseas Broadcasting Services? In times of difficulty the thing that really matters is communication. Communication between countries is the linchpin of the democratic way of life, revealing credit where it is due—and this is revealed all too infrequently now—and debit where it is due, which is sometimes overdone.
I want to refer briefly in the major part of my speech to one country, a country I happen to have been to, and that country is Finland. Finland has been mentioned in the course of this debate, and I believe that Finland has a special qualification to

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get a particular mention. If one looks back in history a few years, if it had not been for Field Marshal Mannerheim and his insistence on keeping Finnish troops on Finnish soil after the last war the odds are that Finland would have gone the same way as, alas, Czechoslovakia has so tragically gone. I have only visited Finland once, on a Parliamentary delegation some ten years ago, but I keep in very close contact with that country, with people in business, in the diplomatic service, in the arts and in many walks of life, and also with a number of Finnish people in this country.
The voice of Finland is broadcast alone by the BBC. America and Germany do not broadcast in Finnish. Some 225,000 Finns listen regularly to the BBC. What would happen if the Finnish transmissions were cut out? It would mean that Russia and Poland would get a virtual monopoly. One only has to look at a map to see that Finland lives very much in the shadow of the Soviet Union. If you go, as I did, north to Tornio and to Rovaniemi, you are within about 30 miles of the Estonian border. It is absolutely vital that we keep contact with a country which fought the Russians very bravely in 1939, which had much of its northern country, particularly Finnish Lapland, razed by the Germans, which had to pay enormous reparations to Soviet Russia, but which today nevertheless manages, despite inflation, to maintain a relatively strong economy.
A short time ago, the BBC television service put out a series of programmes. I think it was entitled "Under the Russian Bear" or some such title, and one country chosen was Finland. I presume that the gentleman who presented this programme had been to Finland recently. I must admit that I only saw the last few moments of the programme, but I read the extracts very carefully in that admirable journal, The Listener. The programme, which seemed to depict Finland as a country which no tourist could visit without being followed and other such sinister manifestations, bore absolutely no relation to what I saw and to what a number of people who I know have been to Finland have seen in recent years. One can move about quite freely. English is the second language in the schools. There is a considerable exchange of tourists, although not enough British people go to
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Finland, largely because it is expensive. There is every opportunity for very much more communication between these two countries, but only if the broadcasting of the Finnish service is maintained, and I think I have said enough in this connection to justify that.
I should like to quote very briefly from a letter written by a Finn only a very short time ago:
"I visited some friends in Estonia last summer. I asked them how often they listened to the BBC and they said many times a week. This seems to be a common practice, at least in Tallin".
which is the capital of Estonia—
"I asked them why they did so, and they said that the Russian news were complete rubbish and the Finnish TV news were very much 'softened' … So, they said, the only source for interesting news were the Finnish news on the BBC. Sometimes these, too, have been jammed. My friends asked in particular to thank you for your news bulletins and for the information you give about the communist countries (defectors, etc.). They also praised your news for their 'freshness'."
My Lords, this country has a trade deficit with Finland. We need to export more to that country, and in what better way could this be at least helped than by ensuring that the Finnish service is not only maintained but strengthened? I submit to the taxpayer that that could be done at relatively little cost. I read the article in the Daily Telegragh this morning. One must wait and see whether it is true. If it is not true then the situation is indeed gloomy.
I turn away from Finland to that, at the moment, very unhappy, very lovely country, Czechoslovakia, which I also visited not very long ago. Many Czech people love this country and have fought for this country, and the BBC could do and is doing much to alleviate the sufferings in Czechoslovakia.
Mention has been made of the Overseas Service of the BBC. I entirely endorse all that has been said about the excellence of its programmes, its news bulletins and the correspondence column which covers many countries. We in this country have much to praise ourselves for as well as much for which we must accept criticism. Even at a time when cuts in public expenditure are necessary, if we were to advertise our own plus points as well as we do our minus points—which is done so effectively by those who work so conscientiously for the Overseas Service of the BBC—the state of this country could gain much.
8.11 p.m.
Lord RITCHIE-CALDER: My Lords, I apologise that my name does not appear on the list of speakers, but I have been out of the country and was not sure whether I would be back in time for this important and critical debate. At least I want to stand up and be counted. The remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Chalfont, about the relative importance of military and political economies reminded me of how during the war I had a pretty heavy commitment as the Director of Plans and Operations for Political Warfare. We—that is to say myself, the noble Lord, Lord Gladwyn, the noble Lord, Lord Weidenfeld, and many others—were trying to build up what we called rather pretentiously the "Fourth Fighting Arm". That was the political warfare element and an important part of that was the BBC and its Overseas Services.
