Lords Sitting of 18 December 1980

Preamble
The House met at eleven of the clock: The LORD CHANCELLOR on the Woolsack.
Prayers—Read by the Lord Bishop of Rochester.

Personal Statement: The Lord Trefgarne
Lord Trefgarne: My Lords, I should like to make a personal statement.
In the course of my reply to the Unstarred Question of the noble Lord, Lord Nugent of Guildford, on 2nd December I said that the correspondence of earlier Administrations is not available to Ministers in this Government. I am now advised that what I said was not quite correct; in general Ministers do not have free access to the papers of the previous Administration, but it was going too far to imply that all correspondence with third parties is barred. It remains the case that I had not, in fact, seen the letter quoted by the noble Lord, Lord Mishcon; but my statement of the general position was not accurate and I must apologise for unwittingly misleading the House.

Butter: EEC Exports to USSR
Lord Boyd-Carpenter: My Lords, I beg leave to ask the Question which stands in my name on the Order Paper.
The Question was as follows:
To ask Her Majesty's Government how much butter has been provided by the EEC to the USSR this year at subsidised prices; and what has been the average margin between price and cost.
Lord Sandys: My Lords, the European Commission estimates that 98,000 tonnes of butter was exported to the Soviet Union at subsidised prices in the period January to September 1980. The average margin between the sale price to the Soviet Union and the cost in the European Community cannot be assessed precisely, but the average subsidy has been of the order of 50 pence per pound.
Lord Boyd-Carpenter: My Lords, I thank my noble friend for that very helpful reply. Will he not agree that it is profoundly depressing, in a world where there is so much hardship and starvation, that no more worthy recipient of this very substantial benefit can be found than the Government which is at this moment occupying Afghanistan and threatening Poland?
Lord Sandys: Yes, my Lords. The Government entirely agree with what my noble friend has said. I would emphasise the Government's attitude. As the House, the Commission and other member states all know, the United Kingdom Government are totally opposed to sales of subsidised food to Russia. Most other member states do not agree, and the
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Foreign Affairs Council decision on 15th January this year allows exports up to traditional levels.
Lord Goronwy-Roberts: My Lords, will the Minister agree that a more worthy recipient in contemporary circumstances would be Poland? Is this country in full support of the EEC intention to send foodstuffs to Poland? Can the noble Lord give details of the value and volume and any indication of a subsidised price for these items, if indeed they are subsidised?
Lord Sandy's: My Lords, this is, in fact, outside the exact terms of the Question, but I think that I can help the noble Lord, Lord Goronwy-Roberts, to this extent. To other Eastern European countries—and that might include Poland, but I have no precise information—14,389 tonnes were exported in the course of this period.
Lord Goronwy-Roberts: My Lords, can the noble Lord indicate what the price per kilo or pound was, and whether or not a subsidy was involved in that case, as in the Russian case?
Lord Sandys: My Lords, that is another question, but my understanding is that it was equivalent.
Lord Mackie of Benshie: My Lords, is it not a fact that this is purely the result of EEC policy and that the surpluses are needed in order to ensure our supply? Is it not a fact that this is part of the CAP; that it is a cheaper way of supporting farming; and that, in fact, the sale to the Russians is a sale to the customer offering the best price for the surplus?
Lord Sandys: My Lords, yes. I do not think that I can add very much to what my noble friend Lord Ferrers said on 21st November last year. I quote his words in this context:
"The discussions of the Council of Ministers are of a confidential nature and I could not tell my noble friend what were the arguments used. But I will tell him this: if there is a surplus of butter, then that has to be disposed of throughout the world. It is a trading matter to dispose of it. The fact is that the Council of Ministers did not agree that there should be a ban on all sales to Russia."—[Official Report, 21/11/79; col. 1121
Lord Boyd-Carpenter: My Lords, is it not the fact that there have been surpluses of this kind for some years? Is it not an indication of a failure by those who administer the CAP that these surpluses have not by now been eliminated, and are therefore now being used in this outrageous way?
Lord Sandys: Yes, my Lords, these surpluses have existed over a number of years. The fact is, though, that sales specifically to Russia have not taken place every year. I could give my noble friend details.
Lord Gladwin: My Lords, is it not a fact that the butter mountain has been consistently reduced during the last few years?
Lord Sandys: My Lords, it is true that the system of tendering has changed within the last 12 months.

The Textile Industry: Consultations
11.12 a.m.
Lord Rhodes: My Lords, I beg leave to ask the first Question which stands in my name on the Order Paper.
The Question was as follows:
To ask Her Majesty's Government whether, in view of the serious contraction of the textile industry and the threat to its future viability, they will initiate urgent consultations with the industry in order to establish the minimum level at which it can operate successfully.
The Minister of State, Department of Industry (Viscount Trenchard): My Lords, the Government fully share the noble Lord's concern about the closures and redundancies which are taking place in the textile industry against the background of a world recession. The Government are in regular and frequent contact with the industry and its representatives and remain ready to consider any proposals which they may have to alleviate their problems. However, I am bound to say that I do not see how attempting to establish a minimum level of activity, which in the end can only be a matter of opinion, would help to resolve the industry's present difficulties.
Lord Rhodes: My Lords, is the Minister aware that I have in my hand a document showing 90 mill closures over the last few months in the man-made fibre section, none of which is in the clothing and the woollen section? Is he aware that the nature of these closures is causing considerable alarm to others remaining in the trade because of the imbalance which is resulting? This document shows a preponderance of spinning firms which have closed down. Also the firms which are making industrial fabrics are in danger of having no viable organisation after these closures. Will the Minister meet the industry, as they want to meet him, to discuss this very problem?
Viscount Trenchard: My Lords, I thank the noble Lord for his supplementary and for giving me in advance some indication of what was in his mind, which is helpful. Let me first say to him that we have met recently—and shall again no doubt meet very soon—with all and with individual sections of this industry, and that applies both to my department and to the Department of Trade. We have been in constant touch over their many difficulties. I should like to nut the situation in perspective, because while I think we are well aware—the industry has made us well aware—of the particular sections which have been most severely pressed, nevertheless in September the industry still had 638,000 people working in it—that is, textiles and clothing together—and the loss of jobs, January to September 1980, was 76,000. Therefore we must keep this in perspective. I do not think that the Government are in a position to fix a minimum level. although we continue to discuss with industry all possible steps to help them, particularly in the areas where they are hardest pressed.
Baroness Gaitskell: My Lords, may I ask the Minister whether we should not have almost a philosophical look at the word "competitive"? Does "competitive"
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mean that we have to ruin people in this country if we are going to be truly competitive with others? Are others not allowed to be "competitive"? Why do we grumble when they can produce goods or materials cheaper than we do? I think we should have a look at this matter, and I was rather pleased with the Minister's Answer.
Viscount Trenchard: My Lords, the textile and clothing industries all over the world have special problems and are the subject of international agreements. Broadly, we try to ensure that those international agreements give our industry a fair trading opportunity, a competitive situation with developed countries and a limit anyway to the rate of increase of imports from the developing world. Everyone else does this under the MFA arrangements, and indeed the United States of America probably enforced the arrangements under the MFA a bit more promptly and vigorously than has the European Community.
Lord Hale: My Lords, is the Minister aware that The Times this morning reports a statement by the Minister of Trade, following a similar statement yesterday, that the United States are in breach of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trades on this matter, and that urgent representations have been ordered by the Council of Ministers to the Common Market Commission to endeavour to induce our great ally, whose trade policy is injurious to us in many connections, at least to observe the provisions of GATT in relation to textiles?
Viscount Trenchard: My Lords, I am indeed aware of the successful negotiation which took place on Tuesday of this week in Brussels, in which the Council adopted a declaration which agreed that developments necessitated a new and stronger initiative, and invited the Commission urgently to pursue discussions with the United States' Administration over the whole range of problems and possible solutions and to report back to the Council as early as possible, with a first report in February. The issue is large and complicated and a little different from the noble Lord's Question, and I prefer to leave it at that point.
Lord Rhodes: My Lords, is the Minister aware that it is not protection at this moment that I am asking for in my Question? What I am asking is that there should be a commonsense attitude in his department, and for them to be aware of what is happening month by month, so that at any rate when we emerge from this recession we shall have a viable industry.
Viscount Trenchard: My Lords, I think I have already said that we are aware, and kept aware certainly week by week and even day by day of the situation in this industry.
Lord Rhodes: My Lords, may I ask—
Several Noble Lords: No.
Lord Denham: My Lords, we have given this Question a good deal of consideration. The House may feel it is time to move on to the next Question.

The Textile Industry and the Recession
11.20 a.m.
Lord Rhodes: My Lords, I beg leave to ask the second 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 a scheme of temporary financial aid for the textile industry, based on interest-free or interest-abated loans for companies which have a viable future but are unable to finance their continued operation during the present period of recession and high interest rates.
Viscount Trenchard: My Lords, the Government have no plans to introduce a temporary interest relief scheme for companies in the textile industry. In the first place, high interest rates are causing difficulties for many companies and it would be invidious to single out the textile sector for special treatment. Secondly, even if this were feasible, the selection of those companies which were thought to have a viable future could be done only on an arbitrary basis. Thirdly, the extra cost involved in such a scheme would only make more difficult the task of bringing public expenditure under control. We are determined to get interest rates down as soon as possible and the further cut in minimum lending rate announced on 24th November is a step in the right direction.
Lord Rhodes: My Lords, is the Minister aware that there are many firms which were well run and profitable when interest rates were lower which are likely to close down? Is he aware that many firms are gallantly prepared to carry on over the next few months if they could be helped by the Government in some way? Is the noble Viscount aware that this is not an original thought of mine, for it is already happening in Belgium and Holland to help their industries in similar circumstances?
Viscount Trenchard: My Lords, the schemes proposed in Belgium and Holland—and that is their status—are under scrutiny by the Commission in Brussels. In the case of Holland, under Section 93 of the Treaty that country have been informed that they should not introduce it pending further investigation. As for interest rates pressing on this industry, as I have already said they press on others. We will not be diverted from the need first to get inflation under control by the root causes. If we failed to do that by bringing down interest rates prematurely we should certainly do more harm to this hard-pressed industry as well as to many others.
Lord Wells-Pestell: My Lords, as this industry is suffering extremely badly as a result of the recession, may I ask the Minister—I ask this quite sincerely—whether it would be unreasonable to find out whether the banks, which have made an enormous profit out of high interest rates, I think running into many hundreds of millions of pounds, would be prepared to offer interest-free loans to this industry?
Viscount Trenchard: My Lords, I am afraid that that scheme would not be practical, nor would it be just. Although the pressures on this industry are severe, it is by no means alone. The noble Lord will be aware that bank lending has been at an absolutely record rate, and the Government are determined that the total money supply shall not expand more than approximately the target range of something like 11 per cent. extra in a year when the country's industry has not produced any extra goods.
Baroness Hornsby-Smith: My Lords, is my noble friend aware that the penetration of foreign textiles into this country is higher than in any other industrialised nation in the world? Is it not reasonable that the industry should ask what level of its own market it will be entitled to? How many more of its people are to be put out of employment? Is the Minister further aware that I believe, slightly in conflict with the noble Lord, Lord Rhodes, that if the industry were given some confidence that it will not be further eroded, it would be able to find its own finance and be only too happy to restore the employment levels to what they should be?
Viscount Trenchard: My Lords, as I said to the noble Lord, Lord Rhodes, the Government cannot decide on a fixed size of any industry; it is beyond the capacity of a Government to do that. What we can do is everything possible to strengthen our international arrangements, which we inherited when we came to office, and we have said we will negotiate or try to negotiate a thoroughly strong MFA. We have also taken steps, which I have already referred to, to cause comprehensive discussions between the Community and the United States, from which import penetration is coming at the fastest possible level. Within the practical steps we can take in our international trading agreements, the industry has to compete and decide its own size within those parameters.
Lord Beswick: My Lords, leaving aside for the moment the argument that high interest rates are in fact inflationary and not counter-inflationary, may I ask the noble Viscount whether it is not a fact that, apart from the two schemes to which he referred, in Belgium and Holland, there are schemes already in operation for assisting with preferential interest rates exporters in foreign competitive countries, and has such a scheme been considered here?
Viscount Trenchard: My Lords, the whole question of interest rates within the Community is under continual discussion, and particular discussion at the moment in relation to exports, and I do not believe that our exporting industries compared with others are in fact handicapped. As for the noble Lord's first assertion, that has been well stated in various opinion-forming journals; the general proposition, however, must remain that if money and credit expands to a great extent, inflation will follow.
Viscount Massereene and Ferrard: My Lords, is my noble friend aware—he must be—that for very many years various countries have provided lower interest rates for vital industries? I have frequently mentioned

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that one can have, for instance, a high interest rate for wine, women and song but for wealth-producing industries one should have a low interest rate.
Viscount Trenchard: My Lords, I do not think I have anything further to add, except to draw the attention of noble Lords to the fact that we have given this industry, both through regional policy and through the special selective policy under Section 8 of the Industry Act, very considerable assistance. My department has been examining the help given in all competitive countries and is continuing to do so as a matter of urgency, and overall I believe we shall be able to give our industry a fair trading opportunity.
Lord Denham: My Lords, I know the noble Lord, Lord Reilly, wishes to ask a supplementary question, and I do not want to interrupt him, but noble Lords may feel that, after he has asked that question and my noble friend has replied, we might then move on to the next Question.
Lord Reilly: My Lords, would the Minister agree that one of the reasons for the troubles of the British textile industry might be the fact that for too long too many of our manufacturers have been adding too little value in terms of design and innovation? If he were to agree with that, would he perhaps be prepared to study the device adopted by the Canadian Ministry of Industry and Commerce to encourage Canadian manufacturers to invest a bit more in design and development?
Viscount Trenchard: My Lords, the noble Lord's point must be a matter of opinion. The industry itself recently held a conference in Manchester and put its own design capability under the spotlight. The conference was entitled, Product Policy for the 1980s. The industry is very conscious of the need to improve wherever improvement can be made, but it is the view of my department—and I share it—that, while standards of efficiency will always vary within each industry, this industry has been efficient overall. Its productivity and its co-operation are good, and in a number of firms designs are good, too.
Lord Brockway: My Lords—
Several noble Lords: Order, order!
Lord Denham: My Lords, if the noble Lord, Lord Brockway, will forgive me for intervening, I would say that we have spent 23 minutes on three Starred Questions. We have a further Starred Question and a Private Notice Question to follow. I can only try to interpret the feeling of the House, and I think that perhaps we ought to move on to the next Question.

Probation Officers: Employment Prospects
11.31 a.m.
Lord Donaldson of Kingsbridge: 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 can confirm that approximately 25 per cent. of the
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400 student probation officers successfully completing courses in England and Wales last July are still without jobs; and, if so, whether such a waste of expensively-trained persons directly damages the Government's expressed intention to make available to the probation service the additional resources necessary to tackle a reduction in the prison population.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Home Office (Lord Belstead): Yes, my Lords. The majority of courses leading to the Certificate of Qualification in Social Work end in the summer and some students, particularly those whose mobility is limited, may well be unable to obtain an early appointment as a probation officer in the area of their choice. In the current year the position is complicated by a fall in the wastage of serving probation officers, leading to a reduced demand by the service for students from training.
Lord Donaldson of Kingsbridge: My Lords, I thank the noble Lord for that reply, which goes some way towards explaining the position. Is the noble Lord aware that a similar situation arose in 1978 and the experience of the Probation Officers' Association is that those who were trained at that time and did not get jobs never did get jobs? Does the noble Lord agree that it looks as if there is going to be a total wastage of the training of about 100 probation officers at a time when the probation service must be reinforced in order to deal with the appalling prison situation?
Lord Belstead: My Lords, so far as the question of reinforcing the service is concerned, I am most anxious to make the point that the problem has not been one of not increasing the size of the service. Recruitment has been, and is, buoyant. The problem is that the rate of wastage has suddenly fallen dramatically. That is most acceptable and welcome in many ways, but of course it causes the particular problem which occasions the Question asked by the noble Lord.
With regard to trying to overcome the particular problem which the noble Lord identified in his supplementary question, I would say that he may remember that at the end of last year my right honourable friend the Home Secretary made proposals for devolving to the individual probation and after-care areas the responsibility for selecting and sponsoring students. A benefit of that proposal, which is not yet finally decided, would be to enable each area to assess its needs and to adapt to the effects of reduced local wastage.
Lord Donaldson of Kingsbridge: My Lords, I am most grateful for that information. I think that that will be a helpful move.
Baroness Faithfull: My Lords, does not the Minister agree that it would be a good thing to increase the numbers in the probation service since, bearing in mind the present cutback in public expenditure, it is less expensive to keep men out of prison, and to rehabilitate those men who have left prison, than it is to keep men in prison? Does that not also provide a very much better service for the country?
Lord Belstead: My Lords, I agree with my noble friend that a healthy probation service is an absolutely essential ingredient towards trying to reduce the size of the prison service. To that end—and my answer crosses the boundaries of both the previous Administration and the present Government—I should like to make the point that the numbers in the probation service have increased from 1975, when there were 4,869 full-time probation officers. At the end of December 1979 there were 5,306, while by the end of September of this year the numbers had risen again, to 5,413. We did indeed make provision for an increase of 1 per cent. in the current year in the size of the service.
Baroness Birk: My Lords, does the Minister agree that, in addition to increasing numbers in the probation service, it is essential to increase the resources available to them such as hostels, clinics, and so on? I find that in the court in which I sit lack of resources is a problem with which the probation service is faced. Does not the Minister agree that to increase the numbers in the service without increasing the facilities and resources that they can use will not be of much help? I think that this is a very important point.
Lord Belstead: My Lords, I absolutely agree with the noble Baroness. I am not going to dodge the fact that local authorities are, of course, being asked to restrain their expenditure very severely indeed; I accept that absolutely. None the less, in that general context I should like to remind the noble Baroness that the Home Office has maintained the support that it gives to the voluntary hostel service, in which of course NACRO takes the lead, and my right honourable friend has taken an initiative in providing a small amount of money to establish particular hostels for offenders suffering from alcoholic troubles.
Lord Davies of Leek: My Lords, is the noble Lord aware that some of us shudder—especially at this time of Christmas spirit—when we learn that three people seemingly are able to break out of prison by penetrating three great concrete walls, and are able to find ropes and planks? Will this kind of thing affect the probation service, or are we going to build better prisons, with a much more humane approach?
Lord Belstead: My Lords, that is another question.

Northern Ireland: Prisoners' Hunger Strike
11.37 a.m.
Lord Brockway: My Lords, I beg to ask Her Majesty's Government a Question of which I have given Private Notice. The Question is as follows:
"To ask Her Majesty's Government whether they will make a Statement on the situation in Northern Ireland arising from the hunger strike of men and women prisoners, and the likely effect in extending violence".
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Northern Ireland Office (Lord Elton): My Lords, there are now
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40 prisoners taking part in the hunger strike at Her Majesty's Prisons Maze and Armagh. These are made up of the seven male republican hunger strikers at Maze, now on their 53rd day, plus the 30 who joined on 15th-16th December, and the three republican women at Armagh, who started on 1st December. The three Armagh hunger strikers are showing appreciable weight loss, but their general condition is otherwise reasonable. The other recent strikers are not causing anxiety at present. The original seven, however, are now all showing marked deterioration.
The Government's position has been made clear in statements made on 23rd October and 4th December. There can be no question of the Government conceding the demands of the hunger strikers for political status. However, the Government have been, and continue to be, ready, despite the protest, to deal with the humanitarian aspects of the conditions in the prisons arising from the protest. Indeed, it is a matter of regret that changes made have been rejected, but this will not alter the Government's resolve to build on the progress achieved in recent years in the administration of Northern Ireland prisons.
As for the public order implications of the hunger strike, it is for the chief constable to decide how best to deal with the operational repercussions of any particular situation. If he feels it necessary to do so, he may call upon army support, which is available. So far the police have not required such support, and no doubt your Lordships will agree that they have handled the situation admirably.
Lord Brockway: My Lords, I wish to express appreciation for that very full reply. Arising from the Minister's suggestion that the Government have been making proposals for humanitarian reform, may I ask whether he can indicate what those proposals are, and whether they cover clothes, association, visits, and letters; and, if so, have those suggestions been rejected by the hunger strikers?
Lord Elton: My Lords, I can best reply to that supplementary question by quoting from the Written Answer given in another place on 4th December, in which the five specific demands of the prisoners were listed: "To wear their own clothes; to refrain from prison work; to associate freely with one another; to organise recreational facilities and to have one letter, visit and parcel a week; and to have lost remission fully restored". The House may not be aware of the extent to which these conditions are already available to the prisoners. Prison rules require prisoners to wear prison-issue clothing or special clothes appropriate to their work during normal working hours, on weekdays from half-past seven in the morning to five o'clock in the evening; but, as a privilege, prisoners may unless they are engaged on orderly duties wear their own clothing for the rest of the evening during the week and throughout the weekend. It will therefore be seen that a prisoner conforming with the rules may wear his own clothing for almost half the time he would expect to be out of his cell. For the remainder of the time, the Government's decision of the 23rd October—and that is to what I would direct the

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noble Lord's attention—means that conforming prisoners will be wearing civilian clothing issued by the prison authorities.
As to work, prison rules require convicted prisoners to "engage in useful work", and four main types of such work are undertaken. First, some prisoners undertake domestic tasks in the kitchens, dining areas, ablutions and wings; second, an extensive range of industrial employment is provided in prison workshops; and, third, vocational training is available to teach a wide range of skills. Courses have been developed to the requirements of the skills testing service of the City and Guilds of London Institute; fourth, education classes are provided during working hours (from two to 20 hours a week) to cover a wide range of prisoners' needs, from remedial education to Open University courses. Classes in craft theory are given to complement the vocational training side, while tuition is provided in a wide range of subjects enabling prisoners to study for RSA City and Guilds literacy and numeracy certificates, GCE "O" and "A" level certificates.
On the third point, association, the prison rules provide, as a privilege, that each weekday during the evening for three hours, and throughout the day at weekends, prisoners have "association" during which, within each 25-cell wing they may watch television, play indoor games, follow hobbies and exercise in the yard attached to each wing and attend education classes. A wide range of evening classes is provided, and there is some dovetailing with daytime courses. Apart from text books, the Northern Ireland education and library boards provide well-stocked libraries; and books and newspapers may be taken to be read in the cells.
On recreation, the protestors demand the right to organise recreational facilities. The prison regime already provides for the use of gymnasia and playing pitches in addition to the statutory exercise period of not less than one hour each day in the open air when practicable. During association periods prisoners may use the hobbies room for supervised handicraft and artistic activities. I hope your Lordships think I am not being too full in this reply, but there is a little more and I think your Lordships would like to know.
On visits, letters and parcels, the protestors demand one visit, one parcel and one letter each week, Under prison rules, each prisoner enjoys as of right one letter and one visit per month. The rules provide, as a privilege, seven additional letters per month at the expense of the prison, three additional visits and a weekly parcel. Special parcels are also allowed at Christmas, Easter and Halloween. Thus, the existing privileges are already more generous than the protestors demand.
On remission, the prisoners are demanding the restoration in full of the remission that they have lost while engaged in the protest. Prison rules provide that a prisoner serving a term of more than one month receives remission, subject to good conduct, up to one-half of his sentence. This is a more generous rate
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of remission than is available elsewhere in the United Kingdom. Remission may be forfeited as a punishment for breach of prison rules, but it may be restored after subsequent good behaviour. The protestors have lost one day's remission for each day they have been in breach of prison rules. The opportunity to regain lost remission already exists.
My Lords, I believe that I could deposit in the Library a fuller account of the conditions if it was required, but I think your Lordships will be seized of the fact that the bulk of what the prisoners claim to be seeking is in fact available to them already, without recourse to the methods they have chosen to pursue.
Lord Blease: My Lords, is it not a fact that this House shares with my noble friend Lord Brockway his deep concern about the dire consequences of the decision of the hunger strikers to reject the personal plea of Cardinal Tomas O'Fiaich and the Government, and others, to end their fast to death? May I ask the Minister whether he considers that there may still be hope if new approaches could be made by Church leaders on the basis of the Cardinal's personal plea and the Government's recent Statement on prison procedures in the Maze? May I further ask the noble Lord whether he would consider making suitable approaches to the Prime Minister to arrange for urgent and private discussions with the Leader of the Opposition and the Leader of the Liberal Party in another place about the immediate issues arising from this hunger strike as it affects the people of Ireland and of this country?
Lord Elton: My Lords, in answer to the noble Lord's first suggestion, that a new approach by Church leaders might affect the commitment of the prisoners, we would always welcome any support from that direction. I am certain that what the noble Lord has said about a meeting of the Prime Minister, the Leader of his party and the Leader of the Liberal Party will be noted in Hansard. I cannot of course commit my right honourable friend to any response.
Lord Hampton: My Lords, is the noble Lord aware that I have visited the Maze Prison and have been very much struck by the high standard of the conditions there for those prisoners who co-operate, and that I do not think that the Government should concede special privileges to terrorists? It will be a tragedy if any of the hunger strikers dies, just as it was a tragedy that their victims died or were maimed. It is all part of the turmoil in Northern Ireland today. Does the Minister not agree that the strife between the two communities will be healed, but that it is going to need a great deal more patience, coupled with a determination to see genuine wrongs righted and grievances sorted out? I do not think these grievances and wrongs fall into the category that might be suggested by the Question asked by the noble Lord, Lord Brockway.
Lord Elton: My Lords, I do not think I can disagree with anything that the noble Lord has said.
Baroness Gaitskell: My Lords, may I ask the Minister a very short question? Why do not the Government make this information generally known in the country? I may say that what he has said today has given me some comfort about this terrible tragedy that is going on, but in the country this information is not known. Why do not the BBC or the ITV present a programme which says this?
Lord Elton: My Lords, I am grateful for the noble Baroness's welcome for what I have said. I certainly will continue to do everything I can to make it more widely known, and so will Her Majesty's Government.
Lord Paget of Northampton: My Lords, would the noble Lord tell us whether, in that programme, there could be included how many people these seven have murdered and how many they have gravely injured?
Lord Elton: My Lords, there is, of course, rather a large number of people under sentence. The prisoner Leo Patrick Green was sentenced for the murder of an RUC inspector; for attempted murder, three counts; for wounding with intent, two counts; and for possessing firearms and ammunition with intent. Raymond McCartney was sentenced for the murder of a constable and of Mr. Geoffrey Agate, manager of the Dupont factory, Londonderry, and for belonging to a proscribed organisation. Sean McKenna was sentenced for attempted murder of two reserve constables; possessing firearms and ammunition with intent, carrying firearms with intent, three counts; carrying firearms in a public place; wounding with intent, two counts; possessing firearms and ammunition with intent; causing an explosion, two counts; possessing explosive substances with intent, three counts; false imprisonment; possessing firearms with intent; conspiracy to intimidate and belonging to a proscribed organisation. Thomas McKearney was sentenced for the murder of a postman who was a part-time member of the UDR: possessing firearms and ammunition with intent, and for assault occasioning actual bodily harm. Joseph Nixon was sentenced for robbery on two counts. Thomas McFeeley: attempted wounding, with intent, of a policeman, using firearms to resist arrest, possessing firearm and ammunition with intent, possessing firearm and ammunition in suspicious circumstances and robbery, two counts. Brendan Hughes: handling stolen goods, possessing explosive substances, with intent, possessing firearms and ammunition, with intent.
My Lords, that is a long list. I think it answers the noble Lord's question.
Lord Denham: My Lords, I do not want to prevent the noble Lord, Lord Brockway, from asking his final question, but when he has done so and after my noble friend has answered, perhaps we might move on.
Lord Brockway: My Lords, as a means of seeking a solution and in view of the statement of the Catholic leaders that they regard these proposals as a way out, could not a deputation from the Archbishops and Bishops be arranged to meet the hunger strikers in their prison to try to dissuade them?
Lord Elton: My Lords, I am not certain to which proposals the noble Lord refers. As I said earlier, any assistance which the Church leaders can give in persuading the hunger strikers to abandon a course which is suicidal to them and difficult for many other people would be very welcome.

Consolidated Fund Bill
Brought from the Commons, endorsed with the Certificate from the Speaker that the Bill is a Money Bill within the meaning of the Parliament Act 1911; read 1a.
Lord Denham: My Lords, on behalf of my noble friend the Leader of the House, I beg to move the Motion standing in his name on the Order Paper.
Moved, That Standing Order No. 43 (No two stages of a Bill to be taken on one day) be dispensed with for the purpose of taking the Consolidated Fund Bill through all its stages this day.—(Lord Denham.)
On Question, Motion agreed to.
Then, Standing Order No. 43 having been dispensed with (pursuant to the above Resolution), Bill read 2a; Committee negatived; Bill read 3a, and passed.

Supreme Court Bill [H.L.]
The Lord Chancellor (Lord Hailsham of Saint Marylebone]: My Lords, I rise to move the Second Reading of this important Bill and I notice that an array of legal talent from the Cross-Benches, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Elwyn-Jones, and, I believe, the noble Lord, Lord Foot, are about to illumine our discussions. At first sight, this Bill is of portentous length. It is 114 pages long; it has nearly 150 clauses and it has seven schedules. I hasten to reassure the House. The primary purpose of this Bill is consolidation. It is not, of course, capable of taking its place as a normal consolidation Bill. Even where it is a restatement of the law—and most of it is—it is to a substantial extent a restatement, like history, in words different from the original; and in any event the amendments, although, I hope, not controversial and certainly, I hope, not controversial in any political sense, are too numerous and too substantial for it to be treated as a consolidation Bill.
May I begin by reminding the House of what members of the legal profession must already know: that the Supreme Court from which the Bill takes its title dates from the 1870s, when the Supreme Court of Judicature Act 1873—a product, may I say, of a Conservative Government—amalgamated the Common Law Courts of Queen's Bench, Common Pleas and Exchequer with the Court of Chancery, and the Courts of Probate, Divorce and Admiralty at Doctors' Commons, and created a new Court of Appeal out of the old Court of Exchequer Chamber.
Our Supreme Court is not a Supreme Court in the American sense; that is to say, it is not, as such, a constitutional court. It is a general-purpose court operating at two levels, the Court of Appeal and the High Court of Justice. It is called "Supreme"; but, like many other British institutions, it is not what it

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seems because it is not supreme. It is called "Supreme" because it was originally intended (and the Act was originally drafted) to abolish the appellate jurisdiction of the House of Lords. Before it came into force, it was amended by Mr. Gladstone—not for the first time, a Liberal Government moving in the reverse direction, backwards, from a Conservative Government. On this occasion, as on some others, it was perfectly right because it restored the appellate jurisdiction of the House of Lords and complemented itself in 1876 by the Appellate Jurisdiction Act of that year which continues your Lordships' appellate jurisdiction and, for the first time, created the Law Lords, thus creating a really supreme court in this House applicable to all parts of the United Kingdom as it then was, ensuring a degree of homogeneity where the wording of statute or the local jurisprudence was the same and rendering homogeneity possible.
The last consolidating measure, as these Acts came to be amended—and they have been amended on numerous occasions—was the Supreme Court of Judicature (Consolidation) Act 1925, under whose relatively beneficent sway I have passed the whole of my professional life. But since this was a consolidation, we are, in substance, still living in our old Victorian mansions of 1873 and 1875. Much of the language is now outdated and some of the original provisions are now unnecessary. This Bill is largely a practitioners' Bill and, as such, it is, I hope, a very useful and important piece of practitioners' work for Parliament to undertake.
The need to restate the law in a series of coherent and contemporary propositions is, I should have thought, incontestable. That is the primary purpose of this Bill. In addition there are, as I shall be going on to say, a number of important amendments. In 1925—and I must go on with my historical survey in order to make my meaning plain—the old Court of Criminal Appeal was abolished and was institutionalised as part of the Supreme Court by the creation of the Court of Appeal, Criminal Division. The post of Vice-Chancellor establishes the fact, long since recognised in practice, that although in actual fact it is the Lord Chancellor who is the nominal president of the Chancery Division, he never sits at first instance in the division of the High Court of which he is nominally the head; the last occasion when he sat at first instance was in the Divorce Court in 1921 when the late Lord Birkenhead sat to teach judges how to get rid of uncontested divorces in a hitherto record time.
Going on with my story, the Probate, Divorce and Admiralty Division was dissolved during my first term of office as Chancellor and, at the same time, a commercial court was created within the Queen's Bench Division and the new Family Division, based on the old divorce jurisdiction, took over part of the family work practised in the Queen's Bench and Chancery Divisions. More important still, by the Courts Act 1971 the Crown Court was added to the structure and took over the combined work of the assizes and quarter sessions.
Perhaps I should say in parenthesis that the number of judges has enormously increased in recent years to deal with the huge increase both in the number and in the length and complexity of cases, and the whole
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structure of their remuneration, pensions and retirement has been elaborated. Incidentally, I should also say that this Bill does make a number of transitional and consequential amendments to the new Judicial Pensions Bill which I introduced the other day. That is contrary to what I told the noble and learned Lord, Lord Elwyn-Jones, on that occasion. The details are unimportant for the present purpose. I have ensured that the noble and learned Lord shall have them in extenso and be made aware of their nature and extent.
From the Bill which I am now introducing there have been deliberate exclusions. These are referred to in the second paragraph of the Explanatory and Financial Memorandum, some because they form a separate code, as do the provisions relating to funds in court in Part I of the Administration of Justice Act 1965 and the provisions in the Criminal Appeal Act 1968 relating to criminal appeals; some because they relate to the appellate jurisdiction of your Lordships' House as in the case of Part II of the Administration of Justice Act 1969, which provides for "leapfrogging" appeals—as the procedure is now called—from the High Court to the House of Lords where it is desired to challenge or systematise an existing ruling in the Court of Appeal.
I now come to the main classes of change brought about by the Bill. The first group relates to the jurisdiction of the Court of Appeal. The object of these is to give greater expedition in the disposal of business, which is becoming a serious problem in the administration of our courts. Clause 54(4)(d) permits the Lord Chancellor, with the concurrence of the noble and learned Lord the Master of the Rolls to prescribe classes of civil appeal which can be heard by a court of two judges in place of the customary three. The need for this arises from the inexorable pressure of work in the civil division of the Court of Appeal where the average waiting time is now between eight and nine months, which personally I find quite impossible. Subsection (11) retains parliamentary control of the use of this power. The types of appeal involved might in the first instance include certain county court cases.
By paragraph 8 of Schedule 3, certain classes of appeal from county courts may be prescribed for which leave to appeal is required either from the county court judge or the Court of Appeal. There are such limits at the moment. The present limit is £20 in Section 108 of the County Courts Act, which dates from the 19th century and is plainly absurd. Even when my father was practising at the Bar there was a certain county court judge who, when he knew he was wrong, always said: "Mr. Hogg, it is less than £20" meaning that he would not give leave to appeal. Again, parliamentary control is retained in the new power.
Paragraph 9 of Part II of the second schedule creates an important new officer, the registrar of civil appeals. At present the Court of Appeal has no staff of its own, except the clerks to the Master of the Rolls and the individual Lords Justices. Nor does it have any judicial officer, apart from the Master of the Rolls and the Lords Justices themselves, who can deal with interlocutory questions and see that cases are properly prepared for presentation and made ready for the court to hear. The three divisions of the High Court all find it necessary to have judicial officers to deal with

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interlocutory matters. In addition, the criminal division of the Court of Appeal finds it essential to have appellate cases properly prepared and in this the criminal division is well served by the registrar of criminal appeals and his staff. The new arrangement for the civil division will relieve the Lords Justices of work which does not require to be dealt with by them and should therefore make a great contribution towards expediting civil appeals.
Clause 55 deals with criminal appeals. Appeals against conviction will continue to be heard before a court of not less than three judges. Appeals against sentence only may be dealt with by a court of two, with the proviso if these do not agree that the case will be re-argued before a court of not less than three. The reason is that the delays here too are intolerable. These are unpleasant figures, but I shall give them. For appeals against sentence the average delay is 20 weeks—nearly six months; appeals against conviction must wait, on the average, 40 weeks—that is, the best part of a year. In the past year, we have reduced by a third the element of the delay due to the difficulty in obtaining a transcript, which was a very serious matter before we started to work on it, and remains so. The purpose of the provisions is to reduce the other element of delay due to the difficulty of finding judicial time without abandoning the requirement of a three-judge court where the appeal is against conviction. The safeguard is the provision for re-arguing the case of appeals against sentence where the two Lords Justices do not agree.
From the Court of Appeal I turn to the High Court, and in the High Court to the senior division of which, for historical reasons, the Lord Chancellor is the titular president. The actual headship of the division is in practice carried on from day to day by the Vice-Chancellor, at present Sir Robert Megarry, and it is time that he was recognised as a head of division. In future, his will be a royal appointment and he will be an ex officio judge of the Court of Appeal. There will be a corresponding reduction in the maximum number of puisne judges permitted without Order in Council.
Clause 31 institutionalises in the Act the recently introduced provisions of Order 53 of the Rules of the Supreme Court by which the old remedies of mandamus prohibition and certiorari were modernised and supplemented under the rubric of "applications for judicial review". These are important provisions and it was thought proper to include reference to them in the new primary legislation. I am sure that that is right.
The Admiralty Jurisdiction of the High Court to commence proceedings in rem (which means proceedings against the ship itself) is now extended up to the limits provided by the Brussels Arrest Convention: Clause 21. The new remedy is by way of the so-called "Mareva" injunction, which I think I ought to explain. It means an injunction preventing the removal of assets outside the kingdom. That was previously the result of successive judicial decisions but is now stabilised by Clause 37(3) and will apply, as the Master of the Rolls has recently decided, to parties whether based inside or outside the jurisdiction. This was prefigured in the "Siskina" case—a case in which I sat judicially—and has subsequently been decided by the Master of the Rolls.
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Clause 49 restates in more economical fashion the fusion of equity and law with the predominance of equity which was originally contained in nine successive sections of the old Judicature Acts. Part IV of the Act and Schedule 2 open the appointments of master and registrar to both branches of the legal profession and drop the requirement that they must be practising at the time. This will increase the field of recruitment in two very exacting classes of office, and I am sure that it is a liberalising measure.
Clause 140 amends the Mental Health Act 1959 so as to make changes in the constitution and functions of the Lord Chancellor's Visitors. In place of the existing medical visitors, who hold full-time posts, and the part-time legal visitor, provision is made for panels of medical visitors, legal visitors, and general visitors who will be available to be called in to make visits as required either under standing directions or, in particular cases, on the order of the judge. General visitors will be able to carry out visits as required in cases where a visit by a medical practitioner or a lawyer does not appear for the time being to be necessary. The clause provides for the present offices of visitor to cease, but that will not sever the important link which exists between the psychiatric profession and this important jurisdiction over the affairs of mental patients. I should like at this stage to pay a justified tribute to the many eminent medical men who have given their services to the Court of Protection and have assisted it by their wise advice to exercise its jurisdiction.
It has been rather a difficult task for me to know exactly what to include and what to omit in a Second Reading speech on a Bill of this gargantuan size which is, as to nine-tenths, I suppose, a consolidation measure. I have tried to balance the balance-sheet as conscientiously as possible. If I err I must apologise to the House. Basically, this is a practitioners' Bill but I hope it will help to reduce delays substantially as a result of its passing—and I hope it will pass—and in that case it will help in the administration of justice generally. I do not pretend it is a revolutionary Bill. I do not think it will lead to the Lord Chancellor being burned in effigy or to demonstrations outside the Royal Courts of Justice. I believe it is a valuable piece of ongoing legal reform and I should like to pay tribute to my immediate predecessor, who I think laid the foundations of this very substantial but, I hope, not very controversial edifice. As such, I commend the Bill to the House and now beg to move that it be read a second time.
Moved, That the Bill be now read 2a.—(The Lord Chancellor.)
12.12 p.m.
Lord Elwyn-Jones: My Lords, I am sure your Lordships will be grateful to the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor for steering us through as much as he thought could reasonably be digested within the space of time available. The Bill has its origins in discussions over a great many years, and I find myself, as did the noble and learned Lord, greatly reassured by the presence in your Lordships' House of eminent legal colleagues. I see that two noble and learned Lords are to speak. We particularly look forward to the maiden speech of the noble and learned

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Lord, Lord Roskill. We have had the pleasure of hearing the noble and learned Lord, Lord Scarman, many times in the past and I hope that we shall have continuing treats in the future.
There is one matter by way of slight complaint. I understand there has been very little discussion and notification to the Law Society about the contents of the Bill, and whereas frequently the information that one is given from that source is most helpful when one is in Opposition and even occasionally when one is in office, if I may say so, that has been denied to me on this occasion. I hope it does not mean that there has been inadequate consultation with the legal profession, both the Law Society and the Bar, about this Bill.
Principally, as the noble and learned Lord has said, this is a consolidating measure. I make no complaint about the exclusions from the consolidation process which the noble and learned Lord has referred to. Part I of the Bill highlights what the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor mentioned—namely, the very large increase in the size of the judiciary in recent years, occasioned principally by the increase in crime and the maintenance of the volume of work also in the civil field. One wonders whether the difficulties with which these developments have confronted the Lord Chancellor have not been somewhat added to by the fact that we are still largely applying civil and criminal procedures meant for a more leisurely time when there were fewer cases and less need to avoid unacceptable delays.
As the noble and learned Lord has said, our civil procedure has remained substantially unchanged since the middle of the reign of Queen Victoria, and, in view of the appalling pressure of work in our courts on the criminal and social side, one wonders whether there is not now a case for inquiry into the possible reorganisation of our civil courts structure—an inquiry which might explore the possible need for an integrated system comprising both the High Court and the county court. I know that any suggestion of yet another inquiry into the courts and the administration of justice is greeted with a sigh, particularly in the Lord Chancellor's Office, and I understand that, because of the pressures on that staff, my suggestion will not be greeted with any enthusiasm. I am bound to say that I considered it myself, but there it lay! But it is something which may well be expected of us, and I think is expected of us by the legal profession.
I venture to fear that there will be some disappointment, in particular about the very limited contribution this Bill will make to dealing with the appalling difficulties which have been increasingly affecting the civil side of the Court of Appeal. Before March 1979 there were 12 Lords Justices sitting in the Court of Appeal. At that time I believe that the average period between the setting down and the hearing of an appeal was about four months. This year, in view of additional appointments that have been made, there are 18 Lords Justices, supplemented by the recall of one or more retired Lords Justices or judges from time to time. Yet the average time for an appeal to come on now, unless it is specially expedited, is at least twice as long as it was only about a year and a half ago. If that is right, and I fear it is, then whereas there has been a 50 per cent. increase in the
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number of judges, there has been a far greater percentage increase in the time taken for an appeal to be heard. My understanding is that the backlog of appeals is increasing.
The stresses that result on the members of the Court of Appeal are probably greater now than ever before. When one discusses these matters with a distinguished visitor like the Chief Justice of the United States, he is appalled, as are many visitors, by the pressures that are brought to bear upon our Lords Justices, and they express admiration for the skill with which, in a very limited space of time, they give ad lib judgments on complex matters and are subjected—as I think all of us who have anything to do with them and the work of the court know—to these great strains. Whether it is fair to expect that to continue, and whether we are not running the risk of the situation becoming even worse, are serious questions indeed. What troubles me, and I have no doubt troubles also the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor is: What steps can be taken to cope with this flood of work into the Court of Appeal?
My colleague, and a colleague of many of the lawyers here, Sir John Megaw—a recently retired Lord Justice in the Court of Appeal—has, along with others, for some time urged three possible remedies to cope with the flood: first, a reduction in the number of appeals that come forward by legislative action—a more stringent winnowing of the right of appeal; secondly, a drastic procedural overhaul; and, thirdly, an increase in the number of Lords Justices. As to the latter, I am very well aware of what that involves. First, it is not simply a question of appointing more Lords Justices, but of finding court room accommodation for them and ancillary staff. There is also, of course, the question of expense and one has to take great care that there is no dilution of the high standards of the appellate court. Those are all factors which bear heavily upon the Lord Chancellor when that remedy is suggested. So that would, I think, be generally regarded as a last resort measure.
What, however, about procedural overhaul in the Court of Appeal? If I may say so, the civil division of the Court of Appeal has not been exactly famous for willingness to undergo procedural and administrative changes, and we have in this Bill some valuable suggestions which could result in expedition and which will cut some, at any rate, of the corners. I had the privilege of reading the report of a working party presided over by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Scarman. I am not sure whether or not it was reported to me, but, at any rate, the report came out in December 1978. I believe I was privileged to see it. I am not absolutely certain about that, but I think I probably was. These arcane discussions very often go on out-with the eye and ear even of the Lord Chancellor. However, I do not complain—much—about that.
But paragraph 21 of that report said:
"We are convinced that the basic reform required is the appointment of a senior lawyer enjoying master status and having control, judicially and administratively, of the process between setting down and hearing",
and the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor has identified that that is done in this Bill. It needs a microscope to find out how it is done. The provision is buried in the entrails of a detailed schedule—

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Schedule 2, Part II, item 9—where there is provision for the appointment of a registrar of civil appeals; and I congratulate the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor on having achieved the position of being able to include that provision in the Bill.
However, a number of further matters now arise in relation to that new officer. Presumably, it is hoped that he will be of as high calibre as the registrar of criminal appeals, to whom the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor has already paid tribute. I assume, also, that he will be supplied with an efficient and qualified staff. If I may say so—and I hope I say this without impertinence—it is very important that he should have the full backing of those involved in running the Court of Appeal. To what extent the Rule Committee will be involved in changes necessary to give effect to this new set-up, perhaps we shall learn in due course.
As to tile flow of appeals, the difficult question arises: should anything be done statutorily to provide for its reduction? I do not find it an easy question to answer. We have rightly regarded the provision of a right of appeal from first instance decisions by trial judges as of great importance, and statutory interference with that right is not to be undertaken without great care. It is clearly right that a decision of a lower court should be received by a higher court, so that errors of facts or of law by the lower court can be put right. However, it would be interesting to know what attempt has been made to analyse the workload of the Court of Appeal on the civil side, and to learn whether any proper screening now takes place of cases suitable for appeal or, indeed, any screening of substance.
So far as the provisions of the Bill are concerned, it would seem that appeals from courts other than county courts are to be subject to the old provisions of the 1925 Supreme Court of Judicature (Consolidation) Act. I think that that is the effect of Clause 18 of the Bill. The main problem, I suppose, lies in appeals from county courts. Clause 143 of the Bill, by the operation of Schedule 3, gives the Lord Chancellor power by order, subject to a negative resolution of either House, to prescribe classes of proceedings in which there is to be no right of appeal under the section without the leave either of the judge of the county court or of the Court of Appeal itself.
Subsection (3) of Section 108 on page 93 of the Bill goes on to specify a number of possible criteria, on some or all of which the Lord Chancellor might reflect, if and when he makes an order under the subsection. They include, I observe, in paragraph (b):
"the amount or value of the money or other property which is the subject of"
the proceedings. Does that provision at Section 108(3)(b) mean that a new means test may be in contemplation? One wonders whether the financial value of a claim, either in theory or in practice, is an acceptable criterion for distinguishing between cases where appeals may be brought as of right, or only with leave given. One asks: does this not appear to involve one law for the rich and one for the poor?
Then I ask: what criteria are to apply if the requirement of leave to appeal is going to be introduced for some or all categories of appeals from the county courts? As the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor has said, the present screening process in
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the existing Sections 108 and 109 of the 1959 Act is generally regarded as practically useless and ineffective, and I suspect that there will be little sorrow at the disappearance of those sections. But the schedule, and indeed the Bill, do not make it clear what is to take their place and perhaps, if not today—I do not want to burden the noble and learned Lord with having to answer these questions, of which I regret I had no opportunity to give him notice, having applied what I am pleased to call my mind to the matter rather late in the day—we may learn more in the course of the progress of the Bill through Parliament.
There is a large number of other matters with which we shall have to deal in Committee. When I was in another place I remember that this kind of Bill was dismissed contemptuously as "mere lawyers' law", but lawyers' law goes to the root of the rights and liberties of the subject in very important respects. If the situation is to exist of increasing delay at the appellate stage in particular, and if the rights and claims and proper requirements of the subject from the courts are going to be further worsened by our ancient procedures, it is high time that something was done to remedy that situation.
12.30 p.m.
Lord Roskill: My Lords, anybody who has had, as I am old-fashioned enough to believe, the good fortune to spend his working life in the law, either as a practitioner or as a judge, must welcome any new Bill affecting the work of the Supreme Court. As the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor has said, the present Bill is mainly a consolidating Bill. Therefore the limits of reform which can be effected within its scope are marked, but the opportunity is rightly being taken to effect some improvements. I respectfully agree with the noble and learned Lord, Lord Elwyn-Jones, that there are many more which might be effected in the administration of justice in that Court.
With your Lordships' leave, may I concentrate for a few minutes this morning upon one part only of the Bill: that upon which the noble and learned Lord, Lord Elwyn-Jones, has also concentrated, namely, the work of the Court of Appeal. Before I had the privilege earlier this year of becoming a Member of your Lordships' House as a Lord of Appeal in Ordinary, I had been a Lord Justice of Appeal for some 8½ years. That court, in both its civil and its criminal jurisdiction, though this is not widely realised, is the pivot of our judicial system. The vast majority of cases, civil or criminal, stop there. If I may venture to paraphrase and adapt a famous phrase uttered in another place, curiously enough exactly 200 years ago, by James Dunning who, as Lord Ashburton, became Master of the Rolls at the beginning of the last century, the work of the Court of Appeal has increased, is increasing and ought to be diminished. Some years ago a newly appointed Lord Justice gloomily remarked that until he had become a member of the Court of Appeal he had wrongly thought that slavery had been abolished. Another remark was that what the Lords Justices needed was a good trade union and a vocal shop steward.
When many of us started in the law, the Court of Appeal consisted only of the Master of the Rolls and

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five Lords Justices. The court then did only civil work and it sat only in two divisions. In 1968, as the Lord Chancellor has said, the criminal division was added. When I left the Court of Appeal early this year it was sitting in six civil divisions and three criminal divisions. The work load is intolerable: seven days a week, 14 hours a day. And many of those hours are what, in the current industrial field, are called wholly unsocial hours, which lead to great strain upon the members of the Court of Appeal, with sometimes—it has happened once this year already—disastrous results to their health and anxiety to their wives and families.
The work of the Court of Appeal does not consist just of a few cases in one division of that court which seem to attract the attention of the media. It consists of a vast number of cases spread over the various divisions of the court which receive no publicity at all. We seem today to live in a society which demands rights and seeks to impose rather than accept obligations. We have a legal aid scheme, of which we are justly proud. We have a horrifying crime wave of the most disturbing proportions. And what is the result? A huge increase in appellate work, both civil and criminal, with which we are seeking to deal with a judicial machine which, as the noble and learned Lords have pointed out, was structurally created, on its civil side, over 100 years ago, and reformed, albeit not wholly satisfactorily as some of us think, in 1968 and 1971 on the criminal side.
I have ventured to scan this massive Bill to see where I can find provisions designed to meet the situation, and I confess that, like the noble and learned Lord, Lord Elwyn-Jones, I have been somewhat disappointed. To my mind, the road to a solution lies along two routes. The first is to restrict the right of appeal in certain classes of case, however reluctant any appellate judge may be to see that happen. The second is to enable maximum use to be made of the available judicial manpower, for a further increase in appellate judicial manpower is, I respectfully suggest, at this time almost unthinkable at Court of Appeal level.
As to the first, I was a little alarmed to see that the new Clause 18 not only repeats in relation to appeals from the High Court the old Section 31 of the 1925 Act dealing with interlocutory appeals but in one respect at least enlarges the right of appeal. That is a step, as I think, in the wrong direction. It also preserves the wholly unsatisfactory and illogical distinction which no appellate judge in my experience has ever been able to define: the difference between a final and an interlocutory appeal. And so does Clause 54 of the Bill. With respect, this is not enough in High Court cases. An unrestricted right of appeal, whether from the High Court or the county court, allows far too much opportunity for what judges call "playing the system", by which we mean avoiding the inevitable by endless appeals and then delaying the hearing of such appeals by every trick or tactic that is possible—and by some that one might have thought were impossible.
I am glad to see that the powers proposed in Schedule 3 in relation to county court appeals have been brought forward, but I venture to doubt—here I share the view which was expressed by my noble and
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learned friend Lord Elwyn-Jones—whether the financial test is the right one. I think we have to look at this very closely. Money is not necessarily the right test to see whether or not there should be an appeal. It should be dealt with much more by class of case. And one must never restrict the right of appeal where children are involved, or injunctions, or questions of personal liberty.
As the noble and learned Lord, Lord Elwyn-Jones, has said, a few years ago he appointed a working party under the noble and learned Lord, Lord Scarman, who had just then left the Court of Appeal. I understand that the noble and learned Lord will be taking part in the debate, and I do not therefore wish to anticipate what he will say. But, like the noble and learned Lord, Lord Elwyn-Jones, I ask: what has happened to the report of that working party? I saw it at the time, though I think I have lost my copy or it since I became a Member of your Lordships' House. I hope the noble and learned Lord will forgive me if I say that it is not all the members of the Court of Appeal who have been opposing reforms in procedure. Many of us have been pressing for them for years and years, as long as we have been there, and have not always found the support in the right quarter which we might have hoped to get.
We find that there is provision now for a Registrar of Civil Appeals. That will be a great step forward, and I hope it can be implemented as soon as possible. This is an opportunity to pay a tribute to the work of the official who has been mentioned by both the noble and learned Lords, the Lord Chancellor and Lord Elwyn-Jones: Master Thompson, the Registrar of Criminal Appeals. Having presided for nearly eight years in one of the divisions of the Criminal Division, I know full well that that division simply could not operate but for the devotion of Master Thompson and his staff. I hope that the Lord Chancellor's Office will be able to find someone of his calibre, and find him as soon as possible, in order that work of the Civil Division of the Court of Appeal may come through a similar sieve.
I also notice the provisions on the use of judicial manpower. Obviously it is absurd that interlocutory appeals, whatever precisely they may be, from the High Court can be dealt with by two judges, yet final appeals from the county court require three. At the moment, the Appellate Committee of your Lordships' House have under consideration a very important and very difficult so-called interlocutory appeal which would have merited perhaps five Lords Justices to consider it, but we have the advantage of considering the views of only two members of that court.
I particularly welcome the provision that applications for leave may be dealt with by a single member of the court. To me, at least, it is not clear whether the provision is that that single Lord Justice shall sit in private and deal with the applications on paper, as happens with criminal appeals, but I earnestly hope that that will be so and made plain. It is also not clear to me whether or not his decision is open to review. I hope it will not be, but if it be, then I hope the power to review will be strictly circumscribed, otherwise the last state will be worse than the first.
The provision for two judges to deal with sentence appeals is long overdue. The noble and learned Lord,

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the Lord Chancellor, gave figures for the delay in criminal appeals—20 weeks, if I heard him correctly, for conviction, 40 weeks for sentence. At the beginning of this term I went back to help out in the Criminal Division for a week. No doubt those figures are average figures, but I can only say, not having sat in that court for the preceding eight or nine months, that I was appalled at how much those delays had increased meanwhile. I found myself dealing with sentence appeals where the sentences had been of the order of two years or 18 months, where, on any view, the prisoner was going to remain inside only for a matter of weeks. For humanitarian reasons, we found ourselves releasing prisoners because no useful purpose could possibly be served by keeping them in for those remaining times. I am sure that the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chief Justice will welcome this provision. This is perhaps the most constructive use of the judicial manpower, because it will enable those appeals which have merit to be sorted out from those—of which I am afraid there are a great many in criminal appeals—which have none.
If I may say so, this Bill is along the right lines, but it does not go far enough. Let it go forward, but let it be improved in its passage through Parliament, for it is still susceptible of improvement. I realise how much work has gone into this Bill on the part of the hardworking officials of the Lord Chancellor's Department, and I hope that nothing I have said by way of criticism will be thought to detract from my admiration of the enormous amount of work which has gone into the Bill.
12.42 p.m.
Lord Scarman: My Lords, I count myself fortunate to be the first Member of your Lordships' House to be in a position to congratulate the noble and learned Lord, Lord Roskill, on his powerful and, if he will allow me to say so of him, very characteristic maiden speech. I have known the noble and learned Lord, Lord Roskill, for far longer than I care to enumerate. I used to hear him as an advocate on the other side; I never then agreed with a single word he said. I heard him on the Bench; when he agreed with me, I agreed with him, but not otherwise. But in your Lordships' House, so persuasive has he shown himself in his first speech that I know I shall always agree with him or else beat a hasty retreat to the corridors and say nothing. I know that I shall be voicing the views and sentiments of the House if I say that all of us look forward to hearing my noble and learned friend again and again and again in the debates and business of the House.
My Lords, despite its length and its formidable appearance, this is a modest Bill. I completely agree with the noble and learned Lord, Lord Elwyn-Jones, that this Bill is no substitute—and it does not pretend to be a substitute—for the sort of far-reaching reform of our court structure and court procedures which many of us have thought is overdue. Unfortunately the Law Commission has never succeeded in taking on that review, and obviously in the hard-pressed times in which we live it is very unlikely that any such review will be initiated in the next few years. Nevertheless, I completely agree with the noble and learned Lord, Lord Elwyn-Jones, that sooner or later such a
1222
review of our court structure and procedures will have to be undertaken. Meanwhile, let us rejoice at the hard work of the legal staff of the Lord Chancellor's Department and indeed other branches of Government, under the guidance, first, of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Elwyn-Jones, and now under the guidance of the noble and learned Lord on the Woolsack. Let us rejoice that they have been watching the work of the courts attentively, cataloguing the various points that arise in the day-to-day work of the courts, so that they could come up with this large but modest Bill.
In so far as it is a consolidation of the various reforming Statutes affecting the Supreme Court, it is to be welcomed, making the law accessible in a modern statute. In so far as it consists of amendments to the law it contains a number of reforms, most of them minor but all of them designed to improve the efficiency of our courts and the quality of justice administered in them. I think one could say with confidence and without going into detail that, viewed on that modest scale, this is a Bill to be welcomed.
We have heard a good deal of discussion on one aspect only of the Bill; that is to say, the way in which it proposes a number of reforms in the working procedures and business of the Court of Appeal. I will also say a word or two about that. As the noble and learned Lord, Lord Roskill, said, the work load on the Lords Justices is intolerable. It is absurd that a court of the pivotal importance as described by the noble and learned Lord should have to sit for five working days in the week; that they should have to write their reserved judgments at home over the weekends, to the intense annoyance, no doubt, of their wives; that they should have to find either some hours late at night or some hours early in the morning to read their papers for the next day's work. If you tell these sobering facts to a visiting American judge he will not believe you. You then take him to the Court of Appeal and he begins to see what you mean.
The working party over which I had the honour to preside and which reported in December 1978, on the working procedures of the Court of Appeal, recommended that the business should be so organised that Lords Justices should have one working day not in court but in their Chambers, so that they could prepare for cases that were coming on and write judgments that were reserved. If—and I know it is a big "if"—the business of the court could be so organised, the quality of justice, which is high in all conscience at the moment in that court, would be higher still.
It was with that largely in mind, although we had other considerations as well, that we recommended in the report of the working party that a master—a Court of Appeal master—should be appointed. We had in mind someone like a master of the High Court who could exercise judicial as well as administrative functions, could take off some of the preparatory decisions that need to be made if appeals are going to be brought on swiftly and if, when they do reach court, they are in a state to be properly argued on both sides with expedition.
This Bill has gone some way, not all the way but some way, towards meeting that requirement. The parliamentary draftsman has tucked away this major reform which the Bill does contain so far as the Court

1223
of Appeal is concerned in Item 9 of Part II of Schedule 2. It is introduced into our law by this astonishing piece of draftsmanship for a piece of law reform. I quote Clause 87(1):
"The power to make appointments to the offices in the Supreme Court listed in column 1 of Parts II and III of Schedule 2 shall be exercisable by the Lord Chancellor, with the concurrence of the Minister for the Civil Service as to numbers and salaries".
Parliamentary draftsmen move in a mysterious way their wonders to perform. Beneath those bland and Civil Service words lurks Schedule 2. In Schedule 2 there is Part II and in Part II of Schedule 2 there is item 9. And what is item 9? Item 9 is merely this: "Registrar of civil appeals"—no indication as to his functions, no indication as to the sort of work that it is hoped he will carry out. Nevertheless, let us be grateful that he is there; let us be grateful that the Bill in this mysterious way has worked its wonder.
I agree with the noble and learned Lord, Lord Roskill, that if a man of suitable calibre is appointed—and there is some assurance that he will be because he is to be a barrister or solicitor of a large number of years' standing—then we shall really begin to see a transformation in the business of the Court of Appeal, that should enable it to tackle more rapidly the workload and at the same time assist Lords Justices in the quality of their judgment, without the necessity, and this is very important, of increasing the numbers of Lords Justices. Because, my Lords, our system of justice has always depended upon High Court and Court of Appeal judges of limited numbers and high quality. There comes a point when if you increase the numbers you are bound to depress the quality. Every reform of the law, every reform of procedure, that we can take to enable the work of the Supreme Court to be done by a comparatively small number of highly qualified judges is bound to redound to the credit and quality of our law. Therefore, I welcome this Part of the Bill, strange though the drafting is.
There are many other reforms in the Bill which we have not discussed and which I do not think need discussion at this stage but which are to be welcomed. My Lords, this Bill is a step forward and I hope it will be accepted as such by the profession and by the public. I am not sure about the degree of consultation that has gone into the preparation of the Bill; therefore I can say nothing about that side. All I can tell your Lordships is that as far as the Court of Appeal proposals are concerned, made by my working party, that working party consisted of judges and representatives of both branches of the legal profession. My Lords, for those reasons I welcome this Bill, and indeed for many others, and, like the noble Lords who have preceded me, I congratulate those whose labours have made this large but modest Bill possible.
12.56 p.m.
Lord Wilberforce: My Lords, would your Lordships allow me to make a few observations on the Bill before the noble and learned Lord comes to reply? I do apologise for not having put my name down to speak and for not having been present during the opening speeches. The reason is that I and others of their Lordships were engaged in urgent judicial business
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which required our attention. May I just take the opportunity of saying, in view of a criticism which was made on a television series the other day, that Lords of Appeal do take their legislative responsibilities in this House very seriously. It is not always possible for them to be present. We have pressing on us a very great degree of business to which we have to give priority in the interests of litigants, but whenever possible, as I think your Lordships will agree, we do try to give the benefit of such experience as we have to legislative debates.
That having been said, I want to make only a very few points, conscious very much that I did not have the advantage of hearing the presentation of the Bill by the noble and learned Lord on the Woolsack. It is very difficult on a Bill of this sort, which contains so much detail, to make a proper Second Reading speech; the points are really almost all Committee points which will have to be taken up later. I should like to draw attention to some which I would suggest will require attention. First of all—and this enables me to join my noble and learned friend in congratulating the noble and learned Lord, Lord Roskill, on his admirable maiden speech—there is the very important question which he raised of the organisation of the Court of Appeal. Everybody must join in great concern as to that subject. Of course, the difficulty arises from the fact that we have this single concentrated centralised Court of Appeal. No other country of comparable size has such a thing. In the United States they have circuit courts of appeal all over the country. In France they have a large number of separate courts of appeal; in Germany it is the same. We have a centralised court, and so long as we wish to maintain that, as I think we do, we have an immense responsibility to improve its organisation. I do not want to say any more, because my noble and learned friend covered that subject, but I did want to endorse very heartily what he said.
Now, a few individual points. First of all, I very much welcome the change which the Bill has made in the status of the Vice-Chancellor. I think that that is very largely overdue. Speaking, as perhaps I may, as a former judge of the Chancery Division, I do very much welcome the recognition which this gives to the head of the Chancery Division as one who deserves status comparable with that of the other heads of Divisions.
Then there are three other points which I notice in the Bill. First, there is Clause 31, dealing with the subject of judicial review. That is a subject of immense importance to the law as a whole, and which has developed very greatly over the last few years. I must express a little reservation as to the insertion of these provisions in this Bill. In the introductory note on page 2 it is said that these provisions, at present contained in an order of the Supreme Court, are,
"in view of their importance, now set out in clause 31".
I venture to doubt the validity of that reasoning. I shall not develop the point now. It does seem to me doubtful whether it is right to take what was essentially a procedural reform, which is what it was, and now to cast it in the concrete mould of a substantive statement in this Bill. That is something we shall have to discuss. I just venture to suggest that it does deserve reflection before Committee stage.

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Secondly, there are two provisions about injunctions to which the same observations apply. I welcome, of course, the attention which those who drafted this Bill have given to developments in the law. It shows that they are following these developments with sympathy, and I am glad that they do. But again I feel some doubt whether it is wise at this stage to bring in to this Bill and to crystalise such matters as Mareva injunctions and what are called Anton Piller orders. These are matters under development by the courts. The subject of Mareva injunctions has not been considered yet by this House in its judicial capacity, but will shortly be so considered. I just want to raise a doubt which perhaps may be raised at a later stage—namely, whether it is wise at this stage when these remedies are in the course of judicial development, to put them into a Bill which necessarily then freezes them in a certain form. Those and other matters will have to be discussed in detail and I do not wish to say more about them now.
However, I should like to say something about one matter which is not dealt with in the Bill but which is of absolutely major importance. When I say that it is not dealt with in the Bill, I mean that it is not dealt with in a positive form. When I am asked, as one is very often in university circles or on public platforms, what is the most important matter of law reform at present, I always give the same answer: first, second and third it is the costs of proceedings.
It is absolutely vital to the survival of our system as we know it that something should be done as regards the costs of legal procedures. One can see every day in criminal trials the immense costs of those cases. One can see it in civil cases. There are some people called the Moonies—I do not know what they are, what they believe in or what they do—who have a libel action which may or may not be justified and they are being called upon at the trial of this libel action to provide security for costs in the incredible sum of £135,000. That is the type of thing that is happening every day. Whenever one looks at the actual figures for a civil case one is absolutely horrified at the level they have reached.
I do not believe, of course, that in this Bill we can produce a cure-all. I notice that in Clause 51 there is a provision which of course reflects the existing law, that costs shall be in the discretion of the court. I venture to raise the doubt whether that is good enough in these days. I wonder whether it is possible to go on with our costs, with our system of civil justice or our system of criminal justice if one does not give the courts powers and impose on them the duty to limit costs in a way much more severe than they can at present. At any rate, there is this provision which still leaves the door wide open to these incredible costs which are absolutely destroying the possibility of the ordinary man, even with legal aid, getting justice.
I do not wish to say any more about the Bill, except to give it the general welcome which other of my noble and learned friends have done. A great deal of work has gone into it. I assure the House that my noble and learned friends and myself will do all that we can in the Committee stage to suggest modest improvements.
1.3 p.m.
The Lord Chancellor: My Lords, I do not think that
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anybody, certainly no Lord Chancellor, could complain of the reception which this very technical Bill has received. I should like to add—and to add briefly, because there are only two or three points that I wish to take up—my congratulations to the maiden speaker, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Roskill, whom we welcomed into our midst only recently from his long and distinguished experience as a judge of first instance and then as a judge in the Court of Appeal.
May I in that connection, and generally, re-echo what was said by my noble and learned friend, Lord Wilberforce, from the Cross-Benches at the commencement of the last speech to which we listened, and that there are people who doubt the value of the House of Lords as a legislative Chamber. I think that it really must be said—and he said it in a rather different way, but I shall say it as a politician—that I rather doubt whether a Legislature could handle a Bill of this kind unless somewhere in the Legislature there was a place for people like the noble and learned Lord, Lord Roskill, and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wilberforce. I really do not think that it could be done. It is, of course, a fluke that the noble and learned Lord, Lord Elwyn-Jones, and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hailsham of Saint Marylebone, happen to be here. We happened to attract the attention of the Prime Minister of the time and to secure the suffrages of a number of electors in our past lives; but that is, for this purpose, a fluke. Indeed, I should have mentioned in an earlier sentence the contribution of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Scarman. It is really essential, if Parliament is to deal with legislation designed to achieve the technical processes of law, that there should be embedded in the Legislature somewhere judges who are able to make a contribution to debates.
That leads me to say something else about the House of Lords, and I think that I am entitled to do so after having part of a life's experience here. The value of this House, such as it is—and people can hold different views about that—lies precisely in the fact that we do not represent electors. It lies in the fact that we are individual counsellors of the Crown. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Wilberforce, need not apologise for the fact that Law Lords do not speak very often. There are plenty of people who do not speak very often in this House, but who are equally valuable Members of it. We come here to give the benefit of our individual experience and expertise, such as it is. There are no generals in the House at this moment. There are no diplomats, as far as I can see—but I am fairly blind—in the House at this moment. But what would the House of Lords be like if we held a debate on defence without the generals, the admirals and the air marshals? What would a debate on industry be like without the trade unionists and the captains of industry? We are a gathering of indivdual counsellors of the Crown. That is what we have always been from the earliest days. And, although I happen to hold—as some of my friends may know—slightly radical views about our composition which are not universally acceptable, nonetheless if we alter this fundamental fact about the Legislature of the United Kingdom we shall be doing it a very real disservice. This debate, although it was of a very highly technical nature,

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illustrates that particular point, I think, almost better than anything that one could say could have done.
It is true, of course, that this is a very difficult Bill to handle on Second Reading, and I must pick out only one or two points from the debate. We have consulted the Law Society, but not about everything in this Bill. We have not consulted it about the restatement of the law very much, but we have about the changes in the law, or those of them which we felt that they would require to be consulted about. If there are any sins of omission I must take them upon the shoulders of myself as representing the office. But, we have consulted them about changes in which we thought they might be interested and in particular we were very careful to consult them about the two-judge proposal in the Court of Appeal, which I was glad to hear welcomed, I think, by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Roskill.
I turn to the amalgamation of the High Court and the county court. Perhaps I ought to say about this reply what I happened to say at a Press Gallery luncheon yesterday which was reported in The Times this morning: it is in Opposition that one can afford to be candid; in Government one cannot afford to be candid at all There are many things that I should like to sayabout this debate which I shall have to be careful whether I say candidly or not. But I remember during the last Parliament, when our roles were reversed, putting that very point about the amalgamation of the High Court and the county court to the noble and learned Lord who then sat on the Woolsack. I remember that I received a very non-committal reply. But I have long since thought that it ought to be done. I tried to stir it up in my first term of office and I was told, quite frankly, by my officials that they had to take on the Courts Act and there simply were not enough officials of adequate calibre to take on the civil jurisdiction at the same time. Needless to say, I have said exactly the same thing this time.
Again, I have been told: "You are taking on criminal legal aid, which is a burden which we in conjunction with the Lord Chancellor have to bear and we simply cannot afford to take on this one." I quite agree. My view of the matter long-term is exactly that which the noble and learned Lord, Lord Elwyn-Jones, put forward. I do not think that the present division of jurisdiction between the county court and the High Court can really stand up to examination, especially based as it is very largely upon the amount of the claim, and with limitations on it which only the more expert practitioners understand.
I think that there is a case for amalgamation of civil jurisdiction rather on the lines of the Courts Act, mutatis mutandis. It is a very long-term project and I certainly do not want to hold out the smallest hope that I shall be able to do it during my lifetime; but I place it on the agenda of sonic future Lord Chancellor at some future time.
We now come to what I think has been the central point of the debate. Here, like Agag, I must walk a little delicately, because I was not quite sure that any of us was fully candid about what we really think in this matter. We were skirting round a problem which, to my knowledge, has dogged every Lord Chancellor and every Lord Justice of Appeal for the
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last 15 years. It is not a problem about which one wishes to be entirely candid. But I should like to say this: what has emerged very clearly from this debate is that the Court of Appeal is about a great deal more than coming to right decisions in particular cases. All judicial administration requires administrative ability. and people who neglect adminsitrative ability in favour of jurisprudential advantages are not doing a service to the administration of justice.
It was rightly said that the Court of Appeal is the pivot of our system. I would go a great deal further. I would say that although we pride ourselves on our system of law, until we had a proper pyramid of appeal, we never had a jurisprudence at all. We had an incorrupt juridicary, trial by jury, habeas corpus, and all sorts of things of which we were rightly proud, but we never had an adequate, coherent jurisprudence until we had the court of Exchequer Chamber. The old writ of error was nonsense. It still persists in America, which, despite the laudatory references to it, is a gigantic museum of archaic English legal procedure. But we never had a coherent jurisprudence until we had a Court of Appeal.
We shall never retain an adequate jurisprudence if we ever start tinkering with the appellate jurisdiction of your Lordships' House, because that is the ultimate filter. It is the only court of appeal which deals with Northern Ireland, Scotland and England and Wales, and it is the only court of appeal which can, therefore, deal with the words of statutes which may be identical in all three parts of the United Kingdom. It has a splendid filter in that you can only get there at all by leave.
That brings me to another point which was first made by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Roskill, on the Cross-Benches; and I think that the noble and learned Lord, Lord Elwyn-Jones, also raised it. It is that the burden of work can only be reduced by providing some sort of filter in the approach to the Court of Appeal. I absolutely agree about that, and this Bill goes some way towards providing it. Of course, during my professional lifetime the work of the Court of Appeal has been partly increased by the virtual abolition of a large number of appeals which previously stopped at the Divisional Court of the Queen's Bench Division. All county court appeals originally went there when I started at the Bar, which was 50 years ago. The Court of Appeal, therefore, has been taking the brunt of the large restriction of appeals to the High Court. That is one of the reasons.
However, the question now is: how do you filter into the Court of Appeal the burden of work which it is increasingly being asked to bear? There was one point in the speech of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Elwyn-Jones, which ties up a little with what the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wilberforce, said at the end of his speech, with which I venture to disagree; and, I venture to disagree—if he will allow me to criticise the content of a maiden speech—with the noble and learned Lord, Lord Roskill, on this point. I think that the amount in jeopardy in a particular case is a factor in whether to take the matter further.
I would venture to disagree with the noble and learned Lord, Lord Elwyn-Jones, when he says that there is one law for the rich and one law for the poor. A rich man can persecute a poor man with a very small

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claim, and a poor man, who cannot pay the costs, can persecute a rich man with a big claim. There are people with equal amounts of wealth who may persecute one another in, say, a dispute among neighbours. I suppose that very few of us who have practised at the Bar have failed in the course of our practice to come across a dispute between two relatively humble people about six inches of territory which divides their two properties. They will ruin one another if they are allowed to. Their legal advisers may say, "But look, you are fighting about six inches". "Ah", they say, "It's a question of principle".
I do not agree that the amount of the claim is not a factor in taking into account the validity of the appeal. Of course, it is true—and this was something I said in my first term of office when we were dealing with the question of small claims courts—that a small claim can involve a very intricate question of law or a vast question of principle, and of course the size of the claim ought not to be the only factor. Of course, it is only a parameter that you feed into the gigantic computer of the judicial mind when it grants leave to appeal. But in all litigation one ought to say at the outset, "Is it worth fighting about at all?"
That brings roe to the question of costs, although—as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wilberforce, rightly I think reminded us—this is not really what the Bill is about. The defamation case which is going on at present I must not talk about; but it is, of course, true that a foreign plaintiff—that is to say, a foreign-based plaintiff—has to give security for costs if he chooses to bring an action in this country. It has always been the law, but of course that is right, because he may just not pay the costs if he loses.
I am very unhappy about the law of defamation—I always have been—but one must say that the costs of such cases are astronomical because people choose to fight them. Unlike every other form of litigation, they do so at their own expense because they are not entitled to legal aid, although there are always movements to try to extend legal aid to it. But there are a great number of defamation cases which ought not to be brought, and a great number of defamation cases which ought not to be defended. If they choose to go to the High Court and spend—what is it?—months and months of the High Court's time, with all the expensive talent at the Bar, and solicitors and I do not know how many witnesses, they must expect to pay for it. They must ask themselves whether it is worth fighting for. But do not let them go to the Lord Chancellor and say that it is too expensive; because they have an alternative, which is not to go to court. Most of the legal profession, being honest men, are constantly trying to persuade people not to go to court when they ought not to fight their cases. However, I shall not say any more about that.
I did not quite agree with the point of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Scarman, about the draftsmanship of the registrarship in the Court of Appeal which we are introducing. I quite agree with him about the importance of reform, but I think he perhaps overlookedthe fact that this Bill is designed to become an Act, and when the reform is instituted it will form a relatively small part of the corpus of law dealing with the Supreme Court. Primarily this is a consolidation Bill, and primarily the registrarship, important as it is administratively,
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will be a relatively small part of the corpus of law dealing with the Supreme Court. It was probably rightly put into the Schedule rather than into the body of the Bill.
The noble and learned Lord, Lord Wilberforce, complained that we have put in Clause 31, embodying in the primary legislation what is at present contained in the Rules of the Supreme Court, Order 53. The reason for that is that it was recommended by the Law Commission I have a certain feeling about the Law Commission which is that one should take their advice wherever practicable. I start with the presumption that the Law Commission is right, and I think that the burden of proof lies on those who say that it is wrong. If the Lord Chancellor does not fight for the Law Commission I can assure the House that nobody else will. The Departments will not. Only the Lord Chancellor supports the Law Commission, and I shall support it, if I can, through thick and thin. As regards the powers of the Registrar of the Court of Appeal, these will be decided by rules of court, and I think that that is the right way to deal with it.
Finally, about the Scarman Commission, I am again going to walk like Agag, a trifle delicately, remembering that even that did not save him. The Scarman Commission was appointed by the Master of the Rolls and it reported to the Master of the Rolls. Do not ask the Lord Chancellor what has happened to the Report of the Scarman Commission; ask the Master of the Rolls, because if the pivot of our judicial system is the Court of Appeal, the pivot of the Court of Appeal is the Master of the Rolls. I have already said too much. The Question is that the Bill be read a second time.
On Question, Bill read 2a, and committed to a Committee of the Whole House.

Royal Assent
The Lord Chancellor: My Lords, I have to notify the House, in accordance with the Royal Assent Act 1967, that the Queen has signified her Royal Assent to the following Act:
Consolidated Fund (No. 2) Act.

Merchant Shipping Bill [H.L.]
1.24 p.m.
Lord Trefgarne: My Lords, I beg to move that this Bill be now read a second time. The object of this short, essentially technical, Bill is to enable the United Kingdom to ratify protocols to two international conventions in the maritime field. The first of these conventions is the 1957 International Convention relating to the Limitation of the Liability of Owners of Seagoing Ships. It establishes overall "global" limits to shipowner's liability, according to the size of ship involved, in respect of claims rising from maritime incidents. The legislation implementing this convention in the United Kingdom is the Merchant Shipping (Liability of Shipowners and Others) Act 1958.
The second of the conventions is the 1924 International Convention for the Unification of certain Rules of Law relating to Bills of Lading as amended

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by the 1968 Protocol thereto. This convention, as amended, is commonly referred to as the Hague-Visby Rules. These rules establish the carrier's minimum obligations, his maximum immunities, and the limit of his liability in respect of the carriage of goods by sea. The rules are given effect to in this country by the Carriage of Goods by Sea Act 1971.
In both of these conventions there are provisions defining limits to the liability of shipowners or carriers in terms of gold francs, which used to be the standard international unit of account for such purposes. However, with the abandonment of an official price of gold, it has become clear that gold can no longer provide a satisfactory basis for the uniform application of limitation amounts in all countries. There is thus a need for an alternative unit of account to replace the earlier gold-based unit.
The solution adopted by the international community has been to substitute the special drawing right of the International Monetary Fund as the new international standard unit of account, and to introduce amendments to existing conventions in a neutral way so that initially at least there would be no effect on the actual limits themselves. Since 1975 international transport conventions have progressively been revised on this basis, with protocols being agreed upon for adoption in the usual way. The two Protocols with which this Bill is concerned were negotiated in the light of what has now become the international standard approach, and they were adopted at a conference held in Brussels in December 1979.
The purpose of the Bill is therefore quite simply to implement the provisions of the two Protocols I have referred to; that is to substitute the special drawing right of the International Monetary Fund for the gold franc as the unit of account in which limits of liability are expressed, with no significant change to the values of the actual limits themselves.
I have already indicated that the changes made by the two Protocols concerned are exactly in line with what has become standard international practice in this respect, and I should perhaps observe that similar amending legislation has already been introduced in the United Kingdom, in respect of other transport conventions, through provisions in the Merchant Shipping Act 1979 and the Carriage by Air and Road Act 1979.
Although the new procedure for converting from gold to special drawing rights and from special drawing rights to national currencies has been agreed internationally, the new arrangements are not yet generally in force, and differences in practice have regrettably developed in some countries. As a result there is now some uncertainty, and no absolute uniformity of practice in the interpretation of the old gold-based limitation amounts. We have no problem in the United Kingdom since we make sterling equivalent orders from time to time which give the value of limitation amounts calculated according to the internationally accepted method. But some other states have not adopted a similar expedient. Consequently there have been instances of United Kingdom shipowners and insurers being faced in actions abroad with limitation amounts based on the very significantly higher free-market price of gold.
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Current uncertainty as to the value of gold-based limits is considered most undesirable by the international community generally, and by United Kingdom commercial interests in particular. International adoption of the protocols will remove this problem, and early United Kingdom ratification will encourage their entry into force. In view of the modest entry into force conditions applicable to these Protocols, in one case 6 states and in the other 5, United Kindom ratification will be a significant contribution to this end. The shipping industry, through the General Council of British Shipping, has strongly urged the Government to ratify the Protocols as soon as possible.
As well as making changes directly by the Protocols, the Bill similarly introduces the change from gold to special drawing rights in connection with the limitation of liability of dock owners, canal owners, harbour authorities and conservancy authorities. This exension has been included in the Bill as so to maintain the parity of treatment as regards limitation amounts that has been a continuing feature of United Kingdom legislation since the turn of the century. Again, of course, there is no change in the limits themselves apart from some insignificant rounding.
Although it is expected that the 1957 convention will in due course be superseded by the 1976 London Convention on Limitation of Liability for Maritime Claims, for which United Kingdom implementing legislation was included in the Merchant Shipping Act 1979, it is not yet known when this latter convention will enter into force. The Protocol will therefore serve a useful purpose in the meantime, not only in this country but also in others where the 1957 convention may remain in force for longer. Any replacement of the Hague-Visby Rules is likely to be further in the future, and the relevant Protocol is therefore likely to operate for a considerable number of years.
I turn to the detailed provisions of the Bill. Clause 1 effects amendments to the Merchant Shipping Act 1894 and the Merchant Shipping (Liability of Shipowners and Others) Act 1900, in both cases as amended by the Merchant Shipping(Liability of Shipowners and Others) Act 1958, in order to substitute special drawing rights in the limitation provisions of those Acts and to specify the date on which conversion should be effected. Clause 2 of the Bill makes similar amendments in respect of the Carriage of Goods by Sea Act 1971. The third clause specifies procedures for converting from special drawing rights into Sterling similar to the procedures in other United Kingdom legislation involving special drawing rights. Clauses 4 and 5 deal with the territorial extent of the Bill and other supplementary provisions.
Despite the essentially technical nature of the Bill, it deals with an issue of very considerable commercial importance to British maritime interests and has their strong support. I commend the Bill to your Lordships. I beg to move.
Moved, That the Bill be now read 2a.—(Lord Trefgarne.)
Lord Wells-Pestell: My Lords, with permission, I will speak on behalf of my noble friend Lord Underhill, who would normally be dealing with this matter but who at the moment is having a medical consultation. There is little I need say. Although it is a small Bill,

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it required the explanation which the Minister has given, over and above the Explanatory Memorandum. Our inquiries into the matter show that this is a highly desirable measure, as well as being relevant in relation to the Acts referred to in Clauses 1 and 2. We welcome the Bill, as it will enable the Government, as the noble Lord said, to ratify the 1979 Protocols to the two relevant international conventions. The substitution of gold francs by IMF drawing rights and the eventual conversion of those units into sterling is common sense. We are pleased to note that the Council of British Shipping considers that it would be an advantage to all sectors of the transport industry if the protocols were to come into operation as soon as possible, and I ask the Government to bear that in mind. We have no reservations about the Bill and give it our support.
Lord Trefgarne: My Lords, I am greatly obliged to the noble Lord for that welcome to the Bill.
On Question, Bill read 2a, and committed to a Committee of the Whole House.
1.34 p.m.
Lord Trefgarne: My Lords, perhaps I might say, with permission, that my noble friend Lord Belstead, who is to take the next business, is temporarily not in his place. I fear, therefore, that I must ask your Lordships to adjourn for a few moments to enable him to get here. I therefore beg to move that the House do now adjourn during pleasure for five minutes.
Moved accordingly, and, on Question, Motion agreed to.
House adjourned during pleasure.
House resumed.

Imprisonment (Temporary Provisions) Act 1980 (Continuance No. 2) Order 1980
1.36 p.m.
Lord Belstead Lord Belstead rose to move, That the draft order laid before the House on 9th December be approved.
The noble Lord said: My Lords, I must apologise to your Lordships for not being present a few moments ago. This is the second occasion on which I have had the duty of asking the House to renew Part I of the Imprisonment (Temporary Provisions) Act and the third on which the House has had a chance to discuss the prison officers' action and its consequences. That action has now been continuing for 10 weeks, during which time we have made strenuous efforts to find a basis for a settlement which is not only fair to both sides but also looks to the future rather than to the past.
Your Lordships will recall that my right honourable friend the Home Secretary has consistently emphasised that we have seen the solution to the dispute in the adoption of a new duty system for prison officers which will be common to all establishments and which will eliminate the anomalies which led to uneven rewards for staff in different establishments. The system devised by a joint group from the Prison Department and the Prison Officer's Association eliminates the built-in overtime inherent in the present system and is based on a change from a working week
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of 40 hours not including meal breaks to one of 42 hours including five hours for meal breaks. It may not sound like it, but this is an effective reduction of three hours.
If this new system proves acceptable, the change from net to gross hours' working will be introduced without abatement of basic pay. In recognition of this advantage, we have asked the Prison Officers' Association to return to normal working by no later than 20th December, not to pursue any claims for unscheduled meal breaks in respect of periods prior to 21st December 1980, and to agree in principle that the new duty system should be introduced by 1st April, 1981.
As part of the transitional arrangements to the new duty system, and wholly dependent on it having been introduced no later than 1st April, 1981, we have agreed, for those establishments which have not hitherto qualified for them, to make payments for meal breaks from 21st December, 1980 up to the introduction of the new scheme. We also propose, as part of a wider agreement with the Prison Officers' Association, to make other improvements, including a scheme for advances of pay for house purchase, a widening of the eligibility of staff entitled to quarters for relief of garage rental, and a simpler and more equitable basis for rent allowance. These proposals constitute a chance for prison officers to achieve a substantial improvement in their conditions of service. They also represent an opportunity to achieve one of the main improvements recommended by the May Committee: a new duty system, which will transform the management of prison establishments.
The House will know that the Prison Officers' Association has been discussing our proposals at its delegate conference, which took place the day before yesterday, yesterday and this morning. I am pleased that prison officers seem to have rejected escalation of their industrial action, but a decision remains to be made on whether there should be a suspension of the industrial action pending a final decision on the new duty system in January. I hope that this will now take place. However, there can be no guarantee that it will, or that all POA branches will comply. In these circumstances, we thought it best to ask the House for a renewal of the provisions of Part I of the Act. Moreover, it would be an unjustifiable risk to give up the emergency provisions before the industrial action is finally over. However, I shall indicate the action that we shall take in the event of its suspension.
If the prison officers decide not to call off their action, we shall be in contact with the Prison Officers' Association in the very near future to seek clarification of its position. Moreover, we shall have to consider very seriously what further steps may need to be taken to cope with what was at its outset, and remains, a campaign of disruption to the criminal justice system out of all proportion to the point at issue.
I wish, very briefly, to give your Lordships a situation report, as it were. Since the House last discussed the provisions of this order, the continuing refusal of the POA to receive large numbers of prisoners sentenced or remanded by the courts has resulted in a slow increase in the number of prisoners in police cells to about 3,700, and in Frankland Prison and Rollestone Camp to about 600 and 350 respectively. On behalf of the Government and, I am sure, the House I should like

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to thank both the police and the armed services personnel who have been assisting with the arrangements at Frankland and Rollestone for their considerable efforts since the dispute began.
The police have continued to cope extraordinarily well, but I must stress the difficulties which this additional duty causes them. It is not simply a question of numbers; it is also one of time. The longer the dispute continues, the greater the burden will be. The House will be aware that conditions in most police cells are unsatisfactory and that only limited facilities are available for prisoners. This is simply a result of the unsuitability of police cells for the prolonged detention of prisoners, and there is nothing that we can do about it. Arrangements for the care and custody of prisoners in police cells are a matter for individual chief officers of police and I know they are doing their best in difficult circumstances. In addition, liaison assistant governors in each police area—to whose work I wish to pay a particular tribute—have been assisting by visiting police stations where prisoners are held, dealing with inquiries and, where possible, arranging for essential equipment to be provided.
I fear it is unlikely that the transfer of prisoners from police cells, Frankland Prison and Rollestone camp to prisons could be completed before Christmas in all parts of the country, even if the POA action were suspended immediately. Once Frankland and Rollestone have been emptied they will hold no more prisoners, unless the prison officers' action were resumed. They will however be held in readiness until the action is finally ended. In the interim I am asking your Lordships' House to recognise the need for the continuation of Section 1 of the Act.
I should like specifically to refer to Section 2, after which I shall not refer specifically to any other sections; but this section has caused particular concern to your Lordships. Section 2 will also be needed while the prison officers' dispute continues. Should this action end while the continuance order is in force, it may be that remand prisoners can be produced for their remand hearing in the normal way, although, of course, Section 2 suspends the requirement to produce prisoners at the end of a period of remand in custody. In this event, we shall from the Home Office ask magistrates' courts to consider issuing directions under Section 2 for the production of all remand prisoners. We shall urge them to start doing this as soon as possible after the end of the dispute when the situation is back to normal. The situation may vary from one part of the country to another, but all those involved will be asked to keep in close touch on this matter so that remand hearings get back to normal at the earliest possible moment.
We have been in touch with a sample of some 50 courts to see how the operation of Section 2 of the Act has been working out in practice. I have written to the noble Lord, Lord Donaldson of Kingsbridge, about this matter, but perhaps I may refer to it if your Lordships wish to question me about it in a few moments' time.
I turn now to Sections 3, 4 and 5 of the Act, which permit the Secretary of State to reduce the numbers in prison custody by authorising the release of unsentenced and unconvicted prisoners, by restricting the
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powers of the courts to imprison for the non-payment of money and by authorising the early release of prisoners up to six months from the date when they would otherwise have been released. My right honourable friend has made very clear his reluctance to use these powers and, so far, mainly owing to a fall in the prison population to about 41,000, it has not proved necessary. However, if the prison officers' action continues, there remains a possibility that we shall have to use these emergency powers, and I am therefore asking the House to renew them. However, I can undertake that, once the action has been comprehensively suspended or ended, we shall not use Sections 3, 4 and 5 of the Act.
I hope that I have said enough to convince your Lordships that the Government are determined to bring this dispute to an end and that the offer that we have made is not only fair to the prison officers, but also a sound basis for the future of the whole prison service. However, we remain in a situation in which industrial action has not been suspended, and I am therefore asking your Lordships' House to approve the order. My Lords, I beg to move.
Moved, That the draft order laid before the House on 9th December be approved.—(Lord Belstead.)
1.47 p.m.
Lord Elwyn-Jones: My Lords, I apologise for the fact that I was not present at the beginning of the debate on this matter. The distinguished judges who took part in the earlier discussions, which clearly were expected to take much longer time, manifested the fact that lawyers do not really talk as much as they are alleged to do; though for us to say that speech is silver, but silence is golden, is not an obviously attractive proposition. I apologise for my absence at the beginning of the discussion, and in particular for the absence of my noble friend Lord Donaldson of Kingsbridge, who had undertaken the responsibility of dealing with this subject from this side of the House.
I was very glad to hear of the continuance of the negotiations, and of course the answer to the problems that we face today is a settlement of, and an end to, the industrial dispute. At all stages of the discussion of this matter we have emphasised that the proposed change in the duty system was the road ahead, and naturally we greatly hope that the efforts that are being made will result in an early conclusion. Concern about the ability of prisons to do their job undermines public confidence a great deal, and therefore we greatly trust that there will be an early settlement.
There are two main matters that are still of concern. The first relates to conditions in police cells. We recognise what was said in an issue of the Police Review:
"There is little doubt that police officers charged with the custody of prisoners for long periods go out of their way to make conditions as reasonable as possible".
The Police Review has heard of many instances of prisoners being provided with radios, televisions, books, and papers on the sole initiative of police, and even of the wives of policemen volunteering to help with meals. These, of course, are splendid gestures on the part of the police, who have these added burdens and duties put upon them at a time when their principal wish and duty, indeed, should be directed to dealing with the

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continual increase in the volume of crime. I am sure they must find these additional burdens very frustrating.
However, the article went on to say:
"The conditions in many stations are appalling, and police do what they can to improve them, but tension inevitably increases when neither prisoners nor police can see an end to those conditions".
If I may say so, it might not be unhelpful if the prison officers are reminded of what burdens are being put upon the police in this kind of situation by their industrial action; and, above all, of the additional pressures brought upon the prison population itself, which creates possibilities of very dangerous tensions.
On a matter of lesser importance, in our discussions on 27th November, when my noble friend Lord Donaldson raised the question of availability of books for prisoners, there was an indication from the noble Lord, Lord Belstead, that books and other activities are made available to prisoners where possible although the police are not able to provide them as a matter of course. I think my noble friend asked what the position was about the provision of amenities, and perhaps the noble Lord, Lord Belstead, will deal with that in his reply. I am happy to see that my noble friend Lord Donaldson has now arrived, not unhappily in the nick of time—if "nick" is an appropriate word to use in the circumstances. But having fortunately secured the brief which was also delivered to him, I am not wholly helpless in this situation; only am I aware that the House will have missed so much his contribution, which he may well make a little later in the discussion.
On the more substantial question that the noble Lord, Lord Belstead, raised—namely, Section 2 of the Act, dealing with remands in custody in the defendant's absence—of course I appreciated what he said, The moment this crisis is over there will be as quick a return to normality as possible. That, if I may say so, is the least that could be said, because the suspension of a defendant's right to appear in court during remand hearings is a very serious inroad into civil liberties, as we have said on more than one occasion.
In recognition of its importance, the Home Office circular of 31st October asked the courts to give serious consideration to the grant of legal aid at the first remand hearing, so that at subsequent hearings the court could consider representations on his behalf made by his legal representative. But concern has been expressed that in some cases access to prisoners is being denied to legal representatives, and that conditions for legal visits to police cells are unsatisfactory. There are also problems of access to prisoners by lawyers or probation officers when they have been moved to police stations or approved places some distance away. The National Association of Probation Officers has written to me, and no doubt to my noble friend as well, expressing concern that in such circumstances a defendant potentially suitable for a bail hostel may be unable to have an interview to establish his suitability.
We have been told that Home Office officials have made a number of inquiries of the courts to check how Section 2 is operating—I think the noble Lord referred to that—and that prisoners have "normally" been legally represented at remand hearings in their absence and the courts have "usually" made a direction for the production of a remand prisoner when requested
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to do so. About 50 courts have, as has been said, been asked to provide numerical data on the way Section 2 is working for the week from 6th to 12th December, and we shall be interested to know what the outcome of that may be. Perhaps the noble Lord dealt with that during the time I was not present.
Lord Belstead: Yes.
Lord Elwyn-Jones: I am much obliged to the noble Lord. What we should really like to know is what the words "normally" and "usually" mean in the context that I am discussing. Do they mean that these arrangements are working in all but 1 per cent. of cases or, say, in a much larger percentage? And if they are not working in a substantial number of cases—and even 5 per cent. would be a large number in this field—perhaps the Government will take steps to reinforce circular instruction by asking courts to require defendants to be returned to court in all cases where a legal representative is requested or where the defendant is not legally represented. In cases where, at a lawyer's request, prisoners have been produced in court from penal establishments I should like to know whether the establishments normally take them back, or whether industrial action extends to refusing that. If the answer is "Yes", why, I ask, should the courts not be told to require any defendant who has been remanded in custody for four weeks to be brought back?
The conclusions that we on this side of the House have come to on the general question is that it is right that the House should approve of this further extension of the Act for a period of one month beginning with 29th December. We all greatly hope that this will be the last occasion when this power will be sought, and that we shall have a solution of this matter, if possible before Christmas.
1.57 p.m.
Lord Harris of Greenwich: My Lords, I think most of us would agree that in this dispute the right honourable gentleman the Home Secretary has been faced with a very dangerous situation indeed, particularly, if I may say so, in the local prisons, where this problem has been felt most seriously. The Prison Officers' Association have raised the range of issues which are now the basis of the current dispute as a result of the fact that they did not succeed when they put precisely the same arguments to a committee of inquiry presided over by Mr. Justice May. I think that we have a rather unfortunate habit in this country now of rejecting the umpire's decision, and I think that if the umpire's decision had been accepted in this particular case this wretched business would never have been undertaken in the first instance. Nevertheless, they rejected it, which I think was particularly unfortunate.
The May Committee was, as the House will recall, a committee set up by a Labour Government, presided over by this particularly distinguished High Court judge and consisting of many eminent people in public life, including many with wide experience of the criminal justice system, and including, too, a senior trade unionist. However, the Prison Officers' Association did not succeed in their objective. In that situation they decided to use their industrial muscle to win their way by taking steps to refuse to admit

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unconvicted prisoners into Prison Department establishments, and to take a number of other steps which were deliberately designed to have the maximum effect in impeding the working of the criminal justice system in this country.
I am glad to say that their efforts have largely failed, though the pressures on an already overstretched system have of course been intensified, quite inevitably. They have failed because the courts have very sensibly remanded more defendants on bail and because the police themselves have given police bail to a number of people to whom, in normal circumstances, they would not have given it.
I am bound to say in passing, that I hope that, once the present crisis is over, these very satisfactory developments will continue, because anyone with experience of these matters knows that in recent years we have continued to remand in custody far too many people—often, in my judgment, quite unnecessarily. But there are other reasons why the actions of the Prison Officers' Association have not achieved their objectives. First, I think, because of the admirable contingency plans worked out by the police.
Once again, I think it is right to say in this House what an enormous debt of gratitude we owe to the police, who, in addition to all their other heavy and pressing responsibilities, have had to take on the altogether new task of holding hundreds of fairly long-term remand prisoners. I have had the opportunity in recent weeks of seeing something of their work and I can tell the House on the basis of what I have seen that the work that is being carried out by police officers who have volunteered for these duties is being carried out with efficiency but also with a great deal of kindness to those who have been placed in their charge—sometimes in conditions which are not otherwise particularly satisfactory. My noble and learned friend Lord Elwyn-Jones pointed this out; and I agree with him. But my noble and learned friend will also agree with me that conditions in local prisons are not particularly satisfactory, either.
I move to the second point: why I do not believe that the present industrial action has met with the degree of success that some of those most enthusiastically for it believed would follow. That is because of the admirable work done by the governor grades of the Prison Service. Assistant governors, as the noble Lord, Lord Belstead, has reminded the House, have been working in the closest co-operation with chief officers of police and have discharged their jobs magnificently. It is one of the many reasons why the problems of many prisoners in police custody have been handled with such speed and such compassion. It is necessary to emphasise this, because one point which is not altogether commonly understood is this: assistant governors are certainly not among the highest-paid public servants in this country. Many of them receive a great deal less at the end of a working week than do the members of the POA who are at the moment taking industrial action. Nevertheless, with their high sense of public duty, they have carried on their responsibilities extremely well in the public service and I think, again, that it is right on an occasion like this to express our gratitude, and that of the wider public for the work that they have done.
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Thirdly, I think we should express our thanks to the Army. I do not expect that the right honourable gentleman the Secretary of State for Defence expressed unqualified enthusiasm when he was approached by the Home Office (as, at some stage, no doubt, he was) and asked to supply servicemen at Frankland Prison and Rollestone Camp. He has many other responsibilities. He has a major responsibility in Northern Ireland and a major responsibility as far as the defence of Western Europe is concerned. A number of servicemen have had to be used in these two new establishments; but I think that the Army did their job well. I think, again, that the House would be anxious to express its warm thanks to the Royal Corps of Military Police and to the other service units which have been brought in to reinforce them at these establishments.
Lastly, I think that I should like to say this about the right honourable genetleman the Home Secretary. It is, from my experience as a junior Minister in that Department a lonely position, particularly at a time of crisis—and certainly one could not describe the present situation in the prisons in any terms less dramatic than that. A Home Secretary cannot share many of his anxieties with his colleagues. It is he who has to carry the principal responsibility for maintaining the Queen's peace. I believe that the right honourable gentlemen the Home Secretary has handled the present dispute with the combination of good humour, moderation and firmness that is his political style. No man could, in my judgment, have done more to bring this miserable dispute to an end. I believe that, on a day like this, it is appropriate for this House to express its firmest support for the stand taken by the Home Secretary.
My Lords, the present dispute is not of the present Government's making. It has been rumbling on, as I know from my own experience, for many years past. When I was Minister of State at the Home Office, we recognised that a dispute of the present character was highly likely. With a number of my colleagues, I began to make contingency plans involving the use of both the police and the Army and, if I may say so, the use of temporary prisons. Nothing, therefore, would be more hypocritical than to pretend that the present Home Secretary bears personally any measure of significant responsibility for the dimensions of the present crisis in the prisons. He does not. What he has done, and I think has done rightly, is to refuse to panic and he has insisted that he will not surrender to demands which in his judgment, are both unfair and wholly unreasonable.
Anybody who has had (as I had) responsibility for the prison service will know that it is right to say also on a day such as this that prison officers do a difficult job on behalf of the entire community. Many do it exceptionally well. Many have a very high sense of public duty too. Many of them, even if there had been a different consequence to the decision of the conference yesterday, would I think have been extremely reluctant to take strike action. Having said that, I very much hope that they will now accept the very reasonable proposals which have been put to them by the Home Office, proposals which would eliminate many of the anomalies created by the existing system. Under these new proposals—indeed, the Parliamentary Under-Secretary has reminded us today of what they

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were—the new working week would be of some 42 hours, including five hours' meal breaks, and this would, in effect, be a reduction in the working week of three hours. No one, I think, could possibly pretend that a proposal of that kind is other than generous. I hope that it will be accepted.
I hope also that prison officers will turn their faces against some of the disruptive actions which they have organised so regularly in recent years, when workshops have been closed, educational courses cancelled and for months civilian staff have been denied entry to individual Prison Department establishments. In one case members of a local review committee were denied entry to a prison department establishment. In one or two cases there has been a seeming indifference to the fact that life has been made intolerable for many inmates. There is no point in assuming that we can maintain tranquillity in our prisons if, in a number of them, steps are taken by some—I repeat "some"—members of staff to lower the already poor quality of life experienced by inmates, many of whom are living three to a cell. I hope also that, following the present dispute, a sustained attempt will be made to eliminate some of the pointless restrictive practices, to some of which was drawn attention in the report of the committee headed by Mr. Justice May.
Mr. Jenkins, when Home Secretary, succeeded in abolishing censorship of prisoners' correspondence in category D prisons: namely, open prisons. But it continues—wholly unnecessarily I may say—in category C prisons. I remember the meeting well as a Minister in a Labour Government when we were told by the Prison Officers' Association that if in fact we insisted on censorship of prisoners' mail not continuing there (which no one thought was even remotely necessary) there would inevitably be industrial action taken against us. I repeat that there is no serious security argument for censorship in category C prisons. It continues because the local branches of the Prison Officers' Association will not agree to its abolition, thus ensuring that this country is consistently hauled before the European Commission on Human Rights to defend policies for which they know perfectly well there is no justification whatsoever. That is the situation which was experienced by Ministers in a Labour Government, and I suspect that it continues in exactly the same way at the present time.
It may be that it is too much to hope that all these problems can be resolved by the time the present dispute is brought to an end. But I hope that when it does end that we shall be able to develop within the prison service a new mood of friendship and collaboration. We all know that it is going to face the most forbidding problems in the years ahead. If we are to overcome them, we shall need a new atmosphere of trust between the service and the Home Office.
I believe that, consequent upon the report of the committee of inquiry headed by Mr. Justice May, the right honourable gentleman the Home Secretary has taken a number of important steps to strengthen the Prison Department. I believe that he has moved into the Prison Department some of the most able middle-ranking officials existing within the Home Office. That is excellent news for all concerned. I believe that there is a new mood of openness and frankness in its day-to-day operations I hope that the Prison Officers'
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Association will now seize this opportunity and to everything it can to establish more civilised relations with the department.
In the meantime, I think that all it is appropriate to add today is that I believe the Home Secretary has the overwhelming support of this House in the formidable problems he is now facing. There should I believe be no more pressure on the right honourable gentleman to make still further concessions. What he has offered the Prison Officers' Association is, in my view, both fair and reasonable. It is time for the Prison Officers' Association to behave with equal reasonableness and moderation. I believe that the case for renewal of this order is overwhelming.
2.7 p.m.
Lord Donaldson of Kingsbridge: My Lords, may I have two minutes of your Lordships' time to apologise most humbly to the Minister that I missed his speech and to the House for my discourtesy in not being here. The reasons are obvious: the traffic blocks were incredible. I wish to say two things. The first is that I want to support my noble friend Lord Harris of Greenwich in his tribute to the Army and, particularly, to the police and the governor grades of the prison service. I discussed with the chief probation officer how things, including Frankland, the new prison, are going. They seem to be going extremely well, and there is very high praise for the police from all sides.
The only other thing I wanted to say is that my noble friend who so kindly bore the cross which I should have been bearing referred to the inquiry made by the noble Minister. The noble Minister has written to me with the answers, and I think that the House would very much like to hear them. With those few words, I look forward to hearing what he has to say.
2.14 p.m.
Lord Belstead: My Lords, if I may just reply to the speeches which have been made on this order, may I thank noble Lords for the support which they have given at this difficult time for the continuation, reluctantly, of this order? The noble and learned Lord, Lord Elwyn-Jones, was good enough to make this quite clear among his other remarks, and I shall try to reply to his other points quite briefly.
If I may say so, I thought that the noble Lord, Lord Harris, made two very important points at the beginning of his remarks. The first was that the May Committee on the Future of the Prison Service had decided against what is known as "Claim 16", which is a claim for retrospective payment for meal breaks and which forms the basis of the dispute which we are now in. The second point made by the noble Lord was that the industrial action which has resulted from this has created very great disruption of the criminal justice system, taking that expression at its widest.
It is for those reasons the Government believed that clearly a solution must be found to this very difficult problem. But the way was to look forward and my right honourable friend the Home Secretary has consistently said he felt that the thing to do was to work out a new duty system. The offer which we made was made some two weeks ago and I was most

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grateful to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Elwyn-Jones, for saying that he felt that this was the right way forward. I am also most grateful for the generous words spoken by the noble Lord, Lord Harris, in respect of my right honourable friend the Home Secretary and also in respect of the Director-General and members of the prison department of the Home Office.
The noble and learned Lord, Lord Elwyn-Jones, made the point that the heavy use of police cells in this dispute is laying very heavy burdens upon the police. If I may just add to those words, it is doing something else as well; it is diverting the police from their proper duty, which is the prevention and detection of crime.
The noble and learned Lord asked whether I could add to what I had sought to say before to the noble Lord, Lord Donaldson, about amenities in police cells. I am sorry; there is very little that I can add to the quite full reply I tried to give last time, except to say this. We are, of course, approaching Christmas and I know that as a result of the dispute there are almost certain now to be prisoners in police cells. Any special arrangements over this particular period are a matter for individual chief officers of police, but I know myself that chief officers both in the metropolis and also throughout the country will be doing their best, through their officers, to see that the Christmas period is at least marked in some way for those who are in their custody and care.
The noble and learned Lord asked about access to prisoners and, specifically, about access so far as lawyers are concerned. Prison rule No. 37 provides that a prisoner who is a party to legal proceedings may be intreviewed by his legal adviser in connection with those proceedings out of the hearing of the officer who is supervising his visit. We have always made it clear from the Home Office that prisoners detained during this time in police custody as a result of the present industrial action should be treated as far as is practicable in accordance with the prison regulations The police fully understand that the confidentiality of the solicitor-client relationship expressed in Rule 37 should be respected.
We have received only one complaint in this respect since the present dispute began and the firm of solicitors who made it has been advised to supply details of the complaint to the Commissioner of Police for the Metropolis, to whose force it is related, so that they may be investigated.
The noble and learned Lord asked me also about the working of Section 2. The noble and learned Lord asked me whether prisoners, once they have been produced and taken to court, are taken back to prison establishments. It is a little difficult to give a direct answer, for this reason. As I think the whole House realises, this was one of the fundamental troubles at the beginning of this dispute. Prisoners were indeed being produced, but they were never being taken back into prison. There they were, as it were, in the community but in the custody of the court, and they had to be put somewhere. That is why the police cells had to be started to be used in the way they were, and that is why, first, Frankland Prison and then Rollestone camp were opened.
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Since then—I must be absolutely straight about this—the Prison Officers' Association have been as good as their word, when they said that when the numbers fell in the establishments below the certified normal accommodation they would then begin taking prisoners in. They have, indeed, been doing this around the country. But the difficulty that I am in, in answering the noble and learned Lord's question, is that as soon as an establishment has come up to what we call the CNA, the gates have again, metaphorically, been shut. Therefore, it is not possible for me to answer whether a particular prisoner in a particular case produced to a particular court is at all able to get back into the establishment.
As regards the details for which the noble and learned Lord asked me about the working of Section 2, about which I wrote to the noble Lord, Lord Donaldson, from the Home Office we took a sample from 50 courts around the country to try to find out how Section 2 is working. The 50 courts involved in the study deal with approximately one-quarter of all criminal proceedings in England and Wales. In the week of the study, which was 6th to 12th December, 377 requests were made to the 50 courts for a direction under Section 2 for the appearance of the defendant. Of these, six were refused and I am told that the reason for the refusals was that the next hearing would again be a remand hearing, and that the court took the view in each case that the question of bail had already been fully considered.
The 50 courts also remanded in the same week 345 defendants in custody, in their absence. Twenty-three of these were unrepresented, and I am told this was either because the defendants did not wish to be represented, or because their legal representatives did not appear in court. A larger number of defendants, 394, appeared in person as a result of a direction under Section 2, after a period of remand in custody. I recognise that these figures are for a limited period only, but they confirm our earlier inquiries. I remember that I said to the House that we felt Section 2 was working reasonably well. I hope that, from the information I have given, your Lordships may feel that these statistics are reasonably reassuring about the way that Section 2 of the Act is operating in the courts.
I think that that is all I can do to answer the questions which your Lordships have asked me. Regrettably, I have advice that the Prison Officers' Association have rejected the offer which the Home Office has put to them. There is no doubt that we continue, therefore, to need the provisions of the Act and I ask your Lordships whether you will again agree to the order.
On Question, Motion agreed to.

Hill Livestock (Compensatory Allowances) (Amendment) Regulations 1980
2.24 p.m.
Lord Sandys Lord Sandys rose to move, That the draft regulations laid before the House on 2nd December be approved. The noble Lord said: My Lords, on behalf of my noble friend Lord Ferrers, I beg to move that the Hill Livestock (Compensatory Allowances) (Amendment) Regulations 1980, a draft of which was laid before this

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House on 2nd December 1980, be approved. These regulations, which apply throughout the United Kingdom, amend the Hill Livestock (Compensatory Allowances) Regulations 1979 and give effect to the higher rates of hill sheep and hill cow allowances which my right honourable friend announced on 28th November.
Hill and upland farmers play a particularly important role in the livestock sector of our agriculture. They provide, in the United Kingdom as a whole, some 60 per cent. of the specialist beef cow herd and 20 per cent. of the total beef and dairy breeding herd, while the proportion of the hill sheep to the total of the breeding flock is about 55 per cent. The role of the hills, therefore, is fundamental to the cycle of renewing the national breeding flock and the production of suckler calves and store lambs.
The importance of hill livestock farming is not, however, confined to its production role. In much of the hill and moorland areas of this country, the raising of livestock is the only possible use of the land, other than forestry. Hill farmers play a vital role in the economic and social structure of these areas. Your Lordships will not need reminding of the special problems facing hill farmers. It is because of these problems that we have a long tradition of providing financial aid in the form of annual headage payments on hill cattle and hill sheep.
Since 1976, these payments have been made as hill livestock compensatory allowances under the provisions of the EEC less-favoured areas directive. The areas in which they are paid cover much of our traditional hill farming and livestock rearing land. Last autumn we found that the hill farmers were faced with the unenviable prospect of seeing their net incomes fall sharply as a result of a number of factors, including the ravages of the bad winter of 1978–79. We accordingly decided to increase hill livestock compensatory allowances by a record amount.
Our hope, and that of the industry itself, was that the hill farmers would have a better year in 1980–81. Unfortunately, when we reviewed conditions this autumn we found that although incomes in some areas are expected to be rather higher than last year, others will undoubtedly be much lower, and overall they remain below the level of two years ago. We concluded that further assistance is required if this vital sector of the industry is not to go into an unacceptable decline.
The regulations now before the House therefore provide that the rate of allowance for hill cows should be raised from £35 to £42.50, an extra £7.50 and the highest ever increase, while the higher rate for hill sheep will be raised from £5.50 to £6.25, an extra 75p. The lower rate of hill sheep allowance will remain at £4.25. This means that the differential between the higher and the lower rates of hill sheep allowance has been increased, which reflects our judgment of the balance of need and accords with the wishes of the Farmers Unions. The regulations, additionally, implement a change in the maximum rate of allowance per hectare payable under the less favoured areas directive. The maximum payment will now be £60 instead of £40.58, an increase of £19.42, and will benefit the small minority of farmers who stock heavily with both cattle and sheep on the same land.
These increases, which will add some £12.4 million
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to the total value of compensatory allowances in 1981, can be viewed as part of a range of measures which will provide assistance to hill farmers. Thus, the £12.37 suckler cow premium, added to the £42.50 compensatory allowance, will means that the hill farmers eligible for both forms of aid will stand to receive £54.87 on each of their breeding cows. As for the hill sheep, although the sheepmeat régime came in too late to have much effect on store market prices this year, the longer-term effect should be highly beneficial and the hill farmers will be entitled to the sheep annual premiums on their breeding ewes.
The higher rates of compensatory allowances, coming at a time when there are continuing severe constraints on public expenditure, have been generally welcomed by the Farmers Unions. They provide further evidence of the importance we attach to the economic and social well-being of hill farming. I therefore ask the House to give its support to the motion.
Moved, That the draft regulations laid before the House on 2nd December be approved. [3rd Report front the Joint Committee.]—(Lord Sandys.)
Lord Peart: My Lords, I welcome very much what the noble Lord has said. As a former Minister of Agriculture, I have always thought that the hill-farming community deserve tremendous support. They have a much more difficult task than the Southern England farmers. The hill-farming areas are vulnerable in many ways and I am glad to see a hill farmer nodding approval—the noble Baroness, Lady Elliot of Harwood, farms in Scotland and is especially involved in this. I have always taken the view that the hill-farming community should be backed and therefore I could not oppose this. I think the Government have done well and I am glad that they have taken this action. I should just like to clear my mind on one figure; was it £2.4 million?
Lord Sandys: No, my Lords, the total increase was about £12.4 million.
Lord Peart: My Lords, that is money well spent. I approve of it and in no way will I delay it. It is first class for the hill-farming community.
Baroness Elliot of Harwood: My Lords, on behalf of the hill-farming community I thank the Government very much for this admirable proposal. It comes at a crucial moment and also at Christmas and I look upon it as a slight Christmas gift from the Government, for which I am exceedingly grateful.
Lord Sandy's: My Lords, we have had a brief but useful debate on these regulations and I am grateful to your Lordships for the support that has been expressed. I am particularly grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Peart, a former Minister of Agriculture who speaks from particular experience in this field and also my noble friend Lady Elliot of Harwood who speaks from day-to-day experience in this vital sector of the farming industry.
The Government are aware that the increased allowances will not fully compensate hill farmers for their reduction in income but they will make a significant contribution to a solution to the problem. I

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believe the House recognises that in the light of the present severe constraints on public expenditure these increases, coming on top of last year's substantial increases, are further evidence of the Government's commitment to the hill livestock sector and to the welfare of hill and upland areas generally.
On Question, Motion agreed to.

Employment Protection (Variation of Limits) Order 1980
2.33 p.m.
The Minister of State, Department of Employment (The Earl of Gowrie): My Lords, I beg to move that the draft Employment Protection (Variation of Limits) Order 1980, which was laid before the House on 2nd December, be approved.
The draft order has been laid in accordance with Section 148 of the Employment Protection (Consolidation) Act 1978 which requires the Secretary of State to carry out each year a review of the limits relating to certain payments made under that Act. This is the fourth review since the legislation was introduced in 1975. The relevant limits relate to guaranteed payments to workers on short-time and temporary lay-off; and to the weekly earnings limit laid down for the purposes of calculating redundancy payments and the basic and additional unfair dismissal award, as well as certain debts in relation to the insolvency provisions of the principal Act.
The Secretary of State for Employment has by law to take account of three factors in carrying out this review and in reaching a decision. They are: (i) the general level of earnings obtaining in Great Britain at the time of the review; (ii) the national economic situation as a whole; and (iii) such other matters as he thinks relevant. If, as a result of the review, the Secretary of State considers that any of the limits should be changed he must lay before each House the draft of an order giving effect to his decisions and where he decides that a limit should not be varied, he must lay before each House a report giving his reasons for not varying those limits.
The upper limit of the compensatory award for unfair dismissal (which also applies to compensation for race and sex discrimination and is relevant to compensation payable in cases involving unreasonable expulsion or exclusion from a trade union) is not subject to annual review under the principal Act.
As part of the review, the Government consulted a wide range of organisations for their views of the limits including the upper limit. In the light of these consultations we have decided that the limits of payments for redundancy, for basic and additional rewards for unfair dismissal, and payments under the insolvency provisions of the Act, should be increased; and the proposed changes are set out in the draft order.
If the order is approved in both Houses, the changes to the limits will come into effect on 1st February 1981. This follows the estalished pattern. The order was approved in the other place on 8th December. The Government did in fact review also the upper limit of the compensatory award for unfair dismissal,
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which was increased both last year and the year before, but in the light of these consultations we have decided against any increase.
As I have just mentioned, in reaching decisions on the limits one of the matters which the Secretary of State has to take into account is the general level of earnings obtaining in Great Britain at the time of the review. The latest month for which final figures are available is August. The August figure showed an increase of 21 per cent. over the previous 12 months. The provisional figure for October has been set at 20 per cent. and this shows a considerable drop on the provisonal figure for September which was 26 per cent. So one can see from those figures that we are reacting in fact to a falling earnings curve.
The Government also have to take into account the national economic situation as a whole. We have to weigh the need to protect employees, on the one hand, against the need, on the other hand, to keep within tolerable bounds the burdens which the Act imposes on employers when the importance of keeping employers in business is today of course so vital. Like the Labour Government before us, the Government have concluded that economic considerations prevent our increasing the weekly earnings limit to an extent that would fully restore its original purchasing power. We have decided that the maximum increase in these limits that can be justified in the present economic circumstances would be around 8 or 9 per cent. Accordingly, we propose to increase the limit on weekly payments from £120 to £130—an increase of 8.3 per cent. For redundancy payments, this means that the new maximum redundancy payment under the statutory provisions will be £3,900, that is, 30 weeks at £130, which will be the amount due to a man of 61 or over who has served 20 years and is entitled to 1½ weeks' pay for each year of service. The increase to £130 will also apply to certain payments under the insolvency provisions of the principal Act. The additional cost to the redundancy fund for the year 1981–82 is expected to be about £2 million.
The increase in weekly limits also applies to the basic award of compensation for unfair dismissal. I would remind your Lordships that this part of an unfair dismissal award is intended to reflect broadly the amount of redundancy payments which would have been received by an employee if he had been made redundant instead of being unfairly dismissed. This is the reason why the Act links these limits. It follows, therefore, that the limit should remain in line with the redundancy payments earnings limit. The new maximum in the basic award, therefore, remains exactly the same as the maximum redundancy payment of £3,900. The additional award which a tribunal may award, where an employer has refused to comply with an order for reinstatement or re-engagement, is also currently subject to a £120 weekly earnings limit, and is increased to £130.
We propose to increase the daily limit on guarantee pay from £8 to £8.75, an increase of 9.4 per cent. We have decided not to increase two of the limits on guarantee pay; namely, the specified number of days in any relevant period, and the length of that relevant period. The reasons for this decision are given in the report which was laid at the same time. They are, briefly, that the maximum number of days for which

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payment is required to be made—that is, five days—still seems to strike a fair balance between the employer's obligations and the employees' rights. With regard to the relevant period, the fixed period prescribed by Section 15 of the 1978 Act was amended to a rolling period by Section 14 of the Employment Act 1980 which came into force on 1st October. It would not, therefore, be appropriate to make any further changes at this review. To sum up, the increases take account of the increases in average earnings, but moderate those increases to take account of the economic situation and the present earnings trends. I trust that they commend themselves to the House. I beg to move.
Moved, That the draft order laid before the House on 2nd December be approved.—(The Earl of Gowrie.)
Lord Wells-Pestell: My Lords, in the normal way my noble friend Lord McCarthy would be dealing with the matter that is now before your Lordships' House, but academic responsibilities prevent his attendance here this afternoon. I have had an opportunity of discussing the content of this order with him and getting his expert guidance on the matter. I think that I could say that this stems, as the noble Earl, Lord Gowrie, has said, from the Employment Protection (Consolidation) Act 1978 which lays out very clearly what action should be taken, although it is left to the Government to fix amounts. As the noble Earl has gone into this matter very deeply—and, if I may say so, very clearly—we have no reservations with regard to it at all. I merely say that we support the order.
On Question, Motion agreed to.

Laboratory Animals Protection Bill [H.L.]
2.41 p.m.
The Earl of Halsbury: My Lords, I beg to move that this Bill be now read a second time. In rising to do so, I should like first to assure your Lordships that down to the last comma it is identical to that which your Lordships were kind enough to pass in the Session of Parliament that has recently ended. Your Lordships passed it about six months ago. It is no longer just a Private Member's Bill, my own Bill drafted by myself and those who help me. It represents the best solution that a Select Committee of your Lordships' House could find to a complex and controversial matter. It was a formidable well-qualified Select Committee, and I am glad to see my noble friend Lord Ashby in his place and so many Members of that committee down on the speakers' list to speak about it. I have already expressed my thanks to my noble friend Lord Ashby in absentia, and it is a pleasure to be able to repeat them again in his presence and to look forward, as I am sure your Lordships will too, to what he has to say.
The subject of the Bill is the prime responsibility of Government and I recognise that I cannot get the Bill on to the statute book without their approval and assistance in due course. But, a succession of Governments have avoided the embarrassment of discharging this responsibility following the report of the Littlewood Committee 16 years ago, by simply sitting tight and
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doing nothing. It was a political hot potato that nobody wanted to touch.
The Bill as drafted by me and those who helped me in the first place, and as amended later by the Select Committee, is now before your Lordships for the second time round. It represents my attempt to get the subject up from down under not by bringing animals into politics through the pressure of an unsupportable mailbag on honourable Members in another place, but by keeping them out of politics through a Private Member's Bill.
I shall not repeat my exposition of the details of the Bill. Your Lordships went through it all before when you passed it and sent it to the other place in the last Session, where it was taken up, but where there was insufficient time to give it attention. My reasons for asking your Lordships to give it attention again are twofold: domestic reasons on the one hand, and on the other hand reasons connected with the Council of Europe's working party on the same subject—home affairs and foreign affairs if you wish to put it that way.
On the home front we have had for 104 years what I have heard called an ineptly drafted Act under which no conviction could ever be secured on any prosecution likely to be brought. But, just because of that rather loose drafting it has been possible to bend the Act and thereby update it by the interpretation that one puts on it. What is not in the Act explicitly can be imported into it implicitly in the form of potential licence conditions over which the Home Office has a monopoly of authority, but of which the public knows very little in the matter of detail.
I do not myself, think that this authority at the Home Office is exercised wrongly, insensitively or unwisely. But the age-old analogy between doing justice and letting it be seen that justice is being done operates in this context and has left the militant, anti-vivisectionists free to argue—though not, to me, convincingly—that the Home Office is no more than the stooge of scientists indifferent to animal suffering. I do not accept that the the Home Office is a stooge. I do not accept that my fellow scientists are indifferent to animal suffering any more than I am myself. They are just as likely to be fond of animals as anyone else and have the same number of pet animals in their homes as other people. Nor do I accept that the alleged suffering is on anything like the extended scale that is made out. Nor do I believe that well-informed opinion among animal welfarists differs very much from mine. Nor do I think mine differed very much from that of the Select Committee.
However, we live in abnormal times in which any advocates of minority opinion now feel free to emphasise their opinions by civil commotion and violence at a time when the judiciary seem to have lost their faith in punishment as a deterrent. In any case, our gaols are so full of every form of serious criminal that there is no room to incarcerate those who merely make nuisances of themselves by damaging property and harassing individuals.
I have always been on good terms with the genuine animal welfare movement, with whose purposes I entirely sympathise. However, it has always had an extremist fringe with whom one cannot really talk—it is a dialogue of the deaf. When I meet them, as I have done, they seem to be somewhat disturbed personalities over a rather wide spectrum, towards whom I think sympathy

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rather than hostility is the appropriate reaction. They include people who like making speeches in public about this and, after all, that is what I am doing myself. In the middle of the range there are somewhat more neurotic types who are embittered about the subject and resemble the man with a grievance—if you remove his grievance, he only acquires another one; if they could not protest about animals, they would be protesting about putting flouride into drinking water or something like that.
Then, at the far end of the spectrum, there are people who are getting on to the border of what is psychotic rather than neurotic and suffering from delusions of persecution, not on behalf of themselves, but on behalf of something else—animals, for instance: a kind of paranoia; one might call it, vicarious paranoia. We have lived with this for over 100 years and we know how to live with it. But unfortunately this militant fringe in modern times has been infiltrated by backstreet bully types who use what is a good cause as an excuse for violence and vandalism, which is their real objective.
Your Select Committee was in no doubt about this. If your Lordships will allow me to read from their report, they said:
"There are small militant groups and fanatical individuals who cause great anxiety to a few scientific workers and who bring undeserved discredit upon the animal welfare lobby".
I emphasise "undeserved discredit".
"We received evidence, including a sworn statement to the police, that some physiologists are the victims of intolerable intimidation. They suffer abusive telephone calls at all hours of the night, threats to themselves and their families, even calculated harrassment of their children. Similarly militant persons are responsible for offensive acts of vandalism, involving damage running to thousands of pounds, at places where scientific work is going on".
Those are not my words; they are the words of a Select Committee of your Lordships' House after listening to the evidence.
Did those so criticised accept this rebuke from your Lordships House?—one of the Houses in the Mother of Parliaments. Not they. Within a few weeks of those words being published, there was organised a protest movement deliberately intended to vandalise the Agricultural Research Council's Institute of Animal Physiology at Babraham, near Cambridge. Emotions had been irresponsibly worked up by that paragon of Fleet Street, the tabloid newspaper, the Star, which described the institute as "Frankenstein Farm" and similar emotive denotations. It hinted at unspeakable horrors going on behind locked doors.
This may have promoted the Star's circulation but it was particularly silly since, like all research council stations of such character, Babraham published an annual report of its general activities while the details were of course published in the various scientific journals, veterinary journals, physiological journals, and so on, devoted to the subject matter. In the result, thousands of pounds worth of damage was done to public property, the animals were far more disturbed and frightened by noise, commotion, rioting, the flashing of camera bulbs, than they ever were by experimental procedures, and nothing whatever emerged from the exercise which could be of the slightest value to any cause at all.
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Arrests were made, and a prosecution followed, but the offenders were only bound over to keep the peace for a period, and promptly claimed it as a moral victory. I have here a photocopy of the Star the day afterwards.
"Fury at horror farm. Furious animal lovers clashing with police yesterday after smashing their way into Frankenstein Farm".
Next door to it, just to illustrate the tatterdemalion standards of journalism to which this belongs, is a picture of a provocatively naked bosom, and underneath it is written:
"Loving it up on the Costa del Sex. Secrets of those seaside singles, see centre page".
I have not got the centre page to flourish at your Lordships, but I am sure it would be much more interesting than the details of mob violence at Babraham.
To continue with the story, a few weeks later vandals interrupted a church service at which prayers of thanksgiving were offered for the work of the Wellcome Foundation, whose centenary it was. I should explain that the foundation is a trading enterprise whose share capital is entirely owned by a trust, the Wellcome Trust, and from the profits the trust receives as shareholder it donates funds in support of medical and allied research all over the world.
Of course animals are used in the foundation's laboratories as they are in other such establishments. But this was made an excuse for noisy interruptions of a church service of thanksgiving by vandals. These people are quite lost to any sense of what is fitting. In so far as the updating of legislation and the failure to update it can be made an excuse for mindless violence of this kind, the judiciary appear little disposed to punish it very severely.
May I then ask the noble Minister my first question? Does he not agree that this situation must be dealt with seriously? Will he condemn publicly, right now and in the strongest possible terms the sort of vandalism detailed in the report of your Lordships' Select Committee? In particular will he condemn the odious practice of adults inciting children to harass other children because they are the children of scientists and their parents' work is disapproved of in fantasy by the inciters, though they make it clear they do not really know what sort of work the parents are doing at all?
Will the Minister tell the House what steps can be taken to draw the attention of the judiciary to what is going on? Needless to say, I am not concerned in the least with interfering with the independence of the judiciary, or their judgment of what is proper to impose as punishment in particular cases, but I see no reason to suppose that magistrates at large are close students of Select Committee reports of this House on matters of no immediate legal concern to them, and surely it is permissible to draw their attention to what is going on generally. There must be some machinery for doing this.
The urgency of the need for new legislation brings me to my second reason for reintroducing the Bill. The declared policy of Her Majesty's Government is to wait on the promised convention on which a Council of Europe working party is engaged at Strasbourg. That was never my intention. On the contrary; I wanted us to give Strasbourg a lead by

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introducing legislation they could copy into their convention based on our 100 years of experience in this field. I do not believe they would have been the least bit adverse to our doing so, for I have visited Strasbourg and talked to the officials engaged on the task and they are well aware that lawyers as such are quite out of their depth in this sphere and that what is needful is experience.
What are we doing to place our experience at their disposal? Are we giving them special facilities for studying this Bill? I have of course sent a copy to the secretariat there and there has been correspondence with them about it, but that is different from putting it on the agenda of the working party; I cannot do anything about that. I am told that the Home Office Advisory Committee is studying the Bill; but if Strasbourg is not, why not? And in any case, should we not know a little more about who are the members of this working party on whom we shall be so critically dependent? What expertise do they command, and does it compare with the expertise present at meetings of your Lordships' Select Committee? What evidence will they listen to, as your Select Committee did? Are there proceedings in public, as your Select Committee's were? What specialist advisers have they, as your committee had? What progress are they making, how often do they meet, what is the state of the all-important appendices—the details of how the convention would work, without which it would be inoperative—and is it the case, as I have heard, that the redrafting referred to by the Minister on the last occasions when we debated this matter (that is, Recommitment and Report stages of this Bill) has set the timetable back by a whole year?
I ask the Minister to tell us frankly how he views the timescale involved. Let me recite all that, in my view, has to be dealt with. First of all, the draft convention must be agreed as between those who are drawing it up and then the appendices must be written. To whom will the draft and its appendices then be submitted for approval, and with whom will the approving authority discuss the draft before approving it? How will the mechanisms of democracy work? What sort of discussions will be held here between the Government and interested parties in this country, not only the animal welfare movement but the medical profession, the scientific profession, the pharmaceutical industry and so on? At what point will Her Majesty's Government be irrevocably committed to ratification? And what of the other Governments; how long will they want before committing themselves?
I would ask the Minister for something else: will he give an undertaking that Her Majesty's Government will not commit themselves to ratification before an opportunity for parliamentary discussion here has been given? If the present state of the draft is not matured to the point where it can be published for public discussion, has it notwithstanding been made available to the Department of Health and Social Security and the Department of Education and Science, both of which are deeply interested in the outcome? Are they satisfied with the present state of the pain clause? When we last debated these matters it was in quite unsatisfactory terms, but the Minister seemed then to be assenting with what I felt, after reading his remarks in Hansard, was some complacency thereto. I repeat
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what I said to him then: it is in my view quite insupportable that, through a statute which leaves no scope for escape, the avoidance of limited suffering by relatively short-lived animals should for ever and in all circumstances have precedence over the avoidance of unlimited suffering by long-lived human beings, men, women and, above all, children. But, my Lords, I do not of course forget the animals, which so much of this research benefits. There must be an escape route from the pain clause which requires that an animal in severe pain which is likely to endure must be put down. The Minister must have power to make an exception to that in special circumstances. Does the noble Lord the Minister agree?
I come now to the pinch of the vice in which the Minister is gripped by the pledges that he has already given. Can he put his hand on his heart and say that the transaction of all this business will be completed in such time as will permit him to be in a position to draft legislation—itself a time-consuming process—which could come before Parliament in the lifetime of this present Parliament? Of course I say "could", not "will", because I know, and your Lordships know, that the Minister cannot pre-empt what will be contained in some future Speech from the Throne, and I should not be so foolish as to expect him to do so. He cannot promise that the Government pledge of new legislation can be kept in the lifetime of this Parliament; but, if not, can he put his hand on his heart and say that in such a case it will not be the fault of Strasbourg?
If the Minister cannot say that much, can he give me another promise instead, a conditional one? If there is undue delay in coming forward with a European Convention and its appendices acceptable to Her Majesty's Government, and likely to be ratified by the Governments of Europe, will he undertake to reopen the decision to wait on events elsewhere and proceed independently with domestic legislation, possibly on the lines of the Bill now before the House? In this sense, my Lords, the Bill is my pressure point. I am not prepared to wait indefinitely without trying to do anything while I watch my fellow scientists harassed because the judiciary is waiting upon the Government to put one branch of the law into an up-to-date form before reacting with severity to a breach of some other branch of the law by way of protest, while the Government are waiting on the rest of Europe.
That is why I would appeal to all interested parties who have supported me so far not to rock the boat at this stage. Doubtless some of my friends would like to see one amendment here or another amendment there which, from their point of view, would be improvements to the Bill. Equally, some of those who support my noble friend Lord Houghton of Sowerby, who has been so helpful to me throughout, would like to be able to say, "We would prefer a little more of this and a little more of that". But I think that the time to give expression to such views should be in the future. No one who keeps his counsel now by assisting the passage of the Bill need suppose that he has forfeited his right to raise his voice or lobby for support at another time or in another place. The compromise wrought by my noble friend Lord Houghton of Sowerby and me, with the help and support of our friends outside Parliament, and of our noble friends on the Select Committee, is one that I believe

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should be allowed to stand, for the time being at least. In that spirit, my Lords, I beg to move.
Moved, That the Bill be now read 2a.—(The Earl of Halsbury.)
3.3 p.m.
Lord Beaumont of Whitley: My Lords, those whom I represent on these Benches very much welcome the reintroduction of the Bill. I had the honour and pleasure to serve on the committee, and it was a most interesting and fruitful experience. We owe much to the hard work and the peace-making faculties of the noble Earl, Lord Halsbury, and of course to the chairmanship of the noble Lord, Lord Ashby, whom we very much look forward to hearing during the debate. It was a considerable achievement that a unanimous report, and therefore a unanimous draft Bill, were produced at the end of the day, particularly since the whole Bill had been completely redrafted, from top to bottom, in the course of the proceedings.
Lord Houghton of Sowerby and myself would in fact have liked the Bill to go rather further. In particular, we should have liked to seek a way of banning experiments on animals for the validation of products which are non-essential to the health and welfare of mankind. I still think that that is an important step which we ought to take in the future, but I accept that the feeling of the committee and of your Lordships' House was against it and the feeling of the public is also against it, and that therefore it is not yet ready for legislation. So we produced a report which we all supported and which we thought was practicable and as humane as in the circumstances it could possibly be. Certainly I stand by that and would wish to support the Bill as much as possible.
I am not going to detain your Lordships for long. We have already had two or three debates on this subject, and it may well be that it will be one of those subjects on which we may have further debates in the course of the next two or three years. But I think it is right that the noble Earl has brought it to us to press it again, and that we can have another airing of some of the criticisms which have been made, although I would go along with the noble Earl, Lord Halsbury, in thinking that none of the criticisms has really a very sound basis, or enough of a basis to make us reconsider the conclusions to which we came. Criticism was made of the powers being given to the advisory committee, but in the last resort the powers stay with the Secretary of State; and it seems to me that the composition of such an advisory committee is one way of keeping the unanimity and the agreement that we ourselves found in our own committee, and thus administering the Bill with common sense and humanity.
The problem of the Council of Europe Convention is a slightly difficult one. Of course, the Government do not want to waste time having too much legislation, or having to legislate first and then legislate again, but I agree that we should keep this matter as much as possible before the face of Parliament and before the face of the Government. Conventions do get bogged down. The Council of Europe (as I know, having served on it for several years) does move unconscionably slowly, and it may be right that we should enact this Bill before the convention goes
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through—certainly, as the noble Earl, Lord Halsbury, said, in case there should be any particular delay. I will not at this stage enter into the arguments about the exception to the pain clause. I think there are arguments on both sides, and without necessarily refusing the pleas of the noble Earl, Lord Halsbury, that we should not try to amend the Bill, I nevertheless think that there may be a case for at least raising this subject again and talking about it; but that is not on Second Reading.
It is important that in a matter like this, which arouses an immense degree of emotion and which is capable of arousing emotions in a large number of citizens of the country, we have a situation where people who regard themselves very much as the spokesmen of particular sides in this dispute have agreed together, and the only people who disagree are a number of extremists who, for one reason or another, cannot bring themselves to this practical solution which most of us have agreed is the best that could possibly be achieved at this particular time. If we have that situation, do not let us throw it away; do not let it fritter away through the sands of time until we go back to the same old sterile arguments again. Let us strike now, and let us do the best we can to put this into law as soon as possible.
3.10 p.m.
Lord Ashby: My Lords, the noble Earl and the noble Lord, Lord Beaumont, have put the case so clearly that there is really hardly anything for me to add except to underline what they have said and to support the Bill. I have one contribution to make. It is this. On a subject so savagely controversial as this, I wish to declare a disinterest. Half my career has been spent in experimental biology, but it has all been with plants, never with animals, and therefore I have never been put in to the position of having to declare loyalty either to those who believe in using animals for experiments or those who oppose it. So I came to the Select Committee with a completely open mind. I am now equally completely convinced that the law needs to be changed, that it needs to be changed as soon as practicably possible, and that, give and take a few compromises and amendments, the law should take the rough kind of pattern which is in the Bill that the noble Earl has presented to us this afternoon. When the Bill was recommitted last June, the noble Lord, Lord Belstead, assured the House Committee that the Government were resolved to replace the present Act. He paid very generous compliments to the revised Bill, but went on to say that the Government were not prepared to act yet and that the Government were not prepared to act on the lines of the Bill now before us.
Therefore, the Bill faces two obstacles: one on time and the other on content. Although it involves some repetition—but this matter needs to be rubbed in—I should like to say a few words about timing. The noble Lord advised us that the delay was necessary because the first draft of the European Convention was being revised and that the chairmanship is now in the hands of the United Kingdom. The noble Lord said that even last June—that was six months ago—the first eight Articles of the Convention had been provisionally agreed and he hoped that the rest would be agreed by (what is now) last September. He concluded

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that by this time next year—that will be, by June 1981—we shall have the complete convention upon which it will be possible for the United Kingdom to act quickly. One of the things which we hope and are quite sure that the noble Lord, Lord Belstead will tell us this afternoon is the present state of play in this matter.
But if there is to be a delay, I suggest to your Lordships that there is a strong case for pressing on with this Bill, even though it might need amendments at a later stage, partly because we are ahead of any other European country in our legislation and our plans for further legislation about this. We could, as the noble Earl has said, give a lead to Europe rather than following behind; and I hope that when the noble Lord the Minister replies he will be able to give some encouragement to that idea. Noble Lords know, and it is already clear from the opening speech of the noble Earl, that there has been long and bitter conflict between those who oppose experiments on animals and those who believe that these experiments, done humanely, are necessary and serve both humanity and the animals.
It so happened that two noble Lords closelyassociated with the two sides of the conflict—and, I hasten to say, moderates on each side—were members of the select committee that revised the Bill. It is, I think, a remarkable occasion that they are both here today supporting each other in pressing for this Bill to be adopted. This is an unprecedented situation. To use the noble Earl's simile: The hot potato is cooler than it has ever been before and, I dare say, cooler than it is ever going to be again. So this is a unique opportunity to seek a consensus on an issue which deeply moves some sections of the public.
Your Lordships may be interested to know that at an early stage of the work of the Select Committee, the committee was receiving some 200 letters a week from the public about this issue. If the decision is delayed this opportunity may be lost. That will cause widespread disappointment among people who have shown a deep concern about this matter and widespread disappointment among two opposite "sides"—if one can put that word in inverted commas—like the Research Defence Society, which looks after the interests of the scientists, and the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, of which the noble Lord, Lord Houghton of Sowerby, is such an important and almost legendary figure.
Secondly, may I say a few words about the Minister's comments on the content of the Bill? I hope that other speakers will take up what I omit. I want to deal with only one point. The Bill provides for a statutory advisory committee with the duty to advise the Secretary of State and to submit, through him, an annual report to Parliament. For many years there has been a non-statutory advisory committee. It has been somewhat sleepy in the past but it has recently been reconstituted and given new responsibilities; but it can only make its views known through the departmental channels. It cannot report formally to Parliament or to the public as, say, the University Grants Committee can.
Your Lordships' Select Committee regarded a statutory advisory committee with the powers you see set out in the Bill as an essential link in the chain of accountability between at one end those who use animals under the Act for tests and experiments, and,
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at the other end, the public. It was to be a watchdog for the public conscience. The noble Lord, Lord Belstead, was apprehensive about this proposal for a statutory committee. With his permission, I will quote from his speech at col. 1335 of Hansard of 20th June. He said that it would have the power:
"to circumscribe the Secretary of State in the exercise of his responsibilities, and undoubtedly quite often to impose its own policies on him".
and that (at col. 1336):
"the Secretary of State is required in effect to clear his annual report with the committee before submitting it to Parliament".
With respect to the noble Lord who sits on the Front Bench, that is not all the way the Select Committee regarded the words they drafted. Clause 2(1) of the Bill says that the Secretary of State:
"shall have regard to the advice and guidance"
of the advisory committee. Clause 10(5) says that the Secretary of State:
"shall receive any comments which the Committee make"
on his draft report to Parliament. Surely to have regard to advice and to receive comments from an advisory committee cannot, by any stretch of the imagination, be described as circumscribing a Secretary of State. Nowhere in the Bill is the Secretary of State obliged to act on the recommendation of the advisory committee.
I hope that the noble Lord will forgive me if I suggest that he may not have been fully briefed on this issue; and it is the most important issue in the whole Bill because the ethical problems involved in this legislation are extremely difficult. The Home Office inspectors—as the Select Committee makes clear in its report—are doing a remarkably efficient job, and they are doubtless thinking about the ethical issues all the time. But they are not philosophers, physiologists or animal psychologists, and they have a statute to administer. They cannot represent the public conscience as the advisory committee could. That is why your Lordships' Select Committee wanted a statutory body of advisers, charged with a continuing responsibility to reflect, among other things, on the nature of pain, suffering and stress in animals, about which we still know far too little.
This, in the Select Committee's view, is indispensable if public opinion is to be satisfied in these days of open government. It is essential, too, for the welfare of the animals used under the Act. As long as 20 years ago two people writing on this whole problem summed up what could be the continuing brief of such an advisory committee. They said what was necessary was continuing study of the three Rs, by which they meant replacement, reduction and refinement: that is, the replacement of animals by non-animals so far as possible, reduction in any case of the number of animals used, and, where there had to be stress or pain put upon an animal, refinement of the methods to minimise that.
So even though the Government will doubtless want to redraft this Bill in the light of the advice they are now getting from the advisory committee, I do plead with the noble Lord the Minister to press for action in 1980–81. If there has to be delay because of procrastination at Strasbourg, can the noble Lord give an undertaking to the House that, pending the introduction

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of fresh legislation, he will ask his right honourable friend the Home Secretary to encourage this at present informal advisory committee to act as it would act if it were a properly constituted statutory committee? My Lords, I leave other points to be made by other speakers, and end by repeating my total support for this Bill and also for the advocacy of the noble Lords who have preceded me in this debate.
3.22 p.m.
Lord Skelmersdale: My Lords, it is with some diffidence on two counts that I rise to address your Lordships on this occasion. In the first place, I am a very strong supporter indeed of this Government. I believe that if anybody can put the "Great" back into Great Britain it is this Government, and I think that in many ways it is beginning to do just that. I wish that the Home Office and my noble friend Lord Belstead, who is speaking for the Government at the end of this debate, were striding ahead quite as fast as some other departments and Ministers of this particular Government. The second reason why I rise with great diffidence is that it is always extremely difficult to get on the same wave-length of clarity of explanation as the noble Lord, Lord Ashby. I am grateful to him in that, without any collusion on our part, he has in the most miraculous way led in to what I want to say.
When I was asked to serve on the Select Committee, I did so in a spirit almost of fear and trembling. I was very worried that, on the one side, we would have the big battalions of science, represented in this case by the noble Earl, Lord Halsbury, and the noble Lord, Lord Adrian, and, on the other hand, the animal welfare side represented by the noble Lords, Lord Houghton of Sowerby and Lord Beaumont of Whitley. Great was my relief, then, when at I think the second sitting of the committee I discovered that my fears were groundless and that we would almost certainly come up with a Bill which was agreed by all members of the Select Committee. That is exactly what we did.
Many of your Lordships will have been sent the pamphlet I am holding, which is Information Sheet No. 12 from the Committee for Information on Animal Research, the Government's comments on the Select Committee's amended Laboratory Animals Protection Bill. It is really a distillate, a précis, of the speech made by the noble Lord, Lord Belstead, on 20th June last, when we were going through the Recommitment and Report stages of Lord Halsbury's Bill of the last Session. It boils down to six-and-a-half points, one of which the noble Lord, Lord Ashby, has already made. Without wishing to be nasty in any way, I should be grateful if my noble friend Lord Belstead could explain a little more fully the rationale of his arguments; of many of the criticisms that he had of the Bill on that occasion.
One of his points was to cast doubts on the new demand that the Bill made on the Secretary of State to have regard to what is justifiable for the advancement of knowledge, or for the health and welfare of mankind or animals. This was done by the Select Committee to take account of the change in public opinion and public need over a period of years. We recognised that the present Act of 1876 had then been running on the
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statute book without amendment for 103 years—it is now 104. So what possible reason have we to be sure that any Bill that eventually emerges will not be in force for the next 104 years?
Secondly, on this problem of advisory bodies, the Government fear that the Secretary of State might be controlled by the statutory advisory body which it is recommended should be set up under this Bill. Now an advisory body's job, basically, is to advise the Secretary of State and, although this body is to be set up as a free-thinking one, its job, in the end result, is purely to advise. We have had an example from the noble Lord, Lord Ashby, of a similar body. I am thinking, although perhaps my analogy is not so apt, of the Nature Conservancy Council, which is also free-thinking, but which also, in the last resort, advises.
The Government's view on the permitted purposes for the granting of licences is that it would be difficult to conceive of any purpose that could not be brought within the terms of Clause 1(2). Again, we have already heard this mentioned this afternoon. But they are also complaining that the Secretary of State must have regard to what is justifiable et cetera. You really cannot have it both ways. Either the criticism is that the power is being passed to the Executive, or the criticism is that too much power is being passed to the Secretary of State. I really do not understand how you can have it both ways.
Next in the new Bill, whether it is to be a Government one or this one is to become law—which, as the noble Earl said, is extremely unlikely and not really desirable; it is something on which the Government should legislate—the Government feel that the pain condition should be inviolate. How, then, is scientific work on the subject of pain to be conducted? How are we to know that new procedures in the future may not make it absolutely essential to have this very carefully drafted exclusion? There may very well be good reasons why the Secretary of State wants to exclude the pain clause for a particular experiment or a particular class of experiments.
I can assure the Government and my noble friend that the Select Committee spent many hours and had more expert opinion on this point than on any other. I thought at one stage that we had reached deadlock on this with the opposing forces that I spoke about at the beginning. The trouble was that they were all absolutely correct in their own viewpoints, and what we had to try to do was to marry their opinions to get a sensible compromise, and I believe that this compromise has now been reached.
All speakers have referred to the Council of Europe convention. The Government again criticise this Bill, in that it does not follow this and does not deal with the procurement, breeding and supply of laboratory animals; whether animals are to be used a second time for laboratory purposes, and so on. But what do the Government think Clause 6 is all about? It covers these points absolutely clearly. It enables the Secretary of State to make regulations on all these points. As we have heard, and will hear again later from them, the Government have promised new legislation of their own on this subject, but only after the Council of Europe convention is signed. I accept that this must be done but I cannot help regretting, in passing, that so often we have to wait, swinging on the coat-tails

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of Europe, before anything is done. I believe that we ought to lead and not to wait unduly. We have a golden opportunity to press not only for a quick convention but for a more positive convention along the lines of the noble Earl's excellent Bill.
We have here a very fragile peace on what is undoubtedly a very sensitive subject. I could not urge my noble friend more strongly to see that the European convention is pushed along with all possible speed. This Bill, which I accept may well need tidying up on some minor matters, presents the Government with a framework not only for their own legislation but also for the convention.
To sum up, I believe that the Government are presented with a golden opportunity, presented, as our American friends would say, "sunny side up". I can only hope that we do not all of us—the Government, the Select Committee, the House, the welfare bodies, the scientists—end up with egg all over our faces.
3.32 p.m.
Lord Houghton of Sowerby: My Lords, whenever the noble Earl, Lord Halsbury, speaks on this subject I wonder how long it is going to be before I pray to be saved from my friends. I associate myself with the first two minutes of his speech this afternoon; I dissociate myself completely from the next 10. It was only when he reached the business before the House of taking stock and trying to find where we go next that I found myself in sympathy with what he was saying. The noble Earl has got vandalism on the brain. He cannot leave the subject alone. I warn the noble Earl, and the House, that the more one talks about vandalism the more of it one will get. I said this in the Select Committee about the very excerpt from the report of the committee which the noble Earl read to the House.
I regret to say that the noble Earl has no understanding at all of the mood, the outlook and the desire for idealism and action of the young people of Britain today. With great respect to him, he is "an old square". It is not a bit of good lecturing the magistrates and criticising the judiciary and virtually asking them to send these people to remand homes or institutions for reform and better order and discipline.
None of that is going to carry any influence with young people. They are disenchanted with the society which has been created for them by their elders. They do not like what they see; they want to change it. They want to be where the action is. Unfortunately, where the action is is usurped by the older people in the community who stand in the way of the attainment of the life and of the vision they want to see.
I appeal to noble Lords to understand this problem more deeply than it has been presented to them this afternoon by the noble Earl, Lord Halsbury. I felt so indignant when he was speaking that had I been in the House of Commons I should have interrupted him. I should have been rude to him. If I had been handy for the Mace I should have run away with it. I should have shown my indignation in the same sort of way that young people do when they find there is no other course open to them.
I am going to leave that aside. I thought we were going to have a business session this afternoon: no restatement of our respective philosophies, no going
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over the ground of whether experiments are necessary for the benefit of humanity or for animals and no confrontation between the "pro" and the "anti" point of view on this deeply sensitive and controversial issue. We had come together on the Select Committee, we had presented a Bill to this House; that Bill was passed through all its stages in June and that marked a positive and historic step forward. So I will leave aside the noble Earl's special pleading for scientists and the defence of the Home Office. Let me tell your Lordships, neither of them are any better than they should be and we will take it for granted that they are doing their best, so, like the pianist, we will not shoot them. We will just leave them aside and get on with our job, and our job this afternoon is to ask the noble Lord the Minister where we are going from here.
One good reason for urging the House to give this Bill a Second Reading for the second time is that it is the best Bill that we have got. It is the only Bill we have got. This is the only Bill which has gone through either House of Parliament on this subject within living memory. Just ponder on that, my Lords—within living memory no Bill on this subject has passed either House of Parliament! Here we are, on the eve of Christmas with a Bill which represents the highest attainable agreement in sentiment and in practice on this subject. Therefore we should regard this as a moment of great potentiality from the parliamentary point of view. If I may say so, it is bigger than 12 minutes of the speech of the noble Earl. I am sorry to refer to him again.
The question is, why are we not getting on? We are not getting on because the Government will not give facilities for us to get on. They will put up with this, but they do not want to do anything about it yet. What, then, are we waiting for? We are waiting upon the work being done in the Council of Europe. That is the main reason for delaying action in our own Parliament. We have heard this before but I think it is time to ask the Minister to be much more precise about the likely period that we may have yet to wait before the final draft of the Convention is available for our consideration.
At column 1332 of the Official Report of this House of the 20th June the noble Lord said that he hoped
"the remaining articles will be settled at the next meeting in September. This is likely to be followed by a meeting of a small drafting group to prepare the final document for presentation to the Strasbourg Committee in March or May of next year"—
that is 1981.
"Therefore I believe that by this time next year we shall have a complete convention upon which it will be possible for the United Kingdom to act quickly".
What we ought to know from the noble Lord is whether that timetable still holds. Is that what we can confidently expect?
In connection with the Wildlife and Countryside Bill the other day we had occasion to look at the Convention on the conservation of European Wildlife and Natural Habitats, which came from the same source—the Council of Europe. I looked at the timetable in that report to see how long these things take. In that case the first meeting of the body concerned was in November 1976 and the draft Convention was December 1978. It was adopted by the Committee of Ministers in June 1979. It was opened for signature

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in September 1979, and we got the Bill implementing the recommendations of the Convention in December 1980. Are we going to have a similar lapse of time between the draft final Convention and the introduction of legislation? How long is that going to take? I do think that the Minister has now to come clean with the House and tell us candidly where we are, because he knows as well as I do that the longer this business drags on the more precarious is going to be the unity on this Bill. It is only held there by the prospect of action, and if the prospect of action recedes then I am afraid the stresses and strains which underlie the present unity may well break again. I certainly will not be able to keep in partnership with the noble Earl, Lord Halsbury, indefinitely. I will cling on to him for a bit longer, but I warn him that he is in danger of losing me, and if he makes any more speeches like he did this afternoon he will lose me more quickly. So I do beg of him to hold his peace and put the responsibility where it belongs, and that is on the Minister, to obey the will of the House, to respond to the mood of the country, because that is very strong indeed, and let us get on.
I am not going to keep the House more than a minute or two longer, but I just want to remind the House of where the differences lie. I agree that it is difficult for us to legislate while a draft convention is reaching its final stages in the Council of Europe. That does provide some difficulties, let us be honest about it. But we must ask the Council of Europe to have regard to our difficulties. We are not waiting to come up to the standard of the draft convention, as I understand that draft is likely to be; we are impatient to get ahead of it. Indeed, the convention will provide for nation States to introduce legislation going further than the conditions of the convention. That is what we are waiting for. The convention is likely to bring other European countries up to the standards we have now, but we want to go further than that. Therefore, from our point of view waiting for the convention impedes our drive for progress. That is why we have to tell the Council of Europe, "Do not shilly-shally too long, you people, because if you do we shall he bound to go on and show you and the world that our standards are better than yours". That is the first thing.
The second thing is, what is the trouble about this Bill, which we might well be considering while we are waiting for the final draft of the convention of the Council of Europe? The noble Lord, Lord Skelmers-dale, referred to this little pamphlet, which I hope I may modestly say I asked this committee to produce. I said, "Let us have in an impartial and intelligible form a summary of the Government's objections to this Bill", and we have got it here. I would refer your Lordships to the last page. Under the heading of "Summary" it says:
"The government spokesman clearly felt that the Select Committee has left too many decisions to the discretion of the Secretary of State, and that Parliament ought to be able to 'grasp the nettle of being more precise about what may or may not be done to animals'".
That summarises one of the main objections expressed by the noble Lord to the recommendations of the Select Committee—too much is left to the Home Secretary, exposing him to too much advice and
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circumscribing his own judgment too much. Heavens above! Ministers are surrounded by advisory committees. They could not live without them. We all know that the Home Secretary is the jack of all trades and the master of none and that he needs all the advisory committees that he can get, because he has no time to reach a judgement of his own in any depth on any subject. In those circumstances this advisory committee would be a godsend to any Home Secretary who wished to share his responsibilities with representative expert opinion.
The Conclusion reached in this document is extremely pertinent. It says:
"If the government draftsman were to succeed in the difficult task of defining unacceptable purposes, prohibiting unduly severe procedures and imposing clearly delineated limits on pain and suffering, this could safeguard animals through the direct control of Parliament."
That seemed to be what the Minister was thinking the House ought to do. However, in the document there is added a comment which is highly relevant, namely:
"Such a task is not easily accomplished".
We realised that in the Select Committee. We thought that some of these difficult decisions would be better taken after close examination, consultation, advice to the Minister and the issue of statutory instruments or draft orders which would deal with complicated matters more intelligibly and in greater detail than would be possible in the Statute. But the document goes on:
"An Act that failed to impose restrictions in effective terms, and also failed to vest a wide discretion in an accountable body, would fail altogether to protect animals and achieve nothing beyond a tidying of the statute book."
If that is what the Government mean by updating the 1876 Act then we are against it. It will not go far enough. It will not achieve the main purpose behind the reforms that we want.
So I think that in the circumstances the Minister—if I may respectfully suggest to him—might confine his observations, not to condemnation of all and sundry but to defending his own position in this matter, which is accountability to the House that wants to get on and is being held back, partly by discussions that are going on elsewhere and partly because of reservations in the mind of the Minister and the Home Secretary as regards the recommendations of the Select Committee. I think that on those two points the utmost candour from the Minister would be most welcome this afternoon.
I am sure, from the speech made by the noble Lord, Lord Ashby, that the House will realise the quality of his chairmanship of the Select Committee, his open-mindedness and his capacity for impartial judgment and reconciliation of opposing points of view. The Select Committee, this House and Parliament were very fortunate indeed in getting a chairman of a Select Committee of such composition who could enable that body to reach an agreed report and present to your Lordships an agreed Bill. That is something to which I think the House should pay tribute.
In conclusion, I hope that the noble Earl, Lord Halsbury, will disown this Bill from his own name and give it a different one, because the term "Halsbury Bill" on my side of the House is an extremely sensitive subject to live down. The sooner it can be known as

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the "Ashby Bill" the better. Then we can get on and have less prejudice against its recommendations. I beg forgiveness of the noble Earl, Lord Halsbury; I think that we shall remain friends for a little while longer, but I warn him, not too long.
3.50 p.m.
Lord Adrian: My Lords, I hope to take no more than a few minutes of your time. I should like to support the noble Earl, Lord Halsbury, to whom we are all immensely grateful, for the initiative that he has taken in this extremely difficult and controversial matter.
As an experimental scientist and a Member of the Select Committee which considered this Bill under the immensely skilled chairmanship of the noble Lord, Lord Ashby, I am extremely aware of the importance of achieving legislation which can be agreed upon by reasonable men. I believe that the Bill which is before us today for a second time does, indeed, pass that crucial test.
There may be other legislative forms which would equally pass that test, and I very much hope that when the Government's own proposals are unveiled, they will do so. However, as a member of the Home Office Advisory Committee, which is at present considering the principles which should govern the Government's proposals, I am sure that your Lordships will understand if I leave it at that.
When we debated this Bill last year, it was newly drafted. There had been no lack of alternative proposals and, as amended by your Select Committee, the Bill was based on unfamiliar legislative approaches. Not surprisingly, it has taken some time for scientists to digest these proposals, and I am very glad of the opportunity today to say something of the reactions of my colleagues to them.
Scientists are extremely conscious of the importance of agreement and, indeed, all noble Lords who have spoken today have stressed this very point. We could hardly be otherwise, as many of us have been subject to harassment and abuse by those who do not like what we do and do not like the 1876 Act within which we work, for whatever idealistic reasons they may have taken these actions. Indeed, we could hardly be unaware that a legitimate concern for the welfare of animals is sometimes combined with a dislike and fear of scientific inquiry itself.
Biological scientists share the concern for the welfare of animals, but they are convinced by the experience of 400 years—that is the period since William Harvey discovered the circulation of the blood—they are convinced of the great utility of experimental inquiry. I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Houghton of Sowerby, will not accuse me of being provocative when I say that.
Any legislation which replaces the 1976 Act will inevitably affect the work which we do and the contribution which we can make to knowledge, to medicine and to human and animal wellbeing. Although it was written in the language of another century, the meaning and the administration of the 1876 Act were familiar and well-tried. There was a community of understanding about what it meant and what might be done.
The new language and the new limits in this Bill do not have that reassurance of familiarity, but I believe
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that they have the support of scientists, and I profoundly hope that they will have the general support of the mainstream at least of the animal welfare groups. If our support is as yet qualified in some details, this Bill, should it become law, will have our wholehearted support if it diminishes pain and suffering and does not obstruct the:
"improving of natural knowledge by experiment",
to use the words of Charles II in a letter to the Royal Society.
In particular, academic scientists welcome the inclusion of university teaching among the permitted purposes. That teaching is in a constrained position under the existing Act. We also very much welcome the new statutory position of the advisory committee.
I should like if I may to add my voice to the words of the noble Earl, Lord Halsbury, about the final discretion of the Secretary of State in the matter of severe pain which is likely to endure—that is, the pain condition, Clause 3(8). The noble Lord the Minister of State said in the previous Second Reading debate that all licences are now issued with a pain condition which lays down that an animal found to be suffering severe pain which is likely to endure shall forthwith be painlessly killed.
I should say at once that no one would dispute that this should in general be done. This condition is not embodied in the 1876 Act and is not in principle at the moment sacred since, on my licence at least, it begins with the words, "Unless otherwise provided below". I should add that it is not so provided below. The noble Lord the Minister of State said that the time had now come to put such a condition into legislation and to make it inviolable. He made the point that we should be required to do this by the articles of the European Convention. My Lords, the relevant passage of that convention is not finally agreed, and its current form is moreover open to a number of interpretations. Article 8 reads:
"When during a procedure it is found that an animal is going to suffer or is suffering severe pain or distress, or a degree of pain or distress greater than was envisaged, which cannot be prevented or alleviated, that animal shall be humanely killed without avoidable delay even if the main object of the procedure has not been achieved".
One needs only to point out that this article is so drafted that, if strictly construed, it does not apply to severe pain which has been envisaged and can be prevented or alleviated but for some reason is not.
I gather that this article is to be reconsidered at Strasbourg in May, and I hope that our delegates will be able to agree a form of words which achieves the protection which we wish to see given to animals, and does not have unforeseen pitfalls.
If the pain condition becomes statutory and inviolable its meaning will be subject to judicial interpretation. And it is here that I foresee difficulty because it is at least possible that a judge might consider that some procedures done under licence today would fall within the words "severe pain likely to endure". I have in mind as an example the testing of the vaccine used to prevent black-leg, which is a painful and sometimes fatal disease of cattle akin to gas gangrene. It might be no trivial matter if testing that vaccine had to be discontinued.
I believe that the European Convention as it now stands is unsatisfactory so far as the pain condition is

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concerned. The Bill before us is, as has been mentioned, a compromise, an essential part of which is the final discretion of the Secretary of State. I believe that a statutory and inviolable pain condition of the kind suggested by the noble Lord the Minister of State could have a number of unfortunate consequences, and it is my own personal view that the pain condition, the spirit of which I am entirely committed to, is better left as it is; a condition put upon the licence by the Secretary of State under authority given him by statute to impose such conditions as he sees fit. I should like to support Lord Halsbury's proposal at this stage.
3.59 p.m.
Lord Ferrier: My Lords, I have followed every word of this debate, as I have followed the words of other debates on this matter over the years whenever I have been able to be in London. It seems to me that hitherto the one subject on which we were all absolutely agreed (with the exception of the noble Lord who has just sat down, who is precluded from taking a view) was that we want to get on with it; we want the Government to get on with it. With that in mind, I ask your Lordships' forgiveness for taking up some time on a few points which I am sure are apposite for consideration by us, and are necessary to have on the record before this measure goes to the other place.
Much of what I have heard has enabled me to cut items from the speech I would have made, though some of what I have heard compels me to add to it. I will not weary noble Lords with details of why I speak and the connection I have had with animals and research, because I do not want to detain the House unduly. Important as it is that the Bill goes forward to the other place without delay, it is equally as important that it should not leave this House without mention of some of the misgivings which arise regarding certain of its provisions, as the noble Lord, Lord Adrian, indicated.
The effect of Clause 8(1) is to subordinate the Bill to the 1911 Act, which was and is designed to prevent deliberate cruelty to animals and to punish offenders who torment them. Licences under the Bill give immunity to experimenters from the provisions of the 1911 Act, but an offence such as the inadvertent omission to renew a licence would be prosecuted under the 1911 Act. I understand that scientific workers object to this innovaton on the grounds that it is wrong that they might be indirectly regarded as having a licence thereby to be cruel. Indeed, is it necessary for the word cruelty "to occur in Clause 8(1) at all? Though not a scientific worker, I strongly object to the inclusion of that word in this context, implying, as it does, that medical research involves cruelty.
This is something which is alleged by the arrogant and sometimes hysterical mischief-makers who seem to be willing to break the law in pursuit of a somewhat bogus campaign, accusing their fellow citizens of all sorts of enormities without true regard to the facts, and here I wish to reinforce what the noble Earl, Lord Halsbury, said, and to differ with the noble Lord, Lord Houghton of Sowerby. I interpreted the latter as saying that young people today are saying, "Get on with it. Get out of our way or you will get hurt".
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That is not my view of what the young people of today are thinking, although it may be the result of watching the awful violence one sees on the television screen. As one of my grandchildren said to me, "I don't know, Grandpa, but they seem to think we go about hitting people all the time. We don't". This is just another of 100 contexts in which we can complain about the situation today; indeed, even when they show the trailer of a film on television it shows somebody being shot or getting run over by a car. But I am leaving the subject matter of the Bill, and I mention it only because I feel that the noble Lord, Lord Houghton, went too far in what he said, and that we must look out for the extraordinary condition of mind which the noble Earl, Lord Halsbury, described so well.
People have substantial financial resources nowadays and can employ stipendary personnel whose livelihood consequently may be to harry people who are carrying on highly responsible scientific work. I wonder how many of them know that in 1947 the House of Lords, in its judicial capacity, found that the National Anti-Vivisection Society
"having as its object the total suppression of vivisection"
was not a body to be exempt from income tax
"because any assumed public benefit in the advancement of morals would be far outweighed by the detriment to medical science and research and consequently to public health, and … because a main object of the society was political in the promotion of legislation"
It was a surprise to me when my attention was drawn to that fact in the Law Reports of 1948.
I yield to no one in my devotion to animals, brought up, as I was, in a tradition of kindness and compassion. I feel justified in being infuriated by what some of the busybodies are prepared to do. But be that as it may, there is a body of opinion strongly opposed to making this legislation subordinate to the 1911 Act. They resent the fact that the Select Committee appear to have taken the view that animal experiments should be deemed to amount to cruelty. Is this departure from the principles of the 1876 Act necessary?
The establishment of a statutory advisory committee (to which the noble Lord, Lord Adrian, referred) is a welcome proposal, provided that it is not to be burdened with minutiae. This is a difficult point which must be thrashed out before the Government adopt the Bill, as I hope they will, and put it under their legislative umbrella, if that is the right word—and that at no distant date. If the advisory committee were to be so burdened that it has to meet frequently, that might limit the range of people of the requisite calibre—which means busy people—who should be available to assist the Secretary of State in major matters of policy.
The Secretary of State's administrators are well able to deal with day-to-day matters and reach prompt decisions. I feel that some of the delays are far too long. With applications, for instance, it takes far too long to get a "Yea" or "Nay". Such delays must be cut to the minimum. Clause 6 provides a substantial range of regulatory provisions, which are adequate.
There are one or two other problems which will remain to be ironed out if, as I hope, the Government will take on the Bill without delay. Bearing in mind the important position occupied by the pharmaceutical

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industry in respect of the country's export trade, there must be considered, for instance, the complex matter, that has already been referred to in the debate, of the relationship with EEC requirements. Furthermore, there are problems about the testing of non-medical products, and this point too must be covered, since the Bill makes provision only for testing products and substances having a medicinal purpose. In this respect I dare say that both the Ministry of Agriculture and the Department of the Environment might be involved in making relative provisions in respect of pesticides and agricultural chemicals on which the provision of food depends. Care should be taken to see that our regulations will not drive the testing of such non-medicinal materials into countries where experimental animals are less protected than they are in this country and than they will be under this legislation.
In posing those questions I nevertheless feel that the Bill should go forward without delay, as everyone else has said, for the reasons which have been so well disclosed. In conclusion, I need hardly mention that the Scottish Act of 1912 is also included in Schedule 4. I only hope that I have satisfied the noble Earl and your Lordships that, in delaying the progress of the Bill for a few minutes, I have made a serious contribution to this important measure, to which I wish well.
4.10 p.m.
Lord Peart: My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Ferrier, for his speech. Mention has been made of one's interest. It so happens that I am an honourary associate fellow of the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons—a body which I can assure your Lordships has great connections with the industry that we are discussing. "Vets" are really remarkable men and women who seek to help animals when they are either very sick or very ill. I hope that no one will assume that a body like that, which is so involved in this subject, would want to cause divisions on this Bill. I cannot understand why my noble friend Lord Houghton of Sowerby, who has done so much in this field, cannot get together with the noble Earl, Lord Halsbury, to settle their differences; because I believe it is essential from the point of view of legislation, and also from that of propaganda, that we should have strength. I know that Lord Houghton is a great man in this field, but I think he ought to try to meet the noble Earl.
Lord Houghton of Sowerby: My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend. We have got together. We have settled our differences. We are agreed on this Bill. What more?
Lord Peart: My Lords, I think my noble friend went a little further than that. However, I am glad I made the point. Thank goodness my noble friend and the noble Earl have agreed. I take the view that Clause 2 is the important part of the Bill in many ways. This provides for the setting up of the advisory committee, whose work will depend on the quality of its members. The noble Lord, Lord Adrian, made a fine speech; and may I also say to the noble Lord, Lord Ashby, who has been involved in this subject very much, that I think he did, too.
In winding up from the point of view of the Opposition—and I do not want to delay the House too long;
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we had a late night last night and I was speaking here late—all I say to my friends who are in this field of animal welfare is: For goodness' sake close your ranks! That is the message. I think that would be the view of the Government, too, and when the noble Lord replies I hope he takes that view. We had a debate on the details a long time ago. I used to go to the Council of Europe—in fact, I led a delegation there—and I am glad that the Council of Europe took a great interest in this question. All I am trying to say to the Government is that I think this Bill is a good Bill. What is needed now is action on the Bill, and certain things which are important will have to be done. With good will on all sides, I think this is a major step forward.
4.13 p.m.
Lord Belstead: My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Peart, has reminded us that he is an associate fellow of the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons. It is quite right that the noble Lord should have mentioned this, because at the end of this debate it has reminded us of the very wide range of interests which have lain behind the speeches made by your Lordships at the end of a long week and just before we break for Christmas, on this very important subject. Like the noble Lord, Lord Peart, I think, and the Government think, that Clause 2 is perhaps in some ways the most important part of the Bill, although there is an aspect of Clause 1 to which I want to refer before I finish where the Government still see difficulties.
My Lords, may I come to the noble Earl whose Bill this is, the noble Earl, Lord Halsbury? He made his intentions clear in the last Session, when he acknowledged that, although his then Bill would be lost in that Session through lack of time, he would reintroduce it in this Session and thereafter until he saw and approved of a Government Bill which he hoped would be modelled upon his. I believe I made the Government's position equally clear on that occasion. Nevertheless, in order that there should be no lingering doubts, I should like to reiterate it. The Government are committed to improve and modernise the Cruelty to Animals Act 1876. We intend to do so when we know the outcome of the current work in the Council of Europe on the preparation of the convention. A drafting group is to meet in January to draw up a final draft for consideration by the full committee next May. This is the timetable that I forecast in our debate on 20th June [Official Report, col. 1332]. As a result of next May's meeting we then expect to have a clear idea of the obligations of the convention to enable us to carry forward our pledge.
I am well aware of the suggestion that the Government should implement their commitment without waiting for the outcome at Strasbourg. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Ashby, that because of this country's unique experience in the field of animal experimentation we should certainly be able to do this. But we do not think it right to jump the gun when we are playing a leading part, both through our chairmanship of the committee and through the substantial contributions by the United Kingdom delegation in drawing up an international instrument to provide for the better welfare of animals used in experiments throughout Europe.

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We entirely agree with the Secretariat of the Council of Europe's Committee of Experts for the Protection of Animals, which is drafting the convention, that that drafting is a matter for experts (as the title of the committee implies) rather than for lawyers. That is normal with a convention of this kind; and it is for that reason that the United Kingdom's own official delegation to the committee includes no lawyers, but it includes three experts in the field of animal care and experimentation. The noble Earl, Lord Halsbury, asked if I would specify who are our representatives in that respect. They are the chief inspector under the Cruelty to Animals Act, with his great experience of the operation of that Act; the principal medical officer of the Medical Research Council, and the professor of Veterinary Clinical Studies at the University of Cambridge, who is a former President of the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons. There is no doubt that the contributions from the United Kingdom delegation at the twice-yearly meetings since 1978 have been welcomed by the members of the Committee, as have the no less distinguished and expert contributions from other national delegations.
I am also aware of the criticism that certain provisions in the convention will be pitched possibly at a lower level of control than we should expect in this country, but I do not accept that that is an argument for proceeding with Government legislation now. The noble Lord, Lord Houghton, said that he wanted to go further than the convention and that we want to go further than the convention and that we in this country want to go further than the convention. There is provision in the convention to apply stricter controls in domestic legislation as each country sees fit; but there is no mechanism allowing domestic legislation which is inconsistent with the parameters of the convention. With very few exceptions, those parameters are already clearly defined. We expect those exceptions to be settled also at the meeting in May and we should then have a clear view of the obligations and so should be able to frame our legislation accordingly.
In addition, we shall then have before us the views of the Advisory Committee on Animal Experiments. The committee was reconstituted last year by my right honourable friend with wider terms of reference. As its first substantial remit, he invited the advisory committee to study the framework of new legislation, with particular reference to recent proposals, including the provisions of this Bill and also of the forthcoming convention. We expect to have the benefit of the advisory committee's advice on these matters early next year. These are the reasons why the Government think we should wait a little longer. This is the background against which the Government propose to carry forward their commitment to next year.
My Lords, may I briefly look at the Bill itself. At the present time it has been, if I may say so quite genuinely, very valuable to have had the benefit of the work of the Select Committee under the chairmanship of the noble Lord, Lord Ashby.
In its report, the Select Committee had some interesting considerations to lay before this House on the replacement of the 1876 Act. But I must leave your Lordships in no doubt that, while the Government
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appreciate the value of the Select Committee's work, they do not think the Bill strikes the right balance. We do not consider it is the right vehicle for Government legislation.
Very briefly, the reasons are these. The central feature of the Bill is to provide a structure which gives the Secretary of State broad powers to licence the use of animals for widely drawn purposes, and this is all provided for in Clause 1. I realise that it is easier to criticise than to put provisions into place, but I ventured some criticisms which, I must say, I stand by this afternoon. I think we can be rather more specific than Clause 1. I very much hope so. None the less, that is the way Clause 1 is drawn. As a countercheck to those powers Clause 2 provides for a statutory advisory committee with substantial powers and responsibilities of its own.
At this late hour, at the end of a long week, I am going to say that I make a criticism of the advisory committee from a practical and not, I promise your Lordships, from a bureaucratic point of view. The implication, as I see it, of Clause 2 is that there should be on the advisory committee a balance of numbers between persons with knowledge of scientific research and laboratory procedures and those with concern for the care and welfare of animals. In other words, a virtual balance between scientific and non-scientific members. After hearing Lord Houghton's speech, following the speech of the noble Earl, Lord Halsbury, I doubt that a body so constituted would be capable of having a corporate view on the controversial and often emotive issues which the Bill would require the advisory committee to consider.
I assure the House that I am in no way saying that therefore I do not believe in the existence of an advisory committee, either necessarily statutory or non-statutory. This is a matter for further consideration. What I am saying is that the Government believe that, whether statutory or non-statutory, the composition and functions provided for in the Bill for the advisory committee are almost certainly not compatible and probably would not work in practice.
May I turn now to try to answer a few of the questions which were put? The noble Earl, Lord Halsbury, related examples of vandalism and asked whether I would condemn such vandalism and draw the attention of the courts to what is going on. Harassment and vandalism in all their forms by militant anti-vivisectionists are to be deprecated. Such actions can in no way be condoned—and I say that on behalf of the Government. These are matters to be dealt with by the police and by the criminal law.
Regarding the suggestion that the Home Office should draw the attention of the judiciary to these matters, I should have thought that the judiciary would read the newspapers in the same way as the noble Earl has and as he has related to us today. One must be careful about the independence of the courts in these matters. I hope that the view that I have given to the noble Earl is acceptable to him so far as the merits of this particular matter are concerned.
The noble Earl and the noble Lord, Lord Beaumont of Whitley, both referred to the pain condition. As I understood the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Beaumont, they possibly did not entirely agree so far as how the question of the pain conditions should finally be

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sorted out. I know that my right honourable friend will take particular note of the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Adrian, who devoted the greater part of it to this subject.
The whole question of pain is fraught with difficulty, as your Lordships will be the first to tell me, because there is no way in which it can be measured in animals. It must be a subjective judgment and there is therefore a real problem here. The noble Lord, Lord Adrian, explained very clearly the case for provision to be made in new controls for a facility to consider the waiving of the pain condition. I would say no more today than that we have taken careful note of his view.
I come to a series of points made by the noble Earl, Lord Halsbury, with regard to the convention. If I may say so, I was just a little puzzled by the apparent anxiety of the noble Earl to question and to be so obviously worried about the work being done at the Council of Europe to prepare the convention. This is work designed to try to secure real protection for animals used for experimental and other scientific purposes throughout, effectively, the whole of Western Europe. If it is successful it will be the first international instrument in the field and we believe it will have an important influence on the rest of the western industrialised world.
The noble Earl wondered about the accountability to the British public of our delegation who are working at Strasbourg. It is the normal practice for Council of Europe conventions to be drafted by committees of experts which are appointed by the Council of Ministers. When this committee of experts on the protection of animals has completed its draft, it will submit it to the Council of Ministers and it will be for that Council to decide whether the convention is to be opened as an instrument for signature by member states. That will be a political decision and my right honourable friend will be answerable for whatever part the United Kingdom plays in it. It is there that the democratic process will have its first crucial impact.
The second and decisive stage will be when the United Kingdom Parliament is asked to pass legislation which will enable the Government to ratify the convention. I think that answers the question put to me by the noble Earl about whether Parliament will have a chance to look at it first, so making the United Kingdom a contracting party to the convention and bound by it, if Parliament so decides. May I give the noble Earl an assurance that in no way has the United Kingdom delegation been in some way shut off in Strasbourg from the views held in the United Kingdom by all those interested in this subject.
Earlier I gave an account of those who are experts, giving expert opinions for the British delegation. Throughout, our delegation has taken close account of the views expressed in both Houses of Parliament on this subject and in particular those arising from the earlier consideration of the noble Earl's Bill, of the views of the Select Committee and those of your Lordships' House upon it, and also of the consideration in another place on the Bill introduced last year by Mr. Peter Fry.
I assure the noble Earl that valuable points arising from the debates on both Bills have been incorporated by the United Kingdom delegation into its proposals to the Council of Europe Committee. There has also
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been continuous and extensive consultation with up to 50 organisations, and of course with other Whitehall departments, throughout the period this convention has been under consideration.
Finally, in short, informed by the extensive discussions in both Houses in recent years, advised on matters of principle and detail by all those organisations with a primary interest in this field and strengthened by the unique individual expertise of its own members, I think I can claim that the United Kingdom delegation has played and continues to play a leading part in the deliberations at Strasbourg.
I hope I have said enough, at not too great a length, to substantiate the Government's attitude to the Bill and our intentions to this field. In advising your Lordships' House about the Government's views, may I go back to a final point? The work which has gone into this Bill and the time which your Lordships have devoted to it and to all the work which went into the enormously important Select Committee Report—which is really unique, as the noble Lord, Lord Houghton, so rightly pointed out—in recent years, has clearly shown the importance and the urgency which are attached to improving and modernising the 1976 Act. The Government attach no less importance to the matter and they intend that there shall be no unnecessary delay in implementing our commitment.
4.30 p.m.
The Earl of Halsbury: My Lords, in winding up what has been a most interesting debate, I shall try to do so as quickly as possible, because I am sure you all want to start your Christmas holidays—certainly with my good wishes—as soon as possible. If I may take those who spoke in that order, the noble Lord, Lord Beaumont of Whitley, and I often did not appear to be agreeing. But I think that our disagreements were not always as wide as they sometimes appeared to be, if one took a superficial view of them.
Of course, I would not myself wish to sanction any form of cruelty to an animal, or a painful experiment on an animal, for something of an entirely frivolous kind. The difficulties that we always had were about where you could draw a line between what is and what is not frivolous, in terms of specifying a product. If I may refer to the demonology of this subject, it was usually nucleated around the word "cosmetics". How do you view a cosmetic? Is it a beauty aid for the public and a means of frivolity, or is it a concealment of some disfigurement which could be a source of very grave mental distress to somebody? Or, for actors and actresses who have to cover themselves with thick layers of greasepaint every day, is it an occupational hazard? Does it come under safety at work?
Can you specify the purpose by merely specifying the classification of the product? That was the kind of disagreement we had, and it turned more on the utilisation of words than the actual difficulties of administering an Act. That, to some extent, bears on the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Ferrier, as to non-medical usages. This is a distinct non-medical use.
I was so glad to have the support of my noble friend Lord Ashby. I put exactly the same interpretation on this question of advisership as he did. In books on managerial theory, it is always held that no man can

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hide behind his advisers, because the responsibility for taking their advice is his. However many advisers a Minister may have, the responsibility for taking their advice is his own and he cannot duck it.
The difference between an informal committee and a statutory committee is simply that, if he chooses to disregard the advice of an informal committee, that is that. But if it is a statutory committee, then Parliament has locus standi in the matter and it can be debated. That is the real difference between the two things and I think it is right that it should be debated.
I was so grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Skelmersdale, for bringing in the whole question of how you can investigate pain by experimental methods. It is extremely important. When I come to my noble friend Lord Houghton of Sowerby—if he will still allow me to call him so—he tells me that I am square. He rather reassures me, against the evidence of my weighing machine, which tells me that with the passage of years I am getting rounder. But he also complained that I have vandalisation on the brain. I have not got it on the brain. I have got it in the post-bag. I am rung up in the middle of the night and harassed about it. I do not believe that my noble friend Lord Houghton is.
I am reminded of the line in Thomas Love Peacock,
"The toad beneath the harrow knows
Exactly where each tooth point goes.
The butterfly upon the road
Preaches contentment to the toad".
If I liken my noble friend Lord Houghton of Sowerby to a butterfly, I hope he will find it a not unacceptable comparison when it is evident that I am the toad. But, if I may pass from Peacock to Shakespeare,
"The toad, ugly and venomous, bears yet a precious jewel in its head",
and the precious jewel that I bear your Lordships by way of a Christmas present is this Bill on Second Reading.
I was very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Ferrier, for what he said about the uses of the word "cruelty". If your Lordships will bear with me for a few moments longer, we are in difficulties here over a rather anomalous usage of words. The Cruelty to Animals Act 1876 has nothing to do with cruelty to animals. It is concerned with licensing experimenters to perform experiments in laboratories, under licence from the Home Secretary. The concept of cruelty does not enter into the 1876 Cruelty to Animals Act.
The 1911 Act, which deals with cruelty to animals, is not called a Cruelty to Animals Act. It is called the Protection of Animals Act. Whereas in many cases the words, "shall be guilty of an offence under this Act", are used in other Acts, in the 1911 Act it says:
"shall be guilty of an offence of cruelty under this Act".
When one repeals the 1876 Act, the 1911 Act becomes the senior statute under whose umbrella all other protection of animals Acts come.
Noble Lords will notice that my Bill is the Laboratory Animals Protection Bill, so it has the same sort of connotation of protection as have all the other Acts. It is not acceptable to parliamentary draftsmen and parliamentary counsel that you should have two criminal statutes for the same offence, so Clause 1 of
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my Bill, as read a Second time, was deleted from the Laboratory Animals Protection Bill and transferred as an offence under the 1911 Act, leaving the Bill as amended by the Select Committee a pure enabling Bill, allowing the Home Secretary to grant licences, the possession of which would be a defence in any prosecution brought under the senior Act.
It would be quite easy, although we did not get it under our belts in the Select Committee, merely to increase the scope of the modification of the 1911 Act a little by omitting the words "of cruelty" in Section 1(1) of that Act so that it would simply read:
"shall be guilty of an offence",
as it did in the original draft of my Act. That is my answer to the noble Lord, Lord Ferrier, and I am grateful to him for raising the point. I am sorry to have taken up your Lordships' time on this rather knotty little matter, but it is necessary to get it right.
I was grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Peart, for his support. I hope he will continue to support me in such pressures as I bring to bear on the Government within my humble capacity as a Private Member.
I come now to what was said by the noble Lord, Lord Belstead. I thank him very much for the obvious trouble he has taken over the brief. He tells me that everything will be through in May, so he may expect a parliamentary Question from me on 1st June. I conceive of the advisory committee as recruited from men of good will, of types specified. I did not think of them as representing this or representing that. I did not think of them as having a sort of conflict. Yes, I was worried about the progress of affairs at Strasbourg and I was very grateful to hear that the noble Lord is satisfied on the question of the judiciary. Yes, of course they read the newspapers, but individual magistrates do not subscribe to press cutting agencies and get an overall picture of what is going on in the country. There are precedents for a ministry informing the benches generally of what is going on.
I believe I have said enough at this late hour to wind up the debate. It only remains for me to ask your Lordships to give the Bill a Second Reading.
On Question, Bill read 2a, and committed to a Committee of the Whole House.
Bearsden and Milngavie District Council Order Confirmation Bill
Churches and Universities (Scotland) Widows' and Orphans' Fund (Amendment) Order Confirmation Bill
Cumnock and Doon Valley District Council Order Confirmation Bill
Dunfermline District Council Order Confirmation Bill
Peterhead Harbours Order Confirmation Bill
Brought from the Commons; read 1a, and (pursuant to the Private Legislation Procedure (Scotland) Act 1936) deemed to have been read 2a and reported from the Committee.
Lord Denham: My Lords, in moving that this House do now adjourn I should like to wish noble Lords opposite, and indeed noble Lords in all parts of the House a very happy Christmas and, if I may, on your Lordships' behalf, to extend that same wish to all those members of the staff who serve us so well throughout the year.
Lord Wells-Pestell: My Lords, on behalf of my noble friends on this side of the House—and indeed all others on this side of the House—I should like to thank the noble Lord for his good wishes and to say that we on our side quite sincerely wish all Members of your Lordships' House on the other side all the joys associated with Christmas and we hope that when we return they will be mindful always of the needs of others. I associate my noble friends with the noble Lord's good wishes to the staff of this House, who serve us so well.
Lord Wigoder: My Lords, may we on these Benches, as always, have the last word and reciprocate the noble Lord's good wishes.