Lords Sitting of 30 April 1980

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

WESTMINSTER HOSPITAL AND THE FLOWERS REPORT
Lord SEGAL: 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 any closure of beds is likely at Westminster Hospital after publication of the Flowers Report.
Lord CULLEN of ASHBOURNE: My Lords, the Flowers Report is concerned with medical schools, not with hospitals. A parallel report by the London Health Planning Consortium does, however, suggest a changed role for Westminster Hospital, involving fewer acute beds. Both reports are at present the subject of wide consultation, and no decisions will be taken until consultation has been completed.
Lord SEGAL: My Lords, I wish formally to thank the noble Lord for that reply. Is he aware that the contemplated closure of the Westminster medical school is likely to lower the standards of treatment in Westminster Hospital, and is bound adversely to affect the interests of many thousands of patients, who include Members of both Houses of Parliament? May I declare a personal interest in this matter not only as a grateful patient, but also as a former student and graduate of the Westminster medical school.
Lord CULLEN of ASHBOURNE: My Lords, the noble Lord told me previously that he is a former graduate of the medical school of this magnificent hospital, to which so many of us are devoted; and the Government are well aware of the anxiety over the hospital. I respect-
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fully suggest to the noble Lord that the question he is asking is somewhat premature, because many consultations are now taking place and are about to take place, and no doubt a more satisfactory answer could be given in a few months' time. However, I should say that there is no suggestion that Westminster Hospital should be closed; I should like to make that clear. The noble Lord is right: the Flowers Report has recommended the closure of the Westminster medical school, and the London Health Planning Consortium has proposed a significant reduction in the number of acute beds in the hospital, linking it with St. Thomas's.
Baroness MASHAM of ILTON: My Lords, is the noble Lord aware that the closure of beds would be disastrous also to the nursing school, and is he also aware that Westminster Hospital is a designated demonstration rehabilitation centre?
Lord CULLEN of ASHBOURNE: No, my Lords; I was not actually aware of those details, but what the noble Baroness has said will be read with interest.
Lord PEART: My Lords, I hope that the noble Lord will appreciate that there is great concern in both Houses in regard to this matter. Westminster Hospital has helped many Members of the other place and many noble Lords. It is a very fine hospital, and I hope that the Government will be very careful about what they do.
Lord CULLEN of ASHBOURNE: My Lords, perhaps I should say that initially the Flowers Report is entirely a matter for London University to consider. The university will be receiving comments until the end of May. In parallel with this the LHPC will be receiving comments on its report, also until the end of May. In due course these reports will be looked at by the London Advisory Group, an independent body which is now being set up, and they will be reporting to my right honourable friend, I think around September.
Lord REIGATE: My Lord,, is my noble friend aware that, with great respect, his earlier answer does not make very much sense? First, is he aware of the very large sum of money that has been spent on Westminster Hospital in the

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course of the last 12 years, bringing it to completion after being started only 40 years ago? Is my noble friend further aware that at least £1 million is now being spent on new operating wards? Does he not agree that this proves that the argument with regard to the decline in population in London is nonsense—because had that argument been so, what would justify the department having spent so many millions of pounds on the hospital, only to scrap it now?
Lord CULLEN of ASHBOURNE: My Lords, I think that I am aware of all the points raised by the noble Lord, apart from the assertion that my answer did not make sense.
Lord NUGENT of GUILDFORD: My Lords, is my noble friend aware that some of us have regarded the Flowers Report as a notable attempt to see the national perspective for the medical profession and our medical resources, in particular in terms of the tremendous concentration of medical teaching resources in London in relationship to the country as a whole? Is my noble friend aware that, while some of the report's recommendations are very tough, they could be helpful towards trying to see how to use limited expert resources in the best possible way?
Lord CULLEN of ASHBOURNE: My Lords, I believe that that is absolutely so.
Lord WINSTANLEY: My Lords, is the noble Lord aware that in my capacity as a medical practitioner I have had occasion to send several noble Lords from your Lordships' House to Westminster Hospital for emergency treatment, and the fact that several of those noble Lords are sitting with us in the Chamber today is surely eloquent testimony to the importance of that august institution? With regard to the medical school, from which I benefited greatly in post-graduate study, may I ask the noble Lord whether the Government, in considering the Flowers Report, will carefully bear in mind the view that when it comes to medical schools, bigger is not necessarily better?
Lord CULLEN of ASHBOURNE: My Lords, I fully appreciate what the noble Lord says.
The Earl of ONSLOW: My Lords, is my noble friend aware that the spina bifida unit at Westminster Hospital is an extremely good one, that people from that spina bifida unit will now have to go to Carshalton, and that there is great concern among parents of spina bifida children at this particular movement?
Lord CULLEN of ASHBOURNE: My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend for what he has said.
Baroness MASHAM of ILTON: My Lords, may I ask the noble Lord whether he is aware that the Westminster medical school is one of the small medical schools in the country, and that many students choose it because, as the noble Lord, Lord Winstanley, said, small is beautiful and their results are excellent?
Lord CULLEN of ASHBOURNE: My Lords, I have also heard that, and the record of success from that school is, I believe, exceptionally high, possibly the highest of all.
Lord WELLS-PESTELL: My Lords, may I ask the Minister whether it is not the fact that the Flowers Report is not in any way binding on the Government? It would be a mistake to think that what is in the Flowers Report is in fact binding, when it is not.
Lord CULLEN of ASHBOURNE: My Lords, I am very grateful to the noble Lord. I hoped that I had made that clear. As I said, it is entirely a matter for London University to consider the Flowers Report. Eventually the London Advisory Group will be in touch with the London University, and then all the comments will go to my right honourable friend the Secretary of State.
Lord SEGAL: My Lords, is the noble Lord aware that a very considerable saving could be made in other directions, by the merger of some of the smaller colleges of Oxford and Cambridge into some of the larger colleges, and that the sheer folly of this suggestion is paralleled by the absurd proposal to merge the medical school of Westminster into the school of another teaching hospital? Would the noble Lord not agree that the wisest course for everyone concerned

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would be to consign the Flowers Report to the same fate as the Annan Report on Broadcasting?
Lord ANNAN: My Lords, I wonder whether I could assure the noble Lord— Several noble Lords: No!
Lord ANNAN: My Lords, may I assure the noble Lord—
Several noble Lords: No!
Lord ANNAN: My Lords, may I ask whether the noble Lord is aware that I would wish to give him an assurance that the report which is under discussion by the House at the moment will be considered very carefully by the University of London? It was a report of recommendations made personally to me as Vice-Chancellor, and I have now asked for the widest consultations throughout the University of London and outside the university so that we can have informed opinions on the merits of its recommendations. Is the noble Lord aware that I would also wish to reassure him that consultations are taking place directly with Westminster medical school, and that at three o'clock this afternoon I shall be at the Westminster medical school with members of the relevant committee, which will be advising the governing body of the university? May I also warn the noble Lord, Lord Cullen—
Several noble Lords: No!
Lord ANNAN: May I, however, also warn the noble Lord that it is very difficult indeed for the University of London to continue to fund its medical schools at the present rate when many of them are in deficit?
Lord CULLEN of ASHBOURNE: My Lords, I am greatly reassured, and I am sure that other noble Lords are, too.
Lord REIGATE: My Lords, would my noble friend accept that the issue raised—that of the better allocation of the resources for medicine and teaching in London—would not justify a bad decision, such as that which is put forward?

NATIONAL FRONT MARCH IN LEWISHAM
2.47 p.m.
Lord LLOYD of HAMPSTEAD: 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 public expenditure was incurred as a result of the police measures in the Borough of Lewisham instituted to protect the march of the National Front which took place on 20th April 1980.
The PARLIAMENTARY UNDER-SECRETARY of STATE, HOME OFFICE (Lord Belstead): My Lords, I understand from the Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis that the cost of the policing arrangements for this march has been estimated at £300,000.
Lord LLOYD of HAMPSTEAD: My Lords, while thanking the noble Lord for that reply, may I ask him this question: Does he not think that we are paying too high a price—and I do not refer to this purely in financial terms—to enable small Nazi groups (because that is what they are), in the name of so-called freedom of speech, to inflict inflammatory racialist slogans on areas which have apparently been deliberately chosen on account of their large coloured population?
Lord BELSTEAD: My Lords, so far as the financial price is concerned, I certainly appreciate the force of the question which the noble Lord asks of me. It is to see whether the balance between the rights of demonstrators and the interests of the rest of the public is correct that the Government are undertaking a review of the Public Order Act 1936 and related legislation, on which my right honourable friend published a Green Paper last week and upon which I know my right honourable friend would welcome the views of noble Lords. Of course, in that respect my right honourable friend will be taking into account what the noble Lord said in his supplementary.
Lord ELWYN-JONES: My Lords, did not the National Front march in

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Lewisham, consisting largely of "skinheads" shouting racialist abuse, in itself constitute a threat to law and order? Was this not foreseeable? If it is thought that the powers of the chief constable are inadequate to protect the public peace by preventing this sort of illegal procession, should those powers not be reviewed immediately to see whether this public abuse cannot be remedied?
Lord BELSTEAD: My Lords, I would not presume to depart from the conclusion which the noble and learned Lord has reached that this constituted a threat, and clearly the Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis took the threat very seriously. But the commissioner has to operate within the terms of the existing law, and, as the noble and learned Lord will know better than I do, the commissioner has to believe that serious disorder cannot otherwise be prevented before he can apply for a ban or impose conditions. The commissioner reached a conclusion that serious disorder could otherwise be prevented; and, if I may say so, in the final analysis the commissioner was proved right.
The Lord Bishop of SOUTHWARK: My Lords, if the Government consider it essential for these demonstrations to continue in the interests of free speech, could not the payments for the police and other payments come from the whole community rather than from the ratepayers of a particular borough? Having witnessed two demonstrations in Lewisham (which is in my diocese) and also one a month or so ago at the Elephant and Castle, it seems unfair that the ratepayers of a particular locality should have to pay the police to protect them from invaders from the whole country.
Lord BELSTEAD: My Lords, I must confess that this is something which has not been taken into account in the Green Paper. What has been canvassed in last week's Green Paper is whether it might not be right to require those who demonstrate to contribute to the cost. This presents difficulties because in some cases it would be difficult to apportion blame for the disorder between the organisers and those who oppose them. In regard to the suggestion that the right reverend Prelate has put to me, I should like to
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look at that and draw it to the attention of my right honourable friend.
Lord PAGET of NORTHAMPTON: My Lords, could the noble Lord tell us whether demonstrators have any rights at all on a high road? In my day, the leading case was Harrison v. The Duke of Rutland where a demonstration march by a gentleman beating a tin can was designed to obstruct the noble Duke's driving pheasants across the road. Mr. Harrison was mulcted of damages on the principle that the only right that the public have on the highway is to use it to go backwards and forwards on their lawful travelling purposes.
Lord BELSTEAD: My Lords, I think that each case is a matter for the courts to decide.
Lord INGLEWOOD: My Lords, would my noble friend say something about the figure of £300,000? Does all of that represent overtime? Could he also say what happens in those districts of London from which large numbers of police were drawn for this purpose? Since we have so few organised reserves, were they left wide open to the petty thieves?
Lord BELSTEAD: My Lords, as far as the first supplementary question is concerned, these are costs which have been assessed by the Metropolitan Police for the expenses they incurred. I am not trying to be unhelpful, but I do not think I can go further than that. So far as the second and important supplementary question is concerned, what the noble Lord has said is taken seriously into account from the operational point of view by the commissioner and his officers before these decisions are arrived at.
Lord AVEBURY: My Lords, quite apart from the review of the Public Order Act which is being conducted by the Home Secretary, is there not an important question of resources which must be devoted to these demonstrations? Would he not agree that the fact that public order was maintained in the event is not necessarily a vindication of the judgment of the Metropolitan Commissioner that this march should have been allowed to take place, bearing in mind that there was a continual threat of serious disorder during the whole of the period that the

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"Nazis" were marching through this area; and the fact that no serious public disorder eventuated was largely a matter of luck and of the enormous resources that the police put in? Are we to put in resources without limit for any future march that the National Front may choose to conduct to areas largely populated by ethnic minorities?
Lord BELSTEAD: My Lords, the noble Lord asks hypothetical questions. The only way I could respond to be helpful to the House is to make it clear that the powers under the 1936 Act to ban or impose conditions on marches require that the decision is made on public order grounds alone. Before going to my right honourable friend the Secretary of State, it is on those grounds, and those alone, as the law now stands, that the commissioner and chief constables throughout the country must make up their minds.
Lord JANNER: My Lords, as one who was concerned with the Mosley predecessors of these vicious people, may I ask the noble Lord to go into the methods used at that time to prevent demonstrations? For example, will he remember that at that time—and will he consider it now—demonstrations in Trafalgar Square were prohibited? Furthermore, is it not a fact that these people are preaching exactly the same kind of thing which we have fought against for years and which caused such terrible disturbances in this country until they were quelled by the people themselves?
Lord BELSTEAD: My Lords, noble Lords are saying many things with which I find myself in agreement, but I seriously ask the noble Lord, Lord Janner, and all noble Lords, if they have time, to read my right honourable friend's Green Paper (Cmnd. 7891) and perhaps to respond to the invitation that I sought to offer at the beginning of this exchange. I repeat that the Home Secretary would very much welcome observations from Members of your Lordships' House.

CONSERVATION: THE MAFF CAPITAL GRANT SCHEMES
2.55 p.m.
Baroness STEDMAN: My Lords, I beg leave to ask the Question which stands in my name on the Order Paper.
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The Question was as follows:
To ask Her Majesty's Government whether the proposed changes in the administration of MAFF capital grant schemes call into question the Government's commitment to conservation, since they could lead to a reversal of the progress made in improving the design and siting of buildings, securing concern for wildlife and improving the conservation of the landscape.
Lord SANDYS: My Lords, the purpose of the changes which are proposed for the capital grant schemes is to make them simpler and less costly to administer. They do not alter the Government's commitment to conservation.
Baroness STEDMAN: My Lords, I thank the noble Lord for that reply, but does he not accept that the Strutt Report recommended that MAFF should take much wider responsibilities for protecting wildlife and promoting landscape conservation? Does he accept that these proposals in their present form only imply the need to be concerned for conservation and designated areas such as the national parks and areas of outstanding natural beauty?
Lord SANDYS: My Lords, I think the best assurance that I can repeat is the assurance given by my honourable friend in another place on 10th March. The noble Baroness will find it at column 437 of the Commons' Official Report.
Baroness STEDMAN: My Lords, if I may intervene again, does the noble Lord accept that the real point of contact for discussing conservation is the point when plans are submitted and when investment programmes are being made? If the need for prior approval is being abolished, have we not lost that point of contact with the farmer from the point of view of conservation of wildlife and better landscape schemes?
Lord SANDYS: My Lords, I think perhaps the noble Baroness is speaking a little prematurely, because consultations are at present in progress, the results of which will be published before long. As regards the point she makes that there is a cut-off from the former procedure, the

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Strutt Report made a particular point that a start should be made in national park areas. This we intend to pursue.
Lord SANDFORD: My Lords, would my noble friend not agree that, although the proposals as regards conservation will not do in their present form, it is only a consultation document at this stage and there is therefore ample time and opportunity to get the proposals right? May I ask whether he will go a little further than drawing our attention to what his honourable friend said last month in the other place and give us the assurance now in respect of these particular proposals that, when his right honourable friend draws them up (after having established such economies as may be found in his department; which is the proper thing to do), he will ensure that under the new proposals it is easy and possible for the Minister to discharge his obligations under Section 11 of the Countryside Act, and also that under the proposals when amended it will be possible to move forward and implement the proposals of the Strutt Report—proposals which were agreed in principle by his right honourable friend and welcomed by all bodies concerned with conservation and the countryside?
Lord SANDYS: My Lords, this is a technical matter. I would here draw my noble friend's attention to what my noble friend Lord Ferrers said when the Farm Capital Grant (Variation) Scheme 1980 was being discussed in your Lordships' House on 28th February.
Lord MACKIE of BENSHIE: My Lords, will the Minister bear in mind that farmers have enough difficulty at the moment without a further set of regulations? They have to live, work and earn their living in the countryside, which is more than many of the people concerned with the present proposals have to do.
Lord SANDYS: My Lords, I very much agree with what the noble Lord, Lord Mackie of Benshie, has said. The object of this review is that there should be a single streamlined capital grant scheme with simpler procedures entailing significantly less use of staff.
Lord MELCHETT: My Lords, would the noble Lord accept that both farmers and those interested in the wildlife and amenity aspects of the countryside are united in agreeing that what the noble Lord has described as streamlined and simplified procedures will damage farming, amenity and wildlife interests? Will he give the House an assurance that as this is a consultative document—and I am glad that he has stressed that—the Government will consult with voluntary organisations concerned with wildlife and amenity aspects in the countryside before coming to any decisions on the proposed changes?
Lord SANDYS: My Lords, in response to the noble Lord, I will gladly confirm that the consultation document of the Rayner project went to 70 bodies, organisations and individuals in the first instance, and to anyone who applied for it. So substantial consultation is in progress at the moment. I would not agree with the noble Lord's suggestion that it will remove the benefits of conservation to proceed with the scheme as intended at the moment. There are safeguards written into the recommendations of the Strutt Report which of course my noble friend confirmed in another place on 10th March.
The Earl of SWINTON: My Lords, would my noble friend agree that it is very often the case that farmers and others who live in the countryside show a great deal more concern for wildlife and improving the conservation of the landscape than those who come into the countryside masquerading under the name of conservationists? I am particularly thinking of the case of the Yorkshire Dales national park, where the buildings that the farmers have put up over the years, the little barns in which to keep the hay, are one of the most attractive reasons why the area is one of such outstanding natural beauty.
Lord SANDYS: My Lords, the Minister intends to discharge all his statutory responsibilities in regard to those particular sensitive areas referred to—the national parks, the SSSIs and the areas of outstanding natural beauty. The House will agree that, given those assurances, the consultation process must proceed.
Lord SANDFORD: My Lords, while I thank my noble friend for the assurances that he has given us, would he not agree that, despite what the noble Lord, Lord Mackie of Benshie, was saying just now, in this particular case it was the National Farmers' Union who were the first and the quickest to point out the mistakes that are being made in this current consultation document?
Lord SANDYS: Yes, my Lords. There have been a number of comments made by the National Farmers' Union. Their earlier comments on the Strutt Report are welcome. It is too early at this stage in the consultation process to say anything more.
Lord LEATHERLAND: My Lords, the noble Lord will recall that he made use during his earlier reply of the letters SSSI. Can the noble Lord tell us what organisation or animal they represent?
Lord SANDYS: My Lords, I beg your Lordships' pardon. It is a site of special scientific interest.

RENT INCREASES: SUGGESTED LIMITS
3.5 p.m.
Lord JANNER: My Lords, I beg leave to ask the Question which stands in my name on the Order Paper.
The Question was as follows:
To ask Her Majesty's Government whether they will introduce measures to limit the percentages by which tenants' rents can be increased.
The PARLIAMENTARY UNDER-SECRETARY of STATE, DEPARTMENT of the ENVIRONMENT (Lord Bellwin): My Lords, the answer is, no. Private tenants are protected by the fair rent system under the Rent Acts. Responsibility for the level of council house rents must rest with individual local housing authorities.
Lord JANNER: My Lords, may I ask the noble Lord whether he will really settle down and consider the position? I am sure that he has had letters from tenants' associations, and is he aware
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that the position today is a scandalous one in so far as middle class people are concerned? What does the noble Lord say about the case that was brought to his notice of an 85-year old woman who had lived in a house for 40 years who had to be turned out because the increased rent wanted was 500 per cent. higher than she was paying? May I ask the noble Lord to look into this matter again and see what can be done? It is a scandalous position.
May I also ask him this: the words "scarcity value", which people believed meant that if there was no place or few places available for rental, that created a scarcity value, in fact did not in the normal sense of the expression. This has been misinterpreted. Will he please see to it that a suitable term is inserted into the Rent Acts to say that, when rents are being assessed, the real scarcity value should be taken into consideration by the tribunal or whoever it may be and should be discarded when fixing what should be the amount of the rent to the tenant?
Lord BELLWIN: My Lords, there are two major thrusts in the question. The first relates to the rateable value limits under the Rent Acts. I am very well aware of the representations that have been made, not least by the noble Lord on many occasions, and by individuals. All I can say as to that today is that we are bearing those representations in mind.
So far as the scarcity factor in assessing rents is concerned, this is a very dangerous suggestion that the noble Lord has proposed. If scarcity was removed as a factor in arriving at fair rents then I would have little doubt that the rents themselves would be very much higher than they are at the moment. That is certainly true in relation to market rents. While that may be a cause of some satisfaction to many landlords who are also concerned about the level of fair rents being fixed, I do not think that it is quite what the noble Lord has in mind.
If I may just take another moment to say again what I have said on a number of occasions when this has been raised in the past, the fact is that the object of the establishment of fair rents is to try to get as fair a balance as possible between what tenants can pay and what landlords need to have as a reasonable return. If we do

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not get either right, then on the one hand the tenant is in difficulty, and on the other the supply of dwellings dries up. That is the dilemma, as I have said before.
Lord STRABOLGI: My Lords, arising out of what my noble friend has said, will the noble Lord confirm that with regard to the scarcity value with regulated tenancies, it is clearly laid down under Section 70(2) of the 1977 Act that this should not be taken into account? Will he confirm that it is the Government's intention not to rescind this particular piece of legislation?
Lord BELLWIN: My Lords, I thought I had done so. I must have put it badly. That is precisely what I was trying to say. There is no intention at all of trying to remove the scarcity factor from the calculation of rents. If I put it the other way round, then I am sorry; I did not mean to do so. I shall read Hansard with much interest when it comes out.
Lord SHINWELL: My Lords, is the noble Lord aware that it is unwise to dismiss this matter in a summary fashion? Is he aware that all over the place tenants' associations are being formed? They are not concerned about the public sector, because those people are being, if not adequately protected, at any rate protected to some extent. But those in the private sector are very apprehensive about what will happen because of the provisions of the Housing Bill. Will he take into account that the so-called "protection" provided through the rent assessment officers is no protection at all, because one cannot be satisfied about the impartiality of rent officers or rent tribunals? If he wants evidence, I can furnish all that is necessary.
Lord BELLWIN: My Lords, I was not aware that I was treating the matter in a summary fashion at all. In fact, the number of occasions that I have answered the same point, or tried to do, I think would indicate that I treat it very far from summarily. It is a very important matter and I treat it with the respect and importance which it merits.
So far as the working of the Act and the fixing of rent levels by rent officers and rent assessment committees are concerned, the noble Lord says that he has evidence he would give of situations where
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this clearly is unfair or unreasonable. I would welcome his giving me such instances and undertake to see that they are properly looked at in detail. However, I think it only right to say that in general there is as much criticism from landlords as to fixed rents as there is from tenants. I repeat, if I may, for the nth time, that there is the dilemma of trying to get it right. If there is a better way than rent officers and rent assessment committees, let us have suggestions.
Lord JANNER: My Lords, may I try to rectify what is obviously a wrong impression gained by the noble Lord in relation to the Question I put. I did not say, "Is he aware …?" I did not say that the scarcity value is not an important factor. What I asked him was: What is scarcity value? According to the tribunals at present sitting, they do not take into consideration the fact of the scarcity of places to rent—and this is the important thing—which was created by people who are (perhaps I had better not use the words I want to use) utilising the present position to create scarcity values by refusing to rent a place at a reasonable rent and are consequently raising the price of the freeholds or long leaseholds by methods which mean that scarcity value, from a rental point of view, is thoroughly misunderstood. Will the noble Lord seek to rectify that?
Lord BELLWIN: My Lords, I suggest that we are getting into very deep water because I had the privilege of sitting on the Francis Committee, where we studied rent regulation and the definitions of "scarcity" every Friday for 15 months. We tried to decide what was a proper definition of "scarcity" in this context. I should hate now to embark upon definitions of "scarcity" for your Lordships' benefit. I do not think you would thank me, but I think that the question which the noble Lord has raised on several occasions really relates to the earlier point I mentioned concerning the rateable value limits. I think that is the way to approach the matter, and I did say that we are bearing that in mind.
Lord SANDYS: My Lords, I think it would be convenient, after continuing Questions for 38 minutes on four very important subjects, if I were to say that at a convenient moment after 3.30 p.m.

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my noble friend Lord Belstead will be repeating a Statement on prisons.
Lord SHINWELL: My Lords, may I ask this question: why was it necessary to allow the other Questions to go on at great length when a very important issue was being raised and we are not allowed to ask questions about it?
Lord SANDYS: My Lords, in response to the noble Lord, Lord Shinwell, I think each Question this afternoon was of considerable importance. It is difficult to weigh the importance of one against another, but we have continued for an equivalent time on each Question.

SOCIAL SECURITY BILL
Lord CULLEN of ASHBOURNE: My Lords, I beg to move the Motion which stands in my name on the Order Paper.
Moved, That the Amendments for the Report stage be marshalled and considered in the following order, vizt.:—

Clauses 1 and 2

Schedule 1

Clauses 3 to 6

Schedule 2

Clauses 7 to 10

Schedule 3

Clauses 11 to 20

Schedule 4

Clause 21

Schedule 5

—(Lord Cullen of Ashbourne.)
On Question, Motion agreed to.

POST OFFICE SERVICES
3.15 p.m.
Lord CAMPBELL of CROY Lord CAMPBELL of CROY rose to call attention to the quality of service provided by the Post Office; and to move for Papers. The noble Lord said: My Lords, I beg to move the Motion standing in my name on the Order Paper, calling attention to the quality of service provided
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by the Post Office. This is a subject of widespread concern at the moment. I shall myself concentrate on two matters: the letter post and the telephone system. Those services affect almost every member of the public, and businesses of all kinds and sizes in the country are also affected by their degree of reliability. I hope that other speakers in the debate will move into other areas of Post Office activities.
This seems a suitable time for a debate on this subject, for two particular reasons. First, the costs of both the services to which I have referred have recently risen very sharply without any matching improvement. Secondly, there have been some highly relevant reports published recently, in particular the Monopoly Commission's Report on the Inner London postal services: that came out only four weeks ago. Also there has been the First Report of the Commons Select Committee on Industry and Trade: that was published last month. In effect, that Committee has made public very recent evidence without comment because, they say, interest is high in the affairs of the Post Office. There are indeed in that evidence important facts and expressions of view to which I, too, am drawing attention. There have also been recent reports from the Post Office Users' National Council, especially those on increases in postal and telecommunication charges. It is my impression that the Users' Council does a remarkable job in marshalling relevant facts in the best interests of the customers.
The postal service is run as a self-contained business and so also is the telecommunications business, both within the Post Office at present. My right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Industry announced last year that the Government have decided to divide the Post Office into two bodies, the second to be called British Telecommunications. This follows the recommendations of the Carter Review Committee of 1977. I will not discuss reorganisation, but I will remind your Lordships that, in their White Paper of July 1978, the last Government did not dissent from that recommendation that the Post Office be divided into two, but suggested that further time was needed for consideration.
I turn first to the postal system for letters. The service is erratic and in

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general is not good enough. There is a strong current of feeling in the country that it must be improved. The huge quantity of complaints in recent months boil down to three main categories: first, general unreliability; second, high cost of both first- and second-class letters in relation to the efficiency; and third, certain particularly bad areas where there have been inordinate delays, for example, Central London. The letter service is patchy. Remarkably quick deliveries do occur. The trouble is that they cannot be relied on. I have come to know several hardworking and conscientious postmen, both in Scotland and in London, who would like to be able to take pride in a speedy and efficient service. They deserve to be able to. The present state of the post is unfair to them.
Let us consider the variations. Within London, it has been the experience during the past year or so that a first-class letter can take two, three, four or more days after posting for delivery, even though it has to travel only a mile or two within London. This is acknowledged in the reports which I have mentioned. There is an anomaly here which I know from my own experience. If I post a letter before midday in the village of Croy near my home, 10 miles North East of Inverness and 600 miles from here, it invariably is delivered by the first post in London. This points towards delays in the presorting and the sorting within London, rather than in the delivery itself. But it shows what can be done, and it also shows how patchy the service is in different parts of the country.
To give another example of unpredictability, a lady in Edinburgh, in a letter published in The Times earlier this year, said that she had posted a Valentine card on 13th February. The postal service frustrated her intention by delivering it on the same day, when of course she had intended it for the 14th. In her letter, she described this as the Post Office being irritatingly efficient on that occasion, and The Times published her letter under the heading "Galloping Hearts".
What are the Post Office's targets? Within the United Kingdom, where there are no special obstacles or remoteness involved, I understand that when a letter is posted by a reasonably early post the
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target is that first-class post should arrive on the following working day, and that second-class post should arrive within three working days. The Post Office carry out their own method of sampling and I understand that they hope for well over 90 per cent. of this target to be reached. I should like confirmation, if my noble friend the Minister of State can give it, when he comes to reply.
It seems from the reports to which I have referred that the Post Office have been aiming for 93 per cent. achievement of their target for first-class post, and 96 per cent. for second-class post. But they also have revealed that in the last 12 months or so, for most of last year in particular, the percentages were in the low eighties, and they were in the low eighties for most of that time. I hope that the Minister can tell us more about this matter of being well below their own targets.
The number of letters being sent has decreased in recent years, understandably, because the service is no better and the cost in stamps is higher. Much of the trouble appears to be in the sorting procedure, and in the failure to move to mechanical sorting as was planned. The report on Inner London is illuminating on this point. It states that complaints about deterioration of the letter service were fully justified—that is the statement of the Monopolies Commission—and it attributes the causes very largely to industrial disputes about mechanisation. This is an area in London where there is a shortage of postal staff, so the possibility of significant unemployment being caused because of mechanisation cannot be a real genuine matter for anxiety.
The most important form of mechanisation being proposed in sorting is the optical character recognition system—OCR. Under this, codes and addresses can be recognised quickly by scanners. The system is successfully in use in other countries, both operationally and experimentally, but in the United Kingdom little progress is being made in this, or in other moves towards mechanisation. Action is required. There must be an initiative to move towards real progress. I believe that rationalisation in jobs is required. Management should be preparing for this, and the unions concerned should see that it is in the long-term interest of

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their membership, because it could lead to more rewarding jobs and better pay.
The use of part-time labour has hitherto been opposed by the unions. If it could be brought in, it might well provide more work in areas of high unemployment and reduce the staff shortages in other areas. I need hardly remind your Lordships about the sharp increases in costs of the post, but in figures, since last August, the first-class post has been increased by about 30 per cent. and the second-class post by 40 per cent. The public expect rationalisation and improvement in return, bearing in mind that about 80 per cent. of the costs of the postal service are at present labour costs.
I should like to draw attention, constructively, to one possibility where a substantial change could be made. I believe that this is bound to come eventually, though it is also bound to be controversial. At present, legislation requires delivery to be made to every individual address. This is not the practice in most comparable industrial countries in the world. In those countries, there are central post-boxes for blocks of flats and garden gate boxes for houses not close to a street or road. In the United States of America, this has been the custom for 30 and more years in many areas. That is a high-wage, high-productivity economy and we ought to heed the direction in which they have been going, because we want to become a high-wage, high-productivity economy, too.
To put it another way, a point is reached when the majority of the public cannot afford the price of a personal delivery service. The citizen may then prefer to make a do-it-yourself contribution of collecting from a nearby box, in return for reliability and reasonable charges; not prohibitive charges as they may well become unless changes of this kind are introduced. This change, I believe, needs to be examined. Parliament has a special responsibility, because legislation would be needed. In other words, the demands on the personal delivery service should be brought into line with present-day requirements and the willingness and ability of the citizen to pay for an inessential but expensive part of the service.
I foresee that most members of the public will resist very strongly having to put
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20p stamps on their letters in two or three years' time, and that is the pace at which postal costs have been mounting. Rather than pay for the time and legwork of individual postmen delivering to every flat or house, they would prefer to economise on that element. The reliability and efficiency of the service are more important to them, and these might well improve as a result. The Post Office have made it clear in the evidence to which I have referred, that for their part they would welcome changes of this kind and it would help them to improve their basic services.
I turn to the telephone system. The first disquieting fact is that during 1979 the time taken to provide services and repair faults increased. In its October report the Users' Council described this as alarming. Secondly, there has been a substantial rise in the charges. Telephoning has suddenly become much more expensive. There has also been a telephone bill dispute, causing much inconvenience. It apparently cost £120 million, which has to be paid for by the customers.
The most disturbing feature of the telephone situation, however, is the failure to meet applications for installing telephones. This seems to be getting worse. Additional business is thereby being lost. I would seek information from my noble friend about the approximate numbers of those waiting for a telephone. In the Press half a million has been given as the number. That was, for example, in a letter in The Times last week, on 24th April. My own impression, assisted by figures kindly passed to me by the Government, is that in fact it is about a quarter-million, so that that letter had doubled the number. But many have been waiting for six months or more, and it is certainly deplorable that a quarter-million should be waiting for a telephone.
It is also unfortunate that the number is increasing, because I understand that a year ago there were under 200,000 waiting for a telephone. There is a connection charge, and I agree that there should be a connection charge for as long as there is a waiting list. That is to avoid frivolous or light-hearted applications which may be followed later by withdrawals, and therefore waste the valuable time of the Post Office telecommunications staff.
The United Kingdom compares most unfavourably with other countries. For example, in the United States you can get a telephone within 24 or 48 hours in most places on request. I should be glad if my noble friend could provide the latest information about this and any news about plans to tackle this urgent task and catch up. I welcome the new system which the Post Office are adopting, called System X. I hope that this will greatly improve the telephone service and modernise it, but can the Post Office or its successor carry out both tasks at once? Can they provide the extra installations for those who are waiting and at the same time carry out this massive replacement with modern equipment?
I should like to say a word or two about public relations. Both the letter and the telephone services need better presentation. At the beginning of what I hope will be a new telephone era, will the Post Office or the new communications body please drop that irritating bird? The advertising symbol Buzby has come to represent all that now goes wrong. When telephoning you can hear his beak tapping on the line or scraping it, before his antics cause you to be cut off altogether in the middle of your conversation. His effect is to encourage unnecessary calls on a network already creaking under the strain. He is also an affront to the tens of thousands—those tens of thousands I have been speaking of—of applicants who are waiting for a telephone. Buzby should be buried or humanely returned to his natural habitat, to the jungle noises with which he has become associated.
Whoever advises on public relations should consider rephrasing the demand notes for payment. After a prolonged period of months with no telephone bills, followed by much delayed telephone bills containing shock figures, relationships with customers are not assisted by the wording, "Unless payment is received within seven days we shall be obliged to disconnect your telephone. Should you pay after that there may be some delay before your line can be reconnected and you will be charged a reconnection fee." Of course, there could be reasons such as holidays or illness, or even inquiring into the size of the bill, which could cause delay. The language of ultimatum is not conducive to good customer relations. This
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ungracious approach is compounded by the absurd time limit. The seven days, as I have indicated earlier, can be consumed by postal delays in each direction as well as the weekend.
Recent history shows that the Post Office's publicity has on the whole been lamentable. The prime example was in 1968 when the two-tier post was introduced. I then initiated the first debate in the Commons on 17th October of that year upon the new system. The Postmaster General of the day had already described the public relations before the system's introduction as a disaster. I was more polite in the debate; I said it had been handled with unexampled ineptitude. But I would remind your Lordships of the chaos during that September and October when mail was being mislaid or taking days and weeks to arrive. What was the Post Office slogan with which one was faced wherever one went at that time? It was, "Someone, somewhere is waiting for a letter from you."
My Lords, in my comments on the postal and telephone services, I have been critical but, I hope, constructive. The public had more cause for complaint during the last year than in any other year in peacetime. This must be changed, and changed soon. The interests of those working in the Post Office are involved, as well as the efficiency with which we can all conduct our daily lives. I beg to move for Papers.

IRANIAN EMBASSY INCIDENT
3.36 p.m.
Lord BELSTEAD: My Lords, with the leave of the House, I will now repeat a Statement being made in another place by my right honourable friend the Home Secretary on Prisons.
Before I make the Statement I should like leave to refer to events at the Iranian Embassy of which noble Lords may be aware. A few hours ago there was a hostage-taking incident. All appropriate steps are being taken.

PRISONS
Lord BELSTEAD: My Lords, the Statement is as follows:
"With permission, Mr. Speaker, I will make a Statement about the present situation in the prison system in England and Wales and about the action I am taking on the main recommendations of the Report of the Committee of Inquiry into the United Kingdom Prison Services (the May Committee). We shall also within the next few weeks publish a detailed reply to the 15th Report from the Expenditure Committee for Session 1977–78, and we shall publish proposals for changes in the powers of the courts in relation to young offenders later in the summer.
"As the May Committee made clear in their report, this country has for many years paid too little attention to its prisons. The result is that our prisons are chronically overcrowded and the prison service operates under severe strain. In the period since the report was published last October, the prison population in England and Wales has risen from 42,500 to a total of 44,000 on 18th April. The figure continues to fluctuate, but the present level is dangerously high. Exceptional measures by way of legislation or administrative action would be unpalatable and frustrating to those whose task it is to administer justice, but they cannot be ruled out if the situation demands them. Our primary task must, however, be to prevent such a situation from developing.
"The following action is being taken. First, we must ensure that the prison estate is adequate for the job it has to do. We have every sympathy with the May Committee's recommendation that the building programme should be increased. The present programme, together with a considerable mantenance commitment, is substantial. Work already in progress will produce some 3,400 new or refurbished places by 1985, including a major new dispersal prison which should come into use next year. Firm plans are being made to start two new major projects in both 1981–82 and 1982–83, which will provide 1,500 further places by the later 1980s. I hope to continue the programme on that basis in 1983–84 and preliminary planning is now proceeding.
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"Secondly, we shall continue our efforts to develop alternatives to imprisonment. The Government believe that the outside community must play an increasing part, whether through statutory or voluntary agencies, in the treatment and containment of offenders, particularly those who have not committed violent offences. We shall give full support to non-custodial methods, and we recognise the major contribution which the Probation and After-Care Service must make to them.
The mentally disordered offender presents particularly difficult problems. My right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Social Services and I accept that it is undesirable to detain in prison persons whose mental disorder permits them to be detained in hospital under the Mental Health Act. We shall continue our efforts to have such persons transferred to hospitals with the appropriate levels of security. My right honourable friend will continue to give priority to the establishment of regional secure units. The programme which has been planned will make a valuable contribution to the provision for these offenders.
"A new development is that we are making public funds available to enable voluntary organisations to make a start in providing simple overnight shelter for people who would otherwise be charged with offences of drunkenness.
"Measures of this kind may not individually achieve a substantial reduction in the prison population, but taken together they can have a significant impact.
"Thirdly, the Advisory Council on the Penal System, the Expenditure Committee and the May Committee have all emphasised the need for shorter sentences. I have already said that the Government would welcome shorter sentences for non-violent offenders, and it should be possible to bring about a significant reduction in the general level of sentences without sacrificing the protection which the public is entitled to expect. I believe that such a reduction can be achieved by the exercise of judicial discretion, and recent judgments have suggested that there is an increasing awareness among judges that the less serious type

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of non-violent offence can properly be met by a shorter term of imprisonment than has been imposed previously.
"I turn now to the May Committee's vitally important recommendations on prison reorganisation. Like the committee, I fully support the principle of preserving direct ministerial responsibility for the Prison Service and for the treatment of individual prisoners. Subject to that, I endorse the May Committee's objective of a structure which will give the prison services a greater corporate sense and enable those in charge to be more directly responsible for its own affairs. I am, therefore, instituting a major change in the Prison Department's position in the Home Office and in its internal organisation. The Prison Department will be given wide delegated authority within the Home Office for the management of its staff and for the control of its finance. Special attention will be paid to improving the system of financial information and control.
"The present Director General will remain in his post. A new post of deputy director general will be created and the membership of the Prisons Board will be expanded to include the four regional directors and two outside non-executive members whose appointments I shall announce shortly.
"I accept the May Committee's crucial recommendations for an Inspectorate separate from the Prison Department, and for the publication of its reports. A new Crown appointment of Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Prisons will be announced as soon as possible. He will inspect and report to the Home Secretary on prison establishments in England and Wales, conducting regular inspections of individual establishments and investigating particular incidents or situations on the Home Secretary's directions. He will submit an annual report which will be published and other reports which will be made publicly available as appropriate.
"I endorse the May Committee's objective of a reconstructed regional organisation which will enable regional directors to concentrate more closely on the supervision of individual
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establishments, reporting directly to the deputy director general. As the committee recommended, most specialist functions will be concentrated at headquarters.
"I will, with permission, circulate further details of these organisational changes in the Official Report. Copies of this information are now available in the Vote Office.
"I endorse the May Committee's views on the need to achieve better industrial relations, to make the best possible use of staff and to improve staff accommodation and amenities. I am pursuing these matters with the staff associations concerned, with priority for improvements in the procedures for handling industrial relations, and for the design of a new attendance system and the associated conditions of service. I accept the committee's recommendation for a comprehensive review of training.
"I believe that the changes which I have announced will provide a framework in which members of the Prison Service, of all grades, will be better able to perform their difficult tasks. I shall do all I can to help them to maintain their high traditions and to develop new and constructive methods in the context of the concept of positive custody as put forward in the May Committee's Report. Work will be put in hand to translate it into the design of prison régimes and the development of prison industries, and I will lay the necessary amendments to the prison rules in due course.
"All the measures which I have announced have a common objective—to ensure an effective prison system and an efficient and confident Prison Service".
That, my Lords, is my right honourable friend's Statement.
Following are details of organisational changes referred to above:

THE MAY REPORT: RECOMMENDATIONS ON ORGANISATION
Chapter V of the May Committee's Report made a number of recommendations designed to improve the administration of the Prison Service in England and Wales. These recommendations

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covered the status and independence of the Prison Department within the Home Office; the structure of its senior posts; the arrangements for inspection; the organisation of regions and establishments; and the functions of boards of visitors. The following paragraphs set out the conclusions which I have reached.
Enhanced responsibilities of the Prison Department
2. Under the Permanent Under-Secretary of State, the Prison Department will assume delegated authority for manpower and staffing matters affecting prison governors, prison officers and administrative and specialist staff serving in Prison Service establishments and regional offices, and certain professional, technical and other specialist staff serving at headquarters. These groups comprise virtually all those non-industrial staff who expect to spend a full career in the Prison Service. The Prison Department will also assume delegated responsibility for the day-to-day management of its finance. Work is in hand on the improvements in management accounting methods and financial information systems to which the May Committee attached importance.
3. As the May Committee recommended, there will continue to be a single principal establishment officer, responsible for manpower and personnel matters affecting the Home Office as a whole. A single principal finance officer will exercise similar responsibilities in relation to finance, and there will be a single accounting officer for all Home Office Votes.
Structure of Senior Posts
4. The post of Director General of the Prison Service will continue at Deputy Secretary level. The principle will remain that this and all senior appointments should always go to the best available candidate: it will continue to be held by the present holder of the post.
5. The deputy director general will occupy a position between deputy secretary and undersecretary. As head of the operational service he will be responsible to the Director General for the operations of the Prison Service in the field. The present controller (operational administration) will be appointed to the post.
6. Other senior posts will be the director of regimes and services, responsible for the planning and co-ordination of prison regimes, the prison building programme and the provision of services; the director of operational policy, responsible for policy and casework on the treatment of prisoners; the director of personnel and finance, responsible for personnel management, industrial relations and staff training, and also for manpower and financial control, including accounting and financial information systems; and the director of prison medical services, whose responsibilities will be unchanged.
7. The holders of these six posts will be members of the Prisons Board. The board will also include the four regional directors, in view of their operational responsibility for the Prison Service in the field; and two non-executive members, as recommended by the May Committee, to bring to the board an independent viewpoint as well
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as their own particular knowledge and expertise. The appointments of the outside non-executive members will be announced as soon as possible.
Inspection
8. Appointments to the new post of Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Prisons will be made directly by the Crown on the advice of the Home Secretary. The widest possible field of candidates will be considered.
9. The Chief Inspector will report to the Home Secretary and will be a member of the Home Office, but he will not be a member of the Prison Department or have any responsibility to that department. His terms of reference will be:
"To inspect and report to the Secretary of State on Prison Service establishments in England and Wales, and in particular on:

(a) conditions in those establishments;

(b) the treatment of prisoners and other inmates and the facilities available to them;

(c) such other matters as the Secretary of State may direct".

10. The Chief Inspector will conduct regular inspections of individual establishments and he will investigate particular incidents or situations on the Home Secretary's directions. He will submit an annual report which will be published and other reports which will be made publicly available where appropriate. In accordance with the May Committee's recommendation, individual grievances will continue to be dealt with under existing procedures.
11. My right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland has asked, and I have agreed, that the services of the Chief Inspector should be available to inspect prison establishments in Northern Ireland.
12. The Chief Inspector will be supported by a deputy chief inspector and by a small team most of whom will be drawn from the Prison Service. Other professional or specialist support will be provided as necessary.
Regions and Establishments
13. The primary tasks of regional directors will be to secure the application of national policy and to contribute to its formulation; and to ensure the proper functioning of their establishments and of the prison system as a whole. They will assume full management responsibility for their establishments, with direct accountability to the deputy director general and with the full support of headquarters. The casework at present done at regional offices is for the most part closely associated with the supervision of establishments and most of it will remain; but specialist functions will for the most part be concentrated at headquarters, as the May Committee recommended. I recognise the value of the work which many of the staff have done while they have been at regional offices and their contribution to the Prison Service, but I am satisfied that their contribution can be made as effectively from headquarters in the future.
14. Establishments for women and girls will for the first time be brought within the regional structure; regional boundaries will be redrawn

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to remove some of the present anomalies; and the internal organisation of regional offices will be reviewed and standardised.
Boards of Visitors
15. I accept the recommendation that boards of visitors should continue to exercise both an adjudicatory and an inspectorial function. In respect of the latter they will continue to be concerned both with inmates and with members of the staff, but I share the view which most boards have expressed that their links with staff should remain informal. I shall give boards every encouragement to extend where practicable their establishment's involvement in its local community.
Further Action
16. The changes to which I have referred will be carried out within the existing staff resources of the Home Office. Those at headquarters should be largely completed by the end of July; those at regional offices will take longer. Organisational change cannot by itself provide a solution to the more fundamental problems of overcrowding and prison regimes, but the decisions which I have announced today should produce the more cohesive and effective management structure which is an essential basis for the wider but inevitably more gradual changes which are now required.
3.46 p.m.
Lord BOSTON of FAVERSHAM: My Lords, the House will be grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Belstead, for informing your Lordships about the situation at the Iranian Embassy.
I should also like to thank the noble Lord the Minister very much for repeating this very important and lengthy Statement.
We shall need time to study some aspects of it, but the noble Lord will recall that one reason why the May Committee was set up by my right honourable friend the then Home Secretary was the crisis level which had been reached in the prison population.
I should like to endorse what he has said about the recommendations which were made by the May Committee regarding the organisation of the Prison Service. Both so far as its structure is concerned, and communications within it, the May Committee found that there were serious shortcomings. Although some of these details will need study, I should like to give an immediate welcome to the proposals which he has made about reorganising the Prison Service and in particular about the proposals to set up a separate inspectorate. This is a very significant change indeed. The independence of a new inspectorate was something which in its
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report the May Committee particularly wanted. The Minister will have full support from us for any effective measures to reduce the prison population.
I should like to ask him, first of all, whether he can say what reduction he expects to obtain in the prison population—and perhaps over what period of time, if it is possible to say so—as a result of the proposals now being made. On the building programme which he has mentioned, a number of proposals were already in hand when the last Government went out of office. As at 31st October of last year, five new prisons were in planning under the previous Government's proposals and 5,000 new places were to be provided under those proposals by the end of the 1980s. I am wondering whether the Minister can say if the proposals which he has just announced amount to an increase over those proposals, and, if so, to what extent.
I should also like to welcome what the noble Lord said about the alternatives to imprisonment that are being considered, and especially to welcome what he said about drunken offenders and mentally disordered offenders. Indeed, fine defaulters and maintenance defaulters are two other categories who, by being kept out of prison, could well contribute to a reduction in the prison population.
There are just three questions, in addition to the one concerning the building programme and the reduction in the prison population, which I should like to put to the Minister. The first is whether the question of one-half remission in place of one-third remission of sentences is under consideration, because that could indeed make a major contribution towards reducing the prison population. If that were to be implemented, it would also involve changes in the parole system, and I am wondering whether this, too, is under consideration.
So far as the alternatives to imprisonment are concerned, can the Minister say whether those which are being considered include the introduction of partly suspended sentences Of course, it also happens to be the case, as I am sure the noble Lord will agree, that the number of people on remand and the length of time spent on remand are still far too great, and further steps in those directions could indeed contribute to a further reduction

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in the prison population. As already indicated from this Bench, the noble Lord the Minister can count on full support for any effective measures to reduce the prison population and so to contribute to overcoming the crisis.
3.50 p.m.
Lord FOOT: My Lords, I should like to join the noble Lord, Lord Boston of Faversham, in thanking the noble Lord, Lord Belstead, for repeating the Statement in this House. The noble Lord may agree with me that the Statement really falls into two parts. The first part deals with what has properly been described by the noble Lord, Lord Boston, as the crisis in our prison system and, although the Statement does not use that word, I think it is clearly the view of the Government that we are faced with a situation of very great gravity.
The second part of the Statement deals with the matter of prison reorganisation and the reform of prison administration. I shall not say anything about that, not because I think it is unimportant but I should like to emphasise, if I may, what I believe to be the terrible gravity of the situation with which we are immediately confronted today in the form of overcrowding in prisons. Look at it how one may, on every count the situation today is worse than it has ever been in the history of British prisons. If we consider the figures taken by the Statement—namely, the figures of the daily average population—we find that that has risen since the publication of the May Report from 42,500 to 44,000 in April of this year, and indeed my information is that in March it went up to nearly 45,000 people. That is the worst figure we have ever had.
Alternatively, we may take another test of the matter: using the test of the difference between the number of prisoners in the prisons at any time and the number of prisoners who can be accommodated without overcrowding, and comparing that with the figure of the population of the prisons as in fact it is, we find that the difference is no less than 6,300 people in excess of the theoretical capacity of the prisons.
Then, if we take the final test, to which no reference was made in the Statement
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but which no doubt the Government have closely in mind—namely, the test of the number of prisoners who are condemned to live two, three or even four to a cell made for one, we find that that figure works out to the enormous total in February of this year of 17,000 people living in those conditions.
That is despite the fact that since 1974 the number of prison places available has been increased by 5,000. In that context it is important to recognise what prospects are held out by the Statement as to what may be done in the way of preparing new places during the 'eighties. As I understand it from the Statement, the expectation is no more than this, that it may be possible in the 1980s to furbish and create a further 5,000 places, the same number as we created during the previous six years.
Also of course we have had this enormous increase despite the considerable efforts that have been made by successive Governments to find alternatives to imprisonment. I remember that it was said by the representative of the Home Office in the former Government that, had it not been for those alternatives which have been found over the last decade, the prison population today would probably be something like 7,000 more than it actually is. The third thing which has to be taken into account when considering these figures is that it is only in the last decade that we have introduced the system of parole. Yet despite all those things we have had this enormous and critical increase in the prison population.
What disturbs me about the Statement and indeed about the recommendations of the May Report is that the May Report seems to take the view that some of the methods which we have used in the past in trying to find alternatives to imprisonment may in fact have been exhausted and it may be that there is not much more to be gained by travelling along that road. I shall be interested to hear what the noble Lord, Lord Belstead, says in reply to the noble Lord, Lord Boston, about what other alternatives to imprisonment the Government have in mind. If I have correctly interpreted the report of the May Committee on this question of overcrowding, I think they really concluded that there were only two ways in which they thought any real impact could

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be made upon the overcrowding dilemma. The first was the idea that it might be possible by administrative measures, by an increase in the period of remission, by extending the area of parole and perhaps even by the device of an amnesty, to reduce the number of prisoners. That was one road which the May Committee thought might be profitable and I suggest that the only other road along which they thought any real progress could be made was if we could have a radical review of the sentencing policies of the courts.
It is, of course, received wisdom today to say that there are far too many people in our prisons who ought not to be there at all. But how are they getting there? They are being sent there by the courts, and unless we can tackle the problem at that end there is no real prospect of achieving any reduction in the average daily population of the prisons.
I should like to know what plans the Government have in mind for initiating that radical review of our sentencing policies. The courts might well reply, "We have no alternative but to send to prison people for whom it is really unnecessary, because society does not provide us with alternatives". That was accepted by the May Committee, and the May Committee expressed the opinion that the National Health Service had been gravely at fault in not trying to make provision for secure units for people suffering from mental disabilities.
I join, of course, with the noble Lord, Lord Boston of Faversham, in saying that any assistance that can be given to the Government from these Benches and from the Liberal Benches in the other place in tackling this problem—which is not a party political problem, God forbid!—will indeed be willingly offered.
Lord BELSTEAD: My Lords, perhaps I may reply to the noble Lords who have spoken from the Front Benches and thank them for the constructive response which they have given to my right honourable friend's Statement. In essence, both the noble Lord, Lord Boston of Faversham, and the noble Lord, Lord Foot, have asked me about the prison building programme. Because of the need to take old prison accommodation out of use, the legacy of years and years of neglect running over
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many different administrations in the past, we have this enormously old prison estate which has to be dealt with bit by bit, and I have to say quite openly to the noble Lord, Lord Boston, that the existing building programme will not remove the overcrowding within this decade.
If I may, I should like to bracket with that immediately a recognition that it was the previous Government who put into their public expenditure survey plans for five new prisons, and 3,400 places, as I said in my Statement, are actually in hand at the present moment. What the present Government are doing now is, first, putting these plans into the shape of firm plans for two new prisons in 1981–2 and 1982–3, and it is our intention to follow that up with another two new prisons in the year 1983–4. That is what we wish to do.
The noble Lord asked me about other alternatives, exceptional measures which might have to be taken; he particularly mentioned parole, remission and the partially suspended sentence. These, of course, were matters—I do not know if the partially suspended sentence was—which the May Committee canvassed as being possibilities, and at this stage I would not wish to discuss the relative merits of those matters any further. I indicated at the beginning of the Statement that we have further things we shall need to say to Parliament in the near future, on the report of the Expenditure Committee, for instance.
The noble Lord, Lord Foot, made the point that a radical review of sentencing policy was needed. I hope the noble Lord will forgive me if I say that I hoped that he might have welcomed the part of the Statement which referred to a reduction which can be achieved, in my right honourable friend's view, by the exercise of judicial discretion. Indeed, recent judgments have suggested that this judicial discretion is being exercised. There is nothing between the Government and the noble Lord in what he was saying; we are trying to move in the direction which the noble Lord was saying was desirable.
The noble Lord, Lord Foot, made the very important point that non-custodial measures may perhaps almost have been exhausted in their effectiveness. I do not think that is entirely true. For instance,

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the provision of £30,000 this year for overnight shelters, for those who otherwise would very likely find themselves in prison for offences associated with alcohol, will help to keep yet more people out of prison. The noble Lord makes an important point when he reminds the Government that the effect of non-custodial sentences has a limit. When the Statement says that we think that non-custodial measures taken together make a significant impact, that is what we mean, and that is the road down which we hope to go.
Finally, may I say this. I know the situation is clearly very serious in our prisons; I accept that the noble Lord was right to make this point. But it did almost sound as if all was woe. Your Lordships might like to know that recruitment for the Prison Service is the highest it has ever been; there is a 50 per cent. increase in the number of candidates for the Prison Service passing through the selection process at the present time.
Lord SOPER: My Lords, I should like very briefly to ask a question on behalf of the largest voluntary body in the country, the Christian Church, and I think in this respect I can probably represent it. We welcome heartily the proposition that money will be available for overnight accommodation which can be provided by these voluntary bodies, which have only been prevented from so doing by the lack of funds up to now. This will deal with at least some of the overcrowding which we all deplore.
The question I should like to ask is a simple one. As an encouragement to local voluntary bodies, and indeed as a precaution, will the Government set out in some detail what they believe to be the requirements of such overnight accommodation, the conditions under which such overnight accommodation ought to be provided and what will be the organisations taking care of those responsibilities? Not only will it be an encouragement to them to hear that such funds will be available, but—I hope I will not be misunderstood—there are a number of over-sentimentalised efforts which have been occurring in the Church in previous years which have done no good to the general condition whatsoever. It is of the greatest importance that such voluntary bodies as are now almost straining at the
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leash to do what they can shall be acquainted with the kind of conditions which will make it possible for them to entertain and receive these emoluments.
Baroness PHILLIPS: My Lords, mine is a question as well, bearing in mind the standing orders. I should like to ask what the Government have in mind when they say, "Less serious type of non-violent offence". Perhaps, like others of your Lordships, I am just suffering from the effects of yet another break-in. I feel it would be undesirable if the Government were too hasty to empty the prisons on that very narrow definition. At the risk of sounding like the hanging judge, since all parts of the House have referred to the increase in the number of prisoners, I would remind your Lordships that there has also been an increase in the number of crimes. There is still a way to keep out of prison and that is by not committing crime. The noble Lord mentioned the mentally ill and alcoholics. I would be very interested to know what other class of prisoner would be considered as liable to a shorter sentence merely to empty the prisons, which does seem to me a very curious reason for dealing with this problem in this way.
Lord BELSTEAD: My Lords, if I may answer the noble Lord, Lord Soper, I thank him for the advice he has given on this, which is valuable and helpful to the Government. The plan is for shelter for people suffering from alcoholic problems which otherwise would land them in prison, which will be provided by existing voluntary organisations who are already running some form of accommodation facilities, people in the field who already know what they are doing. Nevertheless, I should like to draw the attention of my right honourable friend to what the noble Lord said about advice from the department. Already there have been negotiations between the Home Office and some of the voluntary organisations, which of course we had to have before we could come to Parliament to suggest that this is a road down which we wish to go.
With regard to the point the noble Baroness, Lady Phillips, made, I think she speaks for many people when she says that it is not always easy to distinguish between what one may call "violent" or

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"non-violent" offences. If you suffer a burglary and see the appalling devastation in your home, you scratch your head and you say, "I may not have suffered violence, but look at the appalling violence which has been done to my home". None the less, recent judgments have suggested that many judges support the view that, although tough sentences are essential for violent criminals, a shorter sentence could be as satisfactory for many of those currently sentenced to imprisonment for non-violent offences. May I make the point that this is not being said entirely in the context of prisons which are over-full but also in the context of research, a point which many noble Lords take every opportunity to remind me of. Research shows that constant custodial disposals for some criminals in the end can have a counteractive effect.
Baroness FAITHFULL: My Lords, may I ask my noble friend three very brief questions. First, I would ask my noble friend whether immigrants awaiting deportation could be dealt with in bail hostels rather than prison? They have not committed an offence such as that referred to by the noble Baroness, Lady Phillips. Secondly, could not juveniles be dealt with within the juvenile system instead of prison? Thirdly, I should like to support the noble Lord, Lord Boston, on the question of remand cases. Many people in prison on remand finally get a sentence which is shorter than the time they have been in prison on remand.
Lord BELSTEAD: My Lords, I am very grateful to my noble friend for the three questoins she has put, because, if I may say so, they are most relevant. So far as the first two points are concerned made by my noble friend Lady Faithfull—whether immigrants awaiting deportation could be kept in bail hostels and whether juveniles could not be kept in some sort of accommodation outside prison—of course my noble friend would be the first to realise that there are some people, although by no means all those in prison, who require to be kept in secure accommodation. I think we have to keep that in mind when we look at what the noble Baroness has suggested.
So far as remands are concerned, we were of course to have debated this question very recently in this House and
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pressures prevented it, but I think within the next three weeks the debate will take place and we ought to await that debate.
Lord ELWYN-JONES: My Lords, in deciding whether to exercise judicial discretion on whether to impose prison sentences or not it is the case that the Lord Chief Justice, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Lane, has made a most helpful observation on the Bench in his court in the Royal Courts of Justice.
Lord BELSTEAD: I am grateful to the noble and learned Lord. I understand that that is so.
4.12 p.m.
Lord HOOSON: My Lords, while welcoming the general tenor of the Statement, may I ask the Minister to say what grounds the Government have for thinking that these measures are adequate to deal with this enormous problem? If I may put it in three specific points, if the building of 5,000 additional places in prison in the past six years has proved inadequate, what hope have they, by allowing for 5,000 places to be provided in the next 10 years, of finding that adequate? As money has been allocated for reasonably secure establishments for the health authorities and they have almost always spent the money for other purposes, what grounds have we for thinking that reasonably secure establishments will be provided for the mentally disorientated?
Thirdly, is not the reorganisation of the Prison Service largely cosmetic? What greater power is there going to be in the service? Is the appointment of an assistant director general going to be sufficient, or are we not really dealing with an area where successive Governments have been penny pinching? As a community, we have to face the fact that we have to spend very much more in this public sector.
Lord BELSTEAD: I think I can answer the noble Lord very swiftly on the important points which he has made. As to the adequacy of what the Government are attempting to do at a time of severe restraint of public expenditure, we are not restraining the recurrent expenditure on the Prison Service. In other words, we are welcoming as many prison officers as will apply and are suitable for service in the prisons. As I sought to explain to the

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noble Lord, Lord Boston, we are aiming to continue with a substantial prison building programme.
With regard to the suggestion of the noble Lord on the cosmetic nature of the reorganisation of the Prison Service, which is something on which we have not really embarked in this question and answer, that is really not so. If I may give one example only, the appointment of an inspector who is going to be entirely independent of the prison department and responsible only to the Home Secretary, who in turn is responsible for the department, and the appointment of two non-executive members of the general public to the Prisons' Board is, I hope, an earnest of the intention of the Government that they want to be much more open about the affairs of the Prison Service in this country.
Earl CATHCART: My Lords, is my noble friend the Minister able to assure us that the Government have given full consideration to the idea, as an alternative to detention in prison, of giving certain prisoners the opportunity to do constructive work, which would be of good effect to the community as a whole and would greatly affect the morale of the individual concerned by his being able to do something positive instead of being just s hut away in prison?
Lord BELSTEAD: My Lords, the answer to my noble friend is in the affirmative. I think that the record of the community service order—which of course sprang from recommendations from the noble Baroness, Lady Wootton, who sits on the other side of the House, but was introduced by the party that sits on this side of the House—which is one of good co-operation, speaks for itself. What I will do is to send my noble friend a short note showing the percentage of those offenders who are on community service, and also how successful these community service orders are.
Viscount LONG: My Lords, I think we have had long enough on the Statement—38 minutes. Perhaps, as we have a long night in front of us, we could now return to the debate.

POST OFFICE SERVICES
Debate resumed.
4.15 p.m.
Lord WINSTANLEY: My Lords, it seems that it is now time that I endeavoured to draw your attention away from prisons and into post offices, places that are occasionally equally overcrowded but which I hope are otherwise superior in many respects. It is a great pleasure to me to follow the noble Lord, Lord Campbell of Croy. I should like to say straight away how grateful I am—as I am sure is the whole House—to him for giving us the opportunity to debate a matter that is of the utmost importance. Lord Campbell of Croy will remember that some years ago we worked together closely in another place on matters to do with the Post Office, and I hope he will remember also that on those occasions we found ourselves in agreement on all the matters that he raised. Perhaps noble Lords will be glad to hear from me now that I agreed with every single word in Lord Campbell's very interesting speech, which I hope your Lordships will recollect clearly after the interval that we have had since he made it, because he drew our attention to some very important themes.
Perhaps I ought to begin by declaring a previous interest, if there is such a thing, in that for the two-year period of the experiment in industrial democracy I was a part-time member of the Post Office Board, a so-called consumer member. In that capacity as a member of the Post Office Board I was privy to much confidential information that I am afraid is subject to the terms of the Official Secrets Act and which it would obviously be improper for me to disclose. It is not that I might not like to talk about some of those matters, but I will not do so. Thus, perhaps, your Lordships will accept that my words today will be brief. May I also add by way of apology that I have another engagement in your Lordships' House and I shall have to absent myself for part of the debate. I hope that those speaking at that time will forgive me, although I shall return as soon as I can escape from the other engagement.
I have risen on this matter to make really but one point and to try to emphasise

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it. I shall deal only with that particular aspect and matters immediately related to it. I should like to begin personally by paying a tribute to the work of Sir William Barlow in his all too short a period as chairman of the Post Office Board. I think that he brought a new approach, a new freshness and new initiatives. Certainly, having worked closely with him, I should like to say how very sorry I am to see him go and how grateful I was personally to him for the actions that he took. I am quite sure that your Lordships' House would be right in recognising the immense contribution that he made in tackling what were, as the noble Lord, Lord Campbell of Croy, has pointed out, very difficult tasks.
I should like to remind your Lordships' that when Sir William Barlow was appointed chairman, and took up office on 1st January 1978, he immediately concerned himself very publicly with the quality of service. He made statements publicly that he was very concerned about the quality of service and its decline in all of the businesses. He also stated very publicly that he was equally concerned about the apparent gap between the quality of service as measured by the businesses and as apparently perceived by the customers. In that, too, I think he was right in expressing anxiety, because clearly, as the noble Lord, Lord Campbell of Croy, said in talking about targets of 93 per cent. of first-class letters being delivered on day B and so on, that might be the figure that the Post Office obtained from its own measurements, but it was not the figure that the customers actually perceived.
One of Sir William Barlow's first acts, having stated publicly that he was very concerned about the quality of service and wanted it looked at very carefully, was to set up a small committee of the Post Office Board that was charged with the job of examining the quality of service in the various businesses, examining the present methods of monitoring quality of service, by those businesses examining the gap I referred to between the quality of service as measured by the businesses and as perceived by the customer, and looking at those matters which impeded the quality of service or adversely affected it; and making recommendations regarding the collection of statistics on quality of service and report on quality of service
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statistics both to the Post Office and to the public.
When Sir William set up that committee he chose three members, and only three members, to serve upon it. He did, in point of fact, choose the three members of the Post Office Board with the least knowledge and the least personal experience of the Post Office itself. He chose me as its chairman and consumer representative; Mrs. Janice Walsh who was the other consumer representative and part-time member of the board; and Professor Michael Posner, an eminent economist but a person who had not had previous professional connections with the Post Office.
I am bound to say that our experience was that perhaps the chairman was wise to choose amateurs, in a sense, to take on the task. They would inevitably unearth all sorts of problems which the managing directors of the businesses had lived with on a daily basis for many years and knew all about. I think that it was helpful to have some very old problems looked at through new eyes, and slightly different eyes, so that those concerned with actually carrying out the job might perhaps look at them again. For example, in our first report to the board we referred to the importance of the Post Office paying a little more regard to the opportunities for the recruitment of women, bearing in mind that recruitment problems were, in fact, at the root of many of our difficulties as regards the postal services. We were able to remind the Post Office Board that the board itself, 11 years previously, had in fact taken a decision in those very terms. The immediate response by the board was, "Surely you are not trying to hurry us?" The point that I am trying to make is that it was not a bad thing to have some old matters looked at through new and rather amateur eyes.
After a couple of years of taking evidence, digging into the businesses, compiling reports and presenting them to the Post Office Board, Sir William publicly made it clear that many of the recommendations of that quality of service committee had, in fact, been accepted by the board and to my certain knowledge many of them were slowly being put into practice to the great benefit, in the long run, of the customer. Personally, I express regret once again

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that Sir William himself may not be there to see all those new developments through.
The noble Lord, Lord Campbell of Croy, referred, for example, to the very important matter of the monitoring of the pipeline and the waiting list regarding the installation of telephone equipment, particularly in Greater London. This was a matter of very great concern to the board, to the public and to those who had to wait. We investigated very carefully the way in which that waiting list was monitored and the way in which certain people were perhaps elevated in the list and certain people were perhaps kept down, and so on. I was glad to receive an assurance that the recommendations made by the consumer representatives on the board had, in fact, been taken on board by the business and were being put into effect. I think that, in the fullness of time, there will be benefits to the customer.
I said that I wished to make only one point. It is a very brief and general point. I shall say nothing about the success or otherwise of the experiment in industrial democracy with trade union nominated directors on the Post Office Board. It was clearly a difficult operation. To take a massive organisation with a very long history of deeply ingrained procedures for discussion and consultation at the grass roots, and to try to introduce totally new procedures for the board without there being changes at the grass roots, as it were, was perhaps not very likely to succeed.
However, what I want to say is that it is my experience—and I hope that at the end of the day when the facts are finally revealed your Lordships may appreciate this—that there really are possible benefits from the point of view of the consumer that can emerge from the presence of a very small number of independent and perhaps consumer-orientated representatives on the boards of large and major undertakings. People who can perhaps look at matters in a slightly different way bring a new dimension to discussions and occasionally remind professionals of matters with which they have long been familiar, but which they tend to overlook because they have been battling with them for so very many years. I wish to make that one point. While that experiment
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may not have been a total success in other ways, it was my honest opinion that the presence of some independent members on the board was useful from the public point of view. It is an example that could possibly be followed in other large public undertakings.
I wish to say no more about the many matters raised by the noble Lord, Lord Campbell of Croy, save that I agree with each and every one of them. They are matters of great public concern that must be tackled and they must be tackled at the end of the day by the businesses. However, I am sure that the businesses themselves would tackle them a little more speedily if they received some encouragement and perhaps pressure from the Government, and we may, in the fullness of time, hear a little about that.
4.27 p.m.
Lord ORR-EWING: My Lords, I think we owe a debt of gratitude to the noble Lord, Lord Campbell of Croy, for his initiative in tabling this Motion today. It seems to me that it is particularly well timed because I understand that the Government's White Paper is in draft and is due to come out around the middle of July. This is, therefore, a formative time when I hope the Minister, who is very helpful to us in this House, will take on board some of the constructive suggestions that come out of this debate and will incorporate them in the White Paper.
We should remind ourselves that the Government were elected about a year ago. They were elected on three proposals, particularly appropriate to this debate—namely, to encourage wealth-creating industry and especially the encouragement of small businesses; to reduce bureaucracy in the public sector; and, to hive off portions of the public sector which it was felt were better handled by private industry.
I personally wish to concentrate on the telecommunications side for two reasons. The first reason is that it is an area which I have grown to know something about—being an electronic engineer—and the second reason is that it is the life blood of a healthy and competitive industrial and business economy. If we do not have an efficient telephone service, we shall not get the business from overseas and we shall not have the communications

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which are essential today if we are to remain viable and profitable. That depends also on international telephones as much as it does on internal telephones. The third reason is that it is a very capital-intensive industry, but despite that it employs 233,000 people directly and, of course, tens of thousands more in industry manufacturing equipment for the Post Office.
My feelings about the Post Office staff—and I am sure that they are reflected by many noble Lords taking part in this debate—are that whenever I meet them I always come to the conclusion that they are extremely nice, on the whole very well mannered, patient and dedicated people whether serving on the postal side or the telecommunications side. But, I cannot help feeling that this dedicated staff is struggling to cope with an overburdened, over-large and rather archaic system, and is doing its best under those handicaps.
I wish to concentrate my criticism on four points. The first is productivity, which, unfortunately, as in so many parts of the public sector, is too low. The second is shortages and delays, which are very serious to business and particularly to new and struggling business. The third is the need to liberalise this monopoly, which has been part of our policy. Fourthly, if I have time, I should like to say a word on the capital investment programme.
First, let me say that productivity is too low. It is difficult to make judgments on this matter, particularly in a service industry. But the judgment by the Carter Report was based on the number of telephones per person employed. That is a source which is an international measurement, although I realise that it is difficult to obtain. The Post Office Review Committee—the Carter Committee—quoted figures which I am afraid went back to 1974–75, and no later. These figures were that the United Kingdom had 83 telephones per Post Office employee; Sweden had 126, that is to say, 50 per cent. more; Japan had 127, equally, 50 per cent. more; and the United States of America had 154, which was 100 per cent. more than our figure.
The Government White Paper published by the Labour Party in July 1978 accepted those comparisons and said that it felt
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that overseas comparisons were very valuable and should be carried out. The Government then announced that they had set up a joint working party between the Department of Industry and the Post Office to make these comparisons available. Therefore, I hope that when my noble friend replies he will tell us what progress has been made in the last two years and how soon we may expect some publication on the present position.
I should now like to say a few words on shortages and delays. This must affect everyone; it certainly affects the whole flexibility of industry and business. I want to take as an example the private automatic branch exchange, more commonly known as the PABX. The two popular categories—and there are other variations—are the PABX 1, for under 50 lines, which invariably means relatively small businesses and the PABX 7 for up to 100 lines. But there are typical delays of one year from the moment you ask for a PABX before you can get one supplied, and a delay of one and a half years is not uncommon. It is no good the Government saying that they are going to encourage the creation of small businesses by every means possible and are going to encourage the job creation which they will afford, if there is no possible chance of a company getting a telephone system in under a year. In fact, the application for a PABX nowadays is more like taking a ticket in a lottery; one may come up early and one may not come up for a very long time.
There were understandable reasons why the Post Office did not re-order the current designs. They had a new system coming along—Herald for the small business man and Monarch for up to the 120 extension customer. Field trials are about to start. Any business which is not on the field trial list may have to wait two or three years for the new system. The Post Office stopped ordering the old types believing—and understandably believing—that as industry expanded the smaller PABXs would become available and they could be supplied to the newer businesses, and the old ones could be slowly phased out. That has not come about; it simply has not happened. But with delays which may be two or three years for the new business, why not let in other manufacturers? There are other people who could provide PABXs to Post Office require-

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ments. Why keep it to a small number who have long had orders from the Post Office?
This leads me to the third point of liberalisation. Other countries have found it necessary to liberalise their Post Office monopolies. In recent years France has made tremendous progress in this field and, of course, the United States of America is always the leader. I believe that this monopoly has remained sacrosanct for too long. Of course, the recommendation for greater liberalisation has come from a whole host of reports. The natural area where the monopoly should continue to exist is, of course, in the provision of cables. We cannot have competitive systems there, particularly with the new type of cables—fibre optical cables—which are being introduced. Let all the terminal and exchange equipments remain in Post Office hands.
But I believe that the customer's equipment could be much better manufactured, supplied and tested by the private sector. Of course, I recognise—as have the various reports—that a committee would be needed to ensure that the equipment to be attached would not in any way harm the integrity of the network. I would suggest to my noble friend that if there is to be a body to judge between the equipment made in the private sector and that made within the Post Office, it should be an independent committee. If it were to be under the auspices of the Post Office, there would be the suspicion that the Post Office was dragging its feet when competitive equipment was offered for test. Other countries do it, so why not us?
I should like to turn for a moment to the field of research and development. Dollis Hill was on the edge of my constituency of North Hendon, so I used to visit it from time to time. Now, of course, it has overflowed its boundaries and its main spin-off is at Martlesham near Ipswich. A noble Lord who visited it recently, told me that he was excited by the work being done by some 600 qualified people at Martlesham. What is sad is that few of those people genuinely thought that their exciting and stimulating developments would ever see the light of day, would ever be taken up, manufactured and sold. They believed that there were
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possibilities and potential, not just for use in this country but, above all, for the export trade. For if we are not up with the rest of the world in our attachments and in our Post Office services and exchange equipment, we shall not export in a highly competitive area.
These 600 people have had some pretty good results. It was at Dollis Hill that the whole science of fibre optics was initiated. We are going to start it here in a limited experiment. Already the Americans have taken up the idea invented in this country. Japan is now working assiduously on it and expanding its use. Here we are with yet another invention, in this case by the Post Office, being belatedly slow in its development.
I am afraid that this is the natural result of an enormous monopoly organisation. That is why I especially press my noble friend to let in the winds of competition. After all, the Post Office should be encouraging innovation all the way—everything from the simple and competitive telephone in our home to devices like integral moderns, visual display units, teletypewriters and all the forthcoming contrivances of computers, which eventually, of course, will be available in our homes and may well be plugged into the telephone networks.
Surely we ought also to extend the use of telephone jacks. It is done in one area already. If you want a message recorder, you can buy your own with the degree of sophistication that you require and one that fits your purse; having got the one that suits you best, you plug that into a jack at home and then it works. Why should not that sort of thing be used in other fields as well? It would avoid the need for a Post Office engineer, or perhaps two, coming and making the connection, with all the time-wasting that is involved when someone is not in and not available.
In the United States of America they have Post Office shops. Ought not we to have Post Office shops? We have an electricity monopoly, but we have electricity shops. Some equipment is especially manufactured for that monopoly, but a great deal of other competitive equipment is also marketed by their shops and is also available from other sources. How much better to go in and buy your

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telephone; choosing the colour and the type you want. You could have a late-Victorian or Edwardian design, if that is what you want. You simply pay for it, take it home and plug it in. This would introduce some competition into a field where competition and innovation is absolutely essential.
In The Times recently a letter was published about the telephone service in the United Kingdom, comparing its performance with the performance of the telephone service in the United States of America. Mr. Charles F. Hankel wrote:
"I rented an apartment in Houston, Texas, and was able to move in within a week of my arrival … My telephone service, installed within 24 hours, allowed me to make calls, by direct dialling, to any part of the world. I was able to divert my calls to other numbers. I was able to store the larger or more commonly used numbers and recall them by dialling a two-digit code. I did not have to pay for local calls. I received a detailed list of all long-distance calls, showing the number dialled, the date, time, length and cost, including the name of the town. I could use any telephone in the country, quote my name and telephone number, and have the call charged to my own number".
Those are the facilities which are perfectly possible, and you could have them here with a little more drive and dynamics, and with a bit more accord and sympathy for the innovative processes.
I should like to say a word on capital equipment. I do not know whether it is right or wrong that Sir William Barlow resigned because he felt that he was not able to get the capital investment which he deemed necessary. I know that he was an approachable and I think efficient person to head our Post Office, and we owe him a debt of gratitude for what he achieved in his three years of service.
I note when I look at the very well edited and prepared Post Office Report and Accounts that the capital expenditure—and it is also in the Carter Report—has been falling off, in real terms. We all these days have to reduce our accounts to real terms if we are to be realistic. Capital expenditure and capital investment in 1970 was £372 million. In 1979–80 it was £997 million. That looks an impressive increase, but to look at it in real terms it was £372 million in 1970, it peaked at £488 million in real terms in 1973–74—I may say the last year of a period of Conservative Government, which shows our far-sightedness—and it has now
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deteriorated from £488 million down to £262 million. On a rising expenditure, and the need for these services to be improved and with the installation of System X, are we right to restrain capital expenditure to this degree? more particularly, because it is self-financing.
In fact, in the last year, 1979–80, not only did they finance all their own capital expenditure but they paid back £296 million of their long-term borrowing, so there was a net gain to the PSBR, minus £110 million. This year it is forecast in the Government White Paper that there is going to be £65 million which is not covered from their own resources. So even then it is a small extra call on the PSBR—very small. I know that, like the housemaid's baby, each requirement is a small one and therefore need not be worried about, but they all add up to something much greater. But it is £65 million, and the statement in the Government's White Paper on public expenditure (page 148) says quite clearly that, by and large, the Post Office will finance all its own capital investment requirements up to the year 1983–84 from within its own resources. I would ask my noble friend to look to see whether this is true. Perhaps he could tell us in his wind-up speech whether this is right or wrong. Certainly I would not wish to see the Post Office telecom side starved when we are so anxious to encourage the efficiency of this sector.
Lastly, I come to the future. I do not believe that we can go on starving our requirements, our home demand, in this way. This was brought out in the admirable paper, a copy of which was sent to the Minister for Industry in the middle of March, compiled by the Association of Telecommunications Users. I have not got time to cover all the points. They said:
"There have been reports of foreign companies which have abandoned plans to set up offices in the UK, particularly in the City of London, because they have been told by the Post Office that they will have to wait over a year for a PABX.
"The supply position on Post Office PABXs has been so bad for so long that no promises from the Post Office can be taken as justification for delaying the removal of the monopoly on PABXs of up to 100 lines. The Associations suggest this should be done as a matter of urgency".

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If we wait for a Government White Paper in July, it means we shall have to wait until the next Session of Parliament for a Bill to liberalise the industry and cover certain other reforms which I and my noble friend have suggested. Could I ask my noble friend to take note of the suggestion at the bottom of page 19 of this report, where it says that something should be done now even before the White Paper in July? It says:
"Should the Post Office be unwilling to concede these points in advance of legislation"—
that is, the liberalization—
"the Associations would strongly urge the Secretary of State to issue a directive under the terms of Section 11 of the Post Office Act 1969".
We have the power. If we all believe that we need to expand our industry and the efficiency of that industry, let him go ahead from today and do so.
4.46 p.m.
Lord RAGLAN: My Lords, I want to draw attention to two matters which, although they may appear to be small, in fact have the capacity vitally to affect the quality of Post Office service, and closely affect the users of telephones and the writers of letters; namely, the telephone and postal codes. In making my criticism I may say that although it appears to me that perhaps there is sometimes a tendency on the part of the Post Office to forget that it is there to provide a service—and possibly the noble Lord, Lord Orr-Ewing, is right in saying that the telephone service is not as much on its toes as it could be—there are many firms, small as well as large, in the private sector which in my experience are far worse in their outlook than the Post Office, and whose attitude to their customers is one of casualness amounting to superciliousness, as if it were demeaning and humiliating to provide a good service, and as if they were in business to please only themselves.
In fact, the giving of poor service has become something of a British disease, and that attitude may be at the back of a lot of our industrial difficulties. Generally speaking, judged by the contemporary standards in private industry, I fancy that the standard of service which the Post Office provides is really not bad. It may be said that the Post Office needs competition, but I should claim that good service is not necessarily prompted by
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competition. Besides, if, as the noble Lord, Lord Orr-Ewing, would like, bits of the Post Office were hived off and the services which the Post Office supply were open to competition, unless that competition is carefully restricted the results would be to cream off the most profitable bits, leaving the Post Office to struggle with the unprofitable parts. That would be bad for the taxpayer, bad for Post Office morale, and bad for efficiency.
We should give praise where praise is very much due. I am told on good authority, because I am not a stamp collector myself, that the Post Office leads the world in stamp design and is internationally acclaimed for it. Let us give a cheer when our industries lead the world in something. It would, however, be surprising if some of the current British take-it-or-leave-it attitude had not rubbed off on the Post Office somewhere. For instance, I suspect it is not purely a reflection of the Post Office's monopoly position that a telephone set with keys, rather than with a dial, and for which an extra quarterly charge is made, is offered only in a two-tone confection of mud-grey, and it is tidal mud-grey at that! I find this very unimaginative.
It would not be a good enough defence to declare that the private enterprise founder of mass production, Henry Ford, is said once to have offered his customers any colour so long as it was black. People are cleverer nowadays at making variety, and the Post Office should try to do so as a matter of principle. And if, as he threatens, and as the noble Lord, Lord Orr-Ewing, hoped, the Industry Secretary makes legal the use of all kinds of foreign handsets that are now available, I fear that the Post Office will have only itself to blame; it could have done lucrative business in encouraging a variety of its own designs. Now imports will start to flood in and British firms will be behind, as usual, all through what can only be called a lack of imagination.
Perhaps it is not far from that kind of lack of solicitousness about the customer's choice to the inventing of codes which, for all that they may be ingenious, are difficult for customers actually to use. With the telephone codes, at least the STD codes have the virtue of being the same from wherever you are making a call, although you must check another

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directory to see whether it is to be a trunk or local call. But the length of some of the numbers one is asked to dial is bizarre. It is quite common to be faced with having to dial 10 figures. That is enough to find one of 10,000 million numbers on one exchange alone. Yet whether one wants to remember a telephone number or write it down, every extra digit means more time spent, more difficulty and more possibility of inaccuracy. As for the local codes, they are astonishingly inconveniently planned, for the code of an exchange will vary according to the local exchange from which one is ringing, and all of them, like the STD codes, vary in length and rhythm and are likewise difficult to remember. There is, therefore, no point in trying to write down these local codes or trying to memorise them because one is fooled if one does not have a code book handy.
I do not think the noble Viscount, Lord Trenchard, need tell me why, when dialling from my local exchange at Usk to neighbouring Raglan, I need to dial nine digits; that is enough for an exchange of 1,000 million subscribers. Nor do I need ask him to explain why we have telephone codes of such amazing complication. I think I already know the answer. It is that whoever devised these codes is removed from all the common tasks of life by his secretaries, and when lie is at home his loyal wife does the telephoning. The task of designing a good and sensible code plan needs to be given to someone whose concern it is to give us a system which is as brief as possible, comprehensible, easy to memorise and simple to use. My suggestion is that there should be area codes—or code areas, in a word—designated by counties perhaps, so that when dialling into the area you use the area prefix, and when dialling within the area you do not use the prefix. This system operates in London and over the whole of the United States. Probably there is an unnecessary number of digits that must be dialled, but it works well and everybody understands it. Yet those of us who live in the provinces are foisted off with this other system.
One virtue of having code areas would be that sheer distance could cease to be quite the overriding consideration it now is when computing the charge, which is as it should be now that our telephone system is catching up technologically. In
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addition, we should be able to abolish the need for two directories, one for the number of the subscriber and one for his code. I do not say that the present arrangement was designed so that one forgets a subscriber's number while going to look up his code, but that is the effect of the system and what all too often happens, unless one writes it all down. It is one more example of how our provincial code system was not devised with the convenience of customers in mind.
The same sort of remarks apply to the postal code. I have seen some advertising plaintively asking us to use the postcodes. I wonder whether the Post Office has ever asked itself why people do not use them. It is mainly because nobody can remember them. They are a peculiarly fussy and strikingly unmemorisable combination of letters and figures. You are lucky if you can even remember your own. I believe the code to be so exact that a letter might reach your house almost without the benefit of human agency, if it could, and that seems to be a case of attempting to go too far with automation, by expecting too much of it in this application. It is certain that the Post Office will never be able to do without postmen to carry letters and parcels. Surely postmen can be counted on to know their districts, and therefore the kind of theoretical exactitude we have now in the postcode is unnecessary
If we must have postcodes—and if, as the noble Lord, Lord Campbell of Croy, said, action is required on them now—please may we have them as simple as possible both to write and to remember? Surely short, all-figure numbers, like other countries have, would be quite adequate. As things are, I think I can confidently predict that not enough people will be persuaded to use postcodes to make the scheme work. That will not be the customers' fault. It will be the fault of the Post Office for trying to institute a code for their own notional convenience without thought first being given to the convenience of users, whose co-operation is essential to its working. There is no doubt that customers would like to help the Post Office give a better service. My advice therefore to the Post Office is that they should drop the present codes and start again thinking of us, their writers and customers, whom they are asking to use these codes. I am sure they will find

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that such consideration will greatly help them in the improvement of their service.
4.58 p.m.
Baroness ELLIOT of HARWOOD: My Lords, I have listened with enormous interest to the technical and excellent speeches that have been made, and we are indebted to the noble Lord, Lord Campbell of Croy, for initiating a debate on this subject. I rise because I have always had great respect for the Post Office and postmen who, from my experience, do their best to serve the public individually—because the postal service is, for most people, a personal service. Of course it deals with vast quantities of mail and enormous distances—involved are long-distance communications and all the other matters which have been excellently described by, among others, the noble Lord, Lord Orr-Ewing—but the everyday postal service is for ordinary consumers a personal service, and often when the post arrives their jobs and duties for the day are revealed to them. So I believe that on the whole each person really judges the postal service by the delivery service of which he has experience every day.
We cannot deny the fact that there has been a deterioration in the everyday postal delivery, but from my experience this applies more in the cities than in the rural areas. Why that should be, I do not know. Perhaps in rural areas the people who receive the mail are more personally interested in the delivery and in the postmen, most of whom are very friendly and bring news from the other areas in which they operate, which may be a neighbouring village. Very often they discuss subjects of local interest, whether in the agricultural world, the sporting world, or whatever. I believe that on the whole in the rural areas the local interest in the services which are given by the postmen is greater than in the towns.
Postmen bring not only letters, but very often news, because news travels just as well by word of mouth as by letter. In the cities the situation is very different. There it is not so easy to take a personal interest in the postman because our letters simply drop through our postboxes in the morning, and it is only on those occasions when the postman is unable to get a large letter or a parcel through the
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letter box that he rings the bell and one has a conversation with him. In the countryside there is a personal aspect which I believe helps the postal service.
Of course this is a very small part of the mail service, but the influence of service conditions plays a great part in the recruitment of personnel for the Post Office. I have the feeling that it is easier for the Post Office to run its services in the country districts than it is in the cities.
I fear that I have not read as many reports on this subject as has the noble Lord, Lord Orr-Ewing, or one or two other Peers, but I have seen one memorandum and there seems to be a contradictory view about the recruitment of postmen. One document that was sent to me to read states that about another 7,000 postmen are needed, but another memorandum reports that the postal services are overmanned, though admittedly it may be a highly labour-intensive service. I should like the noble Viscount, when he replies, to deal with the question of recruitment to the postal services, and say whether we suffer from over-manning or under-manning. One memorandum I have says that it took 1,900 more personnel in the postal business than it took in 1973–74 to deal with one million fewer letters. If that is correct, it is certainly not encouraging.
Naturally the great interest in the postal charges arises from the actual cost, and I can well realise that with the huge increase in the cost of posting in this country there will be a reduction in the number of people who write letters. But I do not want to see the postal service cut down. It is still vital to the economy. No doubt new methods could improve and help the working of the service, and I hope that the Post Office union will co-operate in the new services because I am sure that at the end of the day this will be to the great benefit of the Post Office personnel as well as to those of us on the receiving end. None of us wants postmen to be exploited and their conditions of work and service are vital matters but efficiency must be a criterion of service since the costs involved are so enormous.
I should like to stress the great importance of the village post offices. They provide many vital services to the com-

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munity, and I believe that any thoughts about trying to cut down these post offices on grounds of cost would not be justified. I am sure that the service that the local post offices provide for the public cannot be provided if instead the post office is miles away and people thus find it impossible to get there to collect their pensions, postal orders or whatever they want. So I strongly support the view, which I believe has been expressed on many occasions, that the rural post office should be retained.
Telecommunications, which have been discussed by the noble Lord, Lord Orr-Ewing, are a very different proposition. Telephones have revolutionised the countryside, and have brought about much speeding up, but there is still a very long waiting list for telephones; and of course the cost is very great. However, it seems that people must want to have telephones installed, since there is a long waiting list, certainly in the country areas. Overcoming this problem would provide more customers and more money for the Post Office, and should be given high priority.
Another group of people for whom telephones are of enormous assistance is the old-age pensioners. If they have a telephone, many old people are enabled to live on their own. They can contact relations or friends when in trouble. Otherwise they would be unable to live on their own, and it would be much more expensive for everyone if they had to go into old people's homes. In this regard I should like priority to be given to old people, where conditions allow, so that they can remain independent as long as possible.
I shall remain a staunch supporter of the postal services, but there must be a great effort by all concerned to stop the deterioration which has been described by other noble Lords, and to improve the service again. I believe that better relationships on all sides would help, and I only hope that this can be accomplished.
5.7 p.m.
Lord MORRIS: My Lords, in investigating this subject I have found the legal and historical background underlying the creation of the Post Office monopoly of telecommunications not only fascinating
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but illustrative and instructive, too. The efficacy and potential of telegraphy leaped dramatically to the public notice during the Civil War in the United States, and it is certain that defence implications, among others, of its use inspired the provisions of the Telegraph Act 1863—the first of many enabling Acts—which provided, inter alia, that
"If One of Her Majesty's Principal Secretaries of State requires the Company"—
that is, the telegraph companies coming within the ambit of the Act—
"to transmit any Message on Her Majesty's Service, such Message shall … have Priority";
and, further, that,
"On the Request of the Board of Trade, the Company"—
which subsequently became the Post Office as well—
"shall … place … such a Telegraph … to be for the exclusive Use of Her Majesty".
Furthermore, the Act provided that,
"In Emergencies Telegraphs may be taken possession of for Her Majesty's Service".
Subsequently the Act of 1869 provided—I am not quite sure how this extension came about, but it is fundamentally an administrative point, rather than a defence point—that,
"The Postmaster General … shall … have the exclusive privilege"—
I stress the word "privilege"—
"of transmitting telegrams within the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland".
It is from these Acts that the current law stems.
I was most interested to note that in a report written on the centenary of the International Telecommunication Union, the authors were forced to state that,
"In Britain, the development of the telephone was at first greatly hampered by the Telegraph Act of 1869 by which the Post Office had acquired the monopoly of all telegraphic communications …".
Very little has changed in over a hundred years!
This exclusive privilege is maintained to this very day by virtue of the Post Office Act 1969, Section 24, under which the Post Office enjoy "the exclusive privilege" with respect to telecommunications. If one looks back to Section 9, however, one might possibly raise a horse laugh by reading that:
"It shall be the duty of the Post Office … to meet the social, industrial and commercial needs

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of the British Islands … and, in particular, to provide throughout those Islands … such services for the conveyance of letters and such telephone services as satisfy all reasonable demands for them".
However, in conjunction with the foregoing one must read subsection (4), which reads:
"Nothing in this section shall be construed as imposing upon the Post Office, either directly or indirectly, any form of duty or liability enforceable by proceedings before any court".
It is some duty where the customers have no legal recourse in regard to the duty imposed! There is also the very strange anomaly that, also according to the Act of 1969,
"In discharging the duty imposed on it by the foregoing subsection, the Post Office shall have regard"—
it is not a duty, but they must "have regard"—
"to developments in the field of communications …".
So we see what the position is quite clearly. There is no duty to provide any telecommunication services, and yet they have exclusive privilege to control. The result is that we are very behind the times in the field of telecommunications, and by that, of course, I do not mean only telephones; I mean radio telecommunications and all the message services which are of course extant these days. That is why I most warmly welcome the Government's decision to relax the operation of the Post Office's telecommunications monopoly. The monopoly is not only out of date, but is counter-productive. Indeed, the Secretary of State for Industry stated that Her Majesty's Government shared the Carter Committee's view—and this is a straight quotation by the Secretary of State from the Carter Committee Report —
"that they were not convinced that the balance of advantage to the community favoured the continuation of the existing boundaries to the Post Office telecommunications monopoly".
He went on to say:
"… we want to see greater freedom for the provision of all kinds of added value services on telecommunications circuits. Subject to safeguarding the technical integrity of the system, we also believe that it is in the national interest to provide greater scope for competition in the supply of apparatus for attachment to the network".
This view must be correct. I think it is quite well illustrated because centralised
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State planning by one customer—namely, the Post Office—has, as I believe, not served Britain's best interests. If State planning and a single customer was the answer, then the USSR should have led in developments in telecommunications and electronics, rather than the free enterprise countries. We have seen that regulated—and I stress that word, "regulated"—private enterprise in the telecommunications field has enabled American industry to develop competitive products and has created a vast market in all areas of telecommunications.
Indeed, the experience in the United States shows that the combination of freedom for attachments and peripheral equipment, independent common carriers and added value services has resulted in increased efficiency without drawing upon precious national financial resources; has increased traffic on the public telephone network with resultant profit; has created new employment in communications installation, maintenance and added value services; has expanded manufacturing, research and development and export production; and has increased competition, resulting in higher quality and grade of service to the customer.
With respect, I would suggest the immediate transfer of the monopoly powers under the Post Office Act to the Minister in the Department of Industry. The Minister should be empowered to license organisations providing added value services; sales, installation and maintenance of attachments and peripheral equipment to the public telephone network; and common carrier services. In addition, a communications authority should be formed, responsible to the Minister, to provide central direction and regulation of all forms of communication. There would of course be an additional benefit, in that a plethora of Quangos and (if your Lordships would excuse a terrible phrase) quasi-Quangos could be merged with or eliminated by the creation of a single communications authority.
Such or similar changes are vital to the health of the nation. The sweeping changes which are occurring in technology and society make it essential that the regulation of communications is removed from the existing historic framework. The rapid development of computers and micro-chip processors are causing the merging of many traditionally separate

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sectors of administration and communications. Information processing and automatic switching using digital techniques are changing fundamental concepts of communication. The rapid development of technology requires regulations which clearly take account of electronic realities and must ensure equity to all communication users to prevent 19th century regulations being used to retard progress and cynically permit multinationals and State monopolies totally to dominate and exploit these advances.
Turning specifically to radio telecommunications, the radio frequency spectrum could be seen to be one of the nation's resources, and, unlike fossil fuels, it cannot be exhausted. It is important that the regulation and management of the spectrum ensures that full use is made of this freely available resource. It is inappropriate, for reasons which I have already stated, or for similar reasons, for outdated Government regulations and practices artificially to prevent the efficient and (I stress this word) responsible use of the radio spectrum. Your Lordships will appreciate that Government decisions on the radio spectrum have historically been dominated by broadcasting and military interests. It must be accepted that the defence of the nation is paramount and that adequate radio frequencies should be available to the defence forces.
In the case of broadcasting, the public are entitled to expect adequate information and entertainment within the economic restraints of the nation. However, Government regulators have allocated and assigned the majority of the spectrum to these services without due regard to the actual use of the radio spectrum. Civil radio communication services are currently allocated less than 8 per cent. of the spectrum below 1,000 megaherz. The practical matter of the two largest services using the spectrum allocated to them is that fundamentally it is impossible for the broadcasters or the defence forces physically to fill the spectrum with working systems. Optimum use of the spectrum involving the sharing between broadcasting and civil radio communication systems is entirely practical but needs a communications authority to co-ordinate and to regulate it.
My Lords, I have spoken for far too long. I should like to finish by thanking
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my noble friend the Chief Whip for ensuring that I did not speak after my noble friend Lady Trumpington, because she is quite impossible to follow. I beseech your Lordships to stay, because I know that we are all in for a treat.
5.20 p.m.
Baroness TRUMPINGTON: My Lords, that is the most terrifying remark to stand up to; but I thank my noble friend for it. I, too, greatly welcome the opportunity provided by my noble friend Lord Campbell of Croy to discuss the quality of service provided by the Post Office while longing to join him in wringing the neck of that beastly little bird Buzby. I intend to confine my remarks to the specific question of Britain's air mail service. Private individuals and members of the Air Transport Users Committee of which I have the honour to be chairman have become increasingly worried about the deterioration in the quality of Britain's air mail service. As individual users of air mail for either personal or business communication, we know that postal charges have been rising at an above-average rate even for inflation-prone Britain and at the same time it seems clear that the quality of service is diminishing. In the era of propeller aircraft it was usual for overseas mail to be delivered within a matter of days; today, with air journey times halved by modern jets, overseas air mail seldom seems to take less than a week.
In 1978, the Air Transport Users Committee decided that the time had come to do something about it. Then we ran into an unexpected problem, it was very difficult to find out what was happening. To some extent, this was due to a certain secretiveness on airline matters among the few organisations which are closely involved. But, also, it reflected the fact that nobody had studied Britain's air mail in recent times and there was consequently a dearth of background information available to users.
As a first step, we invited a well-known air transport economist, Mr. John Seekings, who has made a special study of cargo matters, to carry out detailed research on our behalf and to report back to the Air Transport Users Committee. His report confirms that air mail is indeed a complex business. The report also

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confirmed our fears that all is not well. Two particular aspects strike us as being of fundamental importance. First, it seems that the Post Office does not give air mail the care and attention it deserves, possibly because of the greater economic appeal of international telecommunications; secondly, it seems that a cross-subsidy of one class of user by another has become a widespread and undesirable practice and, as a result, many users are having to pay more than they should for air mail.
I should like, if I may, to enlarge upon these two conclusions as well as touching on other aspects of the whole air mail service. I hope that your Lordships will understand that at times I will be quoting from the report I have already mentioned. I fully appreciate that air mail is a secondary element in the total mail operation. Furthermore, there is a division between letters and packages. Nearly all overseas letters now move by air and make a profit for the Post Office. However, it seems that overseas air mail is not accorded the first-class status it deserves within the United Kingdom. Frankly, I find this scandalous. I should like at this stage to say that POUNC cooperated enthusiastually with the researches made by the Air Transport Users Committee but we learned from them that owing to limited resources they have been precluded from detailed consideration of overseas mail. The Government may well consider commissioning a special study by POUNC of both price and delivery performances of our air mail service.
My Lords, I will now turn briefly to the question of our parcel post. Postal authorities in most countries have always been under intense, and understandable, pressure to promote the export of printed paper, and as a result the situation today is that most postal authorities are incurring massive deficits mailing books and periodicals overseas at special discount rates. This international competition in mail subsidy continues apparently to be acceptable only because the losses on discounted printed papers can be offset by profits from protected letter traffic and quasi-protected parcel traffic or by direct Government subsidy.
From the viewpoint of Britain's publishing industry, for instance, competition
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from its main international rival, the United States, is particularly severe. Under these circumstances, the legitimate effort of the British Post Office to raise rates for printed papers to economic levels while the United States Post Office continues to be prepared to subsidise American publishers creates a very real problem. That problem is that even though rates from the United Kingdom are substantially higher than those from most other competing countries, the Post Office is still incurring a substantial deficit. Quite simply, Britain's publishers appear unable to bear the level of postal charges which would be economic for the Post Office. The Post Office is therefore maximising its profit on other postal activities to offset this deficit.
The concern turns on the fact that if airmail rates are held artificially high in order to cross-subsidise surface mail, then the growth of air mail is significantly impeded. It is possible that the relatively slow growth of air mail letters and parcels in comparison with competing media could have been caused to some extent by artificially-high postage rates. Unfortunately, the Post Office refuses on grounds of commercial security to make available for independent scrutiny the economic information which is needed to evaluate this situation objectively. All that can be said is that informed guesswork strongly suggests that certain categories of air mail parcels in particular and, possibly, long-distance letters appear to be suffering from excessive postal rates.
My repeated use of the word "seems" and the phrase "appear to be" brings me to the last point which I feel needs emphasis. Because some of those involved in air mail service were not willing to furnish specific information some of my conclusions cannot be verified. If the Post Office is to continue to enjoy its traditional monopoly then it must recognise that public accountability is part of the price that it must expect to pay. The split of the postal and telecommunications businesses is to be welcomed in that the proper development of all mail services, but especially airmail, can take place without inhibition. I submit therefore that airmail could be developed in three parallel ways: a regular airmail service with dependable delivery times; an express airmail facility at a premium price founded on a firm economic footing,

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operated either by the Post Office and/or private enterprise; and, finally, an expansion of an accelerated surface post facility into a general form of second-class airmail.
5.29 p.m.
Earl FORTESCUE: My Lords, may I join with others in thanking my noble friend Lord Campbell of Croy for giving us this opportunity to speak on the Post Office. I should like to speak briefly on one aspect only, that of the telephone service. I, myself, do not use the telephone unless I have to, and then only briefly. However, I have a wife and three daughters at home and I find that the telephone bill is one of the largest I pay, and certainly the one I most resent having to pay. I suspect that the British system involves more wasted time and frustration than any other modern system in North America or Western Europe. Wrong numbers particularly irritate me. Not only do they waste time but one is having to pay for unwanted calls.
The majority of calls to all parts of the world now can be dialled direct. I understand that these are recorded by a meter in the telephone exchange. As a subscriber, I also understand that one has no right whatever to check one's own meter reading. This is surely wrong and unfair. I buy electricity and there is a meter in my premises, and the same applies to gas and water. Why should not the telephone meter be in one's own house where one can read it in person if one feels so inclined?
If pressed, the Post Office will rent one a meter which can stand beside the telephone at home. However, the Post Office stress that the reading of this meter is unlikely to correspond with the reading of the meter at the exchange, as meters are not 100 per cent. accurate, and alterations are made to the reading on the exchange meter from time to time for technical reasons. I suggest that the whole arrangement is unsatisfactory and that every subscriber should be charged on the reading of a meter on his own premises.
The Post Office might well argue that this would involve the cost of extra men travelling around the country to read individual meters. I suggest that this could be easily overcome by asking sub
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scribers to report the readings of their own meters with periodic checks by official meter readers, who could at the same time read the telephone meter, the gas meter, the electricity meter and the water meter.
5.32 p.m.
Lord ALPORT: My Lords, like previous speakers, I am very grateful to my noble friend Lord Campbell of Croy because this occasion gives me an opportunity of making one or two points very briefly about an institution in this country for which I have had an affectionate interest for a good many years. I should like to start by saying that I fully agree with the Government's decision to split the present Post Office into telecommunications and postal services. The Secretary of State should be careful before he decides to dismantle the monopoly status of the Post Office as far as postal services are concerned. We should remember that the problems of the latter are to a great extent the problems of size; the enormous volume of mail which these days must be handled every day of the year. This is a problem which faces every postal service in the world.
Earlier this year I sent a letter to the rector of the Venerable English College in Rome. It took five weeks to arrive. The reply, to my surprise, was posted in Harpenden because, so my correspondent said, the delays in the Italian post were so great that they relied on giving their mail to some priest to bring back to England to post here. All the grumbles that we have heard this afternoon and which we continually see in the Press and elsewhere about the postal services, are grumbles which are reproduced in almost every country, not least in the United States.
I would remind my noble friend Lord Campbell of Croy that the cost of first-class post in the United States is marginally greater than here and the standard of service provided by the post in the United States is a good deal lower. Indeed, if my noble friend was living in Croy, Arizona, he probably would have to go once a week in his dressing gown and carpet slippers to the local post office to get his mail, whereas here no doubt he gets it delivered punctually every weekday.
To break the monopoly of the postal services will add to the financial difficulties

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of the Post Office. Above all, it would be a considerable discouragement to management, which is already harassed on the one hand by Government financial pressures, and by the continuous interference of Governments over a good many years, and on the other by the attitude of the trade unions to improvements in organisation and the introduction of mechanised methods. I remember 20 years ago seeing in Norwich the pilot letter sorting machines at work. Yet even today, 20 years later, largely as the result of the attitude of the unions, the distribution of these machines is far from complete.
The resignation of the present able chairman, Sir William Barlow, is evidence of the demoralising effect which contemporary pressures have on the Post Office management. He gave as a reason that there was too much exposure and too many constraints. The Post Office mangement are naturally sensitive to the volume of public criticism; they feel that they lack support from the Government, and they are only too well aware of the obstruction which they experience from the trade unions in their plans to improve the standards of public service which it is their job to provide.
The postal service is not simply just another nationalised industry; the postal service of this country has been the responsibility of the State for four and half centuries. I feel that any decision to break the monopoly would be doctrinaire and not conceived in the best interests of the Post Office. Over the years the revenue of the Post Office has continually been milked to provide in earlier days an income for royal mistresses or a pension for some public figure, and latterly as windfall for the Treasury.
If we want to improve the standard of service, the first thing necessary is for the management of the Post Office to receive the financial and moral support from the Government which any body of men who carry the heavy responsibility for running a public service must expect—a public service without which the Government administration would collapse. Morale in my view is vital. The present attitude of Ministers and of Parliament to the Post Office management has gone far to undermine this in the case of the body of extremely able men and women in the postal service.
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When there was a Postmaster General—to say nothing of an Assistant Postmaster General—a Minister was available to stand up in Parliament to explain and defend and, where necessary, to direct and encourage the Post Office management. He took what Sir William Barlow described as the exposure, and no doubt at the same time he was able to overcome some of the constraints. In my view, there should be a Minister of State at least in the Department of Industry responsible for the postal services. I personally should like to see the postal services become part of the Civil Service once again. It is not an industry in the normal sense, it is and always has been a Government service which, in the course of time, the private citizen has been able to use.
In a period of high wage inflation and as a labour intensive service in which only a limited amount of mechanism is possible, the Post Office has very special problems. My noble friend Lord Orr-Ewing referred in particular to the other side of the present postal administration: telecommunications. This is entirely different. With the application of fibre glass to telephone cables, the introduction of the microchip and with the development of System X, this industry—and that is an industry—has a prospect of technological progress between now and the year 2000 which will represent a major revolution.
However, in order to achieve this, it must have the capital resources at its disposal to introduce the improvements and the modernisation which no doubt is necessary and which at the present moment I know is possible. But the problem really is that if the Post Office or the telecommunications corporation has to develop from its own capital resources or from what it can obtain by loans, it will take a substantial period of time before these improvements in the quality of the service can be introduced.
I agree with my noble friend Lord Orr-Ewing that it is not wise or necessary to maintain the present monopoly as far as telecommunications are concerned; but he knows as well as I do that to open the market fully to any standard of equipment which any customer in a shop would wish to buy to attach to his telephone can quite easily damage the standard of service that the telecommunications corporation can

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produce. Indeed he said that in his speech, and I think it is very important to bear that in mind. It is all very well to say "Let us throw it open to full competition", but the truth is that on the telecommunications side the Post Office has maintained a very high standard of equipment and service up to the present, and they are very anxious not to see that deteriorate with the introduction of all sorts of new instruments and gadgets which may affect the general service.
The delivery of letters, from the Inland Revenue's income tax demand to a birthday card for one's youngest grandchild, will continue to depend upon the human factor—the welfare and morale of the hundreds of thousands of men and women from the chairman down to the post lady with her bicycle who plods devotedly along the village street each weekday morning to deliver the mail and which has always seemed to me to be a miracle of organisation, which is very important.
I therefore support the decision to divide the Post Office into two parts: post and telecommunications. But I would vote against breaking the Post Office monopoly. I implore the Government, and particularly the Secretary of State for Industry, to try to get a better understanding of the nature of the problems of the postal srevice and to give to its management and workers the encouragement which has so evidently been lacking in the attitudes of successive Governments in recent years.
5.42 p.m.
Lord SKELMERSDALE: My Lords, I have not had occasion to mention the details of my small horticultural business before in this Chamber, but since my third largest item of expenditure, as a retail mail order organisation, is on the Post Office and since the expenditure will be something over £10,000 this calendar year, I thought that perhaps this might be a suitable opportunity to come in on this most important debate initiated by my noble friend Lord Campbell of Croy.
My noble friend was indeed critical of the Post Office in his speech, but you will see from what I have to say that on the whole I am a satisfied user of the mails side. This may point up some of the dichotomy referred to by the noble
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Lord, Lord Winstanley, between business users on however small a scale and private users of the mails side of the Post Office business. As I say, my remarks will be largely confined to that.
First of all, my respect for the sales side of the mails side has grown by leaps and bounds ever since I first had a visit from the local Post Office representative, who suggested my using the two-tier contract service for parcels and letter packets. This means in effect that parcels are bulk-weighed and you pay so much per kilogram and also so much for the individual parcels; so you only have to count them and put them on a spring balance. You do not, of course, get involved in sticking on stamps, which is a great advantage when you are hard pressed in a busy packing season, especially this year when sales have been delayed by copious amounts of rain in the early spring. Just recently I have heard of a another type of contract which is based on a single amount per parcel, but I would rather doubt that my own scale of operations would be large enough to justify that system from the Post Office's point of view.
Surely any service is entirely and absolutely dependent on the people who are actually doing a particular job at a particular time. Most of my consignments are packed in padded bags, of the kind normally used for books; and occasionally one gets rapped over the knuckles by a customer because the postman has tried to put a bag through a letter-box which is too small. I would doubt whether the Post Office as an organisation is to blame, except possibly in their training courses where this point may not be aedquately dealt with. I personally have no experience of what goes on in training courses for postmen.
I am also delighted with the Post Office's new free compensation scheme, as very occasionally a parcel is delayed in transit and plants are received in a soggymess—which does not do my business any good and does not do the Post Office much good either. Even more occasionally, they go missing altogether. But a complaint of that kind, which one does hear of from time to time, has to be put into perspective. In the last eight months we have posted about 9,000 parcels or packets and we have only had occasion to

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contact the Post Office four times on this score. According to my usually rather shaky arithmetic, that works out at 0.04 per cent., which I would have thought was a negligible amount and an acceptable risk in most cases. Certainly it is well under the Post Office's own published figures.
Moving from the particular to the general, what exactly does one want from the Post Office?—obviously a speedy, efficient service at as small a cost as possible. In my own experience, speaking generally, we are getting the speed. Parcels for Yorkshire in the last fortnight, for example, have been taking three or four days, which I think is quite exceptional. Never have we had occasion to complain that a parcel has taken more than nine days.
From the Post Office's point of view, I agree with my noble friend Lord Campbell of Croy that we would get much more if the individual postman did not have to walk up garden paths—they do not do this in the tropics and in many other parts of the world, as has already been referred to this afternoon. Perhaps help could be given by providing a post box at the road-gate of houses in country districts but also on new housing estates, where a postman has to walk up and down garden paths with a resulting loss of time.
Indeed, but for the outcry which I am sure would ensue from the general public, one could extend this idea. I suggest that blocks of post boxes could be erected at suitable places which would not be more than five or, at the outside, 10 minutes' walk from any particular home. That would speed up delivery dramatically, and I personally think it would provide a social service and a modicum of much-needed exercise for many people, who would have to walk for a few minutes to a post box and back to collect their particular bundle of post, if any. That, of course, is where the bugbear would be found. If you went for a five-minute walk in the rain only to discover that there was nothing in your postbox, you would be absolutely livid; but of course one always has to take the swings with the roundabouts.
I wish, unlike the noble Lord, Lord Raglan, that more people would use the postcode, although I am told there is
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only one sorting office which has the machinery fully operational to use it at the moment. Even quite small mail order businesses and other business have sufficient post at certain times of the year to take advantage of the bulk mailing rebate scheme. For example—
Lord RAGLAN: My Lords, may I intervene for one moment? I did not wish more people not to use the postcodes; I was objecting to the kind of postcode we are expected to use. I fully support the use of the postcode.
Lord SKELMERSDALE: My Lords, I am sorry: I misunderstood what the noble Lord was saying, and I apologise. The quid pro quo for taking advantage of the bulk mailing rebate scheme is that the sender has to give the Post Office the items pre-sorted into postal towns and counties. This is so much quicker and easier with the postcode, which also makes it very much easier to find a particular name and address. As the noble Lord, Lord Orr-Ewing, said, with the advent of the micro-chip computer, now definitely economic even for a mini-business, in the Government's terminology and certainly in my own—I would not deign to call myself even a small business—the postcode becomes even more important. Although one can, quite easily, assess a name and address from a microcomputer, it is a very slow and laborious process and the use of the postcode speeds it up quite dramatically. I know, because I am busily having a machine programmed at this moment.
Last, but not least, it is fashionable in certain quarters to knock the Post Office. By "knocking the Post Office", I do not mean the kind of constructive criticisms that we have had in this debate this afternoon. I regard them as being useful, and I hope we shall be told by my noble friend on the Front Bench that some of these ideas have already been considered by the Post Office Board and that others certainly will be. However, looking around this Chamber, and indeed around the streets of London as I came from Paddington this morning, I wonder how many noble Lords and members of the public, like me, have blamed the Post Office, because we have not replied to a letter quite quickly enough, or indeed have not initiated one. It is an easy thing to do and "they", the amorphous lump of the

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Post Office, take the blame. But it is not on.
Can you, my Lords, yourselves, imagine running a service industry, delivering over 30 million letters and half a million parcels a day to more than 21 million addresses, often in very inaccessible parts of the country? It is the town deliveries that subsidise the out-of-the-way destinations, and it is the easily accessible addresses that are, at the moment, being creamed off for parcels by British Rail and private couriers.
To allow the Post Office's monopoly of letters and postal packets to be broken would be a disservice to everyone, as well as being the end of a fairly cheap method of distributing mail. All that would happen would be cheap urban mail and very expensive Post Office-controlled mail for the country districts. In a word, almost, I say, "Don't knock the Post Office". Leave it well alone with, as I say, a few pertinent suggestions, such as those made by my noble friend Lord Campbell of Croy this afternoon.
But by all means hive off the telephone part. Many other speakers have spoken about this and I do not intend to add to what has been said except just to say at the very end that, if I remember my A. A. Milne correctly, Wol the Owl had a notice outside his door saying, "Please knock if an answer is not required." Many of us in this Chamber this afternoon are quite definitely pulling at the bell-rope.
5.53 p.m.
Lord PONSONBY of SHULBREDE: My Lords, may I join with other noble Lords in thanking the noble Lord, Lord Campbell of Croy, for initiating this debate this afternoon on the standard of service provided by the Post Office? One always has a fear, when we debate a subject such as this, that the Post Office will be treated as a whipping boy and that people from all quarters will come to attack it and tell of personal experiences of the Post Office being, as it turned out this afternoon, either too efficient or not efficient enough.
But, in fact, the Post Office has had a considerable number of supporters in the debate today and, as the noble Lord, Lord Skelmersdale, has just said, we
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should not regard the Post Office as a whipping boy. I am sure that what we should do is to try to judge the achievements, the costs and the reliability of the Post Office by such international standards as we know of, and also by such experiences as we may have.
When the noble Lord, Lord Campbell of Croy, initiated the debate, he first spoke of the letters service which he called erratic and not good enough. He dealt with three areas—the general unreliability, the high cost, and the parts of the country where the service is particularly had. On the question of unreliability, it is certainly so that the targets of the Post Office for deliveries of 93 per cent. of first-class letters on Day B, which is the day after posting, and 96 per cent. of second-class letters on Day D, which is the fourth day after posting, have not been achieved. In fact, there has been a deterioration between 1975–76 and 1979–80, and the Post Office is certainly concerned that the percentages for those services have decreased.
The latest figures which I have are for the month of February 1980. They show that first-class letters improved, for the Tuesday to Saturday collections, from 83·1 per cent. delivered on Day B in the previous year to 86·8 per cent. So there is some slight improvement there. For second-class letters, for the Tuesday to Saturday collections, the figure was up from 81·9 per cent. to 89·4 per cent. I find these figures slightly difficult to understand or to relate, and perhaps the noble Viscount, Lord Trenchard, can explain. There are two sets of figures, the figures for collections from Tuesday to Saturday, and those for the full week collections, which always tend to be slightly worse than the former.
On the question of high cost, the noble Lord, Lord Campbell of Croy, made the point that people would baulk at putting a 20p stamp on their letters in two to three years' time. If we accept—and I am sure we do not accept—that inflation will go on increasing at 20 per cent. a year, then in 3z years' time that is exactly what the cost of posting a first-class letter will be. Therefore, if we are to ensure that that seemingly high cost for posting a first-class letter is not to come about, then we must ensure that the rate of inflation is brought down to a more reasonable

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figure, which will make the noble Lord's prediction one which does not come about.
The noble Lord, Lord Alport, made a very realistic speech, pointing to the high cost of postal services and to the delays elsewhere. Bearing in mind that situation—the Italian situation and the American situation—to which he referred, the delays which we have in this country are very small indeed.
Lord CAMPBELL of CROY: My Lords, will the noble Lord very kindly give way? He has referred to my speech and it is better if I make the point now rather than later. My reference to 20p was, I hope, not a prediction. I was making it in connection with the suggestion I was making for reducing the cost of the service. It was certainly not a prediction and I very much hope that it will not come about.
Lord PONSONBY of SHULBREDE: My Lords, I am sure we all hope that it will not come about. It will certainly depend on the rate of inflation more than anything else. I should now like to come to the third aspect with which the noble Lord, Lord Campbell, dealt, and which I do not think he said very much about—the question of bad areas. Here, in particular, we think about the position in central London where there has been continual criticism of the postal services. But the criticism is not only of the postal services in London. There have been criticisms of London Transport's services and of the availability of service staff in central London.
A problem which has much concerned local government in London for a very long time is to ensure that there are places available for people to live in the central areas, places from which they can get to their work easily before public transport commences. This is a problem which the Post Office has and which London Transport has. People need to be at work before transport services are available. Of course, in the hotel and restaurant field there is the same problem of people needing to go home after the public transport services have ceased in the evening. This is certainly one of the reasons why the Post Office is understaffed in central London.
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There is also the fact that the job of a postman is, perhaps, not as attractive as it was in the past. Before World War the Post Office certainly had no difficulty in recruiting and retaining good quality staff. It is also true that at that time the conditions of service of a postman were considerably less attractive than they are today, but of course the Post Office—as I have said—had no difficulty in filling staff vacancies. One could say that the general employment conditions of the time made this so.
One can also say that a postman and a London Transport worker, for example, at that time were exceptions in the general rule of pensions and other facilities provided for employees, whereas today virtually all employees of all major companies have those facilities available as a part of their employment. The particular attraction of working for the Post Office and having these specially good conditions of service does not exist now as it did in the past; that additional attraction is not there. Therefore, of course, the question of pay becomes ever more important in attracting people to work for the Post Office.
Indeed, I am told that there is some evidence to suggest that, in order to keep staff at times of uncompetitive pay, managers, have allowed unorthodox methods of overtime to develop. Overtime has been paid for which has not been fully worked. No doubt these managers felt that they had no alternative but to do this, since it was the only way in which the earnings of their staff could be kept high in order to hold enough staff to provide an adequate service. This is undoubtedly a potent factor in causing some of the problems which the Post Office has felt in Central London.
The noble Baroness, Lady Elliot of Harwood, spoke very movingly about the Post Office services and hoped that the Post Office unions would co-operate in furthering improvements within the service. Certainly I very much support what she said about the retention of local services.
A service which was not mentioned but which sometimes comes under attack is the telegram service. Periodically there have been attacks that it was quite uneconomic and that it was therefore a

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service that should be dispensed with. I would resist that proposal very strongly as I feel that the telegram service provides a means of communication for which there can be no substitute for those without a telephone, and that it is a terribly important service. It is curious to note what has happened with the progress of time, because the telegram service was one of the most used services of the Post Office during the latter part of the last century.
Nor would I be happy with the suggestion that Lord Campbell of Croy made, that deliveries should no longer be made to every individual address. Other noble Lords have commented on that and on the American situation where people may have to walk a long way to collect questionable mail. I mean questionable in the sense that they do not know in advance whether there will be any mail for them to collect.
Lord Raglan and Lord Skelmersdale had a small contretemps about the question of post codes. I have always considered myself fortunate here in that I have a post code which is SW1 PIER, which I find easy to remember even though the word "Pier" is spelled P-I-E-R!
May I now go to the question of the telecommunications field'? We must also look at the standard of service there. The particular items one wants to look at are, first, the number of faults which develop in the service, which is a measure of the reliability of the service; secondly, the question of how speedily those faults can be cleared; and, thirdly, the question of the waiting list for people who wish to have a telephone installed. On the question of faults and the speed of clearance, this has shown a considerable improvement in the percentage of calls which failed due to the Post Office from 1974 onwards and reached a peak of perfection, if that is the right word, in 1977–78, showing a slight increase in 1978–79, but still a very low standard of failures due to the Post Office.
On the question of the faults cleared by the Post Office the next day, this shows a gradual decrease in the percentage not cleared by the next day. The latest figures I have show that in the year 1978–1979 about half the faults were cleared by the next day, and the figure is still increasing.
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On the question of the waiting list, Lord Campbell of Croy referred to the fact that the waiting list had increased from 200,000 to 265,000 over the past year. I understand that this was caused largely by a heavier than expected demand, with the effect that there was a shortage in supplies arriving. The manufacturers were not able to produce more supplies than they had anticipated they would be asked for. Also, there were problems with cables and exchange equipment. However, I also understand that there is an intention on the part of the Post Office and the Post Office Engineering Union—the union concerned in this side of the work of the Post Office—to aim in the current year for a substantial reduction to 130,000; that is, if this intention of the Post Office and the POEU is realised, the waiting list will be reduced to 130,000, which is about half its present amount. Perhaps that is not an excuse for what has happened in the past but it is a sign that there will be improvement there.
Lord Orr-Ewing commented on the liberalisation of the Post Office manufacturing policy, so that people would be allowed to install foreign handsets in their homes. One of the problems here has always been that if you have a handset which has not been entirely approved it is difficult to know whose responsibility it is to repair it when it goes wrong. The Post Office will not wish to repair a handset which has been manufactured outside their normal code of operation. This is an area which can cause continual problems.
I apologise to the noble Lord, Lord Orr-Ewing, for being out of the Chamber during part of his speech. I gather that he raised the question of the decreasing capital expenditure of the Post Office. I mention that point because I understand that the Post Office have very rigidly applied to them the Government's cash limits policy, with the effect that they are unable to invest as much as they would like to invest. In some ways they should be treated very much as an ordinary competitive industry. They should not be bound in that particular way if they themselves can generate internally the resources for this additional financing. One would hope to see them being able to act in this way.
There were attacks from different parts of the Chamber on that poor bird Buzby, with the noble Lord, Lord Campbell of

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Croy, assisted by the noble Baroness, Lady Trumpington, aiming to strangle him. I have always felt that he is rather a pleasant character—in some ways perhaps more pleasant than Mr. Cube. I am afraid that I shall not be assisting them in that strangulation policy.
Finally, I should like to say something about the split of the Post Office into the postal side and the telecommunications side. This was strongly argued in the Carter Report, which concluded:
"The case is reinforced by the general impression from the evidence given to us that the present combined management has led to over-centralisation, poor delegation and slow decision-making. The overloading of the present single board has, in our view, inhibited sound strategic thinking. The Post Office has not been an effective policy-making body producing a co-ordinated strategy for the whole range of communications other than broadcasting".
There was no argument over those conclusions by the Carter Committee. However, the Government must look very closely at what arrangements they suggest for splitting the corporation and also at what new structure one will have.
A very interesting suggestion was made by the noble Lord, Lord Alport, that one might have a Minister of State with responsibility for the Post Office. It may well be that a solution to this problem could be to retain the unification, under the guidance of a Minister at the Department of Industry who would have within his area of responsibility the two separate corporations. I thought that this was a very useful suggestion which the Government should look at very carefully. I am certain that whatever arrangements are come to with regard to splitting the Post Office, they must be done as painlessly as possible and in a way which does not unduly ruffle the feathers of all those involved. As noble Lords will know, there is a considerable divergence of opinion about this within the unions involved in the Post Office industry.
I hope that some of the remarks which I and other noble Lords have made will be useful to the Government in considering what should be done for the best for the future of the Post Office.
6.14 p.m.
The MINISTER of STATE, DEPARTMENT of INDUSTRY (Viscount Trenchard): My Lords, the Government are in debt to my noble friend Lord Campbell of Croy for timing the debate to take place now and for drawing from your Lordships' House, as debates of this kind usually do, some very interesting expert opinions over a wide area, some general and some very specific, like Lady Trumpington's expert knowledge in relation to air mail. Therefore, may I thank my noble friend and assure him, and others who have taken part in the debate, that Hansard will be scrutinised, whether in the photographic form—where I discovered to my glee that other people also have to alter what they have said—or in the printed form, if the dispute is over by then.
This whole subject is of enormous importance, and I have been trying to think what a Government spokesman should put first. What I think I should put first is that we echo the sentiment expressed by many people that there are in the Post Office a lot of people who work and try to serve the public in a very dedicated way. With that as background, I think that one should note that in this House today, as elsewhere in the past and as in the Carter Report, there is unanimity on the split of the Post Office, although there are points about the method, such as those made just now by the noble Lord, Lord Ponsonby of Shulbrede.
We should be a little apprehensive about the idea of a Minister providing a major co-ordinating role between two corporations. I am sure that the noble Lord did not mean that. Our philosophy is that Ministers should not, on the whole, run things, and I am sure that the noble Lord would not suggest that that should happen. We will take note of his views, and those of other noble Lords who have spoken in this debate, as to structure, but as to the split into two purposeful management organisations we have no doubt that it should be done. Nor did Sir William Barlow have any doubts about that. He supported us, and I think the noble Lord, Lord Winstanley, will confirm that Sir William Barlow's board also supported this idea throughout.
At this point I should like to echo the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Winstanley, and also those of my right

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honourable friend the Secretary of State for Industry. We are sorry that taking on the telecommunications side after the split is something which Sir William Barlow prefers not to do, and that he prefers to return to private industry. I would ask noble Lords, and in particular my noble friend Lord Alport, to look at the 16th April Hansard report of the other place and see what my right honourable friend the Secretary of State said in relation to Sir William Barlow's resignation. I should also like to draw his attention to the fact that Sir William Barlow has said that there have been no major disagreements on matters of policy between him and the Government.
Lord ALPORT: My Lords, if I may interrupt my noble friend for one moment, I do not think I alleged that this was the case. I said that I understood that the reason for Sir William Barlow's decision not to continue in the service of telecommunications was because of the exposure which he, as a private citizen and chairman, had to the political pressures, which are perhaps inevitable, on a great public corporation of this sort. What I suggested, therefore, was that to relieve the future chairmen of the organisations some of that pressure should be taken by the Government, through a Minister responsible for it—which I think is the right thing to do in the circumstances.
Viscount TRENCHARD: My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend for making his views clear as to the reason for Sir William's resignation, which we regret. For the sake of clarity of the Government position I can confirm that while all nationalised industries would perhaps like it if there were more capital available for them to do everything they want to do, we had a very happy co-operation between Sir William and his board and this Administration and we regret that it is coming to an end.
Before turning to the letter-post I wish to make one general remark, because both in the case of the letter-post and in the case of telecommunications we are, as noble Lords have said, looking at change. I would say that one of the problems which is before us all the time, as it always has been before anyone considering organisational change, is how big are the changes that one wishes to
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consider. Small changes can be decided fairly quickly; bigger and perhaps more radical changes take more time to look at. Therefore, while various noble Lords have asked me whether the Government will come to decisions in both these areas in the near future, I can certainly say, "Yes, in the near future", because we have been considering the position now for some time, but I will not commit myself to anything in terms of dates, except to say that we are certainly not thinking beyond months and we are speeding things as much as we can.
In relation to the post, the position last summer was really very serious. It was serious to a point where I think my right honourable friend was fully justified in immediately allowing consideration and recommendation on the breaking of the postal monopoly. Although I know that my noble friend Lord Alport, obviously with great knowledge, has spoken strongly about the fact that the postal service is, and always has been, a national service, I do not believe that that in itself is a sufficient reason, nor do I believe it is dogmatic to look at the question of the degree to which the postal monopoly over the whole field should remain exactly as it is. That, indeed, is what we are doing, and will continue to do.
In relation to the figures for delivery of first-class and second-class mail I do not think the House will want a lot of detailed figures, but the first-class mail—and these figures are on a Tuesday to Saturday basis—last summer dropped to 77.4 per cent. in June, and it was against that background that we felt that real and sweeping investigation was necessary. The same trend applies to the second-class mail. Since then there has been an improvement. The Christmas peak produced a dip against the conditions mentioned by noble Lords in this debate and then we were on an improvement trend again.
I do not wish to steal the thunder of the Post Office for the March figures, but in order to give them what I think is called in advertising terms a "teaser campaign", I can say that they are several percentage points better than the February figures quoted by the noble Lord, Lord Ponsonby of Shulbrede. So that there is an improvement, thank goodness! I must confess that sometimes I wonder, although the

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sampling is done on the most professional basis possible, just what this kind of survey really means, and at times I wonder how it is that so often I seem to fall into the odd 10 per cent. which lies in the nonstandard delivery part of those figures.
The Government have noted with pleasure for the future the recent acceptance by the membership of the Union of Post Office Workers of a pay offer containing proposals to allow practices conducive to more efficient working to be introduced. That is all part of a two-year plan, produced under Sir William Barlow's chairmanship, to try to work on the many problems that have been raised by various speakers today. My noble friend Lady Elliot of Harwood was right in both apparently opposite directions when she told of the two reports, the one speaking of the shortage of staff and the other of the fact that we were over-manned. Both are true and both, of course, can be true and the manning levels themselves can be affected by the wider-ranging changes which I am sure that my late civil service colleague, Ron Dearing, who goes to take over the Post Office (and I am quite sure that he will make a great success of it) will clearly have to look at in the arguments for maintaining local services in full on the one hand and new ways of making economies on the other. I am sure that the social points will not be missed by him. Both these rival criticisms can clearly be true. With the manning standards and methods used at the present time there are in many areas shortages of staff, particularly in some parts of the country. But this does not mean that there is not room for considerable productivity improvements, both using existing methods and by the introduction of new methods.
In introducing this Motion, my noble friend Lord Campbell of Croy spoke of the escalating costs for a poor service. This is indeed a worry and the prices which are charged are not those which the Post Office would have liked to have used for pricing their services but with the current efficiency levels and with the overall national need to meet cash limits, whether we argue about particular ones or not, these increases were inevitable.
The volume of mail has in fact increased in 1978–79 and the degree to which the
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volume of mail will prove to be price-elastic is something which only the future will show. The optical scanning methods, which my noble friend mentioned, depend upon postal codes. I am not sure whether the noble Lord, Lord Raglan, is right as to the reason why Post Office codes are not used, and he must give advice to the Post Office on his much better system, which is far beyond my skills to design; but I have a feeling that the failure to use postal codes is something to do with the British character and British independence, as well as the problems of the codes, and I hope that Mr. Dearing will somehow be able to coax the British public into using the codes in order to introduce the systems.
Lord RAGLAN: My Lords, may I make a comment here? I suppose no research has been done as to why people do not use the codes. The London codes are very widely known, and so far as I know everybody uses them. So there must be something which is very different about the way the London codes are put together and the ordinary postal code is put together.
Viscount TRENCHARD: My Lords, I am sure the Post Office—and it is more a matter for them than the Government—will take note of any advice on any better systems of this kind that might be possible. In this context, let me say that I am advised that the suggestion of my noble friend Lord Fortescue that a meter should be installed in the house is rather difficult when the charge depends upon distance as well as time, and also when there are different rates for different times of the day or week. This really does require a slightly complicated meter.
If I can pass to the telecommunications side at this point, let me say that I think in general under Sir William Barlow's chairmanship the Post Office has pioneered some very good new equipment, some of which is famous across the world. Had I time I would refer to a number of different items, but some have been mentioned in the debate already. The problem has been the application of the new equipment and getting it in in time, from a situation where we were perhaps behind at one stage. I think one of the greatest things Sir William has done is to improve the technical competence and performance of the Post Office in the development area on the telecommunications side.

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With regard to the delay of up to six months in some cases to get the telephone installed. Yes, it is true that a little over a quarter of a million are on the waiting list for telephones at the present moment—260,000 in fact; and it is true that this is more than the figure for the same time last year, March 1979, which was 196,000. I do not have the internal target that the noble Lord, Lord Ponsonby, mentioned for 1980, but I do know that it is the Post Office's determined intention to turn the path round and improve it substantially. More engineers have been engaged, more last year, I think, than ever before; efficiency consultants have been used; temporary equipment is being used; many other methods are being used to try to improve the position. It is also regrettably true, as my noble friend Lord Orr-Ewing said, that on some other equipment, notably the PABX, delays are considerably longer.
Let me at this moment turn to the point of capital requirements, and let me say merely that we are still looking at the question of whether, if it is clearly the case that we have now more new technical applications which are proven than the cash limits for the future would appear to cover—there must be cash limits, and for the 80s they are not small ones—we are prepared to scratch our heads about how, without breaking Government cash limits, money could be found to speed up development. Of course, one of the main areas here lies in the breaking of the monopoly; we agree with all other speakers and we agree with the quotation which my noble friend Lord Morris made from the Carter Report that the existing boundaries to the telecommunications monopoly do need real examination. We have been for some time now taking advice from all concerned, and we shall announce the results of this certainly in months. We shall not exclude the possibility of phasing in liberalisation rather than one big package; this is one of the alternatives we are looking at.
The problems of compatibility have been described, and the problem of how a necessary authority will approve standards, will ensure compatibility, will draw up any terms for licensing, is well taken on board and is being examined from every angle. In relation to costs and prices, telephone charges did not in fact increase from
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October 1975 until the latest increases were introduced, so that though those increases are steep one does have to take account of the four years of standstill in charges. One had hoped, and I know Sir William Barlow had hoped, that that standstill could have been continued for a longer time, but wage settlements in relation to productivity forced the introduction of the higher charges at the time that they were introduced.
With regard to Buzby, I will not enter into the debate, except to say that I understand that Buzby makes a profit and gets more new business. Furthermore, one of its main purposes is shifting off-peak loads and drawing consumers' attention to the fact that they can save money by phoning on certain days at certain times. The noble Lord, Lord Orr-Ewing, raised a great number of very interesting points. I do not think I shall be able to deal with them all today. The international comparisons are being examined by the joint committee that he spoke of. They are not easy to draw conclusions from. But there is no complacency and they will be dealt with. The Users Association document and its recommendations have been examined very closely, and my honourable friend Mr. Butler has been in communication with the association on all their recommendations.
In relation to the capital situation and to the decline of capital—I think perhaps this is the last major point that I should try to deal with—I have looked rather quickly at the figures raised by my noble friend Lord Orr-Ewing. Of course, there is an uneven path of capital investment; there was very high capital investment in the period 1973–75 at a time of very low profit and at a time when perhaps a great deal of catching-up was necessary. The type of equipment currently required, and the size of the demand, are different, and the Post Office have made mistakes in estimating demand—I think everybody always does. The figures for the future, for the 1980s, in the Government's expenditure plans show clearly that we rise to another pretty high peak.
Perhaps I may best summarise it by saying that the expected expenditure and constant prices in the four years up to 1983–84 will be 20 per cent. higher in constant prices than the total in the four

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years since 1976–77. I will give extra information to my noble friend, but I believe that very large capital expenditure has now been allowed for. The degree of self-financing of capital expenditure depends upon the size of the profit with which it can be self-financed as well as on the capital programme.
I will draw the attention of my colleagues in the Home Office, who have the overall responsibility for the regulation of the radio spectrum, to the points made by my noble friend Lord Morris. I shall make sure that those points are fully taken on board by them. They are fully seized of the importance of the radio spectrum as a very valuable national resource. Once again I should like to thank my noble friend Lord Campbell of Croy for introducing this debate at this time. I apologise for this rather inadequate and disjointed winding-up, and I promise noble Lords that the debate will be drawn to the attention of all of my right honourable friends concerned.
6.43 p.m.
Lord CAMPBELL of CROY: My Lords, I should like to thank all of the noble Lords who have contributed to the debate today. As a result, a number of different topics of concern to the public have been raised—for example, postal codes, air mail, telecommunications equipment and business users, to take but a few that I was not able to touch on.
I should like to comment first on a point raised by my noble friend Lord Alport, because there may be a possibility of a misunderstanding here. He referred to certain anomalies to which I had pointed—for example, that first-class mail within London, travelling only two or three miles, could take up to five or six days; and he drew my attention, quite rightly, to the United States of America where there are post boxes and individuals have to collect their own mail. It was because I lived for three years in the United States some years ago that I made the proposal that we might move to that situation which all other comparable industrial countries have already adopted.
It was suggested that collecting one's mail in that way would be objected to. I suppose that might be the first reaction of the average customer, but when I said
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that for two of those years when I was collecting my own mail locally I was living on the outskirts of New York and not in the sticks, as my noble friend was suggesting—he does not seem to be here at the moment—he will see that it was because I and my American neighbours preferred to collect from post boxes locally rather than pay the disproportionate cost of high-wage postemen doing this extra, but not essential, leg work, that I put this proposal forward in my speech. It was also touched on by the noble Lord, Lord Ponsonby. I apologise for making the point briefly in my speech, but I was trying to cover a number of subjects reasonably briefly and to be very constructive in putting forward a proposal that I believed would be significant for postal costs.
Because of the interest shown in that part of my speech, I must draw attention to the fact that it was Sir William Barlow himself who said that the Post Office would like this legislative requirement to be altered on the lines I have suggested. That is why I hope that my noble friend will read what I have said, because he was quite rightly pointing out how much Sir William had contributed during his term, and I think he was quoting him. Therefore I think it is important to note that on 30th January, in evidence to the Select Committee to which I referred, published and dated 5th March, at page 13, column 2, when he was asked whether the Post Office wished to have the requirement altered that post be delivered to each individual address such as flats in a block, he said that he would. Those who are interested—and it is clear that many who have taken part in this debate are interested in this point—could well look up the exchanges under the reference that I have mentioned. That is why I have given it, because there is a great deal more there that indicates the Post Office view. It is to encourage changes that require legislation to enable it to reduce costs in this area. It was largely because of the Post Office view expressed by Sir William Barlow and because of successful practice abroad that I put forward this proposal. I suggest that it should be examined.
My Lords, if costs can be reduced then the cost of stamps need not reflect inflation. I hope that inflation will be curbed and reduced drastically in the next few

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years, but whatever happens to inflation, if costs can be cut in this way then the cost of stamps need not follow the same path
I am particularly grateful to my noble friend Lord Trenchard for the information he gave in his speech and for replying to the main points which the speakers had raised. I welcome the improvements about which he was able to tell us. The Government, of course, are not answerable for the day-to-day activities of the Post Office, and I would not expect my noble friend to answer any points of that kind. But long-term strategy and reorganisation are matters for the Post Office. Parliament is much concerned, not only because of the interests of the public that are involved but because of the changes that may be necessary in existing legislation. It is therefore heartening that my noble friend and his ministerial colleagues are clearly putting the sound help of these services to the public very high in their priorities. My Lords, I beg leave to withdraw the Motion.
Motion for Papers, by leave, withdrawn.

LOCAL GOVERNMENT GRANTS (ETHNIC GROUPS) BILL [H.L.]
6.47 p.m.
Lord AVEBURY: My Lords, I beg to move that this Bill be read a second time. This Bill is about racial disadvantage, by which I mean the disadvantage suffered by a person because of his colour or race or ethnic or national origin, whether or not it is caused by unlawful racial discrimination. The facts of racial disadvantage have been enumerated very clearly by authorities such as Mr. David Smith in his book of the same title, Facts of Racial Disadvantage, where he showed, for example, that 58 per cent. of Pakistanis were doing semi-skilled or unskilled jobs compared with 18 per cent. of whites; that unemployment is significantly higher among minorities, that 31 per cent. of West Indian unskilled manual workers were in council housing compared with 56 per cent. of the general population; and that only 15 per cent. of Asian women over the age of 45 spoke English fluently or fairly well. Therefore, the information on which to base an
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assessment of racial disadvantage has been available for at least the last six years.
In the White Paper which preceded the Race Relations Act, 1976, the Government said that a comprehensive strategy for tackling disadvantage was just as important as the legal machinery they were then considering for dealing with discrimination. Yet for the last 14 years there has only been one piece of legislation on the statute book that is directly designed to help ethnic minorities to cope with the problem of racial disadvantage, and that is Section 11 of the Local Government Act 1966, which this measure is designed to replace. Under Section 11 there was provision for a 75 per cent. grant to be paid by the Government towards expenditure incurred by local authorities for purposes arising from the presence within their area of Commonwealth immigrants. With the benefit of hindsight I think that we can identify five major defects in that legislation. First, that it applied only to minorities from the Commonwealth and thus, for example, it excluded such minorities as the boat people from Vietnam, although clearly the local authorities that are doing their job properly would have to spend extra money on meeting the particular needs of the boat people arriving in their areas. Secondly, that only those immigrants who arrived within the last 10 years were covered, whereas the 1971 Census showed already that over 40 per cent. of the people belonging to ethnic minorities were born here, and that proportion must certainly have risen to something like half in the intervening years.
Thirdly, that the grant was payable only towards expenditure on staff costs and was not extended to the needs of capital expenditure in this connection. Fourthly, that some local authorities were not making any use at all of Section 11; and if one looks at the figures as regards Greater London that were given by Mr. Timothy Raison in an answer in another place on 28th November last, one sees some quite inexplicable variations between one local authority and another. For example Tower Hamlets which claimed £40,000 in 1978–79 received nothing at all in 1979–80. Lambeth declined from £10,000 in 1978–79 to £9,000 in 1979–80. One can compare that, for example, with Ealing, which received £1.3 million or Brent which received £1.6 million. There

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is no rhyme or reason for the enormous disparities between the amounts claimed and received by one local authority and another. Finally, in the list of criticisms, I must say that the rules are open to misinterpretation, and there are cases where funds have not been used as the Act inended.
I should like to refer to a document which I received yesterday from Lady Murray, the widow of our late and much respected colleague Lord Murray, who is the chairman of the CRC in Gravesend. In this document, which deals fairly comprehensively with the criticism that I have mentioned, there is shown correspondence which demonstrates that Kent County Council did not treat Section 11 as meaning that a teacher should be additional to the basic establishment to be eligible for grant, although Mr. Brynmor John—who was then the Minister responsible for these matters in the Home Office—in a letter to Lord Murray said that one of the purposes was to encourage local authorities to provide additional staff. So, there was clearly a difference of view as to how the Act was supposed to work as between some local authorities, and the Home Office which administered the section.
These limitations had been clear for some time when, in the spring of 1978, there was an all-party attempt to improve matters by means of an amendment to the Inner Urban Areas Bill which was then before another place. That amendment which was, as I have said, an all-party amendment signed by Mr. Peter Walker—now a Cabinet Minister—and Mr. Nicholas Scott, as well as my honourable friend Mr. Alan Beith, was to have been moved by Mr. Alex Lyon, but it was unfortunately not selected because it was outside the long title of the Bill. I then wrote to the Home Secretary, Mr. Merlyn Rees, suggesting that there should be an all-party discussion on how to proceed on a matter where there seemed to be very general agreement. Mr. Rees agreed to see members of all parties. In the event, I actually went to see him alone but with the full approval of my colleagues in the other parties.
Mr. Rees told me on 20th July that he was then urgently reviewing Section 11 and, in the process, he was ready to receive
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views on the subject from all interested organisations including, of course, those which were representing ethnic minorities. Then, after this process of consultation, in November 1978 the Government issued a consultative document setting out the proposals. That was sent to some 4,000 individuals and organisations. It is worth noting that almost none of the recipients of this document objected in principle to the idea of removing the restrictions inherent in Section 11 which I have mentioned.
The next step was the introduction of the Local Government Grants (Ethnic Groups) Bill, which is, to all intents and purposes, identical to the one now before your Lordships, except we do not need the provisions that were contained in that measure relating to Scotland and Wales in case of devolution. That Bill was carried on Second Reading by no less a majority than 267 votes to seven on 12th March last year, and it was in Committee when it was overtaken by the Dissolution of Parliament.
My purpose in reintroducing the identical Bill is two-fold. First, there has not been any statement of policy from the Government on what they intend to do about Section 11, even though when they were in Opposition they did give a partial welcome to the measure. If they have changed their minds in the last year, then perhaps the noble Lord who is to reply will be able to explain why. If they are still of the same mind, they can facilitate the passage of the Bill. My right honourable friend the Leader of the Liberal Party put a Question to the Home Secretary on 25th February, and was told at that time that the Government had no plans for reintroducing the Bill, but they were currently reviewing the operation of Section 11.
Secondly, if the principle is still accepted on all sides—and I can imagine no reason why it should not be—then I should like to create the opportunity for pursuing several important questions of detail which arose in the debates last year and which were never properly resolved because of the Dissolution. Mr. Keith Speed, who was then speaking officially for the Conservatives, said that he was happy about grant-aiding local authorities for the purpose of removing disadvantages from which an

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ethnic group suffered, but he had doubts about the second and third objectives mentioned in Clause 1(2). Those are:
"(b) securing that the services provided by the local authority are as effective in relation to ethnic groups as they are in relation to the rest of the community;
(c) promoting good relations between ethnic groups or between ethnic groups and the rest of the community."
Mr. Speed thought that those provisions gave scope for positive discrimination which, of course, is a naughty phrase not only to the Conservative Party, but equally to Mr. Merlyn Rees. I was not clear how it could be maintained that, if one makes services as effective, but no more so, for black people as for white, it constituted positive discrimination. We never learned how that interpretation could have been put on the clauses, because the point was never reached in the Standing Committee.
As to the promotion of good relations between persons of different racial groups, that was, it may be remembered, a duty that was laid on the local authorities by Section 71 of the Race Relations Act 1976 with, at that time, the warm approval, I think, of all parties, although Parliament never gave them any money to pay for it.
Another point that ought to be resolved is the proposal that was made by Mr. Alex Lyon that, in order to qualify for grant under the Bill, local authorities should be obliged to make a survey of the needs of their ethnic minorities, and to draw up plans for meeting them which, of course, they are not obliged to do under Section 11. There is no question of fitting the applications for grant under Section 11 into any sort of comprehensive strategy of local authorities for dealing with the question of disadvantage.
As there was no sign of action on this front, and as in our view the defects of Section 11 become ever more acute with the lapse of time, we thought that it would be necessary to give an airing to the subject now. An increasing proportion of people belonging to ethnic minorities have been here for more than 10 years, but their problems have not gone away as it was naively imagined that they would in 1966. I think that it will become impossible to use numerical formulae of any kind, such as are built into the application of Section 11—for example, the requirement that 2 per cent. of the population must be of recent Common-
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wealth immigrants—now that it has been decided by the Government not to ask either an ethnic origin question or a parental birthplace question in the 1981 Census.
Furthermore, there are the 15,000 Vietnamese I have already mentioned who probably need special help in acquiring English; and no doubt there will be other refugees, such as those who have been received in this country in recent years from Latin America, Ethiopia and South Africa, none of whom count for grant under Section 11 because, of course, none of those places are in the Commonwealth. It may be of interest to your Lordships to be reminded that in 1979, contrary to popular myth, there were more people accepted for settlement in the United Kingdom who were foreign nationals than Commonwealth citizens.
In November 1979 I wrote to about 100 local authorities asking them whether they approved of the Bill and, if not, what were their criticisms of it. I had an extremely good response from 76 authorities, and of those who expressed any opinion at all there was a majority of six to one in favour of the broad principles of the Bill. Quite a few referred to the consultative document rather than to the Bill, and one of their commonest objections was to the short-term nature of the grant, a point that was recognised by Mr. Brynmor John when he said in his Second Reading speech that:
"… in some instances longer-term funding should be provided".—[Official Report (Commons), 12/3/79; col. 62.]
It was the fact that so many local authorities, including Conservative-controlled ones such as Wandsworth, Kensington and Chelsea, and Harrow, were so overwhelmingly in favour of change on these lines that encouraged us to test the feeling of the House and prompt Ministers to give some indication of their plans. I should mention at this point that not only does the Bill have the support of the majority of local authorities, but I received a letter this afternoon from the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Truro—who told me that he wanted to be present but unfortunately could not make it—who wanted me to know that in his capacity as chairman of the Board for Social Responsibility of the Church, he is in no doubt that the board would, in

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principle, support the Bill. He says that the matter was recently discussed in the General Synod on a Motion of the Bishop of Guildford, and although no formal decision was reached, the response was such that it could fairly be said that those responsible in the Church of England for this area would be in sympathy with the intention of the Bill. I am very glad to know that the Church has been discussing the matter and that this is the general view, as outlined by the right reverend Prelate.
I suppose that we could continue for some years more using Section 11. We could, if this Bill is passed, merely redistribute the same amount of money more equitably, spreading the jam more thinly, as the London Borough of Enfield put it in its reply to our questionnaire. Or, we could increase the resources available so that the existing programmes are maintained and new ones instituted. Mr. Brynmor John said, when he introduced the Bill last March, that an extra £50 million was to have been provided over the next three years, and that in 1982–83 the grant would be 70 per cent. up on the grant for that current year.
One appreciates that the general policy of this Government is to control spending far more strictly than did the previous Government, but there are necessary exceptions. As Mr. Peter Walker warned several times before the election, if we are not going to spend money on eliminating racial disadvantage, we shall be storing up very serious trouble for a few years hence, and there will be a far greater burden placed on the community by false economies now.
What would we be able to do under this Bill that we cannot at present do under Section 11? There was, in fact, a very comprehensive list of suggestions set out in the consultative document; I shall not weary your Lordships with a recitation of them all, but I shall just very briefly mention some examples. The first is staff and facilities for ethnic record-keeping. This is an important facet of the proposals, because if local authorities do not keep ethnic records, they cannot monitor their own performance and see whether they are complying with the terms of Section 71 of the Race Relations Act 1976. The second example is hostels for homeless young people, an extremely
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important and essential duty of local authorities and one which they are obviously not able to carry out under Section 11 because, as I have mentioned, that does not cover capital expenditure.
The third is advisory staff and literature in other languages to improve take-up of services. Here again, any local authority which has a substantial number of refugees in it might wish to print literature in their own language so as to help them, when they first arrive, to have access to the social services that are available to people, whether immigrants or natives. The fourth is social facilities to combat the isolation of women in the home. I have mentioned the large percentage of women of Asian origin of 45 years and over who do not speak any English and who, therefore, tend to be very isolated and unable to play their full part in the social life of the community. Finally, the development of youth clubs, which I need hardly emphasise, is an extremely important development in certain inner city areas where historically this kind of facility has been notably lacking.
In the memorandum placed in the Library by the Home Secretary about the disturbances in St. Paul's, Bristol, we are told:
"The police, like other agencies and representatives in the St. Paul's area, were taken by surprise at the turn of events"
Whatever the proximate cause of the violence may have been, is it not at least possible that the young people there, sensing the hopelessness of their aspirations and condemned to what they see as a perpetually second-class citizenship, were lashing out against what they see as the forces of white supremacy? I spoke to Mr. Peter Courtier, the ACRO in Bristol, this morning and he told me that the CRE there submitted a number of schemes on behalf of voluntary groups in the area concerned with ethnic minorities, but that the county council did not support any of them under the Urban Programme; that the city council did submit one or two schemes on behalf of voluntary bodies, and one of those was concerned with youth facilities for recreation and evening education, but it was given priority No. 7 in the list and was, therefore, not selected. He tells me that since the riots this project has been resubmitted as a special case and has now been approved.

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I hope that we do not have to wait until riots take place in other areas before we give attention to the problems of racial disadvantage. Certainly Bristol had no more reason to explode than many other areas of other cities; an ominous grafitti has appeared in some areas of South London—"Bristol first, Brixton next". And Mr. David Lane said in a speech to the Young Conservatives in Leicester on 1st December last year:
"I have never accepted the inevitability of racial violence in London or in Midland or Northern cities, which has been prophesised so insistently by Mr. Powell and others. But my optimism assumes that politicians and others will he aroused to take preventive action in time. Indifference or inaction will turn today's problems into tomorrow's violence".
We are not talking in this Bill about conferring any special privileges on minorities, but—if I may paraphrase Mr. John—about translating a notional equality of eligibility into a real equality of access to community services. The facts of life shown by those many different surveys I have mentioned, conducted by academics, Government departments and independent institutions like the Tavistock Institute, the Runnymede Trust and PEP, are that minorities and particularly blacks get the short end of the stick in almost every area of life: in education, housing, health, employment and social services. We believe that a just society is one that gives all its citizens, irrespective of their colour, race, ethnic or national origins, the same benefits and the same chances as anyone else. This Bill would be a small step in that direction. I beg to move.
Moved, That the Bill be now read 2a.—(Lord Avebury.)
7.10 p.m.
Lord BOSTON of FAVERSHAM: My Lords, I should like to give a warm welcome to this Bill and to thank the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, for introducing it. There is no doubt in my mind that it is needed, and I believe that the need for it can be seen even more clearly as a result of recent events, as I shall mention in a moment. As the noble Lord has explained, the Bill is almost the same as the Bill of the same name which was introduced by the last Government, except for the powers relating to devolution which were in the last Bill but which are not in this one. In all other respects the terms,
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provisions, and purposes of the two Bills are identical.
The main purpose of the Bill, as the noble Lord said, is to replace Section 11 of the Local Government Act 1966 with wider powers to help disadvantaged people who belong to ethnic minorities. Perhaps I should say here that I know that some of us, including some of my noble friends, do not particularly like the terms "ethnic groups" or "ethnic minorities", and so on, but it is difficult otherwise to find a comprehensive and all-embracing term to cover the various minorities, black, coloured and white.
For some time now there has been wide and growing agreement that Section 11 has become out-of-date, and that was why the last Government brought in their Bill last year. The noble Lord, Lord Avebury, has chosen the right moment to introduce his Bill even if the actual timing has been somewhat coincidental. Recent events certainly have—and here I would wholly agree with him—underlined the fact that the existing provisions for helping disadvantaged people who belong to ethnic minorities are out of date. The events that I have particularly in mind recently are the disturbances this month in Bristol. Whatever are found, as a result of the various inquiries which were announced in your Lordships' House on Monday by the noble Lord, Lord Belstead, to be the underlying causes of those disturbances, they have undoubtedly served to focus attention on the need to do more to help our inner city areas and to assist those members of ethnic groups who are at a disadvantage.
As my right honourable friend Mr. Merlyn Rees, the former Home Secretary, pointed out in another place on 3rd April, the day after the Bristol riots, and again last Monday when Statements were made in both Houses, the existing provisions under Section 11 are indeed out-of-date and need to be revised. I share Lord Avebury's views about the weaknesses of the existing provisions. He has already mentioned a number of them, so that I do not need to remind your Lordships about them again.
There were, I think, two additional matters which perhaps the noble Lord might have alluded to, but which certainly can be added to those which I recall he

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mentioned in moving the Second Reading. First, a further serious weakness of the 1966 Act is that the problems which need to be dealt with are wider than can be covered by the problems relating to language and customs which come under that Act. Again, under the existing Act, immigrants have to be in a particular area in substantial numbers, and that means that there is—and the noble Lord may have alluded to this—undoubtedly a statistical difficulty here. It means that some areas which are too small to meet that requirement have to be left out, even though they ought to have the sort of special help which would be possible under this Bill.
The Bill is clearly designed to overcome those weaknesses and deficiencies that the noble Lord mentioned and of which I have also reminded your Lordships. The noble Lord, Lord Avebury, also mentioned the reference made by my honourable friend in another place in moving the Second Reading of last year's Bill about the provision of grants, when he said that the consultative document which the then Government had already issued the previous year before introducing their Bill rather overemphasised the short-term nature of the schemes envisaged under it.
It turned out not only in Lord Avebury's survey but also in the course of the discussions that went on on that consultation document that what the local authorities—those of them who were concerned about any matters under these proposals—were concerned about was the short-term nature of the measures which could be undertaken under the proposals as they then stood. As the noble Lord has indicated, my honourable friend said that the Government at that time were prepared to adopt a more flexible attitude and recognise that in some instances longer-term funding should be provided. I mention this only to emphasise that this really shows the value of these consultations. Although that particular consultation document perhaps did not fall within the category of Green Papers, it demonstrated the same sort of principle.
I do not intend to detain your Lordships by going into the matters of principle more fully. The noble Lord has already given a thorough explanation of the Bill.
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I also regard it as of great importance that this reform would widen considerably the categories of services for which money could be provided; notably the broad social service category, including especially the health services. There is only one other matter to which I should like to refer, and that is the survery undertaken by the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, last November to see what local authorities thought of the proposals in the Bill. That was a useful piece of work, and I am grateful to him for passing on a digest of it.
What struck me particularly about it was the spread of agreement among a large number of local authorities about the need for these provisions, and the fact that these included some of the more sizeable local authorities, but also that there was a great variety of local authorities throughout the country who felt the need for this reform, including, may say, local authorities controlled by different political parties. I very much hope that this spread of support which has emerged as a result of that survey, and indeed in the course of the consultations earlier, will be reflected in your Lordships' House tonight and that noble Lords in all parts will speed this Bill on its way.
7.17 p.m.
Baroness MACLEOD of BORVE: My Lords, I take rather a different view of this Bill because for many years, in fact since 1959 when my late husband was Secretary of State for the Colonies, I have known many of our friends who are the subject of this Bill. I have met them in their countries of origin. I have also met them since they decided to come to live amongst us. This Bill refers to them all as "ethnic groups" which, like the noble Lord, Lord Boston of Faversham, I dislike as a term, but it is a term that perhaps we have to use tonight. This term ethnic groups,
"means a group of persons distinguished by colour, race, nationality or ethnic or national origins".
The noble Lord seeks by this Bill, as we know, to replace Section 11 of the Local Government Act 1966. This section of the Act was put in as a result of very high immigration figures, and the obvious need to help those members of the Commonwealth who were strangers to our environment and whose language and

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customs differed from our community. But in 1968 the number of immigrants from the Commonwealth was 136,000; in 1978, 10 years later, there were 82,000. But taking Africa and West Indies together, in 1968 there were 34,000 and in 1978, 10 years later, that figure was halved and it was 17,000; whereas those who decided to return to their original homes in Africa and the West Indies totalled 12,000 in 1978.
Clause 2 of this Bill asks for grants to be paid to local authorities for removing disadvantages from which an ethnic group suffers. We are all well aware—and sometimes only too well aware—that this group suffers from disadvantages. Their housing on the whole is not as good as we should like, they do not always have equal opportunities of employment and they sometimes find themselves with a lower standard of education. In 1975, for instance, it was found that mothers among them with children under five worked longer hours than other mothers with children of the same age. In Leicester, 85 per cent. of coloured mothers with children under five worked; in Manchester, 77 per cent.; in Bradford, 44 per cent.; and in Wolverhampton, 41 per cent. compared with the national average of 50 per cent. of all mothers with children under-five. Section 11 provides help in all those areas and to implement it the Government expect to contribute in excess of £40 million during the current year under the Act.
To remove—that is the wording of this Bill—all disadvantages is, I am afraid, utopian and will take many decades to bring about, much as we should all like to see it. The next part of the Bill asks for expenditure to secure:
"that the services provided by the local authority are as effective in relation to ethnic groups as they are in relation to the rest of the community".
The services are there. The local government offices are staffed by people trained to help all the citizens of our country and I cannot believe, as the Bill implies, that those who belong to the ethnic groups are treated in any way differently from the others, and Section 11 covers that. In Clause I (2)(c) the Bill asks that expenditure should qualify for a grant for
"promoting good relations between ethnic groups or between ethnic groups and the rest of the community".
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Here again, I suggest that Section 11 and the money provided is able to promote what the noble Lord has in mind.
However, in my view—maybe I am the only person who thinks this way—no amount of legislation, whether under this Bill or Section 11, will promote good relations. That can come about and succeed only if we want it to be a success. Perhaps it is like a marriage; two people decide to live together and they are normally fairly happy and content with their lot. Occasionally there are rows and misunderstandings—perhaps like Bristol—and both partners have to work really hard to re-establish their former harmony. That is where, in my view, the numerous voluntary organisations can and do play a vital part in promoting the good relations we would all like to see. From the churches and meeting places, which should also include carnivals in the streets, to the schools and the homes, I suggest that more can be done in this sphere by people of goodwill than can ever be done by Act of Parliament.
There is another side to this coin. Many of the ethnic groups are now of second generation; they were born and educated here and have grown up here and are now part of our country. They pay their rates and taxes as we do. Although we do what we can to smooth their path, is it not time that we stopped alluding to them and treating them as though they were different? It seems to me that Section 11, backed up by the large amount of money the Government provide and aided by the voluntary agencies, is adequate to deal with this problem. I shall therefore oppose the Bill.
7.25 p.m.
Lord PITT of HAMPSTEAD: My Lords, I am sorry that the noble Baroness, Lady Macleod of Borve, is opposed to the Bill, because she takes a very progressive view on most matters, particularly social matters, and often I tend to agree with her. I am sorry that on this occasion not only do I not agree with her but I doubt whether her late husband would have agreed with her either.
I have said in your Lordships' House more than once that the problem facing this country is not an immigration problem but a race relations problem, and it is necessary for us to address ourselves to

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it as such. So far we have not done so, and if the attendance in your Lordships' House is anything to go by, we are still where we were because when, recently, we were discussing some immigration rules, this House was packed. This evening the House is nearly empty, so we still have not got the point. This country has a race relations problem with which it must deal because unless it deals with it there will be difficulties, and it cannot be dealt with merely by talking about immigration or tightening the immigration rules. The noble Baroness illustrated my point beautifully when she used the illustration of the West Indians and the extent to which they are already going back. But the situation vis-à-vis the indigenous population and the people of West Indian origin in this country has not improved. On the contrary, it is getting worse. We know that most of the youngsters with whom we have problems—I know a great deal about this—are of West Indian origin. Therefore, the fact of West Indian migration having ceased has not changed the subject because the subject always was what it is, namely the need to break down certain barriers.
Of course, all people—I was going to say of a certain class, but I mean people who are working, say, at a certain level or are living in certain areas—have problems in common and those problems are tackled by programmes for inner city areas or programmes of urban aid or by the social services. Yes, those are all ways of dealing with those problems in common, but over and above them, the people who are distinguished by the colour of their skin have additional problems, and that is what we are talking about. It is that racial disadvantage with which we must deal. That racial disadvantage requires additional effort and for that effort there is need for additional resources. I do not know that it is absolutely necessary for the Government to provide the resources in the way we have agreed. For example, the Government could decide that the Commission for Racial Equality should have a very large budget and be required to cooperate with local authorities in dealing with the problems in their areas. That would be one way of providing the necessary resources.
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What I am quite certain about is that the resources need to be provided; what is more, that they need to be aimed at the problems, where the problems are, and where they can be dealt with. Of course, Section 11 of the 1966 Act does not enable us to do that. After all, Section 11 does not apply to the second and third generation blacks in Liverpool, yet they are as racially disadvantaged as are those in Brixton—in many instances more so.
Therefore, we must try to bring ourselves to look at the issues properly and recognise that we have certain problems, that the problems are the result of racial differences and of certain attitudes to race, that those attitudes need to be broken down, that the consequence of those attitudes is that there are certain disadvantages that people of a certain colour suffer, and that that situation must be removed if we are to create a cohesive society.
These are principles which we must all accept and on which we must all work, because unless we do that, we are bound to have trouble. I find it difficult to understand why, following the evidence from the United States—and there is a lot of it—this country has not learnt the lessons that are there to be learnt. The Americans have reached the stage where they have to indulge in positive discrimination. Do you know why they have to indulge in positive discrimination, my Lords? It is because over the years they have allowed their blacks to suffer discrimination which has put the blacks at great disadvantage, and now today the only way that they can balance the situation is by positively discriminating in favour of the blacks.
We do not want to get to that stage. We do not have to get to that stage. What we need to do at this stage is to remove the obstacles. One thing we have done. We have passed a law making discrimination illegal. It deals with overt discrimination. But we must deal with covert discrimination as well; and dealing with covert discrimination is more difficult and requires many of the resources we have been speaking about.
Legislation will not of course remove these obstacles—not by itself. What legislation does is to declare the public's

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attitude to certain matters. That is what we do when we pass legislation. We make certain declarations, and when we pass legislation such as that now before us, in addition we provide some resources to help carry out the declaration that we have made, to help to attain the objective that we have set. That is what we do.
Of course the voluntary organisations will have to do the job, but the local authorities will need the funds to help the voluntary organisations to do that job. This is where the Bill comes in, but, as I said earlier, it could possibly be done in other ways. However, what is required, and what I hope the noble Lord, Lord Belstead, will announce, is a commitment by the Government really to deal with this matter and to provide the necessary resources.
We must provide these resources. We must take seriously not only the question of racial discrimination but also the question of racial disadvantage, because it is racial disadvantage that makes youngsters rebel in the way that they do. They regard the situation as hopeless, and they regard themselves as not belonging; nothing that they can see suggests that they belong; nothing that is done indicates that they are wanted. That is why they rebel, and that is why we must give them hope; we must do things that make them feel that they are wanted. One advantage of a grant would be that many of these youngsters could have a second chance—for instance, through grants to the further education colleges. This is the kind of thing that is required. I have taken more time than I intended to take. I hope that, whatever the final outcome of this particular debate, the Government will firmly fix their minds on the need to deal with the racial disadvantage which exists in this society and which must be overcome.
7.37 p.m.
Viscount AMORY: My Lords, we are all grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, for describing his Bill to us with his usual clarity. Unlike the noble Lord, Lord Pitt of Hampstead, I found the remarks of my noble friend Lady Macleod of Borve, speaking from her wide experience and with her usual sympathy and compassion, most persuasive. The noble Lord, Lord Pitt,
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speaks with such invariable charm that I find it quite impossible to venture to cross swords with him in the debate. In fact the mere idea of crossing swords with the noble Lord, Lord Pitt, I find very difficult to conceive.
I wish, in three or four sentences, to say why I am not attracted by the method that the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, has suggested for the revision of Section 11 of the Local Government Act 1966. I do not like the method for two reasons. The first is that the whole aim of this Government, and of most local authorities, is to rely upon the general rate support grant, rather than upon specific grants. A plethora of specific grants tends to complicate administration and to confuse responsibility.
The second reason is that it is my impression that special schemes centrally laid down for ethnic minority groups sometimes tend, contrary to intentions, to segregate such groups further. I like very much what my noble friend Lady Macleod said about what the supreme aim should be with ethnic minority groups. I, too, feel that the aim should be as far as possible to treat their members in the same way as other members of society, with as few as possible being treated as special cases. I can well believe that, in cases where an ethnic group forms a high proportion of the total population, it would be right that this factor might be taken cognisance of in the computation of the rate support grant, as indeed are other factors concerning inner city areas.
I believe that the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, may well be right when he says that Section 11 of the Local Government Act 1966 needs to be looked at again, but I suggest that this should be done, after fresh consultation with the local authority associations, by action initiated by the Government themselves. For those two simple reasons, really, I am not enamoured of the method that Lord Avebury has chosen to revise Section 11 of the Local Government Act 1966. I would find it very difficult indeed, therefore, to vote for his Bill as at present drafted.
7.40 p.m.
Baroness FAITHFULL: My Lords, although my name is not on the list of speakers, I wonder whether I might ask

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the indulgence of the House to intervene, having listened to the debate. I speak as an ex-local government chief officer, and it is for that reason that I am a little puzzled and bemused by some of the things said by the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, and by the noble Lord, Lord Pitt. As a local government officer, if one went through the various departments—particularly, I must say, in the area where I worked—one found that whether you were on the housing list did not depend on where you came from, who you were or what you were. What mattered was that you subscribed to the rules and regulations of the housing department. Houses were allocated according to the points system regardless of who you were and where you came from; and I would submit there was no discrimination. I think I would be right in saying that there is no housing department in this country which would discriminate.
Lord PITT of HAMPSTEAD: My Lords, may I interrupt the noble Baroness? There was a survey carried out not so very long ago—I am sorry the noble Baroness has not read it—in which several local authorities were in fact questioned about their housing policies, and it was discovered that quite a few of them were discriminating.
Baroness FAITHFULL: My Lords, I think they may have different points systems. I may be wrong, and the noble Lord, Lord Pitt, may well be right, but certainly the local authorities with whom I have contact had exactly the same points system for everybody in their area, no matter who they were; they just had to subscribe to the points system. Secondly, when it comes to youth clubs, for instance, certainly in the area where I worked everybody was entitled to join a youth club whoever they were, and thought was given to every single person.
I am sitting on a committee of inquiry into the education of children of the ethnic groups, set up by the Department of Education and Science. Certainly I would agree with the noble Lord, Lord Pitt, that there are problems there, but I would submit that it is not a problem of colour but of culture. It is a problem of how we can weave the culture of the people who have come to this country into our culture, so that both the indigenous
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population and those who have come to this country can be woven in together.
Finally, my Lords, having worked extremely closely with the Community Relations Committee I have learned that one of the great things is that those who have come to our country want the dignity of being treated with equality. They do not want a better service or a worse service; they want the same service. If they do not get the same service, and if they ask for more than is given, nobody realises more than the great friends I have in the ethnic minorities that it will be counter-productive. As I say, I would submit that very often it is a question of culture, not of colour, and that we do not want to discriminate one way or the other for any group in our community.
7.44 p.m.
Lord BELSTEAD: My Lords, the provisions of this Bill are very wide, and they have enabled the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, to express his long-standing and deep concern for ethnic minorities and the difficulties which they face. But, although your Lordships who have also spoken in this debate clearly share the noble Lord's concern, not all noble Lords who have spoken see the solution to the problems we have been discussing as being best met by the provisions of this Bill. I should like to make it clear that the Government share the concern which has been expressed, but if the principle of equal opportunities for all our citizens is to be genuine, then I suggest that we must recognise the extent of the problems which face all people whose circumstances call for special help and who live, usually, in the most deprived parts of our inner cities.
That is why the Secretary of State for the Environment has introduced the concept of enterprise zones; that is why we have retained resources for the urban programme; and that, particularly, is the reason why the Government believe that the greatest help they can give to all our citizens—including, of course, ethnic minorities—is to do everything possible to put the economy of the country back on to a healthy and prosperous footing. Unless we can achieve that, efforts to meet the needs of all disadvantaged groups will be fruitless, because there will not be jobs, demand or wealth for people to secure.

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I do not believe that the view I have just expressed differs in any real respect from that of the previous Government, which originally introduced the Bill on which this Bill is based. In November 1978 the previous Administration issued a consultative document, and in paragraph 4 of that document this was written:
"The Government's basic analysis is that a great deal of the disadvantage the minorities suffer is shared with the less well-off members of the indigenous population, and that their most fundamental needs, for example for jobs, housing, education and health services, are essentially the same as those of the general population. It is, therefore, through the main expenditure programmes that these needs should be met, and the Government—like its predecessors—has not thought it right to contemplate meeting all the needs of minorities from special funds separate from main programmes".
Those are the words in the previous Administration's consultative document of November of two years ago.
Lord PITT of HAMPSTEAD: My Lords, will the noble Lord go on reading the document? There is another sentence, or another paragraph, just after that, which says something else.
Lord BELSTEAD: My Lords, clearly the previous Government and this Government will be seen, as I say a little more, not to be seeing matters entirely eye to eye; but the paragraph which I have just quoted I think illustrates the point which has been made by many noble Lords in this debate, which is that this Bill goes off in a direction which many noble Lords feel is ill-advised, in that it would set up a wider-ranging, special fund involving significant additional resources. At the moment, the level of expenditure grant aided by Section 11 of the Local Government Act 1966 amounts to a considerable sum. The 1978–79 grant was paid on a total expenditure of just under £39 million, and we know from the figure given in connection with the previous Government's Bill that additional expenditure was proposed for that of some £10 million in the first year if that Bill had become law, rising to some £24 million additional expenditure in the third year, at 1978 prices, if that Bill had become law. Moreover, legislation of the kind which the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, is laying before the House would require not only that but additional staff, both centrally and locally,
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at a time when we are trying to restrain the growth of staff in the public service.
Having said that, may I say that I realise it is only natural to want to spend public money on objectives which each one of us considers to be desirable. I have done it many times myself. Indeed, I have ventured to make speeches to your Lordships, and I have certainly listened to a lot of speeches from noble Lords in all parts of the House, saying that this is what we want to do. But I must remind the House that, although total spending grant aided under Section 11 has reached some nearly £40 million, there are now reasons for looking very carefully at extra expenditure. Apart from the need to restrain public expenditure at the present time, many of the problems of community relations I think need solutions other than the mere spending of money; and I am bound to say that the Government are not persuaded that this measure is the best or the most effective way of helping ethnic minorities.
The whole object of the Bill is to enable grants to be paid in respect of work with ethnic minorities in a way which appears to cover not only people who are newly-arrived in this country but also subsequent generations. Such a policy would have the disadvantage of identifying positively people whose families have been citizens of this country for many years and who, certainly in some cases, could resent being picked out in this way.
I was interested in preparing for this debate to learn of an article published last winter in New Community which told of recent research on a cohort of 16-year-olds and which, although finding that ethnic minority children are likely to suffer educational disadvantage—which was what I would expect for a variety of reasons—this no longer applies when you look at the cohort when it refers to second-generation immigrants. It is a finding of that kind which one must take to heart and not always lead to the conclusion that, because people have come to this country from overseas, they therefore continue in the family in subsequent generations to be deprived and to look upon themselves as deprived. I do not believe that that is the case. I do not deny that the noble Lord, Lord Avebury (and Lord Pitt made the same point) may well have a point in saying that

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Section 11, as it is administered at present, focuses too narrowly on the problems of being new to this country.
Soon after taking office, my right honourable friend the Secretary of State announced in another place that he proposed to undertake an early review of the operation of Section 11. The noble Lord mentioned this. I want to tell the House that the review has reached an advanced stage and that it has been looking at precisely the sort of points which were raised by the noble Lord, Lord Boston, in his speech. It has already become clear that there may be scope within the framework of the present legislation for changing the current administrative criteria which restrict the scope of Section 11 grants. But any changes could have implications which need to be studied carefully, and would need to be discussed not only within Government but also with such other interests as the Commission for Racial Equality and the local authority associations.
After listening to the speech made by my noble friend Lord Amory, I think that it would be highly necessary for the Government to discuss seriously with the local authorities what their views were. We certainly hope to be able to make an announcement about the outcome of our review before too long. Meanwhile, I think that my noble friend Lady Macleod was right in claiming that Section 11 is none the less playing a useful part in encouraging equal opportunities. Nearly 90 local authorities now receive grant aid which, in the last financial year, totalled approximately £33 million. For instance, £6 million was paid out last year to the Inner London Education Authority. Without this sort of aid, many authorities would have difficulty in meeting the special needs of ethnic minorities living in their area. These are not simply obvious needs like language teaching. Increasingly, grant aid under Section 11 is helping with the provision of staff and dealing with a range of social problems including housing advice officers, careers and employment advisers and social workers. Moreover, there is no sign of any falling off in the rate of applications for new ventures.
I am in agreement with the noble Lord, Lord Pitt, in his call for removing racial discrimination, wishing thereby to see
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the consequences of its removal. But I do not think that we should fall into the trap of thinking that the answers to these problems necessarily lie in the field of resources alone. We must surely also be willing to persist in efforts to remove grievances and to fight prejudice and misunderstanding. This, I suggest, is not a job for Government alone. We all have a part to play. The ethnic minorities must play their part in making a wholehearted contribution to the community; but at the same time the problems of the minorities must be met with sympathy and understanding. Life in this country must not be allowed to become a matter of different cultures subsisting in self-contained compartments. I must say that some of the speeches of my noble friends have been made because they fear that the consequence of this Bill would be to perpetuate that situation. All healthy cultures develop; in the context of race relations they can do so only if we break down the barriers, and particularly the barriers of prejudice and intolerance.
It is against this background that the Government believe that in the present situation it is better to strive to improve the working of Section 11 than to replace it. We think it is open to question whether the proposals in the Bill would achieve better results. They certainly would be more costly. This is unacceptable at a time when restraint on public expenditure is such a vital element in trying to improve the economy for everyone. The single best thing that the Government can do for the ethnic minorities is to lay the foundations of a prosperous and healthy economy. At the same time, the Government do not underestimate the gravity of the problems which face us in the short term. I hope that the Statement about Bristol that my right honourable friend the Home Secretary made on Monday proves that the Government are ready to take steps to promote and try to improve race relations.
This debate I think has been valuable and has enabled the Government to make clear that the operation of Section 11 has been actively and genuinely reviewed. However, the Government take the view that the noble Lord's Bill could not be practicably implemented in the present economic situation, even if doubts did not exist (as they do) about the principle of what the noble Lord proposes. I hope

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therefore that following this debate the noble Lord will not wish to proceed to Committee stage.
7.56 p.m.
Lord AVEBURY: My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Belstead, for the information that he has given us about the review of Section 11 of the Local Government Act which is now being conducted by his right honourable friend. I welcome his hint that perhaps the criteria for the award of Section 11 aid might be changed by administrative means that would not require legislation; because whether or not your Lordships agree to give this Bill a Second Reading this evening, I had not anticipated that it would go through all its stages in both Houses by the Summer Recess but I simply felt that by means of the Committee stage we should be able to ventilate some of the problems raised in the other place and which I mentioned earlier.
Before I ask your Lordships to agree to a Second Reading, as I intend to do, I hope I may deal with one or two points raised particularly in the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Belstead. He said, as if I had claimed that it was a job for the Government alone to improve race relations, that this is not a job for Government alone and that we must involve voluntary organisations and bodies of all kinds. I did not say that we should not involve them. I am not suggesting that this Bill is a panacea for the removal of disadvantage. I support the efforts that the Government are making through the Commission for Racial Equality and the local CRCs to tackle the job in a variety of ways. To suggest that because we are proposing that certain resources should be devoted to the removal of disadvantage, we are ignoring all other means of tackling the problem is, I think, a little unfair of the noble Lord.
The noble Lord said that in the present economic situation we could not afford to increase the grant aid made available under Section 11, grant aid which, he said, was running at something like £40 million a year. As I said in my speech tonight, we have two options: either to redistribute the amount presently being made available by the Government under Section 11 so as to widen the scope—or, as I put it in the words of the London Borough
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of Enfield, to spread the jam more thinly but probably more equitably than at the moment—or, as the previous Government intended, to increase the amount of resources we are putting into the removal of disadvantage.
While I never said and do not say now that resources are the only key to the solution of this problem, I am in agreement with the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Pitt, that what we have done is to go to the opposite extreme: we have hidden our heads in the sand and, as he said, the situation has not improved but got worse with the longer period that people belonging to the ethnic minorities have been in the country. With respect to the noble Baroness, Lady Macleod, it is not a question of recent arrivals. As I said earlier, this was a mistake that Parliament made at the time of the Local Government Act of 1966 in thinking that the problem would disappear with the lapse of time and that the only people we needed to help were those who had arrived in the last 10 years.
The noble Baroness herself recognised that people who have been here much longer than that suffer from disadvantage. She mentioned in particular housing, employment and education. She said that to remove all these disadvantages was to aim at a kind of Utopia. I agree that in the present economic situation we probably have not the resources to do everything that we should like. In common with certain other priorities that the Government have selected as being immune from the cuts—namely, defence and law and order—the problem of racial disadvantage is of such overriding importance that it would be a mistake to exclude it from this special consideration.
Therefore, my Lords, I ask the House to give this Bill a Second Reading so that we can go into a Committee and discuss more fully the objections that the noble Baroness and others have raised this evening and so that we can continuously monitor, by the discussions that we are having in this House, the developments that the Home Office are bringing forward with regard to the consultations with local authorities and the revision of Section 11. This is the way in which we can keep a close eye on what the Government are doing, and I hope that your Lordship will agree to a Second Reading.
8.1 p.m.
The DEPUTY SPEAKER (Lord Amherst of Hackney): My Lords, the Question is that this Bill be now read a second time. As many as are of that opinion will say, "Content". To the contrary, "Not-Content". I think the Not-Contents have it.
Several Noble Lords: Content!
The DEPUTY SPEAKER: Clear the Bar.
8.5 p.m.
The DEPUTY SPEAKER: My Lords, Tellers for the Contents have not been appointed pursuant to Standing Order No. 50. A Division therefore cannot take place, and I declare that the Not-Contents have it.

THE CHILDREN ACT 1975
8.6 p.m.
Lord GIFFORD Lord GIFFORD rose to ask Her Majesty's Government when they intend to bring into operation those provisions of the Children Act 1975 which enable parents to be represented and to obtain legal aid in care proceedings relating to their children in juvenile courts. The noble Lord said: My Lords, may I declare an interest as a member of the Bar who has been involved in cases of child care. The Question which I ask concerns the rights of parents to have proper legal representation when their children are to be taken away by the order of a court and put in the care of a local authority. May I begin by sketching the legal background to what I shall he suggesting is a deplorably unjust state of affairs.
On the last available figures, there were a total of just over 100,000 children in the care of local authorities. Of those, some 48,000 were in care following an order made by a juvenile court under Section 1 of the Children and Young Persons Act 1969. That provides that a care order can be made mainly in two cases; either when a child has committed a criminal offence or when a child has been proved to have been neglected or ill-treated, and that comprises a total of some 15,000 children in those figures. Those are cases where the conduct, behaviour and actions of the
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child's parents are directly in issue, and very frequently the cases are concerning young babies or infant children.
Sometimes the cases concern evidence of direct physical injuries to the child, the child battering cases. These are probably only a minority of the neglect and ill-treatment cases. There is often a much more general allegation of neglect or inadequacy by the parent, and a failure to bring up the child in a proper and adequate way. These are cases which of course go to the very heart of family life. They raise the rights of people to raise their children without interference by authority unless the necessity for that has been very clearly proved.
The extraordinary thing about these proceedings in the juvenile court is that the parents, whose conduct is so directly in issue, are not officially parties to the proceedings at all. The child is a party; the child may have legal aid. The child may appeal if someone is dissatisfied with the decision. But the parents have only a very limited right to answer any allegations made against them. They do not have any possibility of obtaining legal aid and they do not have any right of appeal. One can compare the procedures in the High Court when a child is a ward of court and often very similar issues are canvassed. There the parents are fully parties to the case. They are represented; they can have legal aid and the child is only a party who may be represented by the Official Solicitor in very exceptional cases.
The experience of those involved is that that is much more just, but the result in the juvenile court is confusion and injustice. There is confusion because the child's lawyer is in a dilemma. You cannot take instructions from a baby or a four-year-old. Therefore, the solicitors involved, if they are conscientious, sometimes bring in an outside expert to advise on the matter, but many rely on their own untrained judgments of what is in the best interests of the child. What they do not do is to put forward and have tested by the court the parents' case on the allegations which have been made. The parents are effectively shut out unless either they can pay for a lawyer to represent them—which is a rare case, because we are dealing mainly with those without the means to pay—or they have the good fortune to

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have a law centre or other kind of free legal service in their neighbourhood.
The same problem arises if a parent wishes to apply to revoke a care order. The parent can do that only in the name of the child. A lawyer is appointed to represent the child, and if the lawyer thinks that the care order should not be revoked the parent has no possibility of making the application. This inevitably results in grave injustice. I do not think I can do anything more apt than to quote from the most recent report of the Lord Chancellor's Legal Aid Advisory Committee for 1978–79, paragraph 43:
"We cannot help expressing our very considerable concern at the present unsatisfactory state of affairs. It cannot be right that parents should be denied full opportunity to put their side of the case where their capacity to discharge their parental responsibilities is in question and where the court has power to sever their relationship with their child. Local authorities instituting such proceedings are invariably represented by solicitors and produce technical evidence from social workers and other child care specialists. It is hard to see how justice can be seen to he done when the parents are denied legal representation to test the evidence supporting the allegations against them. We also believe that the present solution is contrary to the best interests of the children involved. In some cases solicitors may unwittingly fail to represent the best interests of the child through attempting to represent both the parents and the child. In other cases the solicitor representing the child may pay insufficient attention to the parents' view of past events and future prospects. We have no doubt that local authorities always act in what they consider to be the best interests of the child, but it seems unduly sanguine to assume that their view is always right".
I have quoted in full the very informed and authoritative view of that committee.
In relation to the last sentence of that paragraph, the experience of those organisations which have to deal in this field—the Family Rights Group, the Law Centres Federation and the Justice for Children Organisation—is that local authorities, perhaps over-reacting to child tragedies that have occurred, are these days coming to the court too often with flimsy and unjustified cases. The experience is that where the parents can be represented and where they can have their answers put properly before the court and tested, the drastic solution of a care order can frequently be avoided.
The next remarkable fact is that Parliament sought to remedy this state of affairs five years ago. It provided in the Children
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Act 1975 that an order could be made by the court granting separate representation to the child and the parents, and that legal aid could be granted to the parents. Those provisions have not been brought into force, except in a very small minority of cases. This is not just a denial of justice; it is a denial of parliamentary democracy that it should take five years without action being taken to bring into force something which has been passed in to law.
There is said to be a complicating factor, in that the Act also provided for a network of guardians to act on behalf of children. It is said that that provision is difficult to operate and may need review; but that need not hold up the bringing into force of the powers to grant legal aid to parents to answer the case which is made against them in these proceedings. That would not be the ideal solution, but it would remedy the worst injustices which take place.
The estimate made by the Government themselves is that would cost about £1 million, and the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor—I am sorry he is not to be the person replying to this debate, because it is from his department's Vote that this money should be coming—has said in a letter to the Family Rights Group:
"I am sorry to say that there are no resources available".
This is a pathetic excuse. We are talking about a mere million pounds against which should be offset the incalculable but considerable savings that would result to local authorities, because less children would be put into care if the cases of their parents were to be adequately presented to the court. But, quite apart from that, surely there are few kinds of case in which it is more important for justice to be done than for the persons involved to be represented. The consequences of a wrong decision are devastating and irreversible to the parents, to the children and to the community at large, and a Government with any decent sense of priorities would have seized upon this as a glaring need.
I fully accept that the predecessors of this Government have neglected this problem and that they did not implement those provisions; but this Government are

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now responsible and I would ask them: When are they going to act?
8.18 p.m.
Lord HOOSON: My Lords, it is amazing that the noble Lord, Lord Gifford, has to ask this Question at the present time, because I was on the committee in another place in 1975 when the Children Bill, as it was then, was going through. There was no dispute as to the right of the parents to be represented in care proceedings. It was only then put as a question of doubt whether the economic circumstances of the country would allow the provisions of Sections 64 and 65 of the Act to be implemented.
Now we are in the position that no one can doubt that a parent should be represented in care proceedings. If one is charged with stealing a can of beans from the shelf of a shop, almost as a matter of course one is entitled to legal aid; yet if one is faced with an application by a local authority which could break up a family—an application for a care order—then no provision exists for legal aid to be given to the parents involved. It is really a ludicrous state of affairs. Our sense of priorities is wrong somewhere along the line, and the sole question for the House is not the justice of the representation of the parents in proceedings of this kind, but a matter of whether the economic excuse justifies a refusal for implementing fully the provisions of Sections 64 and 65 of the Children Act.
I entirely agree with everything that the noble Lord, Lord Gifford, put so very well, and I am grateful to him for his brief historical review, which obviates the need for a repetition. But I could not help thinking that though I have no cause for thinking that I have an interest to declare, in that I have never been briefed so far as I recollect in a care order before a court of this kind, I have often appeared in wardship cases. The contrast between the enormous care which the High Court takes in wardship cases, with adequate representation always available for the parents, and the provisions for representation before magistrates, really beggars description. When one hears that there are over 100,000 children in care, 45,000 of them as a result of proceedings under the 1969 Act, it becomes a high priority
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for any Government to implement fully those provisions to which reference has already been made.
The last Government were greatly to blame, in that they postponed full implementation of Sections 64 and 65, but, as the noble Lord, Lord Gifford, rightly observed, the onus of implementing these provisions is now firmly in the court, as it were, of this Government. Surely nobody can dispute that the true nature of care proceedings by a local authority involves a clash of interest between the parents, usually, and the local authority. How is a solicitor who is briefed to appear for a child who is not in a position to give him instructions, to act? Is he to take upon himself a quasi-judicial role and implement his duty according to his own inclination? Some of them, as I understand it, feel inclined only to go to the local authority for the facts and ignore the parents. Others take it for granted that, because the instructions were originally given by the parents, they should follow the instructions of the parents, though the child's interest and the parents' interest may be in conflict. Or are they simply to go around to everybody, like a bee going to each flower and sucking from each flower, deciding for themselves what are the merits of the case and thus taking upon themselves a judicial capacity? The position of the advocate in this kind of situation is impossible.
In view of the great importance that this country has always attached to family life, the enormous rift which takes place in a family if a child is put into care, and the recently and eloquently expressed modern views doubting the efficacy of care, very often, in this kind of situation, surely the time has come when this Government, and any other Government, must acknowledge that the highest priority should be given now to the legal representation of parents in care proceedings and to the implementation of these sections.
8.23 p.m.
Baroness FAITHFULL: My Lords, I rise to support the noble Lord, Lord Gifford, in his Unstarred Question to the Minister. The Children Act 1975 has 109 sections, of which 35½, if I may so put it, have not yet been implemented and it is not known when they will be. It is now 1980. All of the 35½ sections are

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important, but there are some which are more important than others, and I suggest that, in the interests of justice, this is one of the most important which has not been implemented. I had intended to talk about the legal aspect, but as that has been so ably done by the last two speakers I shall leave that out, and perhaps as a social worker I may turn to the human aspect.
Twenty years ago, the battered baby syndrome was not understood or appreciated. It was first written about and investigated by Professor Kemp in Canada. It was then taken up by paediatricians, doctors and psychiatrists in this country notably at the Park Hospital, and it has now been fully identified, though. not always understood. In this country at the moment, social workers are in a terrible dilemma and I have been in that dilemma myself. A case is reported of a child who has sustained an injury. You visit the home and appear to find loving, caring parents, and yet the child has an injury. The mother or the father will give you a good explanation of that injury—"He fell down the stairs", or "He was alone in the room", or "I just went out for a moment". You think that you will leave the child in the home and you go away, but two days later the child sustains another injury so you then remove the child. Alternatively, you remove the child and go home and wonder whether you should have removed that child.
The media—and the media may be quite right—have so emphasised these cases in the Press, because, sadly, in our Press bad news is good money-making news and there have been many inquiries into the battered baby which I need hardly enumerate. Unfortunately, it is always seen that blame must be apportioned to somebody. This is how the inquiries seem to take place. Because of the growing number of inquiries—probably quite rightly—because of the growing feeling that blame should he apportioned, there has been a swing towards removing children in order to be on the safe side. This is very important, because it means that some parents may well be suffering when they should not be. On the other hand, we should not blame the social workers, because they have stood to be corrected by so many inquiries and by so many people in the media, that they have come to feel that they must remove the
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child. Therefore, it is vitally important that this section, to which the noble Lord, Lord Gifford, has referred, should be implemented, so that parents have separate representation from the children.
It is a tragedy that we in this country have so many children in custodial care. According to the rules and regulations, those cases of children in care should be reviewed every six months for a plan to be made. But, sadly, this is often not done and children remain in care for far too long, thus being deprived, ultimately, of parents and family life. I realise that there is a lack of resources and I am sure that this will be one of the reasons given by the Minister. Therefore, would it not be possible, perhaps, to implement Section 32A if not Section 32B as a first step? Obviously, we should all prefer both sections to be implemented. But if there is said to be a lack of resources, could we not implement Section 32A, allowing for separate representation? The present position is not in accordance with justice as we understand it in the United Kingdom.
I wonder whether the Minister will forgive me, if I improve the shining hour and save your Lordships another Unstarred Question in the House, by asking about some of the other sections which have not been implemented. Can the Minister say when it is likely that Section 1(2), providing for a comprehensive adoption service in this country, is likely to be implemented? I appreciate that this involves the approval of voluntary agencies by the Department of Health and Social Security, and that it therefore has manpower implications for the Civil Service. But it is estimated that there are in this country 8,000 children with special needs who are awaiting adoption. The cost of 100 children remaining in care in institutions for five years is £2 million. Surely, with the very good work that is being done at the moment by local authorities, voluntary adoption agencies, the Adoption Resource Exchange, one could look to implementing Parts I and II and thus saving the country £2 million.
Furthermore if this section is not implemented in the very near future, a number of voluntary agencies will go out of business, if I can put it that way. It is the policy of my right honourable friend the Secretary of State to support voluntary agencies. From the point of view of the

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pathos and sadness of a woman giving up her child, we would hope that the Minister would look at Sections 14 and 16 which cover the freeing of a child for adoption. It would cost nothing, or very little, to prohibit private placements under Section 28.
I make no apology for bringing in some other points under this Act which have not been implemented but which would give a family to children who have no family, and would give parents who have been unjustly treated—as Lord Gifford said—hope that they may care for their own children.
8.31 p.m.
Lord MELCHETT: My Lords, we have had a contribution from the noble Baroness from the point of view of a social worker, and from two noble Lords who have spoken the legal point of view. I should like very briefly to add my voice from the point of view of somebody who was responsible for the Department of Health and Social Services in Northern Ireland for two and a half years. In that period I certainly became very much aware of the sense of injustice, the sense of frustration and the sense of bewilderment that many parents who had had their children taken away from them and placed in care felt because of the lack of legal representation to which my noble friend has drawn attention in this Question.
I was also going to stress, but I will not repeat it at length because the noble Baroness has put it better than I would have done, the twin contradictory pressures which the social services are under. On the one hand there is a growing body of evidence about the inappropriateness of institutional care, or indeed fostering, as opposed to children remaining at home except in cases where it really is justified by the most extreme circumstances at home. All the evidence shows that placement in care is likely to lead to appalling problems in the future for the children who are placed in care. On the other hand, as the noble Baroness said, there are the ever-increasing pressures under which the social services are placed, in my view largely because of quite unrealistic expectations that social workers are able to prevent every child in the country being physically damaged or attacked in any possible way by its parents.
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The noble Baroness mentioned the lengthy, long drawn-out and very well publicised inquiries which take place when the social services are alleged to have made the wrong decision. It seems to me that that latter point must inevitably, as the noble Baroness said, increase the pressure on social services to play it safe and to apply to have children placed in care if they feel that there is some risk involved. I regret that; I am sure social workers regret that. I certainly do not blame them. They are under-resourced, under-financed, under-staffed and facing enormous pressures. Nevertheless, it seems to me to give added urgency to the point which my noble friend has raised.
I have the feeling in this debate that a number of us feel that the case that has been put to the Government is so strong that there is no great need to emphasise that but rather that it is necessary to meet the financial argument which I suspect we all feel is going to come from the noble Lord when he replies to my noble friend's question.
A number of points have been made about that. Maybe I could also try a point on the noble Lord. I am well aware that the argument that if you spend some money on X it will save money on Y does not go down particularly well with the Treasury, and even more so when the savings are on one department's Vote and the expenditure on another department's Vote. But in this case it seems to me that the potential savings are so far out of scale with the likely expenditure that that really should not be a stumbling block.
As I understand it—as I am not sure if my figures tally with those of the noble Baroness, and I did not have time to work it out as she was speaking, perhaps the Minister could confirm this for me—and as far as I have been able to calculate it, the cost of keeping the 46,000-odd children who are in care under this particular section was about £115 million in 1978. I say "about"; I wonder whether the Minister has a more up-to-date figure than that because, as I say, that was for 1978.
It seems to me likely on previous evidence of the outcome of court cases where defendants are or are not legally represented that one could expect really quite a substantial change in the outcome of

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cases. Evidence from previous research into the effect of legal representation on the outcome of cases I do not have at my fingertips, but one would expect the change to be of the order of 10 to 20 per cent.—something of that sort. Assuming it produced simply a 2 per cent. drop in the number of children put into care under this section, there would be a saving of £2.3 million at 1978 prices in a full year—double the estimate of the likely expenditure. That is taking the most modest possible implications of implementing the proposals which my noble friend has put forward. It really does seem to me on that basis that any financial argument which the noble Lord might have been asked before the debate to put to your Lordships really should not be advanced, because it will not hold water.
The financial points are obviously important, and I hope the noble Lords will have been convinced by what I have said on that. It does seem to me that there are other arguments: the argument of natural justice and the other arguments that have been put forward by noble Lords and the noble Baroness are of far greater importance. This is a vitally important decision. The decision to place a child in care will give a local authority complete control over the parents' access to their child. It seems to me to be a growing problem. I heard a representative of the NSPCC say recently that they expected far more cases of children having to be taken into care under this section because of the growing problems of poverty, of unemployment, and because of the cutbacks that have been made in areas like housing and the social services.
It seems to me that fundamentally the system of justice, the delivery of justice would be enormously improved were the local authority to be properly questioned, expertly questioned, about their reasons for wanting to take a child into care, the sorts of benefit they thought would be derived from that step and the sorts of risk which they thought would be taken by leaving a child at home, particularly as I have said because of the overwhelming evidence of the damage that placing children in care tends to do to their future lives.
Also, of course, for those involved—and this was very much my experience as a Minister dealing with complaints, letters
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and individual cases in this field—the allegations that are made against parents by local authorities are of the most serious kind: allegations that parents are likely to kill their child if the child remains with them. It really does seem to me an appalling denial of natural justice that in those circumstances the parents should feel not only that they have no right to legal representation themselves, but very often that there are two lawyers in the court—the local authority's and the child's—who are actually speaking against them.
For those reasons, and not for the economic ones which may weigh with the Government but which I must confess do not seem to be the most important ones, I would hope the noble Lord would be able to give us a positive reply to what has so far been, and will continue to be, a unanimous debate this evening.
8.40 p.m.
Lord WELLS-PESTELL: My Lords, I recognise that I am in a very vulnerable position because I am sure that the noble Lord the Minister, and I shall not altogether blame him if he does, will have to say to your Lordships—I found myself in this position several times when I was in the department—that it is not possible to implement a large number of the sections of the Children Act 1975. I am not unmindful of the situation because I introduced the Children Bill, as it was then, into your Lordships' House when I was in the department. One often has to take the Government's view, which often is contrary to one's own view. It is no secret among my friends that I experienced a great deal of disappointment when the Government of which I was a member were unable to implement this particular section.
I do not want to deal with the legal aspects because they have been so admirably dealt with, first by my noble friend Lord Gifford and then by the noble Lord, Lord Hooson. What I want to do is to remind the Minister, if it is necessary to do so, that during the passage of the Children Bill we had a long drawn out discussion in your Lordships' House as to what was the most important part and the most important thing. I cannot remember the actual words, but after

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much discussion there was general agreement in both Houses that the Bill was concerned with the interests of the child. I think the final decision was that the interests of the child were of paramount importance. I want to ask the Minister—it is not that I have been converted; as I have said, it is a view which I have always held—to concern himself with the one important factor: that the interests of the child are of paramount importance.
There is a good deal of anxiety on the part of social workers who are familiar with care proceedings in juvenile courts. Obviously statistics upon this particular matter to which I want to make reference will not be kept, but if the parties were represented in both criminal cases and care proceedings I am sure that there would not be so many convictions and that there would not be so many care orders. Many, many social workers know from personal experience, as I know from personal experience, that if a person is represented then at least the whole of the thoughts and feelings of that individual are put before the bench, or are put before the magistrates.
There have been a good many acquittals in criminal cases which would not have happened if the person had not been represented. I am equally prepared to say, because I believe it to be true, that fewer care orders would have been made if the parents had been represented. But because they were not represented orders were made, often on the grounds that the noble Baroness mentioned—that is, the dilemma facing social workers who feel that they have got to bring these cases because there is an element of doubt in their minds. But it is the court which makes the decision, and the court often makes the decision on evidence that is not all that strong. We are, and have been for years, removing children from their homes far too readily and far too easily.
Different conclusions are arrived at when children or parents are represented. As things are at present, there is a real risk that justice will not be seen to be done; nor will it have been done in some instances where the parents are not legally represented. In care proceedings, the child himself, not the parents, is the respondent. In the normal way, the court would consider the parents as having the
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child's interests in the forefront of their minds. In care proceedings, however, the issue may well be, and often is: are the parents good, responsible parents? Where the parents' behaviour, attitude and conduct towards the child are in question, then there might be a conflict of interest so far as the child and its parents are concerned.
As we have been told, the child is entitled to legal aid, but unless the parents themselves are in a position to brief and pay for a solicitor and so are in a position to question, challenge and disprove some if not all of the allegations being made about their competence as parents, the court very often has not the best evidence before it upon which to make a judgment. In a letter which I received recently I was told—and I quote:
"At one time a solicitor representing a child in care proceedings automatically took his instructions from the child's parents, thus ensuring their views were made known to the court. Now lawyers are conscious that they represent only the child. Frequently they will not seek instructions from the parents but will make their own assessment of what case should be put to the court in response to that brought by the local authority".
Few parents can afford legal aid, and as yet they are not eligible for legal aid. Parents must of necessity, as things are at the moment, feel at a considerable disadvantage.
My noble friend Lord Melchett made some reference to cost and the Government's attitude towards it. I do not seek to defend the last Government who in this matter were wrong time and time again. If this Government are going to take the same line, I think that they will be equally wrong. We have 100,700 children in care—at least we did on 31st March 1978; I have been unable to get any more recent figures—at a cost of something over £199 million. It means that it costs upwards of £2,000, and in some cases £3,000, a year to keep a child in care.
One could talk about the harm that can be done by taking a child into care. Harm is often done. Professional social workers with many years of experience behind them will say that very often a bad home is better than no family home at all. Of course, some children have got to be removed, but over the years there has been a tendency to take children

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away because, if something dreadful happens, like a Maria Colwell, there will then be a public outcry and people will be pilloried for not taking some kind of action at a particular time. I think it is important that we should ask the Government to look at this matter.
What is a million pounds in a budget of I do not know how many tens of thousands of millions? I believe it would make justice be seen to be done; I think it would mean that parents would at least feel that their point of view had been put fairly and squarely and fully and frankly to the court. I do not think my noble friend Lord Gifford will mind my saying that I do not think the solution to the problem rests solely with the granting of legal aid to parents, important as that is—and I believe that to be very important indeed. After all, it is their child. They have a right to express an opinion, and if they cannot do it themselves they have the right to have somebody to do it for them. I think we need to look at the care proceedings process as it is at the present moment and what in fact actually happens in court.
The provision in the Act for the appointment of a guardian ad litem has, I believe, not yet been implemented, and I believe the guardian ad litem should be an experienced social worker. I believe I am right in saying that this was envisaged in the discussions that we had in 1974 and 1975, that the guardian ad litem would be a qualified—and I really mean qualified—social worker who would be able to assist the court by producing an independent report. I should prefer to see the two things go together, but if I have to choose I come down on the side of providing legal aid for parents, for the reasons that everybody who has spoken tonight has given.
I lay myself open now to a charge of being political. That is not unknown so far as I am concerned. I do not intend this to be a political criticism but I was reading The Times yesterday and I read this:
"More children are likely to be physically ill-treated by their parents because of tensions caused by Britain's increasing economic difficulties. That is the view of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children".
It goes on to say this:
"The threat of an economic recession, high unemployment, fears of redundancy, rising prices,
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diminished support from public funds—all these factors add to family tensions and to the risk of children becoming scapegoats".
I ask my noble friend opposite not to interpret this as a political criticism, but this is the situation that has been happening, not just since this Government have been in power. It happened long before we had economic difficulties. Very often certain families can stand so much and then there is a crack-up. Sometimes it is only a temporary crack-up but the children suffer.
That is not, in itself, a good enough reason for whisking up children, taking them out of their home and putting them in care. What it needs is for somebody to be able to assess the situation and, what is even much more important, is for the parents, if they should find themselves in that position, to be able to be legally represented, so that the court may be made perfectly clear that this is not something that is general within that family but is a situation which has been caused by some kind of emergency.
I am not concerned with just saving £2,500 a year, although of course that is important, but if we can keep children in their own home they will perhaps get a far better basis and understanding of companionship and family life. I have been in some awful homes when I was a professional social worker—places in which I did not want to spend more than a few minutes; but there was an awful lot of love in between the clouting and the walloping, and I think we must be very careful that we do not remove children unnecessarily. I believe there is that danger unless the court is fully informed of the situation. The court can only be fully informed either if the parents can speak for themselves—and many of them are not articulate enough to do it, but that does not mean that they are bad parents—or if they cannot do it themselves, through the services of a competent lawyer who can do it for them.
I do not know, but I think the noble Lord may well be in a position where he cannot give any undertakings today. I have been impressed by the small number of people who have spoken in this debate, but I have also been impressed by the fact that we are a cross-section. It so happens that we represent the three major parties in your Lordships' House, and I wonder whether

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the noble Lord will have a word with his right honourable friend the Secretary of State and ask him whether he would be prepared to meet the five of us who have taken part in this debate tonight. He may well feel that it will not serve any useful purpose, but I am sure that if we could meet him we might get the £1 million that we need to do this.
8.56 p.m.
Lord CULLEN of ASHBOURNE: My Lords, I think that was a very interesting suggestion made by my noble friend Lord Wells-Pestell, and I will certainly put it to my right honourable friend and see what he has to say. I am also sure that he will read with very great interest what I think have been extremely interesting speeches from all sides of the House on this matter. The fact that I am not going to make a very encouraging reply is, of course, another point. It might be helpful if I were first to explain the present position with regard to Sections 64 and 65 of the Children Act 1975, the provision which, when fully implemented, will enable courts to grant legal aid to parents so that they may be separately represented in care proceedings.
Section 64 was the subject of much discussion in this House five years ago. Your Lordships may recall that it enables a juvenile court in care proceedings to make an order which will prohibit the parents of a child from representing him or otherwise acting on his behalf in the proceedings if it appears to the court that there is a conflict of interest between the child and his parents. Courts are likely to find that such a conflict of interest exists in any proceedings brought on grounds of ill-treatment or neglect or exposure to moral danger. The order made by the court is sometimes referred to as a separation order or an exclusion order.
Where a court has made a separation order, it may appoint a suitably qualified independent person—a guardian ad litem—to act for the child in the proceedings. Such a person would be expected to bring to bear social work expertise in deciding where the child's best interests lie. When the Act is fully implemented, there will be power under Section 103 for local authorities to establish panels of persons from which courts will be able to appoint
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guardians ad litem in both care and adoption proceedings. I should make it clear at this point that the appointment of a guardian ad litem to act for the child would not preclude the court from granting the child legal aid so that he may also be represented by a solicitor in appropriate cases. Where both a solicitor and a guardian ad litem have been appointed to act for the child, the guardian ad litem would be expected to give instructions to the solicitor on the conduct of the child's case. After the court has made a separation order, whether or not it appoints a guardian ad litem for the child, it may then, under Section 65 of the Act, grant legal aid to the parents so that they may be represented by a solicitor in the proceedings. It will be clear from this brief explanation of the working of Sections 64 and 65 that the two sections are interrelated in so far as the power to grant legal aid to parents is restricted to cases in which the court has already made a separation-order under Section 64.
This is how the separate representation provisions of the Children Act 1975 would work if Section 64 were fully implemented. However, although Section 65 came into force on 26th November 1976, it has only been possible to bring into force that part of Section 64 which enables parents and children to be separately represented in proceedings arising from unopposed applications for the discharge of care or supervision orders; that is, applications made by the parents which are not opposed by the local authority.
These are proceedings of the kind which led to the return of Maria Colwell to her mother and where the Government of the day felt that there was the greatest danger that the child's interests might not be fully protected because of the local authority's decision not to oppose the application by the parent for the discharge of the relevant order. If I may now direct myself to replying to the noble Lord's Question, Her Majesty's Government do not have any immediate plans for bringing into force the remainder of Section 64 so as to enable parents and children to be separately represented in all care proceedings, including those where the application is opposed. I realise that this will be depressing news, particularly for those Members of this House, who,

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five years ago, welcomed with such enthusiasm the separate representation provisions in the Children Act.
This House may well ask why we have been able to make so little progress since 1975. The answer lies in the fact that Section 64 has appreciable resource implications for local authorities and the probation service who would be expected to provide from their staffs most of the members of the panels from which courts would appoint guardians ad litem and also because the granting of legal aid to parents would place an appreciable burden on the legal aid fund.
Lord MELCHETT: My Lords, perhaps I may interrupt the noble Lord if he is leaving that point. He spoke of an appreciable burden on the legal aid fund. Would he care to quantify that more clearly?
Lord CULLEN of ASHBOURNE: Yes, my Lords; I will be coming to that. When the 1975 Children Act was passed, the Government of the day made it clear in another place that many of the Act's desirable provisions could only be implemented when additional resources became available. It was recognised that the separate representation provisions involved high cost and that it would only be possible to make a modest start by bringing into force the low-cost provision relating to unopposed proceedings to which I have already referred.
The Government are committed to the main aims of the Children Act and are anxious to bring into force any remaining provisions which do not have resource implications for local authorities, the probation service and the courts. My noble friend Lady Faithfull asked what we might be doing in that respect. The Government have stated that their aim would be the speedy introduction of any of the provisions which are identified as needing no extra resources. They hope that these might include the provisions for approval of voluntary adoption societies freeing children for adoption and approved adoption allowances, because these provisions have frequently been mentioned in representations we have received. No decisions have been made about the timing or order of implementation of other provisions which have resource implications for local authorities.
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This must be considered in the context of the Government's overall strategy of controlling the growth of public expenditure.
With this end in view my right honourable friend has set up a joint working party—which includes representatives of the local authority associations—to cost the unimplemented provisions of the Act. The working party is expected to report by the summer and their report will include an estimate of the cost of implementing the remainder of Section 64. But it will come as no surprise to this House to learn that the financial situation of local authorities has worsened since the Act was passed in 1975; and that the prospects of local authorities being able to undertake the work of establishing panels of guardians ad litem is even less favourable now than it was in 1975.
The problem is not simply one of money. Guardians ad litem will need to be persons with a high level of social work skills; persons who will need to examine their social work colleagues' records and possibly question their practice and judgments in particular cases. They will need to have advocacy skills and may have to cross-examine others or stand up to cross-examination themselves, particularly if they disagree with the line taken by the local authority in the case. The number of professionally trained social workers and probation officers with these skills is likely to be limited; so it is not just a question of money but also one of manpower and training.
Then, of course, there is the question of legal aid for the parents who are made the subject of separation orders. The overall cost of providing legal aid in this way would obviously depend upon the number of cases in which courts made separation orders. It is estimated, on the basis of the present number of care cases dealt with in the courts, that such orders might be made in about 4,500 to 5,000 cases a year. In that event the cost of legal aid might very well be of the order of £1 million a year. If it was necessary for parents to be represented separately from each other in some cases, the cost would be correspondingly greater.
My Lords, unpleasant as these facts are, they are facts that we have to face and I must tell this House frankly that, in

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the light of current constraints on public expenditure, there is little prospect of our being able to bring into force the remainder of Section 64 in the foreseeable future: officials of the departments concerned are, however, considering whether a further partial implementation of Section 64 would be feasible and effective in achieving the objectives of this section, subject of course to the necessary financial resources becoming available in due course.
The fact that parents cannot normally obtain legal aid to be represented in care proceedings does not mean that no help at all is available to them. In the first place, they may obtain legal advice and assistance under the so-called "green form" scheme. Under that scheme a solicitor can advise the parents and prepare their case for them, but he cannot represent them in court. Secondly, I am pleased to say that many law centres help to meet this gap in the legal aid scheme by representing parents whose children are the subject of care proceedings. However, no one would pretend that those sources of help are fully adequate substitutes for legal aid, and I am sure that the House will join me in hoping that, resources permitting, a way will be found to resolve this problem in the not too distant future.
I was asked a question by the noble Lords, Lord Gifford and Lord Melchett. The Lord Chancellor accepts that as a matter of natural justice parents should have legal representation to meet allegations made against them. He has said before that as soon as resources permit he would like to make provision for legal aid to be made available to parents in such circumstances.
Lord GIFFORD: My Lords, before the noble Lord sits down, may I ask two questions for clarification? First, can he confirm clearly that it would be perfectly possible and lawful to implement the provisions of Section 64 regarding legal aid without implementing the guardians ad litem provisions, which could then be deferred to a further date? Secondly, in relation to the mention of a study by officials of the department into the partial implementation of Section 64, is this concerned with legal aid, and how long is this particular study going to take?
Lord CULLEN of ASHBOURNE: My Lords, we should have the study by this summer. I am not sure that I can answer the noble Lord's first question; I think so, but I am not absolutely certain.
Lord JANNER: My Lords, before the noble Lord sits down, may I ask him whether he is taking steps to discuss with the Magistrates' Association the implementation of Section 64, keeping in mind the fact—if he is thinking about the financial aspect—that the magistrates in this country are saving millions of pounds because they give their services free, and the fact that the juvenile panel is very anxious to see that Section 64 is brought into full effect?
Lord CULLEN of ASHBOURNE: My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord. I am now able to answer the question that I was asked by the noble Lord, Lord Gifford. It is possible to implement legal aid without guardians ad litem.

ALEXANDRA PARK AND PALACE BILL [H.L.]
Reported from the Select Committee with amendments.