Apropos what we are saying about the Overseas Service today and what it has been doing over the last 30 years; it is a great tribute to us, the BBC in particular—some of us were trying to manipulate it—that we maintained the total integrity of the BBC. As regards that integrity I vividly remember that I had great battles in which I was fighting something called"the projection of Britain". The "projection of Britain" would nowadays be regarded as the advertising of Britain, the public relations of Britain. I maintained, and I still do, that the most effective propaganda for Britain, the most effective projection of Britain, is to show how Britain behaves—not to show what it is doing, but to show how it behaves. Therefore, the whole of our services—and they have continued to be so—were built up with the power of independence and a scrupulous regard for truth which we insisted on respecting. I am talking again as though we were trying to manipulate the BBC; but we insisted on respecting the total integrity of the BBC in its presentation of facts and also on recognising that what was said critically, often by people from various other countries on their own services, was a very important aspect of our promotion—that is, we were letting them criticise us. We built this up until the end of the war when I insisted that Great Britain had lost a great deal. However, we recognised at the end of the war, as we must recognise now, that the BBC was
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our greatest single asset. We had an authority which we could not have bought. There was no way in which we could have exploited the situation to create the authority that we had, except for the war.
I come back to the point raised by the noble Lord, Lord Buxton of Alsa. He said that we must not cut the life support systems of these people. We had become the life support system of the resistance movements everywhere in Europe. I insisted then, and I still insist today, that the whole face of Europe was turned West—not to Britain as a self-advertised Britain, but to London which had become the lighthouse, the only beacon in the Western World. They turned to us as a point of reference. The fact that we behaved well in those circumstances was to our credit, but we could have built into that authority a great influence which we could have exercised; but I am afraid in many instances after the war we failed to do so.
Today something still remains. The remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Chalfont, about the parallel with the military are absolutely indisputable. We used to talk about the BBC as our "grand fleet in being"; we were keeping it intact and not allowing it to disgrace itself, and even if it wanted to do so we would not let it. It was the biggest instrument that we possessed. It was our fleet in being. We should not take our Overseas Service and put the ships into mothballs—if we do so we shall sink them. It is a Scapa Flow: we would be putting them at the bottom of the sea, because as everyone agrees we would not be able to restore them. If we lose the people, we would have no crew. We would have sunk the grand fleet. That is what we are proposing to do. I say to the noble Lord the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, whom I deeply respect, that I hope he will not go down in history as the man who succeeded in doing what neither Goebbels nor the Russians ever succeeded in doing, namely, shutting the mouth of Britain.
8.18 p.m.
Lord GEORGE-BROWN: My Lords, I rise with more than the normal amount of trepidation because I am inserting myself into a debate most of which I have not heard. My only excuse is that I have spent the last hour in the chaos of London

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traffic trying to get here from Euston. I fumed more and more, but all to no avail, and I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Bruce of Donington, for saying that he would not add this particular sin of intervening now too heavily to all the other sins which he already, I know, holds against me in a variety of ways.
There is a matter that I should like to raise and which I suspect has not been raised by other speakers. It is a matter about which I feel strongly and, as we have a debate on this subject so rarely, I should not like to lose the opportunity of raising it tonight. I have raised this matter on the radio and I have written about it in newspapers, and I should like to say it to my noble friends here tonight.
We all pay tribute to the Overseas Service of the BBC and in general I have no wish to disagree with my colleagues about that. Certainly that part of it which goes out in English, which is the part that I can hear and understand—in part anyway—when I am travelling about the world, is one that I am always very glad of, proud of and feel pleased that there is such a clear and trustworthy source. However, if that were all there was to it there would be no excuse for my intervention tonight at all. However, I have recently begun to worry a great deal about other parts of the Overseas Service of the BBC—those parts which we do not normally hear and which even if we did we normally would not understand and therefore would take for granted.
Two recent examples have worried me. A similar example occurred when I was Foreign Secretary. While negotiating in Moscow on some delicate matters, I found myself in great difficulties due to the absolute and, as I then thought, rather arrogant refusal by those who were running the Russian service of the BBC to consider the foreign and diplomatic policy of Her Majesty's Government and the negotiations in which I was then engaged, and who, instead, insisted upon exercising their total independence of the Foreign Office and created some considerable difficulty for me. There is a case for telling Ministers that it is time we had an inquiry—it would probably be better done by Parliament than by anybody else—into the way in which the "own-language services", if that is a clear statement, of the Overseas Service of the BBC are being conducted, how
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policy is being made and to what extent, if any, the foreign policy being pursued by Her Majesty's Government at any time is taken into account.
In parenthesis let me say that we must remember that, although we in this House know about the independence of the BBC, it is very difficult to get that clearly understood in countries which themselves have no such independent organisation. They know that the BBC is funded by the Government and they assume that it must therefore be—as it would be in their own countries—a government service. All of us who have travelled must have had the same experience as I have had in trying to explain to foreign statesmen, politicians and newspapers that that is indeed not so. Although I would not have it otherwise, I believe that it is necessary to be quite sure that those who run what perhaps could be called the covert operation of Bush House are in some way democratically responsible—if not to the Government, then to whom?
Let me give the examples of the recent past which I have very much in mind. Last November and again last January I was in Iran, closely in touch with both Her Majesty's Government and with the embassy, but acting as an independent and individual Member of this House and, therefore, disownable by everybody. However, what worried everybody in Iran—the British embassy, British businessmen, Persian journalists and other nationals—was the extent to which they regarded the BBC Parsee service as exceeding all bounds of news or justifiable attitude-striking in its comments. I had transcripts made for me by our embassy and I had transcripts made by Iranian journalists who had been imprisoned by the Shah, and it was evident that not only were we broadcasting from here news of what was happening, but that we were broadcasting calls from, for example, Khomeini in Paris to the people in Teheran to rise and do things, to engage in disorder. There is the disputed question of whether on one occasion they actually broadcast instructions as to how to make Molotov cocktails, but certainly there were calls to go on strike the next day. On my return when I challenged this I was told that it was news because Khomeini had said it in Paris. Then it became news the next day because it had

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happened in Teheran. In all the answers that I received to my protests I was met with a very fanciful and unreal defence.
This is a danger when our own-language service is bound to be operated by emigres and by others who are here because they are opponents of the existing régime. Unless one is very careful, an enormous amount of bias will be injected. It is unlikely that Mr. Gerald Mansell or his acolytes at the BBC actually read Parsee easily enough to be fully up to date day by day with what is being said by these emigre broadcasters. Last November many people still thought that we had a chance to help get some other government in Iran, either with the Shah still there or with him absent, which would certainly have been a much better situation than the one we have at present. However, the overseas Parsee service of the BBC was not only delivering, in the guise of news, anti-Shah and anti-régime propaganda; it went even further and was delivering pro-Khomeini propaganda. There is no dispute that that is what was being done. Not only in my view but in the view of the business community, other journalists and certainly of the British Embassy they had a very great deal of responsibility for building up the Khomeini campaign which has produced the disasters today, which are certainly as bad as the worst under the Shah, and I suspect very much worse.
That worried me in November when there was still a chance to do something else; it worried me when I returned in January at the invitation of everybody who was struggling to do something; I saw it in an even more exaggerated form then. All appeals that they should desist or that they should be much more careful, or that they should listen to the Foreign Office were refused. I know very well that the Foreign Office here, our embassy there and various very distinguished people in this country, to whom appeals were made, made great efforts to persuade everybody from Micheal Swann to Gerald Mansell and other people at Bush House for Heaven's sake to reconsider the depth of the seas into which they were getting.
I have spoken to people about this since, and as I say I have written about it. I might have forgotten it or tucked it away in the back of my mind like my previous
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Moscow experience 10 years ago, except that one night a few months ago I was watching on BBC 2 a broadcast and then there was a rebroadcast of a film on what is called the "Markov affair". This had to do with the death of a Bulgarian refugee who was stabbed with an umbrella point and died rather horribly, poisoned by, it was thought, agents of the régime. The régime in Bulgaria is very different from the régime in Persia. I do not feel any softer about the régime in Bulgaria than about the other—that is for sure and certain. However, I was horrified by what the BBC showed in the film of the Markov affair. They were very proud of themselves because they showed the film twice. They emphasised that Markov was almost certainly murdered because he was broadcasting propaganda against the régime and the leaders of the régime in his native land, and that this had so stunned the leaders of the régime and was having such an effect that they had decided to eliminate him, and had made attempts to eliminate other members of the BBC's staff. But then I stopped, because that worried me as much as the Iranian matter. What business has a Government funded service to be broadcasting propaganda against the régime of a country with which Her Majesty's Government feel it politic to have friendly relations? Who is making the foreign policy of this country?
I got very worried indeed by the Markov account. I think that somebody has to be asked to look at the directions, because all one's attempts to raise it seriously and in an understanding way with the BBC have failed, because they simply say that one is trying to make a case for the Foreign Office. They have a jaundiced view of the Foreign Office, and they do not wish to have any connection with or control by the Foreign Office, which in a way I hear many people say. But in point of fact the desire to be independent of the Foreign Office does not in my view justify running what amounts to a separate foreign policy. Certainly in the case both of Iran, which I know of first-hand, and of Markov, which I know from their own broadcasts, the BBC were running a policy which was not the policy of our diplomats en poste or of the Foreign Office at home.
This brought a comparison to my mind. Some years ago in the 1950s I was intro-

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duced to, and got very interested in, the operations of Radio Free Europe. It operated from Munich with American funds. It again got terribly involved in running covert propaganda operations. That went on right up until recent times when the American Congress, in the aftermath of Watergate, insisted that the funds of Radio Free Europe should be provided by Congress, and that a Select Committee of Congress should satisfy itself about the operations of Radio Free Europe because of the effect that what they had been doing was having on United States' relations with eastern European and other countries.
I express no view as to whether the United States Government's policy or Her Majesty's Government's policy is right about those countries. That is a matter about which we shall argue on another occasion. But I say that until it is changed it is highly dangerous to have a private empire in the bowels of Bush House, employing emigrés, employing refugees from existing régimes, conducting—it is done covertly but it is open in the sense that it can easily be heard—their own covert operations against the régimes with which we chose to have friendly relations.
Whatever may be the Government's answer to this Motion tonight about making some cuts—and I am pretty certain that some cuts can be made, as one can always find room to make cuts in almost any service, and I do not want to support any view that may have been expressed that you can easily think you can transfer the cuts proposed for the Overseas Service to other foreign department services without also doing damage to the other foreign services—I ask them to consider my proposition that the two House of Parliament should be asked to set up a Joint Committee. This could examine what is going on and discover how policy is decided in this part of the Overseas Services, who directs it, to whom he or they are responsible, and whether any changes ought to be made from here on to secure Parliamentary, if not Government, control. I apologise again for intervening on this point.
8.35 p.m.
Lord BRUCE of DONINGTON: My Lords, the House will be grateful to the
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noble Lord, Lord Buxton of Alsa, for having introduced this Unstarred Question today and for having initiated the debate. It would seem that there has been an astonishing degree of unanimity in the House when it has come to consider what we will think of for the moment as the projected cuts that the Government may have in mind to impose on the BBC External Services. The noble Lord, Lord George-Brown, will perhaps forgive me if I do not deal immediately with the point he raised, but I shall endeavour to refer to it in the course of what I hope will be a short rejoinder this evening.
On the 27th July, in answer to a Parliamentary Question concerning the future of the Overseas Services, the noble Lord, Lord Carrington, said that there was a review of expenditure. He was pressed in this House as to its possible extent but he declined to commit himself beyond saying, as it was quite proper for him to do, that of course it would be incorporated in the normal way in the Government's statement on public expenditure which—and the noble Lord will correct me if I am wrong—is expected towards the end of the autumn. This has not discouraged rumour. It has been said, and I have reason to believe, that the Foreign Office at any rate until quite recently has been asked to effect something like £4½ million of savings on the BBC Overseas Service. As I said, we cannot say that these are firm Government proposals yet, but the reports are that cuts of this magnitude are in contemplation. I hope that after listening to the debate this evening the noble Lord, Lord Trefgarne, who is to reply, may be able to assure us that after giving mature consideration to the whole question these cuts will not in fact take place at all. Or he may be constrained to say that the Government have not yet made up their mind, and will take faithfully into account the views which have been expressed in this debate by the 11 or 12 noble Lords who have spoken.
When we are considering cutting the services, or effecting economics in the Overseas Service of the BBC, what are we really doing? What we are really doing is—and I shall return to the point made by the noble Lord, Lord George-Brown—cutting down the quantity and spread of information that is going out from these islands to the rest of the world. Sound

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radio has a great advantage over other forms of media expression, because for vast parts of the world television is quite out of the question for the vast majority of people. It is different from the Press—on the assumption that a free Press had full circulation throughout all the populations of the world—because the great mass of humanity, although it can speak and can hear, cannot read. Of course radio, particularly where it is addressed to these millions of people in their own language, is something they can understand, even though they cannot read. What we are in effect considering, therefore, is the possibility that the Government of the day may be taking away the only means that millions of people have of knowing what is happening in the remainder of the world—what is happening in the United Kingdom, in Europe and elsewhere.
I can well understand the views of the noble Lord, Lord George-Brown, who bearing in mind the time he was a distinguished person in a very distinguished series of offices, might have found independence highly inconvenient to Government. One of the great strengths of the BBC's Overseas Service, whatever errors it might make, is precisely that point; it is not susceptible to governmental pressures or to those pressures that are overtly and ruthlessly exerted in totalitarian States. It is known to be independent and it is known that many politicians—not, I trust, the noble Lord—would like to have it less independent than it is.
It may well be the case, in the broadcasts on the Overseas Services, that where convenient they employ the services of emigrés, and we know that the enunciation of truth can be taken as an attack on the régimes in certain dictator countries. It may be taken, as Lord George-Brown said, as propaganda; there are many in this world to whom all truth is dismissed as propaganda if it is inconvenient to the dictator and the dictator States. Although I would not invite the House—I would not dream of doing so because I am not an expert in these affairs—to accept the BBC Overseas Service as being the last word in perfection, I am reasonably satisfied that a genuine and objective effort is made to convey what they consider to be the truth to the outside world,
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and I would not resist in the slightest any inquiry to determine whether or not that is in fact the case.
We talk from time to time about the necessity for the Free World to match up in terms of armaments, manpower and science to those other countries which live under different systems from ours in the West and which, it is apprehended, present a threat to the Free World. Indeed, the Prime Minister herself recently emphasised the necessity for the West, and in particular the United Kingdom, to play its part in preserving at least parity with the military menace which is apprehended from other sections of the earth. Therefore in the United Kingdom, in spite of all the cuts it has been found necessary to make in all types of social expenditure—with consequences that were adequately dealt with by my noble friend Lord Wells-Pestell in the debate yesterday—there has been a deliberate increase in expenditure on defence.
I listened with interest to the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Chalfont. We are currently engaged, when we are not retiring behind our defences and improving them, in a battle for men's minds, and in terms of military defence that battle plays a very significant part indeed. My noble friend Lord Ritchie-Calder referred to the whole question of psychological warfare during the last Great War. The battle for men's minds is the most important thing of all, bearing in mind that out of the 152 nations in the United Nations, only about 30 have the freedom of media expression such as we have in the United Kingdom and in other countries of the West.
In terms of defence alone I cannot understand what has, or may have, got into the mind of Her Majesty's Government, who are passionately addicted to defence. Yet when it comes to this vital part, evidently they are seriously considering mutilating the service, and in exceptional circumstances. I could understand the position on 27th July last when the Foreign Secretary, the noble Lord, Lord Carrington, said the matter was under review. But since that time we have had a number of uncovenanted benefits on the credit side of the balance sheet which must have given the Prime Minister rather greater room for manoeuvre than she might otherwise have

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thought. They might even have given the Chancellor of the Exchequer some slight cause for rejoicing.
Noble Lords will recall that on Monday we had the uncovenanted bonus of £14½ million which are to be the savings as the result of the abolition of exchange controls. So there is £14½ million of uncovenanted benefit since these cuts were originally contemplated. Moreover, since then there has become a dawning of the significance of the deficit this county has with the EEC, amounting to some £1,000 million, and, if one reads the Press, the Prime Minister will make every conceivable endeavour to ensure that this country's net liability to the EEC is very considerably reduced. I hope it will be reduced by more than the £4 million or so which is covered ostensibly by these cuts. It would be a poor testimony to the confidence the Government have in the Prime Minister if they were to say that she will not get back more than that.
Of course this country can afford the £4½ million which may be involved here. It is nonsense to suppose otherwise. It is not as though there has been an objective review of the BBC, and apart altogether from any question of asking the BBC to review its own operations, no real coherent reason has been put forward other than the mathematical necessity for making cuts. This is not the technique of Government. This is the technique of the bacon slicer and it is something the country cannot afford to do.
I have said that the Overseas Service of the BBC is a vital factor in the nation's defence. It is also a vital factor in connection with trade. On any one of the three packages that have been put forward as alternatives—and there is the inescapable alternative of the BBC—broadcasts to South America would most certainly suffer in any eventuality. I thought that it was necessary for us to develop our export trade with South America. It is not a very good start to such an operation to cut entirely, or to mutilate, our communications with them.
My Lords, I will not weary your Lordships by repeating the arguments that have been put forward so ably from all parts of the House. It would be invidious to mention names. It may be that at the end of the day the noble
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Lord, Lord Trefgarne, will be able to say that the Government have not committed themselves yet, that they have no real intention of doing anything of the kind, but that they have the intention not only of maintaining the BBC's Overseas Service, but even of increasing it. In that case we should all be very happy to offer the noble Lord our felicitations. But if the Government persist in what must be regarded in any objective language as a completely nonsensical policy, then the verdict ultimately will be as follows. There are cuts in the social services which have been recognised so far as in some cases stupid, in other cases vicious, and in some instances both stupid and vicious. In this particular case if the Government make a decision on the lines feared, they will be completely stupid.
8.52 p.m.
Lord TREFGARNE: My Lords, my noble friend Lord Ferrier referred during the course of his speech to the thought that he was here among the big guns this evening, and I was reminded of an occasion a few months ago when we were in Opposition. I went to South Wales, to a constituency which has hardly ever returned a Conservative MP, certainly not recently. Of course that is why no one more senior was sent. I addressed a gathering of the small number of party faithful who were to be found in that area. When I had finished my speech the local chairman came up to me and said, "Thank you very much for coming. Do you think we could have a Tory big gun next year—perhaps Lord Carrington?" I know that Lord Carrington would have wished to be here tonight but other duties well known to your Lordships have prevented him from doing so, and I must therefore do my best.
If I was in any doubt about the intensity of feeling on this subject when I came into the Chamber this evening, that doubt has been very firmly dispelled by the speeches which we have heard in this debate. My noble friend Lord Buxton of Alsa, to whom we are indebted for initiating this discussion, has put his point of view very clearly, and he has been powerfully and ably supported by very many of your Lordships this evening. I should like to say at the outset that of course the Government agree with all the powerful reasons which have been mentioned tonight in

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support of the BBC's Overseas Service, but it is an unhappy fact of life that in Government we very often have to distinguish between the greater and the lesser evils.
First of all, we have to be quite clear what we are talking about when we refer to the BBC External Services. Unlike the BBC domestic services, which are financed by the licence fee, the External Services are wholly financed by a Government grant carried on the Foreign Office Vote. Although these services are financed by Government, the BBC have full responsibility for their broadcasting operations and are completely independent in determining the content of news, and indeed other programmes. I shall develop that point a little further when I come to the most interesting remarks of the noble Lord, Lord George-Brown.
There are many facets to the BBC External Services, some of them highly specialised like the Monitoring Service which provides speedy and accurate reports of significant news and comment from the foreign transmissions in all parts of the world. There is also the commercially successful "English-by-Radio", whose product is in use in about a hundred countries, and the Transcription Services and Topical Tapes which provide recorded programmes to overseas broadcasters. But by far the best known part of the organisation are the World Services in English and the so-called Vernacular Services.
The BBC World Service broadcasts in English for 24 hours each day. It is a complete radio service, providing not only news and every kind of talks programme, but also sport, drama, light entertainment, and music in continuous transmission addressed to all parts of the world. The Vernacular Services (providing broadcasts in more than 30 different languages) do not provide quite such universal coverage, but their broadcasts usually include news bulletins, and topical commentaries of particular interest to the regions to which they are beamed. These services are carried by some 47 transmitters in the United Kingdom and 27 transmitters at relay stations sited around the World.
The context in which this debate is taking place is that of the overriding need
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to keep Government spending to a figure which is commensurate with our resources. It is in this context that the Government have embarked upon a review of all aspects of public expenditure and, as has already been said in both Houses, the BBC as a grant-aided body cannot be excluded from this review. The Foreign Office itself, as has already been announced, has been forced to bear heavy cuts involving 23 posts abroad, besides substantial economies at home, and further staff cuts are still under consideration. Many other Departments are faced with similar painful choices.
For the Foreign Office it has been particularly painful and difficult to contemplate reductions in the Overseas Services of the BBC, for who better than our diplomatic representatives abroad can appreciate the value and quality of the BBC's External Services, both because of their high degree of professionalism and because of the image which they project so successfully of a civilised and democratic Britain?
Since the inception of the public expenditure review, we have had representations, not only in Parliament and in the Press, but from a wide variety of correspondents both at home and abroad, making special pleas for us to deal lightly with the BBC's External Services. The vast majority of these correspondents have emphasised the value of the World Service in English, which all of us at one time or another, I am sure, have had reason to appreciate. Indeed, I understand that it has a large audience in the United Kingdom as well. The noble Lord, Lord Hankey, and others mentioned this. I have a little personal memory of the Overseas Service of the BBC. I was brought up as a boy in Sussex very close to the main transmitter of the World Service, and I remember that the only thing that I could receive on the crystal sets that I connected to my bed springs at night was the Overseas Service of the BBC, usually in Polish, but none the less interesting when you are nine years old and should be asleep anyway.
Let me say that Ministers have not been unmindful of the often eloquent and deeply-felt representations made by people of all political persuasion. We have also taken into account the points of view expressed by the BBC themselves in the

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consultations they have had with Foreign Office officials. As always, it is a question of priorities. As I have said, the BBC broadcasts in English to the whole world, and in more than 30 other languages to particular areas. Each naturally has its own supporters, but each cannot be said to be equally important to our national interest, contrary to what some of the arguments canvassed publicly in recent weeks—and particularly here tonight—would, I think, have us believe.
My noble friend the Foreign Secretary is firmly resolved to minimise the implications for our interests of any economies in the BBC's External Services; but I am sorry to say that such is the overridding general need to find economies that some at least will have to be made. I regret that I am not yet in a position to give financial details, as these, together with the financial details of economies in other Departments, must await the publication of the White Paper. For the same reason, I am unable at this stage to go into specific details about the nature of the economies which will be made. But I am happy to be able to say that the World Service in English will remain intact; audibility will be maintained and, where possible, improved; and vernacular services to developing countries and to those countries which do not enjoy free and open access to news and information will also be largely unaffected. This announcement will, I believe, allay many of the fears which have been expressed tonight.
May I now deal with some of the points raised by noble Lords during this debate. I apologise if I am not able to deal with all of them tonight, but I will, where necessary, undertake to write to noble Lords who have raised matters to which I cannot immediately provide an answer. First of all, the noble Lord, Lord Gladwyn, asked me whether we could not use some of the existing aid monies for supporting the Overseas Services of the BBC. This is a detailed technical matter which I really do not think I am competent to go into at this stage; and, of course, the details will have to be gleaned from the White Paper when it is published in due course.
I was a little puzzled by the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Hill of Luton. It indeed followed the general pattern of the speeches on this subject in your Lord-
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ships' House tonight, and one's memory fails over the years, but is it not the case that during a distinguished ministerial career the noble Lord was himself responsible for considering, if not implementing, a good many cuts of a fairly firm nature in the BBC's Overseas Services? I confess that at a distance of 20 years one's memory plays tricks. It may be that I am wrong, and my researches have not been able to go back that far in the short time that I have had available tonight, but I thought that the criticisms that the noble Lord was levelling at us tonight did not lie too well on the shoulders of somebody who, so far as I can recall—and I may be doing the noble Lord a grave injustice—was responsible for some cuts, at least, in years gone by.
Lord HILL of LUTON: My Lords, will the noble Lord allow me to interrupt him in order that the record may be put straight? The White Paper to which he refers, which he might have re-read in order to approach accuracy, was published 22 years ago. It moved some strength from one country to another, but it increased the amount of money available to the BBC and the British Council ; and each change during my four years of responsibility for overseas information services revealed an increase, not a decrease. A shifting of resources which involved Scandinavia and Portugal, and those only, plus an increase in the amount of money available to those services, is hardly comparable to the minor massacre to which the noble Lord is now referring.
Lord TREFGARNE: My Lords, if the noble Lord had had such a distinguished record in these matters I am surprised we did not hear more about it when he spoke. The expression "shift of resources" is one which I think I have heard before in other contexts.
Lord HILL of LUTON: My Lords, the noble Lord really must allow me to intervene once more. This debate is about reducing the financial resources to the BBC's Overseas Services. On the occasion to which he refers, and on any other occasion during my four years, the change was one of increased resources, and never one of decreased resources.
Lord TREFGARNE: My Lords, I do not deny that for a moment. As the

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noble Lord has said, it was 22 years ago and I would not want to claim accuracy of memory in that matter. But I am still a little puzzled that that splendid record did not appear in the noble Lord's speech. He could have compared it, could he not, so favourably with what he is complaining of from this Dispatch Box?
A good many noble Lords referred to the "crippling" of the service, for which we are apparently responsible at this time. I really think that that is rather over-egging the pudding. It is really not fair. Noble Lords will have heard what I said just now: that, for example, the vernacular services to developing countries and to those countries which do not enjoy free and open access to news and information will also be largely unaffected. That does not sound like "crippling" to me. I think I would also want to reject the expression, which I noted down from the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Ritchie-Calder, that we were "sinking the fleet."
Lord GLADWYN: My Lords, may I intervene for one moment? I have been following the noble Lord's argument with attention. I understand his argument on this, that there must be some cuts in the overseas programmes of the BBC because everybody is being cut. On the other hand, it is known to all of us, and indeed to the noble Lord, that the defence departments have been exempted altogether from any cuts. If that is so, does he totally reject the argument advanced here tonight by myself and by others, I think, that the overseas programmes of the BBC are, in effect, in the front line of defence of this country?
Lord TREFGARNE: My Lords, that is a sort of philosophical point which I would find it difficult to develop from the Dispatch Box at this time——
Several noble Lords: No, no!
Lord TREFGARNE: ——and I really decline to be drawn along that line. Perhaps I can refer to what was said by the noble Lord, Lord Bruce of Donington. "Of course we can afford £4½ million", he said; "we are adopting the technique of the bacon slicer". My Lords, failure to adopt the technique of the bacon slicer was the characteristic of the previous
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Administration, and look at the mess that they got into!
I cannot hide from your Lordships the regret with which we have decided that some economies must be made in the BBC's Overseas Service. But when we were elected to office last May we accepted as our principal task the need to contain public expenditure, thus controlling inflation and thus, in due course, allowing our economy to prosper and grow. It is for this reason that we are engaged in a public expenditure review, and it is for this reason, and this reason alone, that we must look for economies—happily, fairly modest ones—in the BBC's highly regarded Overseas Services.
Lord CHALFONT: My Lords, before the noble Lord sits down, may I return to one point in his very eloquent reply, concerning the apparent decision of the Government not to cut services, as I understood it, to countries which do not have access to free news and information services. Is the noble Lord aware that this is a situation that can change overnight and that this is the great danger of the Government's policies? Countries which today have access to free news and information might not have it tomorrow. Is the noble Lord aware that once the Government have made those cuts there is no restoring them? That is the danger of this kind of policy.
Lord TREFGARNE: My Lords, I think that the noble Lord is right that we have to take our decisions in the light of circumstances as we see them today. Although I should like to be able to assure your Lordships that we will change our plans and our broadcasting destinations (if that is the right word) or audiences as the political situation in the countries concerned change, I think I should be wrong to give a commitment to do that now because of the difficulty that that would cause. I failed to deal with a point raised by the noble Lord, Lord George-Brown. Perhaps I can refer to it now. He was concerned, rightly, about difficulties which he experienced—and he gave some of his experiences—with regard to BBC broadcasts which he felt were on some occasions not as helpful as they might be. The Corporation have a duty to take these matters into consideration. I quote from the licence agreement of the

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Corporation with regard to these services:
"The Corporation shall consult and collaborate with the Department so specified"—
which means the Foreign Office—
"and shall obtain and accept from them such information regarding conditions in and the policies of Her Majesty's Government aforesaid towards the countries so prescribed and other countries as will enable the Corporation to plan and prepare its programmes in the external services in the national interest".
I hope that the noble Lord will agree that that is a helpful provision.
Lord GEORGE-BROWN: My Lords, I have no complaint that there is no more detail than that on the point that I raised, since my late arrival prevented me from giving the noble Lord any hint of what points I may have raised. When Hansard arrives would he consider the record of what I said? In particular, will he consider with his colleagues whether my plea for a parliamentary inquiry into the way in which these services are controlled might be accepted? Perhaps he and I could have a talk some time.
Lord TREFGARNE: My Lords, I shall consider that, but I must confess that I cannot hold out much hope.
Lord HANKEY: My Lords, may I ask the noble Lord to consider a point I made of a slightly more technical type? If the Government are going to abandon
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some of the vernacular language broad-cases, it is important that they should preserve the use of those wavelength channels for the BBC. There is tremendous congestion on the short waves and countries all over the world are trying to steal wavelengths from each other all the time. If ever we want to get back, when the Government (as we hope) have set this country back on its feet, it is important that we should be able to continue to use those channels. If we do not do it in the vernacular, will the Government consider pumping out more English broadcasts on those channels simply so as to go on using them?
Lord TREFGARNE: My Lords, I will consider that but, as I have said, again, without a lot of hope. It might be helpful to refer to the proceedings of the World Administrative Radio Conference which is taking place in Geneva now and at which the Government are represented. The conference is concerned with the general revision of the entire spectrum of frequencies to particular services but is not expected to assign frequencies to individual countries. The United Kngdom are to propose an increased allocation of high-frequency bands to broadcasting which should, we believe, strengthen the position of the BBC's External Services.
House adjourned at twelve minutes past nine o'clock